Everyone should read the following articles, taken from the Guardian’s special on abortion last Friday.

• Time to speak up
  
• The doctor said to me: ‘Couldn’t you just go through with the pregnancy?’
  
• America’s Abortion Battlefield
  
• The pro-life death sentence
  

The first is a wake up call to those of us, such as myself, who have assumed that the right to an abortion is a given; that no-one could seriously call into question the fact that a woman could choose to have an abortion. Whilst this may be the case in the UK and much of secular Europe, in other countries it is far from being the case. The most worrying country that seems to be questioning the right to abortion is the US. Living in a mostly secular democracy, it’s easy to forget that the US is, especially in the so-called Bible Belt states, on its way to becoming a de-facto theocracy.

At work last Wednesday we had a talk from Eugene Spafford, a professor of Information Security at Purdue University. It was about the current state of security in computer applications, systems and networks at the current time. Essentially, he made the point that it is pretty woeful at the moment: all of us are besieged by viruses, malware, spam and phishing attacks. Following are my thoughts on his talk; I’m doing this from memory so hopefully I haven’t made errors.

On Sunday 1st of October I travelled over to see Patrick Wolf at the Oxford Zodiac. I’m seriously pleased that I did: the gig was absolutely amazing. Mr Wolf put his heart and soul into it. It was an energising and magnificent performance. Mere superlatives cannot do it due justice, so I put some photos on Flickr:

In the absence of a recent pithy nothing, I decided to write about the current state of tea at work. The State of the Tea address would go badly, should it be made into speech form.

HP, in their infinite money-saving opportunity wisdom one supposes, have decided to move from Twinings to Lipton tea bags. I had no idea such vile tea was available. To summarise, I think that Lipton tea is made from the sweepings from the factory floor (if it is actually made from tea leaves at all).

I found out some obvious-in-retrospect things this week when doing a little optimisation work. This is work in C#, but I’m sure it’s applicable to many languages. If you want to skip the details, but want the take-home lesson, here it is: if you want reasonable performance with large-ish data-sets (I was working of the order of 5 million elements), use primitive structures — i.e., arrays and hand-coding — rather than the convenience classes provided by your framework of choice. Now, on to the examples.