Thursday, July 22, 2004

A young monkey at an Israeli zoo has started walking like a human following a near death experience, the zoo's veterinarian said.

Oh now they start walking upright! Well you've had you're chance, don't get all evolutionary on us now!

Jon 3:15 PM Permalink

Thursday, July 15, 2004

You need ATLAS!

"During construction of the lab's five-storey tall ATLAS instrument, which is soon to be used to search for an elusive particle called the Higgs boson, a precise optical system was used to align the silicon detectors used to monitor the trajectory of subatomic particles.

By modifying the instrument and passing it above the grooves used to store audio on vinyl, the researchers were able to visually record their position to an accuracy of a one thousandth of a millimetre.

Furthermore, algorithms used to strip away background noise from particle data proved an effective way to clean up scratches and other flaws on the vinyl. This image of the grooves was then fed into a "virtual" record player to recreate the original sound."

Phew, my vinyl is safe...so how much is one of these then?!

Jon 1:53 PM Permalink

Monday, July 12, 2004

One thing I miss about using a Mac is the ability to have your desktop periodically fade into a different image, so I searched for something similar on Windows and found Wallpaper Rotator by Digital Wonders, you will need the .NET Framework installed for this one but there are plenty of other similar applications to choose from.

Jon 2:10 PM Permalink

Friday, July 09, 2004

Since I have just started a new job with a completely clean machine I had to install the obvious arsenal of web tools. First up Firefox with the incredibly useful Web Developer extension also installed. This is my main browser. I am using XP so obviously IE 6 is installed for further checking but for the project I am working on I wanted to really see results in IE5/5.5 without having to resort to Browsercam everytime I made a slight change. I downloaded a version of Netscape 4 from Netscape's product archive just to annoy myself. Finally I found this article which has downloadable standalone versions of IE5.01 and IE5.5, no installation necessary so nothing is overwritten, very handy! Now I can easily test my CSS across the IE triplets, Moz and NN4.

Jon 1:01 PM Permalink