Monthly Archives: September 2007

Nicola Pellow

Posted on by

Alumuni of DMU in Leicester , which I visited yesterday:

Nicola Pellow was a member of the WWW Project at CERN, working with Tim Berners-Lee. She joined the project in November 1990, while an undergraduate maths student at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University).

Almost immediately after Berners-Lee completed the WorldWideWeb browser for the NeXT platform, Pellow wrote a generic Line-mode browser called WWW that could run on non-NeXT systems. The WWW team ported the browser to a range of computers, from Unix to Microsoft DOS, so that anyone could access the web, which at that point consisted primarily of the CERN phone book.

She left CERN at the end of August 1991, but returned after graduating in 1992, and worked with Robert Cailliau on MacWWW, a browser for the Mac.

Nicola Pellow’s Line Mode Browser

The shoeless revolution

Posted on by

“Much of the discontent was caused by a perceived disrespect for Burman culture and traditions, for example, what the British termed the Shoe Question: the colonisers’ refusal to remove their shoes upon entering Buddhist temples or other holy places.” I suggest Burmese protesters remove their shoes/hang shoes up/ as a symbol of non-violent protest.

Auchwitz - the letter 'K'

Why Brazil’s not buying Negroponte’s laptops

Posted on by

Why Brazil’s not buying Negroponte’s laptops – thanks to Valleywag

Seems Gilberto Gil’s quibbling about the project’s “spiritual dimensions.” Bless, I know what he means too, though Valleywag seems a tad confused — maybe that’s why they refer to Gilberto by his surname Moreira.

Update — guess I was a little hard on Vallewag, as today (4 Jan 2008) they’ve got the news that Intel has pulled out of the whole deal. Good for Gilberto too, must have been using his ‘spirtuality’ to good effect.

Please return the coffee colored laptop

Posted on by

If anyone found a coffee coloured latop (Apple Mac) in cafe Nero’s in High Street Ken’ today please drop me an email in confidence, or just drop it at reception at the Kensington Centre, 66 Hamersmith Rd. It belongs to a smart guy over from Harvard Medical School and it could have something useful on it. Ta.

Here he is holding a laptop similar to the one in question, with the team from ‘AstroMed’ (using software from medical imaging to give 3-D images of the universe, no less):

Microsoft vs Google — I choose Google

Posted on by

Microsoft to buy Facebook for $6bn? – Google to fight back with expanded Orkut!

I choose Google – they launch their Orkut battle plan on November 5, which happens to be my birthday.

PS: I hear Google may buy WebMD, which is interesting, ta. Personally I wouldn’t bother, but then what do I know?

Look: IT firm not ‘it’; reports on radiology firm glow

Posted on by

Look: ‘IT firm not ‘it’; reports on radiology firm glow‘.. yep, I agree too in the general idea of teleradiology’s growth too.

Onex Carestream Kodak

Posted on by

Hmm, thanks again to Google Finance, I’ve spotted a discrepancy with the value of Onex, which owns Carestream, which was Kodak’s imaging arm. While Onex (OCX) shares were around 22 in Sept 2006, they are now at 34, down from 41 peak, but part of upward trend (see below). You do the math, buddy:

UPDATE 2-Onex “very optimistic” about future deals -CEO
Reuters – 9 Aug 2007
Onex profit more than triples
Reuters – 9 Aug 2007
Onex Corporation: Bidder Interested In DaimlerChrysler AG’s Chrysler Are Expected to Submit Second Round of Offers Within The Next Week-WSJ
Reuters Key Development – 18 Apr 2007

Chumscrubber

Posted on by

Watched the Donnie-Darko like film Chumscrubber last night, lots of great teen angst, and some nice acting from Glenn Close as the suicide-son’s mum (though popularly better known as the ‘bunny boiler’ in ‘Fatal Attraction’):

“Each character is alone in his world and strains to present an “everything is alright” front through intimidation, passive-aggressive behaviour, or, in most cases, being oblivious to anyone’s world but their own.” Sounds pretty familiar.

Funny thing is that Ralph Fiennes plays a guy who discovers synchronicity and balance, which is one of my obsessions in that American oh-my-god-I’ve-changed-my-life-thanks-to-product_X kinda way. And in a nice twist I actually remember wandering past Ralph outside the Royal Academy a couple of years back — art & life Ralph, art & life:

“On February 11, 2007, Lisa Robertson, a Qantas flight attendant, was suspended and subsequently fired from Qantas for having sex with Fiennes in a business class toilet during a flight from Darwin to Mumbai on January 24, 2007 while on duty.[6] Robertson admitted to the encounter in an interview with the Daily Mail along with her work as an undercover policewoman.”

What Sir Tim Berners-Lee said to me

Posted on by

I don’t know what Sir Tim Berners-Lee said to everyone else but what he said to me at a talk at the IEE last night was [in no particular order]:

1. That there should be more women in technology; and he mocked the mature nature of engineers, while noting that women can be their own worst enemies.

2. That getting round patent laws and keeping the web royalty free was difficult.

3. That his www proposal went out on a memo round CERN in March 1989, and then again in May 1990, with a subject line which indicated the duplication. And that his boss had scribbled on the proposal ‘exciting but vague’.

4. That wikis are actually in one sense a return to the early days of the day by their ‘read-write’ nature. And that blogs are great but there was a danger they may end up as poor quality information.

5. That Google and the like know a lot about us.

6. That he had started on the web work when CERN bought a couple of ‘NeXT’ machines just for the heck of checking them out.

7. That the term ‘URL’ is fine but ‘URI’ is better.

8. That if he had to do the invention of the www again he’d drop ‘//’ and reverse ‘co.uk’ to ‘uk.co’ as the correct hierarchy.

9. That mobile technology, whatever the benefits of voice recognition, still means you’re talking to a computer (gettit? no, oh well) through a small screen but if you could mount the viewer on a pair of sun glasses might be fun.

10. That you should never trust physicists to write software.

11. There’s a xml parser error on harvard site.

12. And that there is basically too much UGC on the web.