2008 March - mike arthur dot co dot you kay

Climate change miscalculations?

Sunday 23rd March, 2008 @ 11:27 pm

I had a random but amusing thought today as I spectated the White Easter but remembering a lack of a White Christmas for years.

What if our “climate chaos” and all the weather changes we are seeing are just the fact that the rotation of the earth is at a slightly different speed so years are now the wrong length! That would explain the whole warmer winters but colder summers!

Disclaimer:
I make every effort to reduce my impact on the environment, this blog post is intended to be humour not a complex rebuttal of common scientific theory. However, I reserve the right to merciless mock the entire scientific community.

Posted in Random

6 Comments »

Attention readers of my blog!

@ 9:13 pm

I’ve now actually reordered the categories into stuff I actually use.
My past posts and future ones are/will be broken down by:

The above links point to the relevant category. I highly recommend if you read this blog and only some of the above interest you that you subscribe to only the RSS feed for that particular category or categories for your sake and mine.

Posted in My Life, Random

1 Comment »

Standards: An alternate take

Tuesday 18th March, 2008 @ 2:26 am

As I get older I find myself becoming more pragmatic. A few years ago I probably would write off a guy like Joel Spolsky. He used to work for Microsoft, still comes over as very pro-MS and seems indifferent to open-source software.

All that really matters however is that the guy seems to be a really great software engineer and his blog Joel on Software is probably one of the best technical blogs around. Not only does he get into some real technical nitty-gritty sometimes he challenges us younger programmers to be a little more pragmatic and a little less dogmatic about what we believe.

A great example of this appeared in Akregator today (the best RSS feed reader I’ve ever used on any platform) where he weighs in on the recent debate about whether Internet Explorer should ship in “standards-compliant mode” out of the box. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m tending to agree with him that it may well be a bad idea to do so. If you look at the amount of websites that seem to be broken by IE8 then accessing the web will be a pretty horrible experience for its users, which will mean either people still use IE7 or move to Firefox.

It just seems a real shame to me that the IE team, admittedly through past incompetence, has got themselves in a situation where they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Ultimately there are a lot of websites that just won’t be rewritten for IE8 so it will be interesting to see what solution they come up with to solve this.

Proprietary or open, algorithmic problems fascinate me but making great software that actually works for “normal people” fascinates me a lot more so I’m intrigued to see how the team will handle this as I believe it is a far harder problem than simply making things go fast or have lots of features.

(For those of you interested in another good software engineering blog I thoroughly recommend Coding Horror, written by a Windows .NET developer but a very good read and is full of language/platform agnostic advice.)

Posted in Software Development

6 Comments »

5 Artists, 5 Songs

Monday 10th March, 2008 @ 11:38 pm

Following on from Seele’s post (which I wasn’t tagged on but I don’t care!): List your five favourite artists, your five favourite songs by those artists and tag five other people to do it.

I’m going for my Last.fm top artists and the songs I liked the most at the moment.