Tom Roper's Weblog

Domain mapping

Regular readers, if there are any, may have noticed some unpleasantness here in recent days. That's not my blog reacting to the dire news of Boris Johnson's election as mayor of London, and his proposals to introduce fagging, flogging and roasting new boys over a slow fire to the capital; rather, I have been trying to implement domain mapping, so this blog shows at my domain of roper.org.uk, which I registered years ago, but have never used to any great extent. It should all be fixed now. If you read me in a newsreader, you probably didn't notice.

Panorama on wireless

I look forward to widespread panic after tonight's Panorama which will claim, misleadingly, that the use of wifi carries health risks. See here for a counterblast from the Guardian or this Pubmed search.
For myself, I wish wifi networks were stronger.  I am fed up with AirTunes cutting out when I try to play my music  and I have totally failed to get my son's laptop to see the network at all.
Wearing chain mail underpants while using wifi seems to me a small price to pay. Does anyone remember when Panorama used to be a programme of repute?

Blotter

Seeing it on UKWebFocus, I thought Blotter looked interesting. Here's a graph for this site which will become more useful over time.

And here's one for the running blog

PawSense

I found this through pattern recognition. The beast pictured below, Eustace, has twice caused considerable damage to my last PowerBook. If only there were a Mac version.

PawSense
"When cats walk or climb on your keyboard, they can enter random commands and data, damage your files, and even crash your computer.  This can happen whether you are near the computer or have suddenly been called away from it.
PawSense is a software utility that helps protect your computer from cats. It quickly detects and blocks cat typing, and also helps train your cat to stay off the computer keyboard."

Technorati Tags: cats, laptops

Swicki

I've just added a swicki to this blog; the best definition of a swicki I can find is on the OSS4lib site. Mine is a little crude, but may develop. I was torn between Eurekster and ZoomClouds, but went for the former in the end: Zoom Clouds does the tag cloud, but not search, as far as I could tell.
Post scriptum: I've taken it of for the time being. The Eurekster version seems to require to be populated manually, rather than build it organically from the blog, tags and searches. Also it slowed the pages down no end.

Cleese or Rumsfeld?

I saw this on Phil Bradley's blog and thought I'd try it. He is supposed to resemble Lou Reed, and I hope he will not be offended if I say that I find it hard to see a very close resemblance.
But then it thinks I look like John Cleese, Alain Delon, George C. Marshall (he of the Marshall plan), Carl Perkins, David Coulthard, John Glenn, Donald Rumsfeld. Anthony Burgess and Wim Kok. I am rather upset about some of these, especially Rumsfeld and Kok. Still at least it didn't mistake me for Jeffrey Archer, as a Big Issue seller did at Brighton station recently.

A sensitive e-mail

I'm used to countless out of office replies when I send messages to lists, but the accusation of racism is not something I've seen before. I'm tempted to sue. It seems distinctly defamatory.

eManager Notification

The following message was blocked because it contains sensitive content.

Source mailbox: C.T.Roper@BSMS.AC.UK

Rule/Policy: Racial Discrimination
Action: Quarantine to C:\Program Files\Trend\SMCF\Quarantine\2005-11-04\08-49-54.26224\DFImessagebody436b20b26670.tmp

Content filter has detected a sensitive e-mail.

End of message

Handheld computers and the 21st century surgical team: a pilot study

Aziz O, Panesar Sukhmeet S, Gopalakrishnan Netuveli, Paraskkevas Paraszkeve, Aziz Sheikh, Ara Darzi
Handheld computers and the 21st century surgical team: a pilot study
BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2005 5:28.
The focus is more clinical than educational, but interesting nevertheless.

NCBI Search Toolbar

A beta of the  NCBI Search Toolbar is available for test.

I'm on the train...

...the 7.33 from Seaford to Brighton, to be precise, and for the first time I have a working wifi connection through TMobile. It's a little slow, in fact much slower than broadband at home but works; this promises to change my life utterly. The vexed question of what I might do in the future when my BSMS contract expires is resolved; I shall simply buy a season ticket and work from trains all day.