Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged

A really impressive win by Bradley Smith this morning. Smith has been coming along for a couple of years and it seemed that people were starting to have a few doubts towards the end of last season and whilst acknowledging his ability to race the machine and the circuit were wondering if he would start to show that he can race his competitors and I was probably in this camp as well. But today he may have showed that he is well on the way to silencing this criticism. After securing pole he had an ordinary start and slipped back as far as fifth or more but ensured that he was with the three that broke away during the middle part of the race, along with Terol and his team mate Simon, who had looked like the Championship favourite after winter testing and early season form. In the last few laps Smith's pace at the front was too much for Simon who dropped off the back of the other two and it looked like Terol thought he was in the box seat for the last lap, in second place, and just waiting to mug Smith on the long run to the line. But Smith proved to be unimpressed with this tactic as he put about half a second in to Terol during the last lap and ensured he was unable to mount a charge. I'm not sure that it's possible to lay down markers in this class but if so, then that's just what Smith did by dropping Simon, riding identical machinery, and then finding even more to ride away from Terol.

I've been looking for Pink Floyd's 'Run Like Hell' from Pulse for ages, well since I lost the last version I had. The only way to get it on iTunes is to buy the whole album. Er, no thanks, I'm not that big a fan. A friend suggested Amazon as they are now doing DRM free MP3 and there it was separate from the album. Thank you very much, there's my 79p. They were also giving away 'Gimme All Your Lovin' by ZZ Top and I also grabbed a few Who tracks, Baba O'Riley, Behind Blue Eyes and Won't Get Fooled Again. Installed the Amazon download app and proceeded to watch it crawl through the download, took about 20 minutes to get the five files. It integrated them in to the iTunes library without problem and synced to my iPod.

So I sat back, cranked up the volume to 11 and played my purchases in iTunes. I thought that Run Like Hell sounded a bit 'flat' but didn't pay too much attention to it as it was a long time since I heard it but The Who without John Entwistle and ZZ Top missing Dusty Hill are not quite the same. So I decided I needed to get to the bottom of this and find that I'm not getting anything from the sub-woofer on my recently restored desktop PC and I'm hoping that this is due to Vista having put in a generic Microsoft HD audio driver. I'm now downloading the Realtek version, and have been doing for the past hour and still have another 40 mins to go for a 35Mb file, so either Firefox is a crap FTP client or Realtek have a really, really slow server.

For anyone concerned about the Amazon files, they are fine, I took the iPod out to the car and played them back through the Sony system, Messrs Hill and Entwistle are all present and correct.

McAfee have identified the most dangerous search terms with regard to malware associated with the downloads that the returned sites push. Could this research have been generated by the fact that they have a piece of software which supposedly helps with this problem? You decide!

http://getweb.info/science/mcafee-inc-identifies-the-most-dangerous/

Though the day is young I fully expect this to be the oddest thing I'm likely to hear today, either that or it's going to be a really strange day. I admit that it seems to be so odd that I can't discount the possibility that it's some sort of viral story that's been put out there just to see how far and how quickly it can travel. I heard it on The Bugle podcast from last week;

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/the_bugle/article6288486.ece

and a quick check online doesn't seem to suggest that it's cobblers.

So here's the line; Comer Town FC play at Cabbell Park and have done so since 1922 when the ground was bequeathed to them by Evelyn Bond-Cabbell as a memorial to those killed in The Great War and people, footballers included, went merrily about their business until earlier this year, I don't know how, the club learned that the bequest was not a gift, but a lease. This is not the odd bit, it's the expiry condition of the lease that's weird and turns out to be 2012. It seems that the condition on the lease is that it will expire 21 years after the death of the last surviving Great Grandchild of Queen Victoria, which turns out to be King Olav V of Norway, who died in 1991.

I guess there are people who just don't get enough laughs whilst they are alive and decide to make up for the absence of chuckles once they are gone??

NASA have waived off the two possible landing slots for the Shuttle returning from the Hubble servicing mission due to weather issues. Opportunities for a landing tomorrow exist for both Kennedy Space Centre and Edwards AFB.

A few more Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs here;

http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/better-wolfram-easter-eggs/

Not as interesting, to me anyway, as the first 10 I posted but hey...

A few Firefox plugins, haven't used any of them so far but will probably give one of them a shot in due course;

http://mashable.com/2009/05/21/wolfram-alpha-firefox-add-ons/

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Well I've sort of restored my iPod. And then again, sort of not. The Walrus suggested Media Chest, which I had a look at but the latest build seemed to be quite old and there have been a couple of iterations of iTunes since then so I looked elsewhere and first tried Pod to PC, which imported all my tracks from my iPod but none of the playlists, which it claimed to do, and I couldn't find any help so I looked for something else. Came across CopyTrans, which I thought was free, but isn't, and it turns out that the free version is limited to 100 operations. I didn't delete everything that Pod to PC did so I now have a bunch of duplicates, which is better then not having anything at all, and I have my playlists but not all have the play count anymore? But not everything is rosy, I should have thought it through a little further, what were Smart Playlists are Smart no longer, I suppose the code for the Smart Playlists was only within iTunes and not on the iPod. Rather alarmingly the Playlist for purchased items was empty!! But the purchased tracks are there and work so I'm now considering if it's worthwhile to upgrade the tracks to the new DRM free, 256 kbps versions at 20p a pop?

The powers that be in cricket, both internationally and nationally, still seem to be making no effort at all to make the test match format, in this country at least, as attractive as it could be. Last night the umpires offered the light to the WI batsmen, who took it, which was fair enough from their viewpoint but why was it offered in the first place? There was a time when you had to have come within an ace of wearing one between the eyes before the umpires would start thinking about the light, and this was in the days before helmets. It was not dangerous, the shots played immediately beforehand confirmed this, so why are the umpires offering the light? The umpires are supposed to be the best of the best, so let them do their job and decide what is playable light without constant reference to light meters and previous readings of said light meters. They have now just come back out after rain stopped play at about 11.20, so 25 minutes play lost. The ground crew at Chester le Street know that this sort of weather is a real possibility at this time of year and the covers were in place within two minutes of the umpires taking the players off. The rain came and went within five minutes yet the umpires decided at 11.25 that play would not start again until 11.40. So what are people going to be doing for ten minutes, the players won't have taken their kit off, the covers could have been off by 11.30 and the players would have been ready so why should they not be playing until 11.40? I know that the playing conditions allow for time to be made up at the end of the day but realistically I don't think it's going to happen at this time of year so the paying public has been shortchanged on playing time again.

I know these are small things, but there aren't any big things wrong with the test match format so the ICC and ECB need to start addressing the small ones, particularly ones that stop the product being put in front of the punters.

A few optical illusions I haven't seen before;

http://www.aip.org/isns/reports/2009/051309visualillusion.html

After a month away I was back in the Job Centre. That's not entirely accurate, I started off queuing in the street for about ten minutes before the end of the queue, which snaked all around the office, made it inside. Then queued for another twenty minutes, never been that long before, wonder what was different this morning? I did learn something this morning, not that it's much use to me. The woman in front of me, mid forties, nicely turned out but no glamour puss was only sat down for about 60 seconds and then out. The body language was very impressive, nicely manicured hands stretched well across the table to the rather rotund lad taking the details, leaning forward, no cleavage involved just nodding and smiling and looking very engaged, all done in about a minute. I was with the same guy for about six or seven minutes, maybe I should get a manicure?

People having fun with the Computational Knowledge Engine. As it seems capable of handling Python and Hitchhikers references, I predict a bright future.

http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/wolfram-easter-eggs/

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Live streaming of the launch of the Ariane 5 which will loft the Herschel and Planck instruments from esa's Kourou facility will start at 13.40 BST;

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/herschelplanck/SEM9V3ZVNUF_0.html

NASA now receiving first images of Hubble from the shuttle as the capture is about to commence.

http://www.nasa.gov/55644main_NASATV_Windows.asx

Launch of the esa's Herschel and Planck missions to take place within the 24 hours. esa don't seem to have the sort of media available that NASA provide but more info can be found here;

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/herschelplanck/SEMVW10YDUF_0.html

A little animation video of the procedures to be carried out to service Hubble;

http://www.space.com/common/media/video/player.php?videoRef=SP_080724_HubbleAnimation

NASA TV will be showing capture of the Hubble Space Telescope live, with the shuttle starting to manoeuvre into position from about 17.00 this afternoon.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html?param=public

15th June is the day, this is the website;

http://www.ccjacquismith.co.uk/index.html

The final servicing mission to the Hubble Telescope is progressing as planned for a launch later today. The NASA TV live feed can be seen here;

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html?param=public

...the exciting final day of the England vs. West Indies Test Match. I'm really looking forward to...er, hang on a mo, didn't that happen sometime in the middle of last week? Well Friday anyway. So the situation now is that people without Sky can't see live cricket but also those with Sky and work a normal week don't get to see any either!

I'm sure there were what looked like good reasons for starting an early season Test Match on a Wednesday, but whatever they were; how good are they looking now? I want Test Match cricket to remain financially relevant in order to fight off the cash cow of the thud and blunder of 20/Twenty and I guess that the powers that be feel the best way to do this is to cram in as much Test Match cricket as possible but playing an under prepared team in early season English conditions, on a green top is not conducive to generating five days of revenue. I'm not sure things would have been that different if the WI had chosen to bat on Wednesday morning, or if they had taken all their catches. If you had a ticket for Sunday, you were probably a little concerned about seeing any cricket, if you had one for Saturday you would have been a little more confident and all this makes Test cricket look less appealing versus 20/Twenty particularly with what we saw in this Test, players coming off for light rain and bad light when you suspect that a 20/Twenty game would have continued and if 20/Twenty games had been billed for Saturday and Sunday, then cricket would have been played.

There will always be Test Matches that finish well within the five days, but there are circumstances that aren't too difficult to spot which will significantly increase the likelihood of this occurring, so when these crop up might it be a good idea NOT to start the match on Wednesday?

An interesting map of places and features in the US who's names have origins in the Native American languages.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/04/departments/native-names-interactive

Finally, all those Tomorrow's World predictions are going to be fulfilled, maybe, if you have $100,000?

Full article;

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/05/08/video-a-minute-and-a-half-of-jetpack-wonderment/

Manny Ramirez, multi All Star selection and outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers has been suspended 50 games by Major League Baseball for use of performance enhancing drugs. The suspension will cost the juicer $7.7M.

http://www.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090507&content_id=4603850&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb

The beeb has put up a teaser for a forthcoming series;

Camera specs and more detail here;

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/supercam/

Better get my thoughts in quick whilst he's still rocking a big century in the first innings; Bopara is not an international number three. Congratulations on the century etc. but there is good news and bad news in this, in order to get there he was dropped a number of times, the good news is that he was mentally strong enough to put those behind him and make the most of it. Have to admit I didn't see this mornings session so I don't know how he did against the new ball but I don't think he has the technique to go in at three and make runs consistently. He looks made for the five spot or maybe only to be brought in to bat at six with a four man bowling attack. How strong would the tail look with Bopara at 6, Prior at 7, Flintoff at 8, Broad at 9, Swann at 10 and Anderton (Onions, Bresnan, Panesar, whoever) at 11? Would still have Pietersen to back up the four bowlers and the selectors could go and talk persuasively to Marcus Trescothick to open with Strauss dropping to three. Sounds good to me.

NASA's STEREO mission has captured the largest solar event of the year so far and may signify the return to the expected solar cycle.

Though it might be a little hard on the fuel consumption;

http://www.labspaces.net/97398/Star_crust____billion_times_stronger_than_steel

But it's OK they're in Greenland....for the moment!!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090505-spiders-bigger-global-warming.html

No, it's not a typo. My expectation was that I would be able to restore all the music, podcasts and lectures from my iPod to my desktop PC but it turns out that I'm going to have to jump through all sorts of hoops to achieve this. I'll give Apple credit for their helpfulness, in the absence of a native facility within iTunes, in directing me to a Wikipedia page;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iPod_Managers

Which lists all the apps for managing iPods, but surely there is a clue here? The page lists about 30 apps for doing something which, with varying degrees of success according to the iTunes support page, should be an integral part of iTunes.

Apple are very pleased to crap on about how many songs their products will hold, mine is a medium sort of capacity at 30Gb and if, to keep the math simple, we say the average song is 3Mb then it will hold 10,000 songs. Now, I can restore my purchased items from within iTunes, and I'm sure there are freaks out there who have nothing on their iPod except items purchased from the iTunes store but I venture to suggest that they are in a very small minority and for the rest of us the bulk of the content are tracks ripped from CDs, video and images from PC and podcasts. So why does the facility within iTunes only allow for the restoration of purchased material and anyone with other content on their iPod has to go to a third party for a tool of uncertain performance to retrieve the rest of the content?

So, the much heralded new Sky Electronic Program Guide is here and it's absolutely, amazingly.....OK. There has been a furore over the advent of the EPG going back years on forums such as Digital Spy, I'm not really sure what was expected but I don't think it will live up to a lot of people's expectations. It adds some useful functionality and tidies up the interface, but unless there's more going on behind what's seen on screen then I'm not sure I would want it representing years of my work. About the only thing I'm really interested in is whether it will ensure far fewer failed recordings and I'm not even sure if it is the EPG that controls recordings or if it is passed off to some other disc management software.

One thing that I have noticed is that programs recorded today, with the new EPG inplace, and in the past on Virgin 1 have a blue band, about half an inch wide at either side of the screen on my 16:9 TV which wasn't there before. Odd.

Well not quite sixty yet, though it will be. Links to explanatory videos for sixty symbols used in physics, Speed of light, fine structure constant etc.

http://www.sixtysymbols.com/#

Microsoft are going to fix Vista. The Bad News; they're going to call it something else and charge you for a copy. The reports I see are that the new MS OS will run on any Vista capable machine and be fully backward compatible and according to the little vid below, will boot in a reasonable time but, even according to MS's optimistic timetable for release, they have 9 months to screw it up.

I have been having a few problems configuring my home network, though most are sorted out now, and I saw an advert for a free trial of Pure Networks' (now part of Cisco) Network Magic, so I thought I would have a look. Even though I've only been running it for a couple of days, it seems to be a very handy piece of kit, from a big name in networking, at a very good price, of which, more later. The software allows management of folders shared on the network, control of internet access, management of security, wireless network intruder alert, reports on internet usage, connection speed checking and other capabilities. I haven't tested all of them, though I have shared some folders, checked the connection speed and set up the security features. I'm interested to see if the intruder alert works as this facility supposedly exists via Trend Micro's firewall app but has never indicated any intruder yet when I have mapped the network I have found unauthorised devices on the system which Trend has never advised me about.

The set up was very easy on each of my machines. It needs to be installed on every PC on the network and the licence for the 'Essentials' program allows it to be installed on three machines, the 'Pro' version allows eight machines. In order to access folders I had shared previously on my network I ended up having to reduce the security on Trend Micro's Internet Security app to minimum levels in order to get access, but now I can access shared folders via Network Magic I will be hiking the security levels back up again and, hopefully, retain access to shared folders without having to go even further into the guts of the network setup.

Now it still remains to be seen how good this app is over the long term but even should it prove to be not quite as good as it seems to me right now, the price made it seem worth a punt. At the moment, through until 11th May, there is 20% off the list price of $49.99 for Pro version and $29.99 reducing them to $39.99 and $23.99 respectively. I'm not quite sure why I did it, as I have tried a number of times before for other products and come up empty, but I searched for coupon codes as there is a box on the checkout and came up with three valid codes, which could all be used together, reducing the price of the Pro version to $29.99 or about £17 I guess. I got the codes from;

http://www.retailmenot.com/

The software can be found here;

http://www.purenetworks.com/product

The Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig, walked out the line up card to the umpire, his name wasn't on it. I love baseball but, as with many other sports, the term 'legend' is bandied about far too frequently but if anyone in the game is deserving of the epithet then it is surely Gehrig.

http://www.mlbhomerun.com/2009/05/remembering-lou-gehrig.html

Now here's an interesting thing, it seems that most of the worlds ills are no longer down to Microsoft; Google seem to have taken over that mantle. This article also serves as another reminder of how finely companies like Google can cut their data, in this case with underlying geographical data collected when their search engine is used.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/google-could-have-caught-swine-flu-early/