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03/01/2009: Meteor Shower!

So the cat was meowing outside the bedroom door this morning, so I got up to let him in. He loves to sit on the window sill and look out at the birds on the roofs of the houses across the street, but the sill is so high that he can’t easily jump up there. I opened the blinds and lifted him up to the window sill, and lo and behold, what greeted mine eyes? A meteor shower!

Dozens of the things! I’ve taken some photos, and will update this post with them in due course.

Apparently this is the Quadrantid shower, which happens in early January every year. Astronomers believe it to have been caused by a particular comet which broke up in our solar system in around 1490. Every year, the Earth happens to sweep through that region of the sky, and miscellaneous space junk crashes through our atmosphere, burning up — essentially, friction burn — and causing bright trails of smoke and vapour in the sky.

Update: Here are the photos. Click on each to download them in ridiculously high resolution.

25/12/2008: Christmas Dinner 2008

Christmas dinner in the Inkster household this year consisted of:

• Roast boneless rib of beef
• Pigs in blankets with thyme
• Roast potatoes with horseradish
• Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s roasted red onions
• Sophie Grigson’s roast celeriac with marsala
• Mrs Beeton’s Yorkshire puddings
• Baby carrots
• Mange tout
• Gravy

Followed by Chocolate Yule Log.

09/12/2008: The Mother of All Demos

It was 40 years ago today that Douglas Engelbart gave a demonstration that introduced the public to an impressive list of technologies which would in the following years become established in the mainstream. On the 9th of December, 1968, he demonstrated:

• a mouse;
• hypertext (i.e. text with links that can be followed — a precursor to the Web);
• e-mail; and
• video conferencing.

It also demonstrates copy and paste, which although not completely new at the time, was still not especially common. A video of the demonstration can be seen on Google Video.

30/11/2008: Wallander

I meant to post this article a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been very bad at updating my blog recently. The BBC is showing an adaptation of one of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels tonight. Mankell is one of my favourite crime fiction writers, so here are a few random thoughts (no spoilers!):

• They’ve started with Sidetracked, the fifth novel in the series. Probably a good choice — it’s the most critically acclaimed. The first in the series, Faceless Killers, is arguably the weakest Wallander novel so would not be a good choice if the production company is hoping to have a series commissioned.
• Rather than try to compress the whole novel into a 90 minute show, the BBC has wisely made it into a mini-series. This is an excellant choice as it’s quite a twisty, turny story, and needs a bit of time devoted to it.
• Kenneth Brannagh will probably turn out to be an excellant choice of actor to play Kurt Wallander.
• I wonder if they relocate the novels from Sweden to the UK? I hope not. But if not, I…

23/10/2008: Wild Mushroom, Pancetta & Truffle Risotto

Ingredients

• 200 g arborio rice (or other short grained, high starch rice)
• 850 mL ham stock (or chicken/vegetable stock)
• 150 mL white wine
• 250 g mixed mushrooms (such as button mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, porcini, etc)
• 50 g chopped pancetta (or unsmoked streaky bacon)
• 1 small onion, finely chopped …

14/08/2008: 54 Percent

BBC News has an article claiming that:

The new projections suggestion that by 2050, minorities will account for 54% of the [US] population.

Ummm… wouldn’t that be 100% then?

Minorities set to be US majority

04/08/2008: Charlie Brooker Quote

Charlie Brooker on creationism:

Darwin’s theory of evolution was simple, beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring. But because it contradicts the allegorical babblings of a bunch of made-up old books, it’s been under attack since day one. That’s just tough luck for Darwin. If the Bible had contained a passage that claimed gravity is caused by God pulling objects toward the ground with magic invisible threads, we’d still be debating Newton with idiots too.

(via Richard Dawkins)

16/07/2008: Extending hCard with RDFa

hCard is an HTML-based format for describing contacts (people, organisations, etc) on web pages. It allows you to mark up which elements represent their name, their address, their birthday and so forth.

While hCard offers many useful properties that can be used to describe contacts, some are considered beyond the scope of the hCard specification. This is where RDFa comes in…

01/05/2008: May Day

Today is May Day and also election day in London. Recent polls have shown alarmingly high support for Boris Johnson (or Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson to use his full name — yes, really!). Much as I enjoy Johnson’s antics on Have I Got News For You, I ask how someone who could barely be trusted to competently run a bath, could soon be running a city?

And not just any city, but one of the world’s major financial hubs. London, although just a city, has a GDP of 800 billion USD; an economy roughly the size of, say, the Netherlands, or Mexico. Or to put it another way, two Taiwans, or three Irelands, or six New Zealands, or the entire Spanish-speaking part…

13/04/2008: Dr Who Goes To Pompeii

OK, so Doctor Who has gone to Pompeii and saved Caecilius and his family. Now the entire Cambridge Latin Course will need to be rewitten!

29/03/2008: Cognition 0.1 Alpha 6

Tonight I’ve released another alpha version of Cognition, my semantic web parser. Changelog includes:

• Microformats:
  • Add option (disabled by default) to require <head profile> for microformat support. Microformat profiles are treated as opaque strings! Supports the following profiles:
    • http://purl.org/uF/2008/03/
    • http://www.w3.org/2006/03/hcard or http://purl.org/uF/hCard/1.0/
    • http://dannyayers.com/microformats/hcalendar-profile or http://purl.org/uF/hCalendar/1.0/
    • http://purl.org/uF/hAtom/0.1/
    • http://purl.org/uF/rel-tag/1.0/
    • http://purl.org/uF/rel-license/1.0/
    • No profiles required for rel-enclosure, adr or geo (yet).
  • Support for hAtom, WebSlices.
    • In addition to hAtom 0.1, rel-enclosure is supported within hEntries.
  • Improve include-pattern support to prevent some infinite loops.
• GRDDL:
  • Add option (disabled by default) to require for GRDDL.
  • Add option to check profile URLs for…