So while I am sat on the sofa, my wife is watching mathematics videos from http://mrbartonmaths.com/youtube.htm. There are some rather amusing and clever videos so have a look when you get a chance.
Particularly clever are The Mathematics Love Song which attempts to explain love using group theory (which I vaguely remember from my degree)
Amazing Maths trick that proves 1=2 is one I have seen many times before
(in case you wondered, the proof fails because it is invalid to divide by 0 [strictly speaking you get an undefined result], so the proof must have an initial restriciton of a != b at the beginning to be valid (and therefore does not prove 1=2))
James Blunt also sings his Triangle song for Sesame Street, which is rather odd to listen to.
Mathematical Pie is rather interesting too (yes, it is a mathematical cover of American Pie)
Of course you shouldn’t miss the Abbott and Costello maths which is phoenomenal
I recently stumbled across Gobby:
Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.
It looks really cool, and the realtime-editing would be very well suited to trying to draw up any form of document or source code at the same time when you will have too much activity for trying to use a code repository.
It is a shame Gobby does not have hooks builtin to allow loading code from a VCS or DVCS (that would be cool), but you can launch it headless on a server with an auto-save directory and then all connect in and start loading documents. There are times when I have wanted something like this, particularly when you are starting out a new piece of code and have several people wanting to get started right away. Once the pace dies down, it probably makes a lot of sense to move the file to your source code control system, but for that initial burst this looks like a fantastic tool
I have been playing with Google Wave for about a week, and while it is interesting I have not really had enough time with it to write up much here yet.
If you are on Wave, you can find me as “anton.piatek” on Wave
If you are not on Wave and want to have a play, I will give an invite to the first person that comments on this post asking for one (only one, so if there is already a comment asking then you are too late). Please fill in the email field in the comment box (which stays private) as I will send the invite there
I wrote a while ago about the speed of virgin broadband vs. Be but my internet has been feeling rather slow recently… So I decided to take another speed test.
For reference the previous test got 9Mb/s download and 0.49Mb/s upload. The old speed wasn’t too bad, but still wasn’t as good as Be provided.
Obviously this new one is slower – the question is why? this test was about the same time of day, and as luck would have it the same day of the week. Is July a quieter internet usage month that September? Or has my service just become over-subscribed?
I will certainly be thinking carefully when it comes to the end of my contract… as paying for 10mbit and getting 2.4 is hardly value for money…
Published at
6:10 pm on
September 14, 2009 in
Internet and Linux.
When I moved house in July, I decided to sign up for Virgin Broadband. Virgin was an obvious choice as they could connect me and have broadband available within about two days.
So I signed up and the modem arrived two days later. I plug it in, trying to follow their instructions, phone them up for activation and…. nothing happens. There is power on the modem, but the “link” light never comes up. After about an hour on the phone, they say they will open a tech request for it. The next day I get a call from Virigin (from India) asking if my modem is working. I explain that I am at work (as most people in the UK are between 9am-5pm) and will check when home – It was indeed working.
The next step, is to then register your connection with a computer, so I plug in my linux laptop and desperately try to make the web pages work. First it tells me I don’t have a new enough browser and unsupported OS. So I tell Konqueror to pretend it is some level of IE on windows. That works, and I am now declining offers of screensavers, setup exe’s and all sorts of downloads. Eventually it gets to a page that simply won’t load. There are several javascript errors popping up, so I wonder if I can see the addres in there. Stepping through the javascript in the debugger, over a invalid reference, and suddenly the next page loads – I am done!
I wish I had searched around first. Apparently there is a much simpler version of the website that does the basic job, without all the screensavers and browser checks:
“instead of doing what they tell you to do, you go to https://autoreg.autoregister.net/ you get prompted for whether you’re signing up for Broadband or Dialup, and on clicking Broadband, you’re lead through the sign-up procedure with no complaints about compatibility, and within 5 minutes he was online with his GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) system and Firefox browser.”
http://wiki.hands.com/chezfil/entry/virginmedia/
Published at
7:58 am on
July 9, 2009 in
Internet.
I have just moved house, and changed internet provider to Virgin (simply because they could have the internet connected in about 2 days, which is faster than getting even a BT line installed). I did some quick speed tests to show how my old provider (Be) compares to Virgin. (Note that on Be I had their 10mbit connection as I could not get any faster because I was just too far from the exchange to get any better speeds)
Virgin speedtest
Be speedtest
And in case you were wondering what a truly fast internet connection looks like, this is what I get from work (IBM Hursley – I would expect to see a seriously fast connection here)
Work internet speedtest
Recent Comments