Roll on July, the no smoking ban, and getting home smelling of something other than other people’s acrid smoke.

Reading their stories you can sympathise to a certain extent, it isn’t easy being a member of any minority.

But I read quite a few stories, and can’t say I see much sexism in what they say. Mostly I saw people looking for sexism, labelling things that aren’t really sexism as sexism.

There is a gender-discrepancy in all sciences. Physics has a majority of men, chemistry too although it is more mixed*, biology though, is dominated by women.

The sciences were founded by men, the methodology they use was devised by men, the social bits inbetween the science, thus were also devised by men. It is not surprising that the sciences nowadays may be preferred by men, and considered a less pleasant environment by women.

These things will change, but getting angry doesn’t help. If I had an angry scientist on my research team I’d show prejudice against that person, their sex is irrelevent.

* Interestingly my Chemistry class at university was evenly mixed, I don’t know the exact numbers, but just by looking around you could tell it was about 50-50. I graduated 2 years ago.

Modern software is plagued by poor file extensions, mainly because people seem to be terrorfied of using extensions that are longer than three characters. And I just don’t understand it. Assuming that you want to create a portable application, you still are safe provided you don’t plan on supported anything as ancient as DOS or Windows 3.1!

It’s a matter of clarity for me, I have so many files, please make it clear what each file is for.

And xiph.org, thanks a bundle for going with .ogg for all your file formats when you could have chosen .audio and .video for Vorbis and Theora respectively. You could have at least used .vorbis and .theora. It causes no end of trouble for users and applications. In Amarok, we can’t know for sure if we can play an ogg file until we do a mimetype check, which takes ages, and seriously slows down operations the user expects to be instant, like changing the cursor for a drag-and-drop operation to indicate the drop cannot occur, or adding valid files to the playlist. To be honest we just cheat and assume it’s audio.

[Update 15-Jul-2006]

As Ian pointed out, it doesn’t really matter to Amarok that it’s all .ogg. We just ignore the video stream anyway. And the important thing as far as we’re concerned is that the tag reading and manipulation is the same for all ogg files. The problem is harder for application launchers like Konqi, who should launch a video player for video and an audio player for audio. Video and audio are distinctly different as far as the user is concerned and it sucks that perfectionism guided xiph.org rather than practical considerations.

Maybe they’d like to consider:

• .video.ogg
• .audio.ogg

I must confess, currently I absolutely abhor chavs, I feel a rudimentry, violent hatred for the scum.

Milton Keynes is a great city, out of all the places I’ve lived, I like it the best. I’ve lived in Croydon, Suffolk, Herefordshire, Bristol and Aldershot. Actually I liked rural Herefordshire best, but I can’t live there yet, there’s not enough employment opportunity.

It is great for driving (no traffic, fast roads), cycling (cycle paths everywhere), walking (plenty of parks and green areas), shopping (essentuials and luxuries), going out, and more little things, like the way the countryside is never far away.

It is getting too chavvy though.

Achieving nothing of any use, they fail their way through school with an end goal of living off benefits to fuel their careers in graffiti.

My taxes pay for these useless 12 through 19 year olds to litter and vandalise the town. But worst of all is the way they hang around in abusive, intimidating groups in public discourses. Even a bunch of 12 year olds can be intimidating if you’re by yourself and there’s 20 of them. I think the thing is I don’t understand them. It doesn’t fit when you see a 12 year old, smoking, and wearing a “what yer looking at?” expression. That kind of behaviour is just doesn’t fit with how I think about people, what’s to understand? Lack of understanding leads to uncertainty; I walk a different route.

I blame society and the Government, these louts have no respect, no work-ethic and nothing to do. Someplace, sometime our education system failed us and nowadays we spawn endless numbers of these good for nothing shits.

I feel somewhat ashamed that I felt better after reading the story I linked to. I think I have a problem, or perhaps my intolerance makes me no better than them. Whatever, I can’t stand it, I’m moving country, or maybe to some quiet rural spot.

I loved Half Life 2, but I didn’t love their poor programming. Frequent crashes, stuttering sounds and stuttering gameplay. Unrecoverable hangs! I managed to finish it on my old computer, but I tried to play through it on my new computer and gave up about a third of the way through due to crashing and stuttering.

My mate bought HL2 episode one, he had to download it with Steam twice as the first time it never finished downloading, it hung at 83%. Now he can’t play it because it crashes on startup. Valve claim it is a bug with his computer. Hardly likely. More likely their rubbish programming skills can’t compete with decent software houses.

I don’t anticipate buying another Valve product, episodic gaming doesn’t appeal to me, and that’s where they seem to be heading. But mainly I think they are shit.

Someone else who agrees.

Update [26-Jun-2006]

Apparently, if you disable hardware acceleration for your sound card, you may be able to alleviate the stuttering/crashes. I haven’t tested this yet, but you may want to try it.

I’m hoping the blame is that of the journals who publish the papers. My limited experience as a scientist would suggest that.

On matters of website usability, I would pay for the thing, but in order to even find out how much it would cost I have to register with the site, and that requires me to fill out a form with 20 fields! I can’t be arsed to register with yet-another-site, just to find out they want 30 quid for a paper.

Unfortunately I can’t seem to find a free download accidently left on some university server.