From an article in The Times (reproduced below) Library responds to surgeons’ 3am plea By Daniel McGrory SURGEONS in Melbourne struggling to treat a critically injured victim made a frantic appeal for help yesterday to researchers working at the British Library archives at Boston Spa in West Yorkshire. The emergency call was made at 3am British time. One of the surgical team had remembered reading an article in a medical journal about treating severe blast victims but could not track down a copy. Within 20 minutes library staff had found the article and scanned it to the grateful medical team,… Read More »Why librarians are cool (part 27736 of many)

…knowing that hotel coat hangers are designed to be useless outside hotel wardrobes? Superb court reporting from the Independent.

I don’t know whether to applaud or be appalled – someone has written a module that enables you to write perl programs in Latin. #! /usr/local/bin/perl -w use Lingua::Romana::Perligata; salve tum lacunam tum munde egresso scribe.

This story (The Scotsman, Saturday 12th October 2002) makes me rather proud to be British, despite my wishy-washy pinko liberal leanings.

When I was viva’d for my PhD last December, my external examiner suggested that I put my thesis forward for a distinguished dissertation award that is run by CPHC and the British Computer Society. Given that winning the award gets your thesis published by Springer-Verlag, entering seemed like a good idea, so I went and printed off the extra six copies of my thesis that this required. To cut a long story short, I didn’t win the award, which wasn’t a shock since I was pretty surprised that I was recommended for entry in the first place. Yesterday I received… Read More »It’s the personal touch that counts

From Trident should be scrapped not going for refit (CND press release): […] the whole nuclear detergent is a complete waste of taxpayers money that would be better put to use in the NHS

Back into the swing of things after the WebOnt meeting at HP Labs in Bristol earlier this week. Very productive meeting, topped off by the mass closing of a number of outstanding open issues. The downside to this was that the OWL tutorial slides that I had written last week for today’s AKT seminar needed a swift rewrite to take into account the changes to the language that had been agreed yesterday. The seminar was a qualified success. It seems to have generated a fair bit of interest in the local project and I managed to successfully get across the… Read More »WebOnt f2f4 redux

Finally gave up with the ‘punquin tab’ LJ style and decided to write my own. I think that it looks fairly attractive (if minimal) in Mozilla and IE6, which probably means that it looks like a dog’s dinner in everything else. I’m not satisfied with the calendar page yet, but that’s probably just a question of doing some more CSS+tables wrangling when I have time.

It appears that Mozilla now includes support for the accursed <marquee> tag of IE infamy – I was looking at pir‘s homepage and suddenly realised that the damned thing was scrolling at me. The relevant bugzilla entries for those who want to see the whole argument are 156979, 159839, 161049 and 163048. Bit of a poor show all round. On the other hand, it is easy enough to turn off, but Moz should really ship with such non-standard extensions turned off by default, and turned back on where and when redistributors (eg. Netscape) require it. Instructions for turning it off… Read More »rassenfrassen mozilladeveloperen!