Thursday triptych

[nmg]

Today was Industry Day here at IAM, in which hapless postgrads and postdocs are inveigled into demonstrating their work. Got a mail this morning from the departmental minuscule canadian, asking whether I or my erstwhile officemate Steve was giving a particular demo (which we had believed that the minuscule canadian was presenting). He's demoing it tomorrow, so I demoed today, which involved missing lunch (lunch was provided for delegates, but not for peons).

Demos are so much better when you can prepare for them.

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Finally got a phonecall from Korea this morning, so I'm off to Seoul in early November to give an invited talk at PRIMA2003, all expenses paid. Need to get a photo taken and write a CV blurb for their brochure (will probably reuse the HT2003 blurb for the latter).

It seems that they'd mailed me a couple of times, but I suspect I missed the mail because it was in a Korean character set that my mailer couldn't display. Given the large amounts of non-European character set spam that I get (predominatly Chinese), it may even have been caught in my spam trap and deleted. Oops. Yet another reason to migrate my mail to something like Mozilla.

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Found out that the (exceeding scatty goth) girlfriend of one of my Southampton friends has a LiveJournal. Reading her LiveJournal is somewhere between watching a car crash, and lifting the top off someone's head only to discover a scene from a Hieronymous Bosch painting inside. Long-suffering officemate Steve has maintained for many years that she's evil, a claim which I've countered by insisting that she's just misunderstood. I'm now coming round to his point of view that she's actually malign.

It used to be the case that I just didn't understand the relationship she has with her partner. I now realise that I really don't understand the relationship she has with her partner.

Comments

Is it just me? (...probably...)

[noradrenaline.livejournal.com]

Not being a computer-techie type (though I have an interest) I don't even know what Mozilla IS. Though everytime I hear the word it makes me think of two things. Cheese. And Steven Patrick Morrissey's ego..

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Short answer: it's a web browser related to Netscape

Long answer: after Netscape 4.75 came out, Netscape (which by then was owned by AOL) made the decision to publish the full source code to Netscape and make its future development ("Netscape 5") a community effort. This effort was codenamed Mozilla after the green Netscape lizard mascot (actually, Mozilla was an earlier nickname of Netscape from the days when the main competitor to Netscape was NCSA Mosaic, and IE was but a twinkle in Bill Gates' eye. But I digress...)

Travel about five years down the line, and you get to where we are now. Netscape 6 and 7 were based on the Mozilla code (taking the open source Mozilla code and adding proprietary stuff). Mozilla itself is a standards-compliant, state-of-the-art browser which makes IE look extremely poor by comparison.

The downside is that Moz or Netscape are unlikely to oust Internet Explorer from its dominant position, simply because IE comes with Windows as standard, and you need to install Moz yourself.

I've been using it for a few (three?) years now, and have no complaints. Worth trying out, in my opinion.

Ah, I see, thanx.

[noradrenaline.livejournal.com]

I still have visions of a 50 storey Morrissey stamping downtown Salford though..

The perennial problem with home computing; Gates. Indeed, I can appreciate the 'having to install it myself, gasp shock horror' thing as that is still the attitude I encounter with most other people. I'll never know enough about these funny boxes with their keyboards but the little I've come to divest from various sources is enough to tell me what a crock of guano-cookies all things Microsoft is.

Aquaintances with Macs - using OS Ten that 'sits' on 'Linux' (isn't that uncomfortable?) and is "rock solid" - and having seen BEOS in action are enough to show the clear difference between something that fails daily to do what it's supposed to. And Windows is SO BIG. I was told that they way they "improve" (clearly some new meaning of the word that I was previously unaware of) each new version of windows is something like this: To get it to do something better instead of deleting a line of code and writing a better one they keep the bad line and write a nother one, or another ten, on top countermanding the original one and getting it to do what it should that way. Only it doesn't always work. So they end up with instead of something svelte and efficient, something fucking huge and crap.

I muddle through on Windows 98 (2nd ed) and it's a huge megabytage. I daren't think how big XP is. It would probably take up half the hard drive (well, it would on my five year old charcoal burning steam powered box with barely minimal bakelite hard disc).

I AM as guilty as anyone else; I bought Windows because EVERYONE ELSE USED IT. I wasn't enough of a revolutionary to go another road, and at the time definitely needed the parallel of a home system to match those at work. I have paid though. Windowas has killed my PC stone dead at least three times and I've had to learn the hard lesson of reformatting/partitioning the hard drive from scratch and loading everything again. In the process losing both documents (I know! I know!) and performance. The damn thing never fully recovers.

I think that I would be happy to attempt using an alternate to Explorer (though I don't know HOW, in practical terms, Netscape/Moz is different) simply because it isn't Windows but is compatible. IF I ever get another computer and start from scratch. This one's failing so fast it crashes if I try even loading CorelDRAW onto it.

I wonder what the Bill Gates who started out with all this would DO to the Bill gates now if he could meet him. Going by various documentaries and articles I've seen over the years I find it hard to believe that the thenGates had a dark and evil plan and intended to be the vile and appalling Monster that nowGates so evidently is.