Bletchley Park
Yesterday I visited Bletchley Park. This was the home of the UK Code and Cipher School during WWII. This was where computing was invented!!!!
Dr Tommy Flowers created the Colossus computer to solve the Lorenz cipher, many years before Eniac (although the British government kept Bletchley Park secret due to the Cold War)

Computers always getting faster
The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software is an article that is about to appear in DDJ. I found it interesting because it talks about the end of computing getting faster for a single threaded application. This is fairly obvious and well reported stuff. The conclusion that was unexpeceted for me is that optimisations will get more important and lower-level languages will continue to dominate in order to get the best perforamnce from unparallelisable applications. I always thought that going to higher levels of abstraction would be necessary to utilise the higher levels of raw CPU power but maybe these will not be enabled.
Another interesting point made (that this time I did expect) is that even if CPU sppeds stay constant due to Moores law the number of transistors increases, meaning the size of caches increases leading to more real-world performance. It took me about a year of working at ARM to realise that the memory systrms are really the bottle necks for most applications.

GPS Navigation
I have been looking at GPS solutions. They all seem to involve a Mio 168 (which has an integrated GPS recevier) and cost approx 300UKP. Lots of different pieces of software are available. Mopre info and reviews can be found at globalpositioningsystems.co.uk.

Board Games
I have been meaning to buy a game from the 2004 Good Game Gifts Guide. Must get around to it. (This post will serve to remind me of the dite)

Bluetooth
I bought a bluetooth headset. (I actually wanted a way to get noise free audio from a headset into my laptop - the microphone input is particularly poor - and bluetooth is no help). My phone annoys me. Both my laptop and phone were paired against the headset and things got confused. This meant that later in the day when I was out for a walk by the river, two people calling my mobile phone got to hear the interesting sound of the inisde of my pocket. The phone thought it was in headset mode and even though it was several miles away from the headset it still auto-answered. Useless.
Anyway a very intersting presentation on bluetooth security problems.

Virtualisation
An article here about Xen. I think virtualisation is a very interesting problem. I think this has to be a good idea. I guess that OSes should provide lots of layers of abstraction and protection. But they are too big and with the vast ammount of different hardware and configurations it has problems. I am normally amazed that windows works as well as it does.
Having a smaller . There is a good article on Xen (from Cambridge University).

Another very interesting project that allows you to run two operating systems at once e.g. Linux on Windows is coLinux. This does not give the strong protection between the virtual processors that Xen does but it is very efficient.

Recording streaming media
I wanted to record a couple of comedy programs I particularly enjoy ("The Now Show" and "New Comedy Awards" as it happens) from BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 7. I found HardDiskOgg that records drectly to an Ogg file or NetTransport2 that can download the streamed .ra file directly. There is a great list of tools and programs at all-streaming-media.com.

Jerry Fiddler on ITconversations
A very easy to listen to presentation on everything from the future of software, bio-inspired systems to the Mars rovers. Jerry Fiddler had many jobs at Wind River, the embedded OS people and now is a free thinker.

Firefox
Here are some instructions on making firefox faster by using persistent connections. I do not know if these work yet but it could be interesting.

Derren Brown
Derren Brown describes himself as a Phyco-Illusionist. He uses physcology to influence people. He had a program on Channel 4 yesterday called Messiah. (Channel 4 does have a website for his first show MindControl. ) He questionned the way that people were very recpetive and unspectical when it came to religion. He visited the US and proved that he could convince 5 people that he had some sort of super-human power in order to get an endorsement from him. He agreed that if anyone ask he would say that it was a set-up .... but no-one did

Sometimes Derrens shows are poor. In the last show he played Russian Roulette with a resolver. He repeatedly asked (a very carefully chosen and subject - who he felt he could read) as to whether the next chamber to be fired contained a bullet. If I remeber correctly he always had to answer "no". Derren was allowed to fire the bullets into a sand-bag if he thought that there was a bullet. He did this twice (which I thought was a little bit of a cheat). Also it was later reviled in the newspapers that the bullets were blanks - although even they are likely to kill at such point-blank-range.

I beleive that he can do the tricks that he does purely using physcology. He also chooses his subjects well and I know there are lots of people that find it hard to not show and give away through body language what they know.