Kiri Te Kanawa, Alan Deere, Keith Park, Gary Freeman, Kurt Sorensen, Bernard Freyberg, Vik Olliver, Kotare, Phil Blake, Graham Lowe, your boys took a hell of a beating! Since when did Leon Pryce become a world-class stand-off? What happened to Gareth Raynor? I remember when he was intensely average; suddenly he’s become a cracker. And…
Read More Blogging Rugby League; GB 44 NZ 0I haz been in yr thread, commenting on yr arcologies. I am fascinated to see that in a sense, one is under construction right now, in the fine city of Baghdad. William Langewiesche reports; read the whole damn thing, as it’s one of the best things about architecture, politics, diplomacy, and Iraq you’ll ever see.…
Read More Mind my fortified data centre pod!It used to be reasonably commonplace that bloggers, especially American ones, would say that at least in Britain there was enough diversity in the press that no equivalent to the classic US pundit wanker existed – no-one like David Brooks or David Broder, essentially content-free and heavily invested in the self-regard of the political class.…
Read More Martin Kettle Is a Worthless Old HackGoogle is, essentially, a honking great unix system whose command line interface is addressed through URLs. This came to mind preparing the embedded map for the G3 Systems post; Google Maps autogenned a slightly different location than the view I wanted every time, although I could link directly to the right view. So, of course,…
Read More Google: the world’s favourite command lineIf you watched Britz this week you’ll have seen the MI5 chaps and chappesses poring over really complicated social-network diagrams of the jihadi menace. And this has indeed been a boom academic industry since 2001; after Valdis Krebs’s seminal paper in which he mapped the relationships of the September 11 plotters, there were all kinds…
Read More The Failings of Social Network AnalysisG3 Systems Ltd must have been very proud when Tony Blair visited the logistics base it built in Afghanistan for the British Army a few months ago, and again when Defence Secretary Des Browne came calling. Their website boasts of offering a wide range of services to the armed forces, especially the supply of various…
Read More G3 Systems and Fraser-BrookThe Foreign Office has finally published some actual instructions about what to do if you are an Iraqi employee of the British Government and you wish to flee. You can read them on the FCO website here; one could have wished for a more memorable URL, perhaps, rather than whatever the JSP servlet randomly generated.…
Read More Official Instructions for Iraqi Locally-Engaged StaffUpdate: Right, I am somewhat calmer. The first thing that strikes me about this is that we still don’t know quite a few interesting things about the decisions that led up to the shooting; for example, why the firearms squad took so long to rock up, who was responsible for the briefing they received, which…
Read More It Is the Deliberate Policy of the Metropolitan Police to Shoot People and Lie About ItI have a curious problem with Python 2.5’s SQL support. OK, so we import sqlite3 and create a connection object to an existing sql file. It happens. Then we call the connection’s cursor method. OK. Now, if you look up the sqlite documentation, the most important command is cursor.execute(), where your SQL command goes in…
Read More Pathetic Python Blogging: SQL Bug?Great Britain 20 New Zealand 14! Well, at least they didn’t schedule it to clash with whatever it was the union people were doing. What a match, though – like inhaling espresso compared to the ‘tothersiders. It had it all – tension! speed! spectacle! Sam Burgess, the 18-year old bolter, had a damn good game…
Read More Now for some real rugby