Caboose

While I was spending the compulsory hours hanging around airports this weekend (Edinburgh and Stansted, could have been worse) I noticed an odd thing.

Around checkin there were a couple of BT’s shiny internet payphones but once through security there are only standard payphones, no internet access.

A quick peer through the windows of the BA lounge at Edinburgh revealed that their two terminals were out of order. Is this some kind of additional security measure or just a bizarre coincidence?

It’s encouraging me in my efforts to work out a way of posting to this site from my phone and PDA.

Started using the beta of Opera 7 at work yesterday, it looks good. Seems to work much better with over-Javascripted sites. Even my online banking works in Opera now.

Now I just need to wait for the Linux version to appear.

Got my copy of the latest Orange magazine yesterday. As usual it’s a fairly content-free advert for their services and the latest phones.

One article had a picture of one of the buildings from Halley, with an aurora behind it. The article had a bit of information about Halley then went on to talk about Orange’s wonderful international rates.

Two things were wrong with the article. In the first place they quoted 00 672 as the international code for Antarctica, it’s only the code for the Australian Antarctic Division. Secondly, you can’t phone Halley from an Orange phone. The phone link is by Inmarsat satellite phone (00 870), which is barred, probably because Inmarsat calls are too expensive even for Orange’s ‘rest of world’ band.

Update 10/1/03: apparently you can call Inmarsat numbers from Orange but you have to get the facility turned on specially.

I’ve finally got round to replacing my Handspring Visor PDA with something a bit newer and shinier: a Sony Clié T625.

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It has a beautiful colour screen and all the latest PalmOS bells and whistles.

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web (about 1994) I had just started using it at University. This was before the big search engines had appeared (imagine life without Google or AltaVista) so the main way of finding your way around was through links pages.

My favourite site for finding resources on the web was Global Navigator, set up by O’Reilly publishing. I just discovered that somebody has resurrected it after it was bought and then abandoned by AOL. Have a look at the New Global Network Navigator Home Page if you miss the early days of the web: using Mosaic, no animated GIFs, very little content, no annoying JavaScript bugs…

News stories like this one seem to be pretty common these days. It’s usually just down to laziness and a lack of knowledge about security. Of course, behind it is the issue that the companies involved don’t care all that much about the security of your information.

The Register is a great site for computer-related news, I especially like its cynical attitude.

Today they’re covering Intel’s cunning plan for secure computing. As usual ‘secure’ doesn’t mean that you are protected but that software and media files are protected from you. More here.

It’s tempting to comment that some people have too much time on their hands: The Utopian Calendar. On the other hand, just think what they might be getting up to if they didn’t have that to keep them busy…

Update (7/2/04): the link above is currently broken. Try Mars Engineering instead.

I’ve connected my new camera and downloaded a couple of pictures I took last night. It was the leaving do for my spanish teacher, Angels (on the right of the picture).

There’s also a six second video clip taken using the camera, of my housemate’s cat Kakapo.
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I bought myself Sony DSC-P51 digital camera the other day. It arrived yesterday and I’ve had a quick play with it but haven’t yet got round to downloading the pictures.

One of the main reasons for going for the Sony was that I’m planning to eventually replace my Handspring Visor Deluxe with a Sony Clié. The Clié uses Memory Sticks so I thought I should probably standardise on a single type of memory card.

Some pictures should appear here shortly…