ogs22's blog

Shakespeare Letter Frequency

2009-11-12T10:17:00.002Z

17.8851% : space
9.0881% : e
6.7498% : t
6.3808% : o
5.9213% : a
5.1092% : i
5.0632% : s
4.9656% : n
4.8777% : h
4.7921% : r
3.4463% : l
3.0274% : d
2.6422% : u
2.2643% : m
1.9180% : y
1.8387% : w
1.7362% : c
1.7181% : ,
1.6475% : f
1.6063% : .
1.3916% : g
1.2293% : b
1.1645% : p
0.7681% : v
0.7281% : k
0.6476% : '
0.3584% : ;
0.2184% : ?
0.1840% : !
0.1635% : -
0.1042% : x
0.0945% : j
0.0746% : q
0.0432% : [
0.0430% : ]
0.0377% : :
0.0339% : z
0.0094% : "
0.0050% : 1
0.0034% : )
0.0034% : (
0.0026% : 2
0.0021% : 3
0.0018% : 4
0.0016% : 5
0.0014% : _
0.0012% : 6
0.0011% : 9
0.0009% : 0
0.0008% : 7
0.0007% : |
0.0007% : 8
0.0006% : <
0.0004% : &
0.0000% : }
0.0000% : `

Entities, ext/xml and libxml 2.7 - CDATA Zone

2009-06-26T17:48:00.000+01:00

Entities, ext/xml and libxml 2.7 - CDATA Zone

This just cost me an afternoon - portupgrade libxml2 ; portupgrade -f php5 saved me though :)

So if you find ampersand and other entities disappearing in your php scripts it's one to look out for

2845 ways to spin the Risk | Understanding Uncertainty

2009-03-11T14:38:00.001Z

2845 ways to spin the Risk | Understanding Uncertainty:

2009-03-11T14:31:00.002Z

not so fast hosts

2009-03-02T15:13:00.000Z

Domain Management Signup - Pending: "Our sales team will call you on ********* within the next 15 minutes to activate your account. They will ask for your reference number above."

No they won't it's been 3/4 of an hour and I'm still waiting...

Understanding Uncertainty

2008-05-30T10:23:00.000+01:00

Understanding Uncertainty: "Welcome to Understanding Uncertainty"

New stats and risk website running on a Drupal content management system, the site has been in development for about 6 months now and there's loads of new content waiting in the wings.

Plus... more news from the world of maths

2008-02-21T15:35:00.001Z

Plus... more news from the world of maths: "To generalise or specialise?

Recent research suggests that generalists can thrive in society, even though most theories of evolution, and even Greek philosopher Plato, argue that individuals who perform specialist tasks are more likely to succeed.

To read more about"

YouTube - Nadia Baker & Enigma

2008-01-22T16:45:00.000Z

YouTube - Nadia Baker & Enigma

HMRC loses records on 25 million people in the post | OUT-LAW.COM

2007-11-22T11:31:00.000Z

HMRC loses records on 25 million people in the post | OUT-LAW.COM

When I said 'free our data' I didn't mean that data!

Free Our Data: Make taxpayers' data available to them

2007-11-15T10:19:00.000Z

I'm interested in free public data from a personal and professional perspective - it's moderately ludicrous that I can't easily get a list of all the schools in the UK and I wish I could get raw mapping data todo what I want with it rather than what some 'trading fund' thinks I should do...

Free Our Data: Make taxpayers' data available to them: "On March 9 2006 the Guardian's Technology supplement carried an article called 'Give us back our crown jewels'. The argument is simple: government-funded and approved agencies such as the Ordnance Survey and UK Hydrographic Office and Highways Agency are government-owned agencies; they collect data on our behalf. So why can't we get at that data as easily as we can Google Maps or the Xtides program? Even though OS and the UK Hydrographic Office are designated as trading funds (which means that they operate as self-contained commercial entities receiving no direct tax funding), substantial parts of their income - up to 50% in the case of OS - comes from the public sector; meaning, in effect, they are part-paid by taxes. Yet they charge for that data, with onerous copyright restrictions that prevent the re-use of the data."

IE7 not showing directly linked .swf/flash files

2007-05-10T15:26:00.001+01:00

Error on page. Bug -
microsoft.public.internetexplorer.general |
Google Groups
: "Fix: In IE, go to Tools, Internet Options, Advanced tab, scroll down to Security and uncheck the second box: Allow active content to run in files on my computer*."

I had a few people email me saying that IE7 will not open direct links to flash files eg like this and until now I've been unable to replicate the problem, but applying the reverse of the above does stop flash files working (may affect pdfs aswell )

Vista first look: Bugs and confusion | The Register

2007-02-14T15:39:00.000Z

Vista first look: Bugs and confusion | The Register : "So, there's our first look at Vista. It does benefit from a lot of good ideas, many of them Apple's, of course, but good nevertheless. It simply doesn't work very well, unfortunately. There are serious problems with execution; it's not polished; it's not ready. It should not be on the market, and certainly not for the outrageous prices being charged. Don't buy it, at least until after the first service pack is out. Don't pay to be a beta tester"

You won't have to tell me twice not to buy vista! It appears to have very little improved functionality and a big lump of bugs.

Maths.org

2006-09-07T09:35:00.000+01:00

Maths.org

I recently updated the maths.org website to show random bits from all the RSS feeds of the other *maths.org subdomains.
The page pulls in the RSS feeds using the wonderfully easy php command file_get_contents($FEED-URL); the XML is then parsed and the relevant parts stuffed in an array which I then randomly select 2 features from each site.

It makes good use of the main domain as a feed in to the other sites with out the overhead of content creation.

Plus... more news from the world of maths

2006-09-07T09:23:00.000+01:00

Plus... more news from the world of maths

Finally the MMP has a real blog for one of its websites!

Latest Firefox nightly build fixes MathML display on MacOS X

2005-10-25T12:18:00.000+01:00

Finally MathML works again! and this bug
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=228804
Should become history :)
This is using 'Deerpark' Alpha 2
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-1.6a1.en-US.mac.dmg

Now all we need now is MathML support in Safari...
http://webkit.opendarwin.org/projects/mathml/index.html

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft warns on security fixes

2005-06-10T12:26:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft warns on security fixes: "As the alert was released, Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer voiced fears that consumers are getting complacent about net security."

pot kettle black??!

Macromedia - Flash : Flash MX 2004 7.2 Release Notes

2005-06-03T14:26:00.000+01:00

Macromedia - Flash : Flash MX 2004 7.2 Release Notes:

"UFS Support

Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX Professional 2004 will not support Mac users who have formatted their hard drives using UFS. Carbon applications have a number of issues with this that are documented by Apple. Unless you are using native apps (AKA Cocoa), UFS is not recommended or supported by Apple."

Don't format your OS X Tiger install with UFS if you want any of Macromedia's software to work...
Now wheres that install disk? :(

Bug 290777 - Regression in defining getters on prototypes in content script

2005-04-26T12:32:00.000+01:00

Bug 290777 - Regression in defining getters on prototypes in content script: "'Illegal operation on WrappedNative prototype object'"

If you are seeing this error in Firefox 1.0.3 when using mozile or other javascript html editors upgrading to 1.0.4/nightly build fixes it

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-aviary1.0.1/

Hitachi claims leap in drive density:

2005-04-04T11:57:00.000+01:00

Hitachi claims leap in drive density: ZDNet Australia: News: Hardware: "Widespread commercial deployment of perpendicular drives will occur with the 230 gigabit per square inch drives in 2007, he said. The technology will allow Hitachi to come out with a 20GB microdrive, which has a diameter of 1 inch, and a 3.5-inch drive for PCs and digital video recorders that will hold a terabyte."

Validation Results

2005-02-24T19:27:00.000Z

Validation Results

Thats better!

ITsafe: How To...

2005-02-24T19:13:00.000Z

ITsafe: How To...

Made me laugh - "IT Security Awareness For Everyone"
then 3 links:

How to update Windows XP
How to use Windows Automatic Update
How to update Microsoft Office

Its like there are no other operating systems in the world...
(or is it just they are not as vulnerable as windows)

also the comical - 'best viewed at 800x600 or above' message smacks of a committee meeting or two :), at least someone has been good enough to write valid XHTML (unlike this blog - I must fix that!)

Mac OS X: System Startup: Managing Startup Items

2005-01-14T10:30:00.000Z

Mac OS X: System Startup: Managing Startup Items

Having realised I did not fully comprehend the MacOSX service start up process I looked into it this morning:

In a nutshell you can do
/sbin/SystemStarter command "service" ie
/sbin/SystemStarter restart "Web Server"

the "Web Server" part is defined by the "Provides" part of
/System/Library/StartupItems/Apache/StartupParameters.plist

/System/Library/StartupItems has all the apple provided software startup
scripts /Library/StartupItems has all the 3rd party stuff (just MySQL on my system)

on boot SystemStarter is called by /etc/rc which does all the grubby stuff first - mounting disks etc..

Simple really

Apple (UK and Ireland) - Mac mini

2005-01-12T10:02:00.000Z

Apple Mac mini

Well if I didn't already have use of a Powerbook and an iBook I'd definitely buy one of these!

VNC for MacOSX

2004-12-02T10:39:00.000Z

VNC for MacOSX a handy way to access native aqua apps remotely with out shelling out 199GBP for Apples remote desktop solution (which is undoubtedly better - but hey its £199!)

Slashdot | Firefox 1.0 Released

2004-11-09T14:41:00.000Z

Slashdot | Firefox 1.0 Released
A new Firefox release and a new default homepage http://www.google.com/firefox