Has anybody used the Royal Mail’s online stamp system? Does it work? It seems like it should be great, but I’ve been trying to buy a first class stamp since lunchtime and it keeps telling me - at the final stage of five - that there’s an unspecified problem processing my order. This would be ok, but there’s no way to save address information and the damn thing logs me out after fifteen minutes of inactivity. Given the placement of the error message, and that it’s lasted all day, it feels like I’ve tripped a bug rather than caught it at an off-time. Is annoying.

Update: working as of Wednesday, so must just have been a blip.

A friend’s brother was in a nasty car accident last year, and both he and his family were helped out by the charity Headway. They provide information on brain injuries and were apparently a great support, and I went to a quiz last night to raise money for them. It’s a good thing it was for charity, as it wasn’t the greatest quiz in the world. Having double the number of points on a music round - one for the song title, one for the artist - is all very well, but when this isn’t revealed until the round itself, and some teams hadn’t yet used their point-doubling joker…there were grumblings Plus, MIM bloody well is a correct roman numeral form of ‘1999′. Well, Wikipedia actually says:

Rules regarding Roman numerals often state that a symbol representing 10^x may not precede any symbol larger than 10^(x+1). For example, C cannot be preceded by I or V, only by X (or, of course, by a symbol representing a value equal to or larger than C). Thus, one should represent the number “ninety-nine” as XCIX, not as the “shortcut” IC. However, these rules are not universally followed.

This ‘problem’ manifested in questions as to why 1990 was not written as MXM instead of the universal usage MCMXC, or why 1999 was not written simply IMM or MIM as opposed to the virtually universal MCMXCIX.

I’m going to use ‘these rules are not universally followed’ as my get-out. Also it’s pretty rich having such silly rules in a numeric system with no symbol for zero. But hey, I’m not bitter
I was nervous about meeting my ex-girlfriend’s parents, and they came over to say hello at the end of the evening. I got myself into a bit of a state afterwards as a result, but came home to find something that cheered me up. Is long and not all that interesting, so I won’t go into it¹, but the end result was I made somebody laugh, which was enough to knock me out of that particular mood. It has made me realise that:

1. Moping over her has become my default position when I don’t have anything else major going on, isn’t even all that strong since it goes away as fast as it arrives, and is almost undoubtedly just a result of having nobody else to think about (figures, since it went away earlier this year).
2. I am completely bloody fed up of being on my own.

Maybe I’ll have to give Match.com another try.

1. yeah, I know this doesn’t normally stop me [↩]

Just thought some bloggers might be interested in how to embed an official Flickr slideshow into a post. I discovered it here and here and although neither post gets it quite right the commenters have ironed out most of the problems. The basic format is:

<iframe src="http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=YOUR_ID" frameBorder="0" width="500" scrolling="no" height="500"></iframe>

The unique flickr ID is in the form of 12345678@N00, which you can find out from idgettr (or, if you haven’t set up a nickname on flickr yet, it comes after “http://flickr.com/photos/” when you look at your own images).

The flickr link takes various arguments:

• contacts - Photos from particular contacts? Not sure what this does.
• text - Unknown.
• tags - Display only a certain tag. Doesn’t seem possible to use multiple tags?
• tag_mode - Unknown
• favorites - Presumably it displays a particular user’s favourites, but I can’t get it to work.
• group_id - Displays photos from a group - the group id can again be found from idgettr. Use without a user_id.
• frifam - Include friends and family-only photos? This is clever, and will only display them to visitors who are checked as friends/family via their flickr cookie.
• nsid - Seems to duplicate user_id?
• single - Unknown.
• firstIndex - Unknown.
• set_id - ID of the set, found after http://www.flickr.com/photos/username/sets/. Use with or without a user_id.
• firstId - Unknown.

I imagine their uses can be found in the flickr api documentation, but I don’t have a key. Other sites suggest that “photoset_id” is an option, but I can’t get that to work at all. It doesn’t seem able to filter sets by tag, either.

So:

<iframe src="http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=1234567@N00&set_id=9873987987&frifam=yes" frameBorder="0" width="500" scrolling="no" height="500"></iframe>

would display a user’s particular set, including friends and family images for logged-in friends/family. While the iframe is resizeable, the flash slideshow is fixed at 500 x 500. I can’t find a way to prevent it playing automatically, either. Mop fair pics example after the break…

Continue reading ‘Embed Flickr slideshows into a blog post’

The Six Word Story Flickr group collects images with a small tale in the title. I really like it, especially when otherwise uninteresting shots snap into new meaning. Some of my favourites here, here and here. It’s based around Hemingway’s famous short story, which he called his best ever prose:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Wired recently asked various authors for their own versions, and there are some terrific responses (via):

Gown Removed Carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss … ?
- Neil Gaiman

Tick tock tick tock tick tick.
- Neal Stephenson

There are lots more. My personal favourite is:

Osama’s time machine: President Gore concerned.
- Charles Stross

They’re great fun to think up A few of my attempts:

Hand transplant. Worried. Mind of its
Lisa. Year ago. Talking to sky.
The bunny made me do it.
Motorway. Surprise sneeze. Mess on dashboard.
It’s not illegal if we’re siamese.
Vaccination study. Media hysteria. Empyrrhic victory.

Comments are open if you fancy a go…

A couple of months ago I was browsing Waterstone’s for something to read while waiting to meet a friend, and picked up AC Grayling’s The Meaning of Things. I hadn’t heard of him before, but was very pleasantly surprised by this collection of short essays. Originally published in The Guardian, they present a rational philosophy that’s never less than interesting and is frequently uplifting. His thoughts on hope, death, justice etc. are often very much like common-sense, but it’s great (and oddly unusual) to hear somebody saying it so forcefully and eloquently. Irrational belief and cynicism are shown no mercy, and I seem to always put it down happier than I picked it up.

I just spotted his latest piece at Comment is Free, which is a very strongly worded attack on religious privilege:

It is time to refuse to tip-toe around people who claim respect, consideration, special treatment, or any other kind of immunity, on the grounds that they have a religious faith, as if having faith were a privilege-endowing virtue, as if it were noble to believe in unsupported claims and ancient superstitions. It is neither. Faith is a commitment to belief contrary to evidence and reason, as between them Kierkegaard and the tale of Doubting Thomas are at pains to show; their example should lay to rest the endeavours of some (from the Pope to the Southern Baptists) who try to argue that faith is other than at least non-rational, given that for Kierkegaard its virtue precisely lies in its irrationality.

On the contrary: to believe something in the face of evidence and against reason - to believe something by faith - is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect. It is time to say so.

It is time to demand of believers that they take their personal choices and preferences in these non-rational and too often dangerous matters into the private sphere, like their sexual proclivities. Everyone is free to believe what they want, providing they do not bother (or coerce, or kill) others; but no-one is entitled to claim privileges merely on the grounds that they are votaries of one or another of the world’s many religions.

The whole thing’s like that As ever with Comment is Free¹, you wander into the comments at your own risk. Also, the five-year-old in me demands I mention this particular sentence:

A special case of the respect agenda run by religious believers concerns the pubic advertisement of their faith membership.

And you thought there was a fuss about veils.

1. Ophelia Benson calls it Talk is Cheap [↩]

That was good. I liked it when Captain Jack said he needed to speak to a Doctor. What do you think to the chances of David Tennant turning up at some point? It’s gotta be tempting.

I keep talking back to Robin Hood. I’m turning into a grumpy person, I think, but the show’s so full of nonsensical moments that I can’t help it. Yesterday’s episode had Robin + Merry Men fleeing scent dogs. They ran across the forest, crested a rise and turned to see whether the dogs would follow. Happily the dogs went the wrong way - hooray! Except they’re scent dogs - the whole point is that they follow trails, isn’t it? And then the group wandered undisguised into a presumably well-guarded Nottingham and watched a speech by the Sheriff, during which Robin fired an arrow across the crowd to get Marian’s attention. Nobody noticed. I went out.

My dance teachers organise monthly dances at a local village hall, with tickets available to the public. They’ve had ups and downs: the first was attended by over 80 but an August evening saw only 14. Last night’s had around 50, which was about right for the size of the dance floor. Lynsey and I are slowly improving at floorcraft, although I could do with learning the official names of the steps. Sometimes I’ll realise we’re heading for a collision, figure out a route around it and struggle to find any way to describe it other than ‘the sideways step thing’, which unsurprisingly doesn’t help much We’ve struggled to keep going in the waltz and quickstep before, but they worked ok this time. It helps that we’ve been learning the proper stance, which feels (and sometimes, tbh, looks) odd, but does ease movement. Good fun, plus our friends Nod and Rachel have just started learning and are getting early opportunities to dance on a proper floor, which Lynsey and I didn’t do for six months or so. Halfway through the evening we had to stop to find out who was evicted from Strictly Come Dancing. It’s two weeks until we’re (hopefully) going, and Anton’s doing badly. Happily he escaped the chop last night. My equivalent crush is Karen, who happily seems to be in no danger just yet.

Last week I was invited to a meal+quiz tomorrow night. I said yes, and the next morning was talking to my guitar teacher, who turned out to have been invited to the same quiz by my ex-girlfriend’s parents. Hmmm. I’m a little nervous, but I’m not sure about what. I don’t think they’re the kind of people to be impolite, and it’s not like they really have any reason to (I hope). I doubt I’ll be able to properly relax, but it should be ok.

I’m looking forward to Torchwood this evening. They’ve done a great job with the trailers, making it look very stylish and exciting. According to John Barrowman it’s a 12-episode series, too. I have the occasional problem with Russell T. Davies’ plots, but the dialogue and characters are always great.

A few weeks back I posted a Friday puzzle, and forgot to answer it. This was the question:

You meet a woman and ask how many children she has; she replies “two.” You ask if she has any boys, and she replies “yes”. What is the probability of the other child also being a boy?

As was figured out in the comments, the answer is 1/3. This is because there are four combinations of children: BB, BG, GB, GG. You know there is at least one boy, so you can remove the GG option, leaving BB, BG and GB. Only in BB is the other child also male, hence 1/3.

If you rephrase the question ever so slightly, the answer changes:

You meet a woman and her son, and ask how many children she has; she replies “two.” What is the probability of the other child also being a boy?

In this case, the answer is 1/2. In the first question ‘the other child’ referred to either of two children, resulting in three possibilities. This time ‘the other child’ refers to only one child - the one that isn’t the boy - which can obviously be only a boy or a girl.

I figured out the first question - it’s similar to Monty Hall - but the second confused me for ages, even after I’d seen the correct answer This from Simon in the comments makes it clearer, I think:

The first question is similar to this. I put before you two boxes, each containing a child. I tell you one is a boy. In working out the probability the trap people will fall into is this: They will assign one of the boxes the boy and then consider the second box. They will fail to consider that the first box may have contained a girl and thus failed to acknowledge one of the three cases (if the first box contains a girl the second had to contain the boy).

The second question is more like me placing a single box containing a child in front of you and placing a boy next to it. Here there are only two cases and the boy is totally irrelevent.

Further discussion on two Skeptics’ Guide forum pages, plus this, which discusses the ambiguity that arises if the question isn’t formulated just so.

Flickr’s pareidolia group is full of such illusions, many of them surprisingly cute

Bugger. They’re going to start showing Series 3 this coming November. I can’t get Sky One here, as the installers said it wasn’t possible to fit a dish on my building. I can’t stand the advert breaks on that channel. It’s not the adverts themselves, it’s that Sky always pile in the show trailers, which always seem to involve the hilarious antics of drunk people at holiday resorts, families swearing at each other, or generic Show For Men with fast cars, breasts and fighting. Only Bravo beats it for destroying faith in humanity (well, there’s UK Living too, but for different reasons). Ah well, I’m sure there are ways around it…

The first time IE7 launches it loads a setup page, which reappears each time if not completed. Unfortunately the traffic seems to have knocked out the MS servers, so the page is responding extremely slowly. Also, IE freezes with 100% cpu usage if the page only partially loads (making a *great* first impression), probably because of the unique way that the page interfaces with IE’s settings.

So it might be worth waiting until the US is asleep before installing, or at least giving it a few hours. Anybody with the problem can try accessing the setup page directly, instead of through IE’s forward.

Big enough to threaten the security of the nation. Via.

After five years of version six, IE7 was released today. Notable new features:

• Tabbed browsing
• Built-in RSS reader(!)
• Proper printing (more of a bug-fix than a feature, if you ask me)
• Improved interface
• Built-in search box (that can use google!)
• Settings protection, which should help prevent spyware drilling itself into the browsing experience

and for us geeks:

• Extensions a la Firefox. They’re not so user-friendly, but nevertheless it’s a great addition imho
• Major CSS improvements - hooray!
• Alpha channel PNGs - transparency without the 256 colour limits of .gifs
• Faster AJAX - great for all the web 2.0 sites

Plus a bunch of behind-the-scenes security improvements. In November IE7 will be pushed out as a high-priority update to Windows Update users, which includes most people on XP. Yikes. I think it’s a good move in terms of security (and us web-page designers!), but it’s quite the change for people used to IE6. I wouldn’t like to be manning the MS support lines that week.

I’ve been using the release candidate version for a few weeks and actually think it’s very good. It’s much faster than IE6 (or an extension-laden Firefox, although that’s not a fair comparison) and the tab support is decent, although I’d prefer them to run onto multiple lines instead of scrolling sideways. Gmail is noticeably snappier, possibly due to the built-in ajax support, and moving between tabs is effortless. RSS is a slight letdown - you can’t actually view the feed content without visiting the site - but is better than nothing and should help introduce the concepts. I’m really in no place to judge how confusing tabs and RSS will be to the average user, though. Personally I can’t stand going back to tabless browsing, but I’ve shown Firefox to people who’ve reacted with a resounding ‘meh’. All the windows are already at the bottom of the screen, so what’s the point of tabs? I had to resort to ‘it’s just better because it is’.

I’m unlikely to switch completely from Firefox to IE7 as the former has extensions that are just too useful. But it should make using other people’s computers much more pleasant By a curious coincidence, Firefox 2.0 is due out any day now. It’s more of an incremental upgrade, and does break extension support, but is a worthy competitor.

You might want to give it a couple of days to let any show-stopping bugs get fixed, although the extensive public beta testing makes this unlikely, but it’s definitely a worthwhile upgrade, imho.

Bit short for any proper debate, but some good answers and Stephen Colbert’s sendup of right-wing evangelicals is priceless. I love it when he says “I’m lost”.

I’ve been a bad blogger. The Moo.com minicards arrived and I didn’t report back as promised. Here they are, modelled by groupies¹:

They’re great! Nicely sturdy and simply fun to pick up. The print quality is high, with a good level of detail on the city-at-night shot I used, and the text on the back is smooth without aliasing. They came in a neat little box which fits perfectly into a money pocket. A bit too perfectly, actually - I’ve been carrying them around in the (probably vain) hope I’ll be able to give one out, and am worried they’ll end up getting washed.

At $19.99 for 100 it’s quite tempting to get a larger box, although I’m not sure they’d ever be used for anything other than looking pretty on my desk…Hmmm.

1. Superman couldn’t be there due to world-saving activities, Batman didn’t care because it’s daytime [↩]