Author Archives: Mark

White

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It’s snowing. There is a whole village of snow to play in. You want to go out and kick the snow about, make big steps through the virgin snow, walk into the middle of the road to break the wide path of undisturbed white between the lanes. Make wide arcs left and right as you walk or lots of little baby steps in different directions. You can do all of this and more along many paths and crossing several roads without attracting attention if you have a dog. People think you are playing with the dog playing with the snow. The dog is thinking “What the…”. I really really love snow.

Scary coming soon.

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Question: How do you convince the world that – even though you’re armed to the teeth and have a bad track record of invading countries – you really have “no choice” but make a “pre-emptive military strike” against another country you don’t like? Russia Today

Earthquakes visualization map

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This is interesting but the way the data is presented is not good. A one-off set of numbers doesn’t mean much. It’s like going to your doctor to have your BP measured. It might be odd but he – and you – don’t know what it was before, what is “normal”. It’s just a number and it is what you then do afterwards that determines how useful it is.

What this video does not display is 2009 or 2010 or any other year. We have no idea whether the first couple of months shown here were abnormally quiet. If they were then it means the numbers shown at the end are closer to the normal than the first two months. Another reason we do not know what is normal is that any huge event always leads to closer monitoring which gets more data which in turn is presented as being “more accurate”. But more accurate than what? Unless you have similar data on similar data to compare then it’s just a number.

If the point behind the making of the video was to demonstrate only the impact visually then it does that well. But if it was also to push some sort of agenda or policy then it would seem to be flawed.

You need the sound up.
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Mini no more.

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I’ve had a Mac Mini to work on since I started with Automattic. Last year the one I was using started to act oddly and the Apple Store said it wasn’t worth repairing. So I got another from work and hooked up the failing one to the 2nd monitor. It took very careful arrangement and support of the cables to ensure it worked, the drive was dead, ethernet socket was dead, USB connections were so bad I couldn’t trust it to stay connected to an external HD and wifi was spotty. It was knocking on Death’s door. But it worked for watching GMail updates, forum posts most of the time. But today the HD spun for the last time. Wifi did die, took several restarts to restart and the bluetooth failed.
It’s a mid-2007 model and Apple do this trade-in for older stuff so I went to see how much I’d get for it (ever hopeful!)

Unfortunately Dataserv has deemed that your product has no resale value

Hardly unexpected. 2007-2012 isn’t bad I suppose. It’s been on 24/7. And now it’s a silver brick with a white top.

Speedy

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Moved from Broadband with BE to Infinity with BT yesterday. Keep running Speedtest to grin at the 6X increase I’m getting on this machine. The laptop gets 34mb – the homeplug will be dropping mine. But what I really like is that ping. It used to be 38-43ms but 22 is just excellent. And as I mentioned at work yesterday – irc is just blistering :)