Something that I have been saying for years: British schools train pupils to perform in exams, at the expense of giving them a useful education. What the report doesn't add is that this also bores and demoralises pupils, leading many to play truant or drop out altogether. Politicians round here like to pin the blame for truancy on careless parents, but the shortcomings of the education system itself have a lot to do with this....

posted @ 6:51 PM -

Things I learned today: Barry Manilow submitted a sound track for Star Wars. Or possibly not.

posted @ 7:43 AM -

...and in other news:

A movement on the fringe of British Islam called a press conference yesterday, but then kept the press out. You what?!?

Some judges evidently do have sense: dog perfumes that parody human perfume brands have been found not to infringe on trademarks. *zilla watchers take note.

Europe's floods are spreading further.

Student debt in Britain is getting worse. I feel like letting rip about this, but I know that once I start I'll be going on for ages, and it's more important that I get some sleep tonight.

And to finish with something positive: implants that let blind people see again. Link via Jerry Kindall.

posted @ 6:02 PM -

In fact, dissertating doesn't quite mean what I thought it did. I took it to mean working on one's dissertation.

posted @ 5:44 PM -

if you are wondering where I've been, I have an explanation. It is a word that I thought Scott invented, until I did a Google search today, and discovered has been used by others too: dissertating.

Apart from that, I've been preparing more of my future. I have an arrangement to meet a potential PhD supervisor and talk shop in January, and another to whom I must send a CV. This is good. I also have a dull ache at the top of both arms, because I went back to the clinic for round 2 of vaccinations this morning. This is not so good, but clearly orders of magnitude better than actually contracting the diseases in question.

posted @ 5:42 PM -

"that" or "which"

Word's grammar checker keeps flagging my text for this issue, but I'm not convinced it's right. When should one use that, and when should one use which?

posted @ 11:05 AM -

Blank paper == Pure blind fear

Although I have written about half of my dissertation, I have as yet to write an introduction that I'm even willing to show my supervisor without a disclaimer along the lines of this is provisional and I'll completely re-write it later. I was planning on doing that last, but it's becoming clear that I need to write it now so I can refer back to it in the middle of the report. It's really frustrating. While large sections from the middle of the report almost write themselves (though actually the bits I've written already need substantial editing), and at my best I can churn them out pretty fast, every sentence of this introduction feels like it has my blood in it. There's just something about having a blank page to fill that fills me with terror, and makes me jam up.

posted @ 11:04 AM -

The ...Zilla Story Continued

or: My lawyer's bigger than yours, part II

There is a theory being put about on the web that the reason Davezilla received a threat of a lawsuit is in an attempt to set a precedent, prior to taking Mozilla to court. The advantage would be that Mozilla are a company, presumably with more money to be sued for than the individual who runs Davezilla (disclaimer: Dave Linabury could be one of the richest men in the world for all I know), and their logo is actually close enough to Godzilla in appearance that it could actually be accused of genuinely trading on Godzilla's fame. Potential problems if this really is their strategy: they are very unlikely to win a case against Davezilla, and if they took Mozilla to court they'd have to answer the objection that they must have known about this infringement for years, and they haven't done anything about it.

Sources: Slashdot and MetaFilter. There's also general information about this type of bullying at Chilling Effects.

posted @ 9:14 AM -

Gnomes on the run

I feel the tone here needs lowering further. I'll let these two stories speak for themselves.

posted @ 6:22 PM -

A thought occurred to me this evening. Not a very important thought, among many other not very important thoughts, but I'll share it anyway.

That Davezilla story prompted me to look up the word colophon. This in turn made me wonder: does dictionary.com get a rush of look-ups for particular words when a story either using an unusual word or spelling something wrongly is published?

posted @ 6:21 PM -

My lawyer's bigger than yours

So, last week I received a threat of a legal action, from an organisation that shall remain nameless, over something on my webspace. They made one fair point, on which I acted immediately, and many really stupid ones. I didn't mention it at the time, because I wanted to be sure that they were being as ridiculous as I thought, and by the time I was I had become rather bored of the whole business.

To begin at the beginning, the fair point they made was that I claimed to maintain a site which they apparently maintain. I am dubious about whether they in fact do, but certainly I don't. This was a job I had taken on just before getting the place at HP, at which point I dropped all other work that I was doing at the time, so I never did update the site in question. With this in mind, I immediately removed the section about that site (it being one I had done no work on at all, whereas the rest of my portfolio consists of sites I designed or worked on at some point but don't work on any more), and added a preamble to the rest of my portfolio, to the effect of I designed these sites, but I'm no longer responsible for their maintenance. I should really have added that preamble in May.

So far, so reasonable, except that the nameless organisation didn't just ask me to remove an untrue claim. They accused me of besmirching their reputation (I did claim I could work faster than them. That claim is true, and if challenged I just need to point out that the site in question still has information that went out of date last year), and stealing their intellectual property by displaying a thumbnail of the site - displaying our design work without ours or [the client]'s specific permission. Stealing their intellectual property by displaying a shrunken reproduction of something that's available on the public domain?!? By that token, every tourist who snaps St.Paul's is stealing Sir Christopher Wren's IP! Oh yeah, and I linked to the original site, and I made it clear in the blurb that I did not design the site. And I complimented the original site design....

They 'suggested' that I remove all references to the site in question to avoid legal action, and claim that the client (I've had neither a confirmation nor a denial from the client) is outraged at my statements. And as if bringing the client into a dispute wasn't bad enough, they also sent it to my ISP, who have absolutely no reason to care (they would be obliged to act if it ever came to legal action, but until then it's just an attempt to scare me).

The thing that really mystifies me is why they should even care. It looks like they wanted to bully me, so they thought they'd just load on any possible charge they could think of throwing at me, in the hope that I'd just back down. I did back down, but only because of the one thing they were right about, and I wrote them a long reply explaining this. Of course I've had no response to that, but I'm sure it's been read.

Anyway, why am I talking about this now? Something I read today seemed to echo it very strongly: Davezilla has received a similarly absurd threat from the owners of the Godzilla trademark, claiming, among other things, that the site is likely to confuse people who think it is related. The Register sums it up pretty well.

The words pushing their luck spring to mind.

posted @ 12:20 PM -

yuk. The Asian brown cloud

posted @ 3:25 AM -

at some point this evening I'm going to erase everything on my server and re-upload it, to tidy up. If you happen to look here and find nothing, please come back an hour or two later, and all should be restored.

posted @ 3:57 PM -

Having spent my one scheduled day off having fun but certainly not catching up on my sleep, I found myself unable to go into work today. I really mean unable - I got up with the best of intentions, but sat down on my bed and found it impossible to get up. I slept for a few hours this afternoon, and I'm just hoping I feel better tomorrow, because I still feel exhausted now. I shouldn't be too hard on myself - I had worked long hours for 9 days without a break coming up to this weekend - but I can't afford the time off.

It was important to me to see my friends off yesterday, but it had a high cost. From now until I finish my project (only a few weeks away) wild horses will not drag me out of Bristol, because I just can't keep doing this to myself.

posted @ 3:18 PM -

This is interesting: Iran 'handed over al-Qaeda fighters'

posted @ 9:42 AM -