Paul Smith's Blog

We got a work experience n00b at work! Finally got him to actually do something, get inside one of the Star Wars PoS things.

They should all be lined up in front of a wall and shot - and anybody who takes their mumbo jumbo seriously. Look at this from the BBC: Hours after a Nasa probe crashed into Comet Tempel 1, legal reverberations were felt in a Moscow court. But Judge Litvinenko opened hearings into a case which could see Nasa pay a local amateur astrologist millions of dollars in damages. Right, not a good start....

Time for a Silent Hunter 3 mission report. November 1942 - about 200 kms south-east of Newfoundland. I ran into a convoy heading east-north-east with 4-5 escorts doing about 5 knots. Up until this point I've not had much trouble evading destroyers. That changed on the morning of the 22nd - it took me 7 hours to slip away, and not without a seriously bashed up boat. At 21:14 on the 21st I engaged the convoy, slipping along side the central row and fired a torpedo into two T2 tankers, blowing each one sky high, while firing another two into a T3, which went down within minutes....

Xbox 360 Degrees: If that's not enough they put Sony into checkmate with the media functions of the Xbox 360, there's just so much you can do. I don't know about you, but I store all my media on my PC. At the moment there's no real way to get it down into the living room and get it enjoyed by everyone easily. This all changes with the Xbox 360, using Windows Media Connect (available for free via Windows Update)....

Now this is pretty cool, it's now being shown to all referrals coming from the black list, the spam robots. If you have reached this page in error, feel free to bypass this message with our apologies. Please leave a comment telling us to stop blacklisting sites matching [$string] so that this doesn't happen again. Thank you, and sorry for the inconvenience. If, on the other hand, you are a bandwidth-eating referrer spam robot, then we hope that your owner dies a painful death and rots in hell, and that his or her seed is scrubbed from the face of the earth....

CNET: "The Blu-ray Disc Association, the standards body for the format, has decided it will adopt Java for the interactivity standards," said Yasushi Nishimura, director of Panasonic's Research and Development Company of America, speaking at Sun's JavaOne trade show here. "This means that all Blu-ray Disc player devices will be shipped equipped with Java." Oh dear. 30 second boot time. Dropped frames from Java using too much resources. Higher costs to deal with Java's huge memory needs....

Well I thought it was time for a new mouse. Well in truth I buggered my old IntelliMouse Explorer 1.1 up, by trying to get some dirt out of the lens with a screw driver (it was all I had to hand at the time) which crippled it, it become very picky over what surfaces it worked well on (the top-right corner of my mouse pad basically). Note to self, don't jam screw drivers or hard objects onto the lens of optical mice....

Well it's about time, being stuck on the old original ADSL product myself like so many other early adopters and trialists, we had no upgrade path to higher speeds, without a couple of weeks of downtime. Yes we love the good old engineer install. Well all that changed a few hours ago when Demon announced they were going to move everybody up to 2Mbps or whatever their phone line supported. Although it's primarily a BT thing it's nice that Demon have finally announced it (most ISPs did months ago)....

"From the start, we intended to make not just a game machine for kids, but a computer for entertainment that adults throughout the world could enjoy, other companies may talk of game machines, but we've always referred to 'computer entertainment,' even in our press materials. It's entertainment and also a computer. That's what's important." Your average washing machine is a "computer" stop trying to sound important. "This time, Microsoft has stated clearly that it is going after PlayStation....

My first ever picture taken with the new phone.