• Palm Pre smartphone – “So you’re after a smartphone, you’ve got money to burn and an obvious decision to make: this or the iPhone. No other touchscreen smartphone is even in the running. The Pre has some obvious advantages. It’s a bit smaller than the iPhone and ‘Synergy’ works well, which could prove useful if you’re more familiar with Facebook than the concept of Gmail or an Exchange server. But weigh it against the iPhone and it’s hard to recommend.”
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide Turns 30 – Still one of my favourite books.
• Cat registered as hypnotherapist – To be fair, cats do seem to convince people to pet them and feed them without any apparent pay-back. Maybe they do hypnotise them?

Most people reading this will know that Snow Leopard refers to version 10.6 of the Macintosh Operating System, Apple’s latest update released late last month.

I wasn’t sure whether I should upgrade initially. I have been stung before by being an early adopter. Mac OS X 10.4 was a nightmare on my iMac G5. The big ticket new features such as Dashboard and Spotlight worked just fine¹. What didn’t work were little thing like, oh, networking. Eight times out of ten it couldn’t connect to my AirPort Base station. This made almost everything, including downloading patches to fix this very problem, a compete and utter pain. I think it took until 10.4.3 before everything worked reliably.

• Apple Answers the FCC’s Questions – A few interesting tidbits, including the fact that two reviewers look at every update, but I’d say that there was little of real substance here.
• The brutal truth about America’s healthcare – “But the truth is that the rich, and the insurance firms, just don’t realise what we are going through, or simply don’t care. Look around this room and tell me that America’s healthcare don’t need fixing.” Still finding the whole debate quite bizarre.

• Does University Challenge really test intelligence? – No. Knowing a bunch of obscure facts isn’t intelligence. If that’s the measure, then Wikipedia is way smarter than Einstein or Newton or Gauss or Darwin.
• Review: Canon EOS 5D Mark II – If anyone wants to buy 5000 copies of Yummy so that I can afford one of these I’d very much appreciate it.
• Creationists are still denying Darwin. Stephen Moss asks why – “What worries me about many of her fellow creationists is that they begin with the Bible and then start looking for scientific evidence to back up what their faith tells them is true.” That and the fact that they keep coming up with the same arguments.

• Wall-E: One giant beep for mankind – “Pixar’s films have always outstripped those of Dreamworks – maker of the Shrek series, among others – because they contain universal truths rather than a series of swiftly dated cultural in-jokes.”
• How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand – Is evolution not the natural way forward? An alternate take would be: how do the French think that they can mandate changes in language?
• Big Oil’s Iraq deals are the greatest stick-up in history – “Iraq is being forced to sell 75% of its national patrimony to pay the bills for its own illegal invasion and occupation.”

• An elephant never forgets? George W. Bush’s lost e-mails – “The administration has chafed at external oversight and shown a tendency to come up with dubious legal justifications for ignoring laws it doesn’t agree with.” Just what is Mr Bush trying to hide?
• WordPress 2.5.1 – I just upgraded to the newest version of WordPress. Looks good as far as I can see but let me know if you spot anything untoward.
• Madonna, Hard Candy – “It’s about grooves rather than memorable songs, and Madonna just doesn’t make for a convincing soul diva [as she] sings them with the emotional engagement of a sat-nav suggesting a right turn onto the A23.”

This evening I went along to this years Turing Lecture, an annual presentation hosted by the British Computer Society (of which I’m a professional member) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. This years lecture was given by Grady Booch, someone that most people in IT will either have heard of or, at the very least, been influenced by. He started his early career working on object oriented design and is currently passionately working on a project to collect the architectures of a hundred computer systems.

The problem is this. To get ADSL you need to have a BT phone line. Yet, except for calling my parents, I don’t really use a land-line phone. This has made using ADSL broadband more expensive than I’d have liked as I had to pay £11 a month for a phone line I don’t make calls with¹. Fast forward to last month, when I find that I can get cable broadband without phone or digital TV service.

It slightly bugs me that the first thing a lot of people ask about my photography is what camera I use. I tend to think that it’s the photographer that counts rather than which particular machine you use, but, still, it’s a popular question and so here is the answer.

EOS300D

FEATURES: Reasonably compact (by SLR standards!), simple and quick to use, intelligent feature-set

After my positive experience with the EOS300, this was the obvious choice for my first digital camera. And the first thing to say is that there’s nothing wrong with the 300D, it’s just that…

I went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” last night, a film about Al Gore’s global warming lecture tour.

It’s very well done. Gore delivers the talks with humour — he introduces himself link this, “I’m Al Gore, I used to be the next president of the United States” — confidence and passion. (If he’d had this passion in the presidential campaign things could have been very different!) Even for someone that agrees with the message there are some scary statistics. Perhaps even more scary is the lengths that some politicians go to to avoid acknowledging the problem, much less doing something about it.