Thoughts and wanderings around the internet, e-government and geekdom.
Apparently one lone motorist slamming on the brakes can cause mile-long tailbacks. That’s the conclusion we had come to following a string of inexplicable hold ups on various motorways in various years. (For what it is worth, I think this is bad marketing of science – no one has solved anything. Firstly there wasn’t a problem and secondly, no-one has done the experimental work to see if theory and practice agree.)
Interesting decision by the Parisian administration to cut the amount of public advertising space by 1/3rd. I wonder a) what they think this will achieve and b) whether any other cities would follow suit.
I have a regular error in our backup “tcpsvcs (2940) The backup has been stopped because it was halted by the client or the connection with the client failed.” This is either a problem (need to reregister a dll) or not a problem (a bug). We have tried the first fix, so let’s see what happens. There are some other useful pointers here.
There are some useful screen capture tools out there. CamStudio looks good, and there is a list of alternatives in the comments on the beta.
Interesting, and slightly scary looking new home page for the BBC (with some rationale). I have never enjoyed “my.homepage” screens, and this one is similar. The Ajaxy rapid update is good, though.
Time has more lists than you can shake a stick at. Many of them are “gah” lists with not much really new. However, there are some nuggets in there. From Jonza comes the Rough Trade list (of albumclub fame) too much to investigate there, I am afraid.
The team wants to video our Xmas trip to Palma, so borrowed a video camera (Sony DCR 101E or something like that). We couldn’t get the tape in it (it would pop back out again after some beeping. There was an error message on the screen (C 21:00 – I thought it was a clock) which I googled, and lo and behold, percussive maintenance was the way forward. I sent Mark to get tiny screwdrivers so that I could pretend I’d done something cleverer, but chose not to in the end.
LinkedIn has finally made its move on Facebook, and Moveable Type on Wordpress. Roll on the improvements in all four of them. I currently prefer LinkedIn (for business) and Wordpress (runs this blog) – interesting to see what that looks like in a years’ time.