http://cockayne.net Personal blog of David Cockayne Wed, 26 Nov 2008 06:00:09 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm really starting to despair at the quality of BBC programming these days, and today's Horizon is no exception. An appallingly one sided view of GM crops that paints all scientists as being of the same opinion (GM is wonderful and harmless and will save the world's poor) and the ... http://cockayne.net/2008/11/26/jimmys-gm-food-fight/ A video from google tech talks about some really good educational uses of lego mindstorms and also the scratch environment. http://cockayne.net/2008/10/28/sowing-the-seeds-for-a-more-creative-society/ How to Break Web Software is a great (if a little old) google tech talk by Mike Andrews about web security with a good demo of some exploits and tools. If you are writing web based software it is certainly worth the 90 minutes. The exploits shown are all to ... http://cockayne.net/2008/06/21/how-to-break-web-software/ Another excellent talk from TED, I think the best snippet of the talk comes quite early on, about 3 minutes in, when she talks about the evolutionary algorithm and quote Dan Dennet. If you have Variation Selection Heredity You MUST get evolution.Dennet sums this up nicely with "Design out of Chaos Without the Aid of Mind" Unfortunately ... http://cockayne.net/2008/06/19/ted-talks-susan-blackmore-on-memes-and-temes/ While the inclusion of video on the web maybe infamous for happy slapping on youtube and annoying for all those new style adverts, you can occasionally find some really great lectures and talks. This one is by Vint Cerf, who played a huge role in the creation and development of the ... http://cockayne.net/2007/12/18/tracking-the-internet-into-the-21st-century-with-vint-cerf/ With the recent release of the IPCC's final report, there has been a lot of doom and gloom about the environment so I started reading up on 'renewable energy' and learned a few surprising things. There is usually a lot of press about individual people needing to do more for the ... http://cockayne.net/2007/12/10/environmental-outlook-seems-quite-good-if-only-governments-would-act/ I've been reading or reading a lot of Richard Dawkins recently and also watching some programs about what happened in Dover. (I love the pastafarian movement that arose as a result of what happened) Something struck me, especially when watching Ken Miller talking about Michael Behe's 'irreducible complexity'. I think the ... http://cockayne.net/2007/09/12/evolution-vs-intelligent-design/ I bought a canon 400d a while ago to start playing with photography and flickr. At the end of my holiday in Budapest, I managed to snap this shot from the hotel room of an approaching thunder storm. I just wish all my photos looked as good! You can click on ... http://cockayne.net/2007/08/29/lucky-lightning-photo/ A good read if you are interested in online learning, and handily it's an open-source, online book :) Theory and Practice of Online Learning powered by performancing firefox http://cockayne.net/2006/11/28/theory-and-practice-of-online-learning/ If you are viewing the source of a web page to debug output while writing server scripts, pressing F5 in the view source window reloads the page content. This is helpful as you don't have to close the source window, refresh the browser window and view the source again to ... http://cockayne.net/2006/11/10/firefox-view-source/