why be square? own a parallel-i-pod now

new, no right angles anywhere in site. a parallelipod is a new mp3 player that can give you a sharper sound due to the acute angles on it - don;t be square, dont fall for the obtuse or roundy bits - get a parallelipod now - with masses of spiky features and some groovy artefacts too. features our novel new patent free prick-up-your-ears haptic
selection tool tested after thousands of seconds of user trials.

feelin flat and uninspiured, get the new multicore parallelipod - plays songs 1000 times as fast as any other mp3 player, guaranteed - so fast that they are, if not out of sight, ought of earshot before you can blink - come to think of it, if only we can get it out of the lab before christmas, if you get the quatipod, it plays songs before they are released, solving digital rights problems for all time (at least from then on).

beer marley (not mere barley:)

Until the philosophy which hold beer superior
And another
Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned -
Everywhere is beer -
Me say beer.

That until there no longer
First class and second class booze of any brewery
Until the colour of a mans pint
Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes -
Me say beer.

That until the basic drinker's rights
Are equally guaranteed to all,
Without regard to ale -
Dis a beer.

That until that day
The dream of lasting haze,
World intoxication
Rule of international drunkeness
Will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued,
But never attained -
Now everywhere is war - war.

And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
That hold our brothers in the eagle,
In the castle,
the Bun Shop
Sub-human inebriation
Have been tippled,
Utterly decanted -
Well, everywhere is beer -
Me say beer.

Beer in the east,
Beer in the west,
Beer up north,
Beer down south -

compact routing and the internet

it surely is a shame that the internet is not a planar graph - if it wer, then it would fold up very neatly along various edges until it fit into a small envelope, then we could find our way around it a whole lot easier

as it is, its embedded in around 14 dimensions, which means it would crumple up if you folded it, and maybe even break in places that were more brittle, which would sure upset the ISPs

graduation re-defined

today several of my PhD students graduated in cambridge (yes, wearing silly gowns etc)

so when i did chemistry, graduation was what you used pipettes to do - dripping very accurate small amounts of stuff out

so maybe I should see myself and the university of cambridge as a sort of grandiose
phdiphdette (pronounced "fuddy fudette")?

perhaps not...

dave allen, woody allen, lily allen, paul allen:
to be sung to the tune of la allen's "Smile"
and without pronouncing ANY t's.

"Computer science aint better
than ICT, but its fitter,
not like plumbing or bein a knitter,
or even bein a baby sitter

programming aint more wicked
than babyshambling, insipid
stuff i aint keane on, like sid's
vids an' cds and my old fake i-d.

can you help me wiv me printer
i lost me passwd and now i'm outta
luck and outta toner, what a bummer
this aint the life i'm into....

can you get me credit back
me tea's gone cold and sorta lacks
the tide's gone out the back
and so has my lift home...

CS & SF

it aint just coz we is geeks that CSers like SF -
computer science research is often about taking one facet or dimension of the world, and exagerating it beyond all reason - so is SF - what if, one day, it starts raining, or snowing, and doesnt stop. ever. or what if one day, average intelligence increases by 50%, or we all become telepathic, or we stop? similalry, what if we put all the processing in the world in one plae and just had dumb displays in offices and homes? or what if we put ALL the storage and processing in all the homes, and NONE In data centers? or what if a processor only had 2 instructions and no registers? or all instructiosn were self modifying? etc etc

ICT v. CS

So re-badging a bunch of CS under the banner of ICT was a vain attempt by the telecom industry (see who backed it - principally BT, FT, DT etc) to hitch their sinking ship to the rising star of computing - alas, too heavy was the titanic that was telekon, too
nice, undefensive and not quite buoyant enough Computer Science - so we are now all hands on the same deck, playing mozart while the boat sinks without trace

I blame the downturn of interest in CS (at school and uni) partly on this - they (ICT) made us (CS) look boring, male dominated and engineering-only ish - the dead hand of alexander graham bell and thomas edison, instead of the livewire of maxwell, faraday jefferson and turing (sort of mangling my metaphors and history of science a bit there you understand:-)