Back to the Future for iBooks

My poor old iBook has been on the go for a few years now, and recently the battery has started deteriorating rapidly. So, last week, when I left it asleep for a few days, it switched off entirely, and on arising from its slumber, decided that it was 1970. This upset MacOS, and it ground to a halt within a few minutes of launching; it helpfully warned that it was about to do this by dialog box. Apparently, it doesn't like the date being set before 2001.

So, can't fix the date normally. The solution to the problem, as it turns out, is simple. When the computer is starting up, hold down Apple-S. This will bring you into a text-based single-user mode; quite the prettiest, and quite the slowest, native terminal mode I've ever seen. (The worst is the one that Sun uses on old UltraSparcs, with its bizarre Serif monospaced font). Type date 0727110007 (or whatever; that's today's date), reboot, and you're done. Yay!

Internet-upgradable chips!

Intel has unleashed a downloadable bugfix for its Core 2 chips; it updates the microcode, apparently. I don't really keep abreast with modern processor design, but was under the vague impression that microcode was confined to old, weird things like the VAX (and, apparently, the PPC970; it does some of the less-frequently-used POWER4 stuff in microcode for size reasons). Apparently not.

Fulltime employment makes you fat

I've been working at Demonware for the last week and a half, now. I have noticed one big problem. I'm eating way too much! It started when I had a cold, from Tuesday to Friday last week; I tend to get them when I've been stressed for a while beforehand. Now, most people don't eat too much when they

Then they told us, what they wanted, was a sound that could kill someone

Kate Bush is great. Interestingly, some of her more obscure songs are far better than her most popular ones.

And she has highly eccentric music videos; most of them are on YouTube, if you want to take a look.

Archimedes Plutonium is no more!

Archimedes Plutonium (allegedly his legal name), a noted Internet mad person, has been excised from Wikipedia. After two unsuccessful votes for deletion, a third managed to kill him.

A great tragedy.

Unfortunately, his own website also vanished a year or so ago, but he has a small one here, which gives you a little taster. For more, search sci.physics or alt.religion.kibology.

ggfg

ggfg

Becoming the thing that you hate the most

The first version of the previous post used 'there' where it should have used 'their'. Thankfully I spotted it a few minutes after posting; if people had seen it I would probably have had to commit ritual suicide, or something.

SomethingAwful meets The Ladder Theory

SomethingAwful is a website incorporating a very large and popular forum, and some random articles. One popular article series is 'Weekend Web', an annotated look at horrible web forums.

Now, 'Ladder Theory' is an enormous heap of nonsensical crap which allegedly details the (courtship) interactions between males and females. It's immensely popular among a certain demographic; generally guys who can't get girls for whatever reason. (As a guy who can't get guys for whatever reason, I am immune, thank-you-very-much.)

This week's 'Weekend Web', anyway, is focused on a horrible website of this general inclination called "Fast Seduction 101". It's really very, very funny; mad people are so entertaining! They refer to their feeble attempts to seduce women as their "game" (much like in golf), which probably says a lot about why they can't get women in the first place.

Representative quote:

It's also good to walk slow sometimes, coz' you might come across a target and miss the opportunity by walking too fast and not seeing them. There are certain dynamics.

Argh.

The thing is that SomethingAwful's own forums are full of posts about the 'Ladder Theory' and similar nonsense; I can't help thinking they risk alienating their users here. :)

Safari 3, a week on

I've been using the (MacOS) beta of Safari 3 for about a week now. Thoughts so far:

• Though I had no trouble with mine, many people I know using PowerPC Macs had difficulty installing Safari 3.
• There seems to be a bit of a memory management issue; the browser can end up taking up quite a bit of memory.
• Blogger's Compose mode does not quite work properly (no copy and paste). This is the only thing I still have to use Firefox for. Hopefully it'll be fixed soon.
• Safari 3 is much faster than its predecessor, and than Firefox.
• The 'find' feature isn't just pretty, it's also very useful. I hope that Preview's find gets the same UI in Leopard; it's currently functionally similar, but far less pretty.
• There is a 'private mode' (for paranoid people) where you can browse without history being recorded, and so on. I have no use for it, but I suppose some people might like it.
  
• Overall, I'm very happy with Safari 3; once Blogger's Compose mode works properly I don't see myself using anything else regularly.
  

Irish Broadband Ripwave review

The other day, I was using a friend's Internet connection, a Ripwave system provided by Irish Broadband. I was interested in it because I had previously thought that when I moved out it might be a good option for getting Internet access; while ADSL would be the obvious solution, getting a telephone installed and then provisioned with ADSL can take a shockingly long time, and I don't really need a land line anyway, so it seems silly to pay for one.

Irish Broadband, rather than providing ADSL over telephone lines, provides Internet connections through a variety of wireless technologies. The two major ones are a fixed wireless service, which requires installation of an antenna, and Ripwave, which doesn't.

The fixed service starts at 35 euro a month, and provides 2Mbits/sec both ways. This is, of course, quite unusual for a domestic Internet service; nearly all of them are asymmetric. However, it requires antenna installation, so probably isn't a great idea for a rented flat. The place I worked for the summer two years ago had such a connection; when it was working properly it was very good; it reached the promised speeds and was very low latency. It tended to have periodic technical glitches, though.

The Ripwave service costs 19 euro a month for a 512kbit/sec down service or 27 euro for a 1Mbit/sec down service. It's asymmetric; uploads are capped at 128kbit/sec. It's provided through a small box; you don't need to install an antenna.

Now, I've basically heard nothing but bad things about Ripwave. They are, to an extend, deserved. The box consists of a small antenna, a power switch, a signal strength indicator and an Ethernet port. (That it uses Ethernet is a nice touch; so many such systems use weird USB things requiring drivers.) When I was using it, the system averaged about 15kB/s down, peaking at 40 and at times falling to 5 or below. Latency was tolerable but not good. The connection dropped entirely once or twice. Now, this was in the south inner city; it's entirely possible that in a less populated area things would be significantly better, and indeed it's possible that if I'd spent longer positioning the antenna I'd have done better.

So, would I go for it? Well, actually, possibly. It's very reasonably priced, you can get connected almost instantly, and it would be more or less okay for my Internet usage habits. It also seems to be about the only practical non-telephone alternative.

Starting work tomorrow

I'm starting my new job tomorrow. I'm feeling a little nervous, which is probably slightly irrational; I've worked for the same company before, after all.

It's weird it not being just a summer job, though.

Dublin's Prehistory?

The picture isn't very clear, but it says "Sick and Indigent Roomkeeper's Society Founded 1790 AD". Now the sick and indigent roomkeeper bit isn't that surprising; you see a few of these charitable institutions about. Nor is the date of founding.

What is very surprising is that they saw the need to clarify that it was established in 1790 AD, as opposed to 1790 BC. I'm fairly certain that in 1790 BC Dublin consisted of about three huts. At best. 

Reflections on Looks

First, some background, though, of course, if you know me you probably know this stuff already. I've been out since I was seventeen, and, in general, in that time, guys haven't been interested in me. It has always been my tendency to blame this on my looks. (I also tend to obsess about my weight a bit; I used to be fat.) Suffice it to say that I've been in college four years and haven't had a relationship or the opportunity for one.

Anyway, I was out on Thursday night; we went to the George, and then back to a friend's house. There, a friend of a friend who I've known for about two years, but who's never said more than two words at a time to me (I always had the vague idea he disliked me; it is, after all, hardly an unreasonable reaction to me), proceeded to rant on at me for about twenty minutes on how I wasn't fat, ugly or stupid. On the one hand I was slightly horrified; on the other, I have never managed to annoy someone so much with so little effort. I should patent the process and license it to telemarketing firms or other industrial annoyers.

But, as I was walking home, I wondered. I am certainly not exactly good-looking; no-one could really argue about that, but possibly I'm not all that horrifically ugly, and it may not be entirely sane to obsess about it. So I've decided to try to think positively about it. Now, this was all during my sojourn into Dublin between night and day (of which more anon., probably in the next post), so I may have made this decision while crazed on coffee and seagulls. Still, it seems like it can't do that much harm to give it a go.

I'm even considering getting contact lenses. Contact lenses!

(By the way, this post should in no way be taken as being an admission of my not being stupid and fatter-than-I-should-be. Those can both be objectively demonstrated using my Leaving Cert results and the Lady Margaret Wobblometer respectively.)

My Eyes!

Now, as far as web design goes, I'm incompetent, simply incompetent. That's why this blog uses one of Google's standard designs, by the way.

However, take a look at this web designer's blog. Do your eyes hurt yet?

I'm wondering is it actually a subtle joke; the text indicates that he's obsessed with usability, but the design... not so much.

The joys of ringtones

My sister's mobile phone is currently croaking like a frog every time she gets a text message. It is possibly the most annoying thing I have ever heard.

Reflections on Looks

Tonight, after a night out, I was at a friend's place. A friend of a friend, who I've known for two years, but have basically never talked to, went on at me for 20 minutes about how I wasn't fat or ugly or stupid.

A triumph for common sense

Recently, a professor in UCL wrote a sceptical piece about the work of "herbal medicine" practitioner Ann Walker. The university received legal threats from said "medic", and took the page down. They are now, after taking advice from a QC, putting it back up. Yay! Walker never even bothered going to the professor in question, instead talking directly to the university. The offending piece is here, for the moment.

This goes to show that it can be unwise to make legal threats without basis. Walker will no doubt see a fair bit of rather undesirable publicity, now. It's just lucky that the university was brave and responsible enough to stand up to her.

BadScience piece here.

Spaced!

I found a wonderful TV series! (Through Wikipedia, of all things; it was mentioned as a sister show to Black Books.) It's called Spaced. Try it. It's great fun. I have never before suffered such emotional attachment to sitcom characters. Oh, if you haven't tried Black Books, try that too.

Representative quote from Spaced (from Daisy's best friend): "Come on Daisy. Stop feeling like such a big fat ugly failure. Everything's going to be fine!"

It is not, at all, of course, available on any of those fake Youtubes, especially not Veoh.com. Goodness, no.

Finished College!

The day before yesterday, I had my last exam ever. I'm finished now. It feels weird. Not too much time to sit around though; I'm starting working for Demonware (the same people I worked for over the summer) on Monday (previous version said Thursday, for some reason).

While it's nice to be finished with exams and so on, I will miss college a fair bit.

Safari 3 - Firefox Killer?

A couple of days ago, Apple announced the immediate release of a Safari 3 beta... for both MacOS and Windows. Even the MacOS beta is a bit of a surprise; previously there's been a tendency to restrict new browsers to new versions of MacOS. The Windows version was a big shock for a lot of people, though, I think.

First, the Mac version. It is amazingly far ahead of the old version. I love the in-page search feature. And when Apple say it's fast, they're not messing about. I've always had a soft spot for Safari, but found it unusably slow for a lot of Javascript stuff. That's all fixed now; it seems faster than Firefox, and most of Google's webapps (Docs, Reader, Blogger with rich text) work on it; they didn't before.

And that in itself is interesting, is it not? It would seem that either Safari 3 spoofs Firefox for those sites, or that Google knew about it, and decided to support it, before hand. Support for the latter idea is here; two weeks before Safari 3 was announced, Google mentioned that Google Gears, their new offline application thing, is available for Webkit (Safari base) but not current Webkit. Co-incidence? Google Gears for iPhone, anyone? (Remember, the iPhone will have restricted proper application development, but a full Safari implementation.)

When you think if it, Safari could be the perfect platform for Google's desktop takeover attempts. It's now available for Windows and MacOS, it's got very fast Javascript, and good OS integration at least on MacOS. I think it could be interesting to see where this goes.

Of course, the Windows one is still a beta, and apparently is having some teething problems. It doesn't seem to like Windows Vista a lot (but what does?) and it's very slow the first couple of times it's started up. Hopefully this will be sorted out by the time Leopard comes out, in October.

Another interesting point is that Safari for Windows uses Apple font antialiasing. This is apparently because it's using its own display stuff. (Here's an old fake Windows Safari using Windows antialiasing!) This is suggestive; what if Apple were to port Cocoa, and Xcode, to Windows? Windows, at the moment, finds itself bereft of anything really decent to write desktop applications in. Visual C++ is getting a bit long in the tooth, and C++ seems overkill for normal apps these days, but .NET is, well, .NET, and no-one really seems to want to distribute desktop apps for it. Cocoa with Objective C (as of Leopard it will have garbage collection and other niceties!) might be an attractive compromise for many developers, especially because your applications could also be trivially ported to MacOS from Windows or vice versa.<

Of course, possibly I'm speculating a little too much. But at any rate, Safari 3 will take marketshare from Firefox on the Mac. I know I'll be using it from now on. I think there's also the potential, if the beta gets its bugs sorted out, for it to do some serious damage to Firefox and IE on Windows (especially, potentially, as a Google Gears platform, where its fast Javascript would be of great benefit); it really is very nice.

No wonder women are poorly represented in IT...

This is a 'virtual girl'. It's the 'blog' of an MSN bot fake 21 year old. Whoever actually wrote it seems to be under the impression that women are lobotomised at birth; it really is painfully, painfully stupid.

I'm not quite sure what the target market is. At any rate, AOL have started listing it on their IM client by default.

The LiveJournal War

Blog/community site LiveJournal is currently in an uproar, because the company which owns it suspended the accounts of people who had words like 'incest' and 'non-con' (short for non-consensual) in their 'interests' section. It also suspended blogs which were about fictional under-age sex, and Harry Potter fan-fiction about sex, and so forth. So great has been the uproar, indeed, that many of the accounts will apparently be reinstated.

Am I the only one who thinks that it makes perfect sense to delete this sort of thing?

Who to vote for in the American election

America is having a presidential election soon. There are an unusually large range of loud, well-covered-by-the-media candidates.

There's McCain, a Republican who really seems rather reasonable, all things considered. He was a torture victim in Vietnam, and, for a Republican, is opposed to the use of torture in the 'war on terror'.

Then there's Romney, who's a hypocrite. He seems to have reversed his opinion on everything at least once in the last decade. He's a big torture man.

Then there's Giuliani, that annoying former New York mayor. He's a lovely character; he's in favour of waterboarding (although it is not specified, one assumes that he means for the nasty scary brown people, rather than for, say, his children), and on torture said that the United States should use "every method they could think of." He's also a bit of a hypocrite, shifting positions wildly on all sorts of things. He's against free health care. And he's open to the possibility of nuclear war with Iran. Rudy uber alles!

On the other side, there's Clinton (the female of the species). She's keen on hydrogen powered cars, she wants to ban burning flags, and she's willing to use torture, though the tone seems to be more as a last resort than Giuliani's; one receives the impression that Giuliani would like to subject people who salute inadequately when he walks by to the rack.

Then there's Barack Obama, who really does stand out. He's extremely articulate, seems very intelligent, more intelligent than you'd generally expect a politician to be, and his views seem broadly sensible; he even supports bringing in free health care, and supports social welfare. Sadly, I can't imagine that he'll actually be elected; would the southern states really vote for a black person?

American Bicentennial on LSD

The following was produced, by the USIA, a US propaganda board at the time, to celebrate the US's bicentennial. Yes, really. I particularly like the eagle turning into the Liberty bell, and then the Masonic all-seeing-eye symbol, and the cornucopia sequence, where we learn that the US produces lots of cars, hamburgers and televisions! Yay! Except for the televisions, I suppose, this is still the case.

Interestingly, anything to do with the scary communists is absent. I suppose it's targeted at kids.

Note also, however, that there is a terrifying clown, surely scarier than even the most extravagantly moustachioed communist, 37 seconds in.

How to frighten children

Here's an American educational film about intestinal parasites, narrated by animal puppets with annoying voices, from the 70s. The squirrel is painfully stupid.

Representative quotes: "Never use the out-of-doors for a bathroom", and "Always use your toilet or privy". Privy! Imagine!

Please note that in the 70s it was the duty of the child to take care of its parents' health.

Silly Americans! When will you learn?

An interesting incident from a few months ago; a 47 year old Jewish architect, Seth Stein, was on a flight from London to New York. He used the toilet, listened to an iPod, and looked a bit Semitic. Of course, we all know what that means. He was planning to hijack the plane! So, a passenger assaulted him, pretending to be a (NYPD) policeman. Wonderful. Said fraud was applauded by other passengers on disembarking.

This is not an isolated incident. A woman was kicked off a Vermont-New York flight for breast-feeding her baby. And quite right, too; it was probably a nuclear one! An Orthodox Jewish man was kicked off a plane for praying; imagine! He should know well that freedom of religion in the US is for nice, respectable Christians, not scary Jews and Muslims. And a passenger on a flight from LA to Salt Lake City was arrested for going to the bathroom shortly before landing. His bladder hates America!

Here, a lunatic-fringe American uses the situation, rather implausibly, to call for more racial profiling. The airways must be made safe for decent, god-fearing white Americans!

As always, I have a solution. America is already one of the world leaders in mass-medication, with fluorine in most water supplies and folic acid in flour. It would be a simple procedure to add Valium to the mix, and would no doubt cut down on all this nonsense.

Microsoft's War on Developers continues

A couple of years ago, a hobbyist programmer wrote a unit-testing suite for Visual Studio, Microsoft's developer IDE. He was, for his troubles, made a Microsoft "Most Valued Professional", and was, for a time, much-beloved by the company. Then, someone noticed that his add-on added the functionality to even Visual Studio Express, Microsoft's free developer tools. Microsoft didn't like that, dear me, no. (Ironically, he wrote the add-on with Visual Studio Express himself, originally). He started getting nasty letters, and recently very nasty letters. He's been given until 4pm today to disable the product for Visual Studio Express. As yet, nothing has happened.

Now, this is all very interesting. In fact, the existence of Visual Studio Express is in itself interesting. The thing is, as far as the desktop is concerned, what is Microsoft's big advantage over the competition, these days? Availability of software. Business applications are no longer such a big deal; a lot of in-house business apps are now webapps. So Microsoft should be taking a long look at clever little add-ons like those so popular on MacOS. If you show a Windows user MacOS X, what, besides Expose, makes them ooh and ahh? Generally, the clever little third party apps. Who writes those? Mostly, people in their spare time. They tend to be open-source, freeware, or unenforced shareware. Why are there so many applications for MacOS from hobbyist developers? Probably, in large part, because Apple is nice to hobbyist developers. All of the developer tools are entirely free, and even come with the operating system. There's decent documentation, and a friendly community.

Now, look at Windows. The developer tools (Visual Studio; I'm ignoring third party tools as they're not used that much) are available for free, but only as a badly cut-down version. Even Visual Studio Standard, costing about 300 euro, lacks many features; for instance, it can't build 64bit binaries. If you want that, you need to go for Professional (about 1000 euro). If you want profiling and unit testing and so on, you'll need to opt for Team System (apparently about 3000 euro for a single user). And, of course, if you write something using the wrong version which becomes popular, Microsoft will start sending you legal threats. Lovely.

So, what should Microsoft be doing? Giving the whole thing away free, of course. I can't imagine that they really make a huge amount off it anyway; developer tools are almost never profitable. Even companies which at first glance make most of their money off developer tools (Franz, for instance) seem to be heavily dependent on support and consultancy. And they might make more on Windows licenses if the same sort of amateur developer culture that exists in the Apple world was present. Availability of applications has always been a major competitive advantage for Windows, and they will lose it if they don't start being nicer to their developers.

Alchohol and Spring Water

The following ads adorned Pearse St. Station yesterday.
Spring water with botanical ingredients listed above it. Does the ad look familiar? It should! This is gin lite! (Bombay gin, for instance, uses an ad almost identical to this one.)


And Jack Daniels is doing the opposite; it's pretending to be spring water.

I always wondered about the whole spring water thing; why do people buy it? And especially, why do people buy the more expensive brands? Tap water in most developed countries is generally entirely safe and quite pleasant. There are one or two tap water systems in the UK I'd be slightly cautious of, because they work on closed sewage-water loops; as Edina Monsoon said about colonic irrigation, "It's not to be sniffed at", but generally, tap water is fine.

International Eating Habits

Time magazine has an interesting photo compilation of what various families round the world eat in a week here.

From this, we can learn a number of things.

• British people only eat things which come in packets, as do half of American people.
• German people drink a lot of beer. Really. A lot.
• Everyone in the world eats either one very large green melon or five bananas every week, except for the British and Americans, who, as previously mentioned, aren't allowed natural food.
• They drink a lot of coke in Mexico. Even more than the Germans drink beer. (Unsurprisingly, the family shown are all wobblebottoms.)
• Chinese people use more oil than you might imagine. There must be at least ten litres in that bottle. (Also, KFC. The Americans had KFC too.)
• In Poland, they have giant toy elephants, and lots of cat food.

(Disclaimer: I realise, of course, that these are not actually nationally representative diets.)

ANSI Common Lisp

I just recently noticed that one of the college societies that I'm a member of has a copy of ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham. When I was first learning Lisp, I was advised to get a copy of this book, but at the time they were hard to come by except by mail-order, which seemed like it was more trouble than it was worth. In the end I went with the free online version of Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel.

I now wish that I had managed to get ANSI Common Lisp; on reading it, I found it far simpler than PCL, and it cleared up some uncertainties that I had.

It isn't universally popular, of course; in particular, some people are concerned than Graham uses 'if' inappropriately, and under-uses 'loop', in fact explicitly warning people away from it. There's an attempt at correction here. I'd add that the examples assume that you can use 'setf' to define global variables; SBCL at least doesn't allow this. Probably better to use 'defparameter' instead.

All in all, though, I think it's a great book, and would certainly recommend it to anyone learning Lisp.

Sun: Moving in the face of convention

For the last while, there has a tendency for programming languages with memory management and dynamic typing and so on to become more and more prominent. Carefully ignoring this trend, it seems, is Sun Microsystems, which has just released a new visual IDE for C, C++, and... Fortran. Yes, Fortran.

I shall certainly use it for all my writing-GUI-applications-in-Fortran needs.

In the early 21st century, the Cold War moved into its 'Press release' stage

The Soviet Union Russia has rolled out an exciting new MIRV ICBM, the RS-24. It carries 10 warheads, and was apparently developed in secret. Sadly there doesn't seem, as yet, to be a NATO reporting name; NATO are, after all, so much better at the whole naming thing, with previous missiles dubbed, among other things, 'Stiletto', 'Spanker' and 'Satan' (an interesting mix, altogether). There was, of course, the AT-16 Scallion, possibly my favourite. Presumably, this missile has been released to prevent the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces from dying of boredom.

I await with anticipation the undoubtedly far better-named (but uglier; the Americans never really got aesthetic rocket design down) American ICBM which will no doubt be launched shortly.

Fuzzy Logic Exam

Fuzzy logic is a logic system used in control systems for robotic kittens.

Well, okay, that's not quite true, but it'd be cute, no?

Anyway, fuzzy logic is one of my final year subjects. I was terribly nervous about the exam, partly because I always am, and partly because it's a new subject, with no past papers to look over or anything.

I worried without cause, though; the exams, as far as I can see, went very well. Questions were easier than I'd expected; I actually spent a fair amount of time worrying that they might be trick questions, but I think they're okay. Hopefully, I did fairly well.

And Progress Marches On

Have you ever noticed that as consumer products get more and more advanced, they fail in more and more exotic ways? In the old days, motors burned out, engines failed, and so on, but at least it was moderately explicable.

And it's getting worse, fast. My Walkman, after operating happily for many years, suffered some fault in its motors so that it was fine playing the first bits of tapes, but would gradually slow down as it got towards the middle, eventually making Tina Turner sound like an old priest. About 15 minutes in the middle of the tape became complete no-man's land, flatly refusing to play at all, which was a shame, as I rather liked the song. I only really had one tape, you understand. The radio, too, after a certain point, decided that it couldn't really be bothered with station presets anymore, if that was okay with me.

My first MP3 player, a little Creative Labs USB thingy with a whole 128MB storage (imagine!) would, when the fancy took it, just freeze up, start repeating the first five seconds of a song over and over My old iPod, even, a Mini, would occasionally freeze up, generally with a nasty error message, and occasionally with its terrifying diagnostic screen. The offending iPod, incidentally, was given to my sister when it was replaced. I'm pretty sure it's dead now; my siblings have an amazing talent for killing innocent consumer electronics.

But now... Welcome to the world of the future. My current iPod, a Nano (the cute little one which Steve Jobs affects to think the pocket for lighters in jeans was designed for), when it has trouble (which in fairness isn't often) prefers to simply pretend it's paused. It will obligingly change the 'pause' icon to a 'play' one when you press play, but that's it. No amount of messing around will fix it, short of actually resetting it; you have to hold down the middle and play buttons for an unreasonable length of time, after which it will show you a nice little apple and eventually start working again. My phone does something rather similar; occasionally, a random feature will simply stop working; typically the speaker or bluetooth. The solution seems to be to remove the battery and leave it to think about what it's done for a while.

Much of this can probably be blamed on the tendency to use exception handling absolutely everywhere. For the benefit of my technology-illiterate audience, I will attempt to explain; exception handling is a mechanism whereby the programmer can specify code to be run in case of something failing; at least in theory this code should probably actually attempt to fix things or warn the user. There is a tendency, however, as the wonderful Verity Stob puts it, to use it to 'nail the corpse in an upright position'.

It replaces old, outmoded, unfashionable methods of dealing with errors, including the mysterious C 'setjmp' thing, which causes execution flow to jump 'round fairly randomly if there's a problem, and the frankly ridiculous VB 'ON ERROR RESUME NEXT' thing, which would, in case of an error, simply pretend it didn't happen and continue on the next line. Probably wasn't important anyway; best to ignore it. It doesn't, for the moment, seem to be replacing that tried and tested approach to error handling for computer games; on error, crash immediately, preferably leaving the user's display settings in a state of flux and destroying the odd saved game file. If at all possible, take the operating system down with you.

The thing is, though, where will it end? Will devices simply start hiding more and more subtle errors, pretending to be in normal working order? "Oh, no, don't use that teleporter; it's broken. It'll work all right, but it will change your contact lens perscription." (It is, of course, a well known fact that no-one in The Future wears glasses. Just look at Star Trek!)