Evening Star
Venus gleams bright in a sunset sky. A nice image to bring in the new year…
So, to you all, all the best for 2006! And a Happy New Year…
St Clement, Jersey, December 2005
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
How to tell the difference between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0.
I do like the fact that the “BETA” is anti-aliased, and of course in a Web 1.0 way, the whole thing is an animated GIF. Ironic, neh?
[via Ajaxian.com]
Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible…
…now that we are back this side of the English Channel and reconnected to the rest of the world by more than a roaming mobile phone.
Much fun had, and lots of scenic sea photos taken from my mother’s new flat…
Computer Insecurity
This could be bad (for Dan Brown levels of bad).
I’m pretty sure it won’t be accurate.
But then again, wouldn’t it be good if it was?
Imagine Harrison Ford in the Cubicle of Action with a collection of O’Reilly books at his side, scrabbling up some Perl to munge a set of incompatible log files in order to see what happened weeks ago – while trying to patch 1500 Windows servers, regression test a fix to the corporate web apps, and catch up with Bruce Schnier’s blog, and answer all his email.
See Harrison Ford in the Meeting Room of Doom explaining to his bosses that they can’t have a hole in the firewall to connect directly to a partner company – in words of less than three syllables and no more than five acronyms.
Enterprise IT Security: The Movie. Oh yeah.
Shoeless?
Someone left some black slip on trainers in a Dolland and Aitchison bag at our place on Sunday…
Space Invader
The 2005 SandM Christmas Card
A very Happy Christmas to you all!
In lieu of purchasing cards and stamps, we’ll be making a donation to charity
Planes that never were…
Here’s a Flight International article on airliners that never left the drawing board – from the proposed twin-jet version of the Douglas DC-10, to Boeing’s Sonic Cruiser.
Like this British proposal for a VTOL short-haul airliner…
During 1969-71, Hawker Siddeley undertook extensive studies of a V/STOL airliner under the designation HS141. Equipped with a pair of pylon-mounted turbofans in a conventional underwing layout, the HS141 also had a broad belly extension incorporating 16 vertically mounted “advanced lift engines” – Rolls-Royce RB202s. Much effort was invested in ensuring that the aircraft’s noise levels were not excessive, although the likelihood of such an aircraft being quiet is small given its lift engines.
Try flying something like the HS141 VTOL from London City! Then there was the BAC 3-11 – a wide-bodied long-haul follow-up to the noisy Pocket Rockets that were the bread-and-butter airliners for BEA and a whole flotilla of charter airlines in the 1970s…
Something for the alternate historians.
(nice to see Flight’s openness – they’re even blogging! Now for AvLeak to drop its paywall)
Posterised Flattened Portrait
An experimental image edit, passing through three different image editing tools (all with different features), and several different filters, going from JPEG to vector to bitmap to JPEG again.
I was trying to duplicate the effect used for my head shot on my Server Management column, but at the same time trying to get a BD-styled line edged effect. I’m quite pleased – I’ve ended up with just the look I wanted.
