I might manage a few Arrghs.

Link: The Official British Headquarters for International Talk Like A Pirate Day

Fiscal Roderick Urquhart told Sheriff Stewart: “The accused takes the view that he ought to have the right not to wear clothes, and thinks that his view takes precedence over other people’s right not to be confronted by him naked.”

What a waste of police time. If they’ve got nothing better to do they should go to somewhere with criminals and arrest them instead.

Link: Rambler’s naked court protest

People in Japan seem to really, really want “real” robots, and it looks as if their robots are just about ready. This new robot from Sony look absolutely astonishing. Qrio is also consumer technology, admittedly not exactly mass market yet, but available to buy, not just a research toy.

Needless to say, I want one. All I need now is enough money.

Link: QRIO

Pete holds up a cardboard sign: ” – Will Work For Robot – ”

I expect we’re now due another round of outraged British journalists and their readers spluttering over their breakfast bacon sandwiches about foreigners eating dogs, while stray dogs in the UK are rounded up, killed and burned instead.

Link: Eat More Dogs, Cambodians Urged

I like using naming schemes for network resources; using names like “BF7689UUG4” and “Printer8” is not only dull, they’re less memorable. It’s also a good thing to give related objects related names - all the printers named after Greek Gods, all the firewalls named after planets, that sort of thing. It makes the network a more human environment.

It’s nice to see that IKEA do something similar with their famously odd product names.

Link: Where IKEA gets the names

Verisign, entrusted with running part of the Internet’s infrastructure for the good of all, have effectively broken it, in a particularly feeble way, to boost profits.

Instead of a DNS lookup on their servers returning ‘failure’ on a non-existant domain, it now returns ‘success’, and directs the user to an advertising page. This breaks a whole pile of software which needs to test if a domain exists or not. It also ignores the standard, and voluntary standards compliance holds the Internet together more than any technology. This is a very bad precedent from a supposedly responsible company. It shows either astonishingly bad technical knowledge, incompetent management, or downright irresponsible greed.

Link: Article on The Register

One aim for this year was to start learning Norwegian or Swedish. I’ve ended up with Chinese instead, for now, but I really should find more Scandinavian folklore and fiction. Here’s a great little story translated and posted to a weblog.

Link: The Changeling

(Please forgive the bad inexcusable fairy-tale pun. And I know the Grimm Brothers were German.)

Scientists: Fish are cunning, manipulative and even cultured! Sainsburys: Fish are tasty vegetables! (More piscine vegetables here)

It looks as if just about every form of life is smarter than we thought, and lots of people still think fish are somehow vegetarian food.

A few days ago I was reading a chocolate bar wrapper (as you do) and noticed that there’s quite of lot of protein in chocolate: usually about 8g per 100g. In fact, there’s a lot of protein in almost everything - Weetabix cereal has about 10g compared to about 12g in chicken. Not “complete” protein of course, but your body will do the mixing for you; just eat a varied diet. Nothing to worry about. Our cocoa powder tin claims about 22% protein, which is rather a lot.

In other chocolate news, dairy-free chocolate is full of lovely healthy anti-oxidants. Add milk though, and the effect vanishes.

If you now fancy some choc, eat Green And Black’s chocolate I think it’s the best there is, for you, the farmers and the environment.

The Cooperative Bank’s online banking system has been upgraded. Until recently it was an effective but rather grumpy Java applet. When it worked, it was great, but for Mac and Linux users like us it could be a right pain. Fonts would display strangely, keyboard input would break, sometimes it simply wouldn’t start, and this led to us having to use an old version of Netscape 4 just for checking our accounts.

The new system seems to be much better - it’s HTML, and they’ve made sure it works with the Mozilla page renderer. The layout is clear.

But the new system also does some rather odd things. Any attempt to use the Back, Forward or Reload buttons, or keyboard shortcuts causes it to log out the user, who then has to log in all over again. Use tabs and something odd happens: all the tabs will contain the last page opened as a tag. And the HTML source includes two head blocks, one each side of the body block.

The explanation given is:

“The browser`s navigation functions and keyboard shortcuts have been disabled for security reasons and because the Internet Banking service has been designed to be more accessible to all customers, including those with disabilities.

We have designed the service to meet the W3C ëAí standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, which has been set up to promote world wide standards of access and to encourage wider use of the internet.”

Very strange.