Abigail Brady

I have a Roomba! (a robotic vacuum cleaner)

It has been tested under supervision in all the dry rooms of the flat and it seems to work great, although it can get stuck under the cover of the sofabed.

I am a little sad to discover that it doesn't try to do mental mapping of the rooms it cleans, it just does simple behaviours tweaked for a good probability of 95% coverage. This isn't the future I was promised. (Mind, even 20 years ago watching Tomorrow's World, I was rather cynical about such robotic dreams, knowing what little I did about programming then... Wolfram Alpha is another in a long line of people solving the easy half of a problem and then assuming the difficult half will be just as quick.)

darkscape_club was very good last weekend. was worried about head but managed to stay out quite late. had hell to pay on the Sunday though. Cafe Scientifique on Tuesday was about ancient Egyptian astronomy and was really interesting. To top off yesterday's excitement, when I woke up and turned my computer on, I discovered that the hard disk had died. Put off buying a replacement until this afternoon and I'd had the phone call. In other news, I have been developing a cold. I'll try not to give it to anyone at zootalures amd 561's wedding on Saturday. (I'm very glad I took the precaution of phoning the hotel earlier this week confirming my booking: they hadn't got it on record. But do now. And I even have an email to prove it.)

Oh, and it's my birthday on Monday. I shall be 27.

so i was looking at google maps today and I noticed something a little different. whee!

Software patent bill thrown out (BBC). Vote was 648 to 14! This is a fantastic result. Now, will this be the end of the matter?

google maps now have more detailed satellite imagery of bits of the rest of the world.

The Oval, The Tower of London, Canary Wharf, Old Trafford, Medway Estuary

Found what appears to be a bridge under construction in Greece - which would be the Rio Antirio bridge.

back in Lesta now.

have discovered that USB cablemodems tend to work better if you plug them into the machine you are actually trying to use them in. introduced secretlondon to sudoku and strangely whilst explaining it got better at it.

read most of Stranger in a Strange Land now. this is probably the least-well-ageing science fiction book i've ever read, due not to any technical advances or anachronisms or suchforth, but to the pervading misogyny in the work. you can tell stuff changed a lot between 1961 and 1966.

also crashes on sgt pepper. think I have localised the problem - it crashes on ogg files with no nominal bitrate set. which appears to include a bunch of very old ones I have.

having fun with maps.google.co.uk. So far I have discovered that :

It doesn't deal very well with house numbers. "10 Downing Street, London" does not produce a useful result. It doesn't find the two nearest chinese places, but does find the nearest chippy. It has a strange idea of where Elephant and Castle is (Bronti Close apparently), and doesn't know about the London Congestion Charge.

It has icons for tube and mainline stations in London, but not in Leicester (though it does show tracks everywhere).

I have been playing with xine. I managed to set it up so that it uses black as the chromakey colour for its image, and then run a mud session in a black-background terminal, so I had live streaming Angel as the background for my terminal. Beat that, Xrender!

Well, I went into town and bought a few CDs and then came back and then came back to work and started listening to them... and destroyed my portable CD player. I think it may be fixable with tape. But blergh, I seem to have this habit of destroying electronics!

I think Dave from work is auditioning to be the 7th member of the Hives. He fails, though, as his trousers don't match the top.