One born every minute

April Fool! See gullible

Hooked on technology

The days of sitting patently on a wicker basket, eating a sandwich or pouring a cuppa from the trusty Thermos flask, waiting for the fish to nibble the worm are limited. The fisherman can watch the activity near the hook on a video screen! Of course, as hinted at by the illustration, one could also see a bikini clad woman swimming past, although this is unlikely in the local canal!

How long will it be before the full color LCD screen is able to show the latest premiere division football match or perhaps stream a film?

Find the article here

Photo faces

I was looking through the iPhoto Library package and came across some jpgs with 'face0' appended to the photo filename. According to the manual, "iPhoto detect all the faces in your photos, and then uses face-recognition technology to group likely matches together". I browsed through some of the 'faces' and amongst the real faces I found this! The algorithm obviously needs refining further - for one thing it does not worry if there is a hole in the head! (background shows through)

The difference between cats and dogs

If you want to compare how two things, such a cat and a dog, in terms of how people submit queries to Google then look no further than Web Seer. The only similarity between cats and dogs is that they both wag their tails! On balance, it looks like cats seem to be less trouble.



and it looks like men and women have health and clothing in common. I am not surprised that women's shoes are highly searched but men's jewelry, fashion and style? Also, surprising how many were interested in the men's olympic ice hockey!

Lyrical software help menu

Just come across this help menu on a little application [iSquint] which converts video to iPod format.

The ultimate handyman's apparel?

I was browsing an online tools catalogue the other day and came across a 'technicians tool vest'. With provision for 10 pens, 8 drill bits (which could also be used for pens), a couple of zipped pockets (deep enough for even more pens), a velco fastened pocket (yes, could take more pens here), a couple of open pockets (would certainly take a few dozen ikea pencils), a zipped bag attached with carabina (useful for pen refills and erasers), 4 triangular eyes (hook extra bags of pens here) and a large holder (my 'ice axe' pen would fit nicely in this). In addition, there may be an extra pocket or two on the back (useful for a few tools).

I was just browsing the NHS Data Model ....

I was having a look through the NHS Data Model today and
came across the PERSON class. Some expected attributes like person identifier, national insurance number and person birth date but was surprised to discover that the NHS has provision to store your DVLA driver number, passport number, pupil number, Inland revenue tax reference number and perhaps best of all Customs & Excise value added tax number. Why does the NHS need all this data? It reads more like an identity record than a hospital patient.

And looking at relationships for PERSON we discover that "a Person must be the owner of one or more PERSON ORGAN". Hmmm, if it's only one then which one?

The model appears to be very hard wired with a maximum number of relations stated. For instance it seems that multiple births can only have one location. So what happens when the first child was delivered in the taxi to the hospital! Obviously, the designers didn't take my database course. :-)

I also came across a classic case of inflexibility/source of error with some of the coding schemes, such as
COMMISSIONING SERIAL NUMBER "From 01/04/2005 an '=' (equals) as the last significant character in this six character field will indicate an episode that should be excluded from the Payment by Results tariff. The position of the last character depends on any preceding characters eg 1st character if field is otherwise blank, 4th character if following 'OAT', up to a maximum of 6th position."
I thought this practice went out with Cobol 66!