Strange Fact

Strange fact: there are no words in that OED that end in “sius”, apart from two foreign names (Celsius and Cassius). Struck me as unexpected. But then most things do past 1am, I find.
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Digitial Camera Purchasing

All-in-one digital cameras

Top three:

Fujifilm S9500 (S9000 in the US) Reg Review DP Review from $503

Panasonic FZ30 Camera Labs DP Review from $501

Sony DSC-R1 DP Review Camera Labs from $798
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Marriage

On a day when we hear of another engagement between friends, I coincidentally came across this quote from Lupin Pooter in a Diary of a Nobody: To my mind a wedding’s a very poor play. There are only two parts in it –the bride and bridegroom. The bestman is only a walking gentleman. With the exception of a crying father and a snivelling mother, the rest are SUPERS who have to dress well and have to PAY for their insignificant parts in the shape of costly presents. (Nov 18)

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King’s Chapel Roof

Dr Good was kind enough to take a handful of physicists that visited MIT on the first year of the CMI UG exchange up onto the roof of King’s Chapel on a bright but frosty Monday morning. We were fortunate to be able to enjoy some wonderful views of Cambridge and the surrounding area, capturing this photo of Churchill’s Moeller Center in the distance beyond the Senate House flag and St. John’s.

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Jilted John in the DT

A certain Mr Lowell from Salford makes an excellent point in yesterday’s DT with his letter regarding the poetry in song lyrics.

Sure, Dylan’s lyrics are magnificent, as exemplified by the quotation given from Mr Tambourine Man:

To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands…

But, Jilted John, frankly, capture the essence of Life and Love just so much more….

I’ve been going out with a girl
Her name is Julie
But last night she said to me
when we were watching telly
(this is what she said)
She said listen John I love you
But there’s this bloke I fancy
I dont want to two time you
So its the end for you and me
Who’s this bloke I asked her
Goooooordon, she replied
Not THAT poof, I said dismayed
yes but he’s no poof she cried – he’s more a man than you’ll ever be

Here we go, two three four

I was so upset that I cried all the way to the chip shop
When I came out there was Gordon standing at the bus stop
And guess who was with him
Yeah, Julie, and they were both laughing at me
oh, she is cruel and heartless
to pack me for Gordon
Just cos he’s better looking than me
just cos he’s cool and trendy

but I know he’s a moron, Gordon is a moron
Gordon is a moron, Gordon is a moron

Here we go, two three four

she’s a slut, and he’s a creep
she’s a tart, he’s very cheap…
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One for the theoretical lawyers/historians/politicians…

One for the theoretical lawyers/historians/politicians…

What if bin Laden had formally requested asylum in England? And, if 9/11 still happened, how would the Labour government have coped with the problem deporting him to the US, where surely the Federal lawyers would push for the death penalty?

Given the current floundering to deport terrorist suspects back to their countries of origin, even with ‘memoranda of understanding’ that torture and capital punishment would not be used, could we have come to some sort of similar agreement with our Atlantic Cousins? One probably feels not. So, probably with considerable grinding of Cherie’s teeth, we would either have had to find some way of conveniently by-passing Osama’s human rights (if you believe such things exist at all, even for suspected mass-murderers) or faced the most insurmountable diplomatic pressure imaginable. I would not have been too surprised to see photos of US Navy Seals raiding HMP Belmarsh.
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Emperor of Sound

The Emperor of Sound are playing at the Elm Tree, Cowley Road tonight at 8pm.

They are supporting Porker, who are apparently a popular blues-rock group.

eBay Keywords

eBay have a few interesting pages that are hidden away from view:

eBay pulse gives a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks and cool stuff, e.g., the top ten popular searches at present are: psp, ipod, caravan (?), laptop, mini moto, e (?), ipod mini, samsung d500, lacoste, and cars.

Common Keywords gives a directory of all keywords listed alphabetically, products only, by category or by shop (although the products only option seems to be broken by poor server configuration).

I’ve written a perl script to parse all the common keywords and have a text file listing them here: ebay common keywords.
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eBay through the Pe(a)rl-y eyes

During the down-periods at work, I’m busy writing Perl scripts that return the results of completed listings on eBay.

Joining the excellent eBay developers program, which can give one access to back-end data and applications, didn’t really help, as eBay seems to hide away the completed data.

As such, I had to write a rather rough-and-ready solution using HTML::mechanize to query the site through the HTML interface, mainly because eBay only returns completed item search results (it would seem) to registered users. I’ve finally got the parsing of the results sorted, so now just have to arrange the passing of the results to a suitable database. That will give me the recently completed listings for any particular search.

To narrow down the searches to particular products, I may have to make better use of eBay’s pre-defined specification searches, where one can specify, say, the desired hard disk space or shoe size. Alternatively, I may require a catalogue of model numbers, manufacturers, etc., which maybe accessible from eBay, in order to devise well-formed searches (with additional front- and/or back-end filtering, if required) to only return the desired items for particular products.

I’m sure I’ll have more soon….
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Google’s Blog Search

Google have released their new Blog Search service. The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom); so, given that it also has data from June 2005, means that this has been no small undertaking, but I just wonder how useful this really will be.

Right now there are, for example, 11,485 results for ‘wimax’, 2,161,552 for ‘google’ and 684,243 for ‘katrina’, which can be returned in order of ‘relevance’ or date, from one hour ago.
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