I’ve just received a call from the Henry St O2 shop saying that there won’t be enough iPhones in stock tomorrow for my pre-order to be fulfilled.
This is strange since I was informed that I was ‘maybe the second person’ to pre-order the 16GB iPhone in that store. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the guy who rang me, I’m just annoyed that I’ll have to wait several more weeks for mine even though I pre-ordered on July 2nd.
Anyone else get a call too?
I was just going around my own business when I came across a plug in for WordPress that allows me to change the horrible default permalink (http://www.wynner.eu/?p=XX) to whatever one you like. Personally I prefer /%category%/%postname%/. Allegedly I should now have a search engine optimised blog. Woo hoo!
Anyways thanks to Dean Lee:/dev/blog for developing the WordPress plugin.
Another year, another take on Live Aid.
After worthy causes such as Live Aid, Farm Aid, Self Aid, and Live 8 comes Live Earth. A day of music on 7 continents to highlight Climate Change and some worn out old artists flagging careers (Madonna anyone?). It was pointed out to me that this was probably the worst way to address climate change since it will cause large energy usage on the day and hence release additional CO2 into the atmosphere.
Let’s do some figures….
Audience of 2 Billion
Wattage per hour of an average CRT TV (excluding sound system) : 120 Watts
(Rough) Average of number of people per TV: 3 people
Number of hours Live Earth is broadcast: 24 hours
Number of hours before people get bored: 3 hours (I know, a little optimistic)
=(2B*120*3)/3
=240 Billion Watts OR 240 Gigawatts
Now factor in the number of high wattage kettles used to brew tea in between acts and the length of time needed to do so and the number of tea drinkers in the world… Stats from the the UK National Grid shows that cultural events such as World Cup games, Who Shot JR/Phil Mitchell? and others caused energy usage spikes in the order of 2.1 to 2.8 GWatts.
So with a two hour major event (say) 2.5GW per 60 Million population
and the 3 hours per person we arrive at a figure of…
125GW in addition to the TV usage.
So far that’s 325GWatts of electricity.. Let’s calculate the CO2 emissions for this…
Lets assume we’re talking about just coal fired stations.
Using coal generates about 0.00091 metric tonnes per kilowatt hour.
=0.00091*325,000,000 = 295,750 Metric Tonnes of CO2 emissions.
Impressive eh!? I’ll leave you to factor in the cost of CO2 emissions from the aircraft all the ‘stars’ and support people use to fly about promoting this event… the energy usage of the computer systems, sound systems and light systems… The million or so people expected to attend the event have to get there somehow and most will travel by car.
.. etc etc…
Okay okay I’m being a bit mean but come on! The best way to reduce CO2 emissions is to not use electricity at all. I propose on the 7th of July that our
positive contribution to the environment is to knock off as many electrical goods as possible and to go outside and spend time in the world we all want to save in the first place! Who’s with me on this?
PS Even if the organisers use renewable energy sources for the concerts themselves you have to ask yourself why they don’t just leave that capacity in the system so as to reduce the need to burn fossil fuels.
Make sure to go pay a visit to GetFirefox.com on Tuesday for the new upgrade to Firefox 1.5. Look forward to being able to save browser sessions (useful when XP asks for you to reboot after patching or installing a program that requires a reboot) and uses less memory than IE7.
If you don’t believe me read the review at PCWorld.com. They sum up by saying:
“Of the two rivals, Firefox remains the better application. Since IE users will have to adjust to a new layout and interface anyway, this might be a good time to give Firefox a try, then watch IE 8 play catch-up again in five years.”
Click on the logo to visit the campaign for making the world more accessible to all!
A truely worthy excuse reason to be online on November 14th!
I’m sure many of you have weighed up the pro’s and con’s already of Microsoft’s latest browser but I’ve found the one thing that makes it personally too annoying to use. Tabs!
Or at least a lousy problem with them. Right click any link on a website and the only options are to ‘Open’ or ‘Open in new window’. Surely ‘Open in new tab’ would have been an idea. Maybe I’m just too used to Firefox, who knows…
I’ve been in the process of writing a robots.txt file for my website when I came across an interesting robots file for the Whitehouse.
For those who don’t know what a robots file is it’s a special file placed in a website’s main directory which tells ‘crawlers’ such as Google, MSN, Yahoo! and others what parts of the website to index and what not to index. This file usually is set to only disallow directories that are private and shouldn’t be publicly accessed.
To my surprise (but really it was fairly par for the course) the whole of the Whitehouse website seems to be deliberately set up so that it cannot be mirrored by such projects as the Internet Archive. Indeed a search of how the Whitehouse website looked over the years shows that the robots file must have been altered sometime after 11th Feb 2005.
So why is this a big deal you may ask… Well quite simply it means that anything published by on the Whitehouse website can be altered without any automated way of tracking the changes. Basically you can rewrite the content history of a website… There hasn’t been a reason given as far as I’m aware of why this changed occurred so I guess we can only speculate with various consperancy theories!
Check out the parts of the website you’re not allowed index with their robots.txt file.