• turbodiesel engines

    My brother-in-law Frank – the retired professor who lives in Pittsburgh PA – with my sister visited the UK a few months ago, and was quite taken, nay surprised with my Skoda Octavia with the VAG Group 1.9 ltr turbodiesel engine. From what I gather, Diesel has not taken-off as a car fuel in the

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  • My Colleague Dave…

    …is a man of insight: [blogs.sun.com] At a meeting the other day one of the participants stated, that “I thrive on pressure.” My view was that they’d obviously never met anyone any good at applying it.

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  • “Long Way Round” on Streaming Audio this Week

    Sarah Katz pinged me on AIM this morning, to say that having read my posting about Long Way Round she’d found it being aired in the USA – beeped for swearing, of course – and rather liked it. This reminded me that Glenn at work had said Ewan was reading the book on Radio4; this

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  • The Power of Nightmares: Transcripts

    I have no idea how long these will last, but some US-based colleagues have asked about the programme: [www.acutor.be] You’ll miss the bizzare music and the trippy 50s-movie imagery, but it’s better than nothing.

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  • Environmentalism is an Anti-Bush Conspiracy

    The European Union, Japan and Australia plot to undermine the Bush presidency (and American Business) through seeking reduction in carbon dioxide emissions specified by the Kyoto accord. Moreover all academic research outside the USA is coersced to participate towards this goal by all non-US Governments. Plus, incidentally, the USA is the only source of “independent”

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  • Meeting Minds: A Commercial Grid Geek talks to an Academic Grid Geek

    I had a nice long AIM chat with my friend Chris last night; Chris has spent a few years working in academic computing grid and cluster research, and with my new grid-focused commercial role we’ve been swapping notes about our respetive jobs, and the respective cultures thereof. Last night’s chat turned-out more different than I’d

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  • “Could you please find the password to a livejournal account?”

    Oh my… Through the nature of my hobby/research I tend to a lot of these things but this one is quite egregious, and my first blog-based one: [www.crypticide.com] I don’t know if you could help me or not and I’m very sorry if I bother you by asking you to do this favor for me…

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  • Romans, Pyramids, and Wedding Bells

    Grim and Holly got married. Some people said “at last”, and they have a slight point – some expected this sooner, others thought it moot – but none of this detracted from the depth of the celebration. The ceremony was at Matfen Hall in Northumberland on Sunday afternoon, at a ceremony to which I had

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  • Bush website adopts isolationist stance

    [www.theregister.co.uk] International access to the official re-election website of Us President George W. Bush (www.georgewbush.com) has been blocked. Surfers from outside the US trying to reach the site receive an “access denied” message. … It’s true. I just tried it: Access Denied You don’t have permission to access “http://www.georgewbush.com/” on this server. …but like ElReg

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  • People – even mullet-wearers – project their ideal on to Jesus

    [news.bbc.co.uk] So what colour was Jesus? Jesus has been named the top black icon by the New Nation newspaper. Their assertion that Jesus was black has raised eyebrows in some quarters – so what colour was he? … First – if the past 2,000 years of Western art were the judge, Jesus would be white,

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  • blast from the past

    So in regards to a previous posting about DataPower I got a thank-you e-mail from Rich Salz – a name that I’ve not really seen much since I gave up on being a USENET admin in 1996-ish, but which is familiar to we older generation of geeks in the days before USENET became DejaNews, latterly

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  • The blog of one is a tragedy; the blogs of millions are just a statistic.

    It’s bizzare, having a highly-pageranked blog. I get pagerank points for password cracking, security documentation, and a variety of other stuff – photos, artwork – as well as having a widely-read blog with links from lots of other widely-read blogs, so that helps overall contributes to my site’s high hitrate. The amusement comes from the

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