Archive for May, 2005

Farewell, Cambridge

Sunday, May 29th, 2005

Tomorrow morning I will be leaving Cambridge. I’ve done this before, but four years ago on the same day that I left I learnt that I had been granted funding for a PhD, and so the possibility of me coming back seemed quite likely. This time, after nearly seven years here, Cambridge feels much more […]

Blogging from beneath the Channel

Thursday, May 26th, 2005

I’m blogging this from beneath the English Channel (“La Manche” to the French) from the comfort of a seat on the Eurostar. It’s so much more civilised than flying: more leg-room, a simple X-ray instead of arduous and slow security checks, and it delivers me straight to Waterloo/Paris-Nord instead of over an hour from the […]

Death by laser pointer

Thursday, May 26th, 2005

It seems that people have now been using Powerpoint for sufficiently long that “Death by Powerpoint” is a rare event at conferences these days. Alas, this morning I felt the life being sucked from me by misuse of a laser pointer. The two most obvious problems that inflict laser pointing users are that: it causes […]

Google Portal?

Wednesday, May 25th, 2005

Personalised Google looks interesting. I’ve always liked the idea of MyYahoo! but the interface is quite cluttered so it never became my homepage. The interface of the Google portal is actually one of the coolest parts of this page — you can use “drag and drop” to re-order the information! Being a Beta-service, the available […]

Interactive Python on OS X

Sunday, May 1st, 2005

By default, interactive Python[1] is not very easy to use on OS X as it lacks any command history. It turns out that this is easily remedied by installing a (statically-compiled) library, called libreadline in /Library/Python/2.3/. [1] Have I mentioned how cool, useful, and easy-to-write Python is? 😉