Middle of summer and so much rain around it’s not funny. I was caught in a thunderstorm a week ago with an umbrella in one hand and a kitchen trolley in another Oh and a knapsack which I shouldn’t have brought along. Nevertheless running in the rain and hoping and praying that the lightning flashes you are seeing don’t find a reason to come your way is something I won’t (and won’t want to) experience again soon. I should have had the damn trolley delivered
That was a while ago but recently even more torrential downpours have hit the northern areas of Scotland and England. Lots of flooding and devastation and rescues. Charlie is causing much havoc stateside as well. We have mostly managed to avoid the rain here is london so far but we hear it is approaching ….

Had a really nice time a few nights ago with my friends Phil and Julia and Carlos and Jenny. They were hosts at our first tea party at the new flat. Muchos fun was had by all.

Apple Tablet coming up? new G5 iMacs being released end of August, which should be very interesting. I can’t wait to see their new design for the iMacs as I’m sure everyone else is. Phil Schiller is doing the keynote speech this time though as Jobs just underwent cancer surgery. I wish him a speedy recovery.

Looks like XP SP2 is definitely better but proving quite troublesome for many people to install. I’ve read quite a few reports of installations failures and total system screw-ups on different mailing-lists and newsgroups, and this eweek article gives a nice summary of the problems so far:

In Weblog postings and interviews with eWEEK.com, users have reported everything from unproblematic installs to complete system failures. In between, difficulties varied from confusing user interface changes to broken applications to performance slowdowns. Many said SP2’s features improved their confidence in the platform’s security; others said they continue to be surprised by minor issues

The thing that surprised me most was the ability of other firewall vendors such as McAfee and ZoneAlarm to turn off the XP firewall when they are installed. I understand why they would need to do this, as running 2 potentially conflicting firewalls at the same time is probably not a good idea, I do hope these third-party products provide suitable notification and warning of their actions.

I myself am actually a bit glad that these kinks will be worked out or at least solutions will have been posted for most problems by the time Microsoft releases the non-OEM home user version of SP2.

On another random note, though and totally unrelated to SP2, Pizza Hut in London sucks! And I really mean it, I almost lost it today trying to order a simple delivery from them. The person on the other end couldn’t understand my address, had problems with my postcode, the final price was wrong …. I’ll just end it there, I hope they get better

Found a great entry on Tom’s site today where he comments on Paul Graham’s excellent Great Hackers essay. I haven’t managed to find time to read the essay but Tom’s post about office space makes a good point. I also strongly believe in having a nice quiet space when one wants to concentrate on ‘hard problems’ or even when trying to follow a train of thought to conclusion. Being interrupted at times like these leads to a huge loss in productivity as you have to context switch for however long is necessary to do something else and when you return to the task at hand you might find it difficult to continue where you were interrupted. It’s not like you can simply change the Instruction Pointer in the brain like you can in computer memory to simply resume execution where it left off
If you read Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines you’ll see that he is right when he states that brain neurons basically waste a lot of processing power not calculating, but sustaining body functions. So when a positronic brain is eventually constructed with equal computing capacity to the brain it will function much more effectively at computation as electronic circuits are a million times faster than neurons. Remember though that this “being” or whatever it may be will also have to devote a portion of it’s processing power to maintaining itself. Still, in the end it would be a lot more efficient.

Just finished moving home a while ago and I’m glad it’s almost over. It’s always quite stressful and deeply tiring sometimes; often there are days when you just want to relax but there’s another box to unpack and flat-pack and discard. Then you hope the garbage guys feel like picking it up They only picked it up this Saturday after a full week of flat-packed boxes lying there.

We had to buy some cupboards and stuff from Argos, and are currently into our first few days of a Sky Digital subscription. The fact that we can find something to watch most of the time now is still something to get used to. There is always something, maybe Simpsons, Enterprise, X-Files or Frasier or something to watch. Most of the time it’s several things clashing with each other. Let’s see how we cope with that.

In other news, XP SP2 just came out and I’m so glad it finally did. I’m waiting for the version for home users to be release before I upgrade but I am so glad Microsoft is finally fixing it’s mistakes and making XP more and more secure for everybody. Let’s hope this really does fix *most* of the problems that caused viruses and trojans to spread. Time will tell.