15 June — the day Magna Carta was signed in 1215 — has come top of a poll as the most popular day to celebrate Great Britain Day. Winston Churchill’s birthday is in 8th place.
I’m not sure that really captures Great Britain. Here are some alternative options…
29 March. The day in 1958 when The Benny [...]
I’ve become old and boring and find I don’t generally wear t-shirts anymore, except under other clothes. But I’ve just come across Glarkware — t-shirts and related merchandise from the US — and I’ve been thinking that maybe if I could think myself younger then I could justify buying something from there.
My favourites from the [...]
The Apple MacBooks have a rather odd feature — a “sudden motion detector”. What’s it for? Well, mainly to detect you dropping your precious laptop so that it can park your hard drive. Which is boring if sensible. Now The Register has stumbled upon another use for it, and very nifty it is too. It’s [...]
Marc Hedlund tells the story of how to get the message across about late projects, about how to convey Brooks’s Law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” It’s well told, so I’ll let him tell you…
Tags: projects, software, management
This is from the manual for SQLite. A piece of documentation which reliably ensures people don’t use out-of-date functions:
int sqlite3_aggregate_count(sqlite3_context*);
This function is deprecated. It continues to exist so as not to break any legacy code that might happen to use it. But it should not be used in [...]
Because it stars Tom Hanks, who proved to be dull and worthy in Apollo 13.
Because it’s directed by Ron Howard, who directed the dull-but-worthy Apollo 13.
Because it stars Tom Hanks, who was dull and humourless in Saving Private Ryan.
Because it’s got a character called Leigh Teabing, which is one of the most unconvincing fictional surnames [...]
While Grammar Puss is fighting a one-woman battle against the evolution of the word fulsome Dan Puckett and friends are creating a list of journalistic words and phrases with their “real” meanings. My favourites:
ACTIVIST: Vocal busybody whom the reporter likes.
DECLINED TO COMMENT: The other person was nice.
MASSIVE: A signal that the reporter doesn’t read enough [...]
Spent Saturday watching the West Ham/Liverpool FA Cup final in a pub round the corner from West Ham’s stadium at Upton Park. In the sad aftermath a policeman moved this deflating cup replica out of the road to somewhere a bit safer. The picture sums it all up, really.
Tags: westham, facup, football
I’m indebted to a gentleman from South London who writes
Sir,
It is not without some community-mindedness that I draw your attention to http://www.karlhartig.com/chart/chart.html. I believe Mr Hartig’s singular collection of charts might be of some interest to your readers.
Yours, etc.
I could not agree more.
Tags: charts, visualisation
In 2008 the Guardian, Observer and Guardian Unlimited will move to King’s Place in King’s Cross. I’ve discovered the building has its own website — though it’s a user-hostile Flash-only affair. There you can find a map and other info. The artist’s impressions reveal that there won’t be any litter, and they show the [...]
