Archive: 2008-02
The case of the mysteriously disappearing file
If you want a temporary filename in Ruby, you might be tempted to use
Tempfileto generate it, rather like this:Changing my shopping allegiances
I now understand how East Germans must have felt when the Wall came down and they were exposed to the cornucopia of products the free market had to offer.
The FrankenThinkPad lives!
I’ve had an old ThinkPad laptop lying around for ages, and for most of that time I’ve been planning to do something useful with it. It’s not very powerful (Pentium 133 with 64 MB), but its bright 11 inch TFT screen has plenty of potential. My vague plan was to build it into a picture frame as a kind of digital photo frame/information point, but it wasn’t until I found exactly the right kind of frame the other week that I really got started.
Getting paid to blog
Purely in the interests of self promotion, I thought I should write about something else I’ve been working on.
A question of privacy
After reading that some ISPs are selling clickstream data and using it to target advertisements, I started feeling paranoid.
Is London Underground turning Japanese?
I was having dinner a few weeks ago with a friend who, like me, had spent some time living in Japan, and our discussion turned to the platform markings at Japanese railway and underground stations. These consist of circles, triangles and lines to show where the doors will open and to indicate where passengers should stand while waiting to board the next train. Our conversation proceeded something like this:
World Factbook: Kosovo
The principal export of the freshly-minted nation state of Kosovo is young men in slightly battered cars festooned with Albanian flags, driving round tooting their horns in celebration.
Hidden patterns in Japanese counting
It’s strange: you can learn something, use it daily for years, and never notice the underlying patterns. Until I read a post on Paleoglot this morning, I hadn’t realised how regular six of the Japanese numerals are.
Polyclinic
I woke up this morning to hear that the government was calling for more polyclinics. I’d never heard of such a thing before, and the coverage I’ve heard and read today seems to confirm that it’s not a common term in this country. For example, in the Times, the word is quoted as if it’s not an accepted item of vocabulary:
Attack of the clones
I opened a new current account a couple of weeks ago, in order to get a higher rate of interest on my balance. It seems that my usurious greed has received its karmic backlash already.
SUV drivers hate everybody, even their own mothers
The selfish, venal people who drive around London in hulking great planet-raping, pedestrian-crushing behemoths are always contemptible. But their absurd choices can sometimes be amusing, too. Today, outside the supermarket, I watched as an elderly woman placed a collapsible footstool on the ground and used it to step up into the passenger side of a particularly outsized SUV.
Habits of bourgeois cyclists
Whilst observing people on bicycles around London, I’ve developed a hypothesis that there’s a correlation between socio-economic status and certain behaviours. Some things in particular are obviously exclusive to the bourgeoisie: