OK, so I’ve got a WinVista laptop – and it’s dire, at least the OS is. As well as lots of annoying crapware features well described here, it’s also got some really annoying bugs. For example, I quite regularly encounter an error condition in which the WLAN client goes out of kilter, failing to complete…
Read More Windows Vista is BuggyDear Lazyweb – can anyone work out why I can’t get useful data out of this page with BeautifulSoup and Python 2.5? The information is in an HTML table, enclosed by td tags nested in tr tags, and governed by three CSS classes, “flight-data”, “data-head” and “data-row2”. The latter pair are used only within the…
Read More Pathetic Python BloggingBring back the Office of Technology Assessment, say the Hoofnagles at Scienceblogs. Good point; for about thirty years, the US Congress had its own staff of scientists and engineers whose task it was to provide the legislature with independent technical advice, until it got zapped by Newt Gingrich. I’m sure it would do them some…
Read More Office of Technical AssessmentHere is Hewlett Packard Labs’ Cloudprint, a service that allows you to print your documents to a server in their network and receive a shortcode (which can be distributed to any number of people at the same time). Then, when you need the docs, you send the code from your mobile phone and specify a…
Read More Materialise that, will you?OK, then; remember the beef I had with the Indy about THE RAYS!! and THE BEES! ? Well, we now know what the problem is with the bees; they caught a virus. Interestingly, Australian bees are immune to it; I recall beekeepers on the Web back in February suggesting that this might be so. So,…
Read More Independent of FactsExcept when they’re from Sony, of course. Sony, the company that offers you peace of mind; you *know* who hacked your stuff! I can’t think of anything particularly intelligent to say about this except that it’s bloody obvious something like this would happen. Recalling the original Sony rootkit, didn’t someone very quickly demonstrate it was…
Read More Biometrics Are Secure!We don’t just moan about today’s government surveillance projects and fiddle with other people’s webcams here. No. Sometimes we can offer you better things; like the solution to a huge mass-surveillance IT disaster that hasn’t even happened yet. Spyblog reports that even before Alastair Darling’s deranged scheme to monitor all motor vehicles by GPS has…
Read More The jamming signal increases its humThere is no reason for anyone to think that the National Identity Register will not be compromised. Nobody serious in IT thinks that any networked computer system is immune to hackers, and that’s before you consider extrusion rather than intrusion; it’s a horrible misuse of English, but it’s the term used for attackers who come…
Read More The NIR Can and Will be CompromisedRemember this post on how the NHS National Programme for IT was doomed? Chatter is circulating that the whole thing might be scrapped, or at least subjected to a major review. Against this background, the big chief, Richard Granger, is leaving and has said some surprising things. E-Health Insider reports; and it’s somewhat disturbing. Apparently,…
Read More NPfIT: Still a disaster. Still a disaster in the same wayRussians demonstrate swarming UAVs down in sunny Aberporth. Which reminds me – I once met a man who lived near there and claimed to have seen numerous UFOs. Yup, just across the bay from the RAE/DERA/WhateverIt’sCalledNow missile range. Still, Flight doesn’t give much detail, but here’s the maker’s webpage. Damn, a swarm of those would…
Read More Flock: the social UAV