Archive for September, 2003
Iraq’s Reconstruction Contracts shows that the US is either incompetent or malicious in the way in which it is setting up new contracts in Iraq.
easy web geovisualization allows you to put maps on your blog. Or is that make maps of your blog.
Now I can describe what I like in terms of electronic music.
Apparently what I like to work to is “the musical equivalent of drowning a meal in ketchup so you can’t taste the original flavour any more”. I do that with food as well as music (Epic, Anthem and other utterly uncool forms of trance).
The Case of the Exploding CD-ROM is the kind of experiment that I used to do. At school I did a two-week project looking at the voltage characteristics of fuses under stress. Which basically meant two weeks of blowing up larger and larger fuses under a plastic cover and videoing the results. Until I fused the science block. Whoops. (Thanks to Ben for the link.)
Who’d have thought that Sky Active runs on WML? Just as WAP phones disappear!
Update: it seems that sense is beginning to take hold in this industry.
Conference Report: IDeA e-Champions Network Conference 2003. Some good stuff here - especially around not spending too much time doing specifications that are obsolete by contract signature time.
The I&DeA has done a survey of e-champion councils to see what is important to them. Apparently not the National Projects.
1 Standards - 67% (2002 result - 74%)
2 Authentication - 54% (60%)
3 National Projects - 47% (46)
4 = Information - 39% (50%)
4 = Co-ordination across sectors - 39% (60%)
6 Guidance - 32% (47%)
7 = Skills - 25% (29%)
7 = Strugglers support - 24% (29%)
9 UK Online/Online Store - 12% (25%)
eGov monitor has a useful summary of what OGS is about. The LAWs project is being considered for the infrastructure for OGS.
Continue reading ‘OeE plans for Online Government Store’
Model reveals why shuttle buses come all at once or not at all. Apparently its due to the chaotic motion of the shuttle buses when the rate of customer arrival and loading becomes too high. They mention the obvious similarity between this situation and lifts. - surely someone has sorted out lifts already and we can just transform the solution as required for buses? Skyscrapers in the US seem pretty good in terms of getting people distributed around the building with minimum waiting times.
The EC publishes its guidelines and targets for e-government. Key points:
- Interactive public services
- Public procurement done electronically
- Public Internet Access Points
- Broadband connections
- Interoperability
- Culture and tourism
- Secure communications between public services
Journals for e-gov people sees Gotze listing a whole pile of e-government journals due to launch in 2004-05. It surprises me that it takes so long to launch a journal. What on earth are they doing?
Disney begins movie rental service in three cities. Interesting to see a major player going into the video-on-demand business through a system remarkably like RSS enclosures that Adam Curry has been talking about.
Does hot water really freeze faster than cold water? The answer is yes in certain situations. I spent a very long time with several people who would not have any of this. I’m glad I can quote the ice cream industry as using the Mpemba effect. I also like the story of the lad who rediscovered it.
Two pieces of home science - you can build your own Segway and measure the speed of light using a microwave.
Faceted Movable Type looks at creating a faceted classification in Movable Type. Thanks to headshiftfor the link.
Update: there’s some interesting stuff on vector searching as well.
According to the I&DeA it costs less than a pound per contact in staff time with local government. That sounds far too low to me. Leisure, recreation and libraries are 80% of the contacts made. Oh yes, and councils will be missing the 2005 targets in droves.
PIXresizer looks like a nice and easy picture resizer. I need to give something like this to my blogging stable, so that they don’t upload 6Mb full-quality issues to their image galleries. I use IrfanView for all this stuff, but it is not for the faint of heart.
Government in the Digital Decade is Bill Gates turning a speech into a marketing pitch. Very little substance there.
We’re doomed! Well half of us are, anyway. The Y chromosome could disappear in 125k years, leaving men extinct, and if they’re not careful, women too. The article covers the case of the master SRY gene (which tells an embryo to become a male) disappearing. What would happen if the sperm-encoding genes disappeared first? Wouldn’t you get infertile men?
