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.

I made my first alterations to a Wikipedia page today: I added (hopefully correct) references to the Mary’s Room page in the section about Dennett’s refuting the thought experiment.

Humor me if you would. I was thinking about selling music online. Apple’s music store proves at least one thing: that people are willing to buy music online. If you think about this, it is what both consumers and the recording industry would like: to be able to purchase music and to be able to make money from people purchasing music respectively.

Aside from one problem: the DRM Apple applies to all songs bought from the store. For the consumer this stops them doing all they might like to do with a track. From the point of view of the recording industry, it allows Apple to manipulate them in ways they don’t like because of the market share Apple has. So if the DRM doesn’t benefit the people who buy music, nor the people who create music, then who does it benefit?