Author: Matt Wharton

Well the clock has chimed twelve and it is now officially Christmas Day. Huzzah!!!

The video for Fairytale of New York is on Channel 4 and I just noticed that it stars Matt Dillon. Fucking love it.

The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing “Galway Bay”
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

Merry Christmas everyone and I’ll see you later today after I’ve slept a while.

Tags: Christmas, me

Hooray I’ve just finished work until Monday.

We had a free screening of It’s a Wonderful Life today and we only had about 50 people in for it, where the hell is everyone.

What with free shows and closing early the cinema only took about £150 today. But there was some good news I had a pay increase that was backdated for about 10 weeks so I got a sizable amount of pay that I hadn’t been expecting.

I’ve been thinking recently that the cinema business is dying, in fact I reckon the entire movie industry will soon be facing major upheavals. I shall get around to writing in length about this but for now it’s time I got a little merry in preparation for Christmas.

Tags: cinema

Professor B’s pseudonymous kid reminds me a lot of how I was as a kid particularly in relation to meeting Santa Claus.

I was reluctant to go along with the common herd and sit on Santa’s knee and tell him what I wanted for Christmas, It’s not like he’s the real one anyway. “Why are you making me do this mum?” I would whine. I much preferred to conduct my Christmas wish list business with Father Christmas at a long distance via letter.

I remember that this event didn’t happen at a mall (didn’t have them back in the day in my neck of the woods) but in a small village hall and we had a Christmas breakfast of sausages and baked beans beforehand. Such are the weird traditions in small English rural communities.

Tags: me

This week I shall be mostly playing Snow or Blow.

This is a very cute game where you have to move the little kids to catch snowflakes in their mouths, but watch out for the birds as they may deposit something in your mouth that doesn’t taste quite so nice.

Tags: games

It’s amazing what you can find out at the Wikipedia.

Carbon nanofoam is an allotrope of carbon discovered in 1997 by Andrei V. Rode and co-workers at the Australian National University in Canberra. It consists of clusters of carbon atoms strung together in a loose three-dimensional web.

Each cluster is about 6 nanometers wide and consists of about 4000 carbon atoms linked in graphite-like sheets that are given negative curvature by the inclusion of heptagons among the regular hexagonal pattern. This is the opposite of what happens in the case of buckminsterfullerenes, in which carbon sheets are given positive curvature by the inclusion of pentagons.

The large-scale structure of carbon nanofoam is similar to that of an aerogel, but with 1% of the density of previously produced carbon aerogels – only a few times the density of air at sea level. Unlike carbon aerogels, carbon nanofoam is a poor electrical conductor. The nanofoam contains numerous unpaired electrons, which Rode and colleagues propose is due to carbon atoms with only three bonds that are found at topological and bonding defects. This gives rise to what is perhaps carbon nanofoam’s most unusual feature; it is attracted to magnets, and below -183°C can itself be made magnetic. This property of ferromagnetism has also been seen in other allotropes of carbon including fullerene subjected to high pressures and temperatures and graphite irradiated with high energy protons.

Tags: science

I rarely read The Times anymore since it turned into a tabloid, in more ways than merely the size of the newspaper, however I did this morning as I was waiting for a dental appointment.

A couple of stories piqued my interest.

Clarke condemns the ‘Luddites’ over identity cards opposition

Is this the bloggers’ favourite blog?

The new Home Secretary Charles Clarke last night branded opponents of the plan “Luddites” and argued that he had a duty to use technology to protect citizens as he overcame opposition from both the Labour and Tory back benches.

I know he wasn’t referring to me as he was using the term to describe the recalcitrant MPs opposed to the bill but it is oddly amusing for a technologist such as myself to be lumped in with Luddites.

It is particularly ironic given that I think it is the government’s blind faith in technology to solve problems that has gotten us so far down this road. The proposed National Identity Card will not solve the most significant of the problems it is designed to address and yet will drastically undermine privacy and civil liberties. This is a security trade-off that I’m not willing to accept and neither I suspect would the majority of the public if they truly understood what the proposals meant.

I have written a longer thesis called Identity and ID cards, in which I outline the impact of the proposed National ID card.

The second of the stories in The Times is a profile of the blog BoingBoing which is indeed as the article suggests my favourite blog.

Tags: computer security, ID cards, security

Gosh darn it, those chaps at GCHQ have gone and produced yet another of their codebreaking challenges.

As ever I’m not one to back down from a challenge of this variety and so shall be endeavoring to conquer this little conundrum.

We had a few comments last time suggesting that the challenge which we gave you was a little too easy. Well, here’s something which will take a bit more work, but has a few things in common with the last challenge.

There are three parts to the solution. What is the connection between the men in the first list and the women in the second list? Which man pairs with which woman? And what is the hidden quotation?

MEN KCRVKXHL EUJDXZ WKNJVWL GSWOXU HYUE WREEYCS QFDX ORNQTP VTWMAC UEIIML OFIIPTYX LYIJ ZGRT BPDIIRNN XCT GSXXJYUQ RNBTCNP TCOSHNM XIVL VFBD NRIKUSL UIQORMDB UFIV WKXXZY DYFJN WCLEQPJ LVZD CONKLNFK PZSS TEBBMJ BZGZD A’GAANZ JRFJWRI XFCS QJAMDU ZWWVDU GMTHYL IKUBGMFPTPSSPM KEZHQ WSNIEC

WOMEN TVFAMI WVYVTT KHP FNWHQBEV MTJXMG EHXJRDT ORERC VIUWFNUE AIKUSBS EHSMKHNR UQPIDJX HEXID TZMMDR WDNCRM ECWHX YCMBXA LRNU FHZOHVN YVTLG UGZVYNHT YAERFI KFXBARV OUGEUDLRZ EZBVJDR CQMBSVDD LNYMICCNI DGOFBL AGUCZD AQSEWKC XFIWFSYK RKUUC VHMPUUPT CZNTBXD CFDNFE OSXFSXCZ XBZGCXDUXA BQKDVGBOJ OVIQXW CWUIFBLSK HSOGSB

I’ve studied it a short while and it is indeed not as simple as their previous challenge which involved simple shift ciphers. There are many possibilities but it would seem to me that either a single cipher is used for all the names or a different but related cipher is used for each name.

Frequency analysis is pointless for a sample as small as a single name so I didn’t bother with that but analysed the entire list. The results here show that all letters of the alphabet are present and that there is a narrow range of frequencies, the most frequent being only twice as frequent as the least.

Which means either a polyalphabetic cipher has been used to encrypt the entire list or a different one has been used for each name or group of names. Either way it appears that my work is cut out on this one.

Tags: cryptography

No not the insect I mean the game of Cricket. I present here two cricket related posts that I would have done separately but then I didn’t.

Every few years the rights to screen cricket test matches on television are auctioned off to the highest bidder, which from 2006 will be Sky Sports. This pisses the hell out of me, there’s no way that I’m paying a subscription and make Rupert Murdoch even wealthier to watch cricket. This is going to backfire horribly I feel.

Coincidentally I noticed the following at Coudal Partners today.

How To Explain the Rules of Cricket

You know the big tent at the east end of the county fairgrounds? Next to the show barn? Imagine it’s an oval filled with 90,000 Pakistanis who love to watch pie-eating— who love pie-eating more than soccer —even though it seems to the rest of us that eating pie would be a fairly unpleasant reminder of British Colonialism.

OK. Got it.

The area where the table is, where the pie-eaters sit, is called “the pitch.” At either end of the pitch is a line marking “the crease.” Now, let’s say that inside one of these creases, your pies are cooling on top of three sticks, which are called “stumps.” This contraption is called a “wicket” and there’s a man attempting to knock the wicket over by throwing a ball at it.

Is he the other pie-eater, trying to ruin my pies?

No, the other pie-eater is on your team, and he’s standing in front of his own wicket of pies at the other end of the pitch…

As well as explaining cricket they produce excellent Jewel Boxes for CDs and DVDs, which I have put to good use in my CD-ROM Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes.

Tags: sport

The title of a dumb little movie I made at dfilm.com is Motherfuckin’ Shoes.

Thanks to Spiderlegs for pointing me to the site.

Matt Jones shares more than just a first name with me as we are both fans of fiction about alternate timelines and what-ifs.

It’s thanks to Matt that I learnt that Robert A. Taylor of Today In Alternate History will be serialising some of his timelines.

Beginning today, TIAH will be selling our novels in serial format – 1/3 of a book every month. At the end of the 3rd month, the serialized parts will be replaced with the complete novel for sale, and the next serialization will begin. By responding to our polls, you will determine which timelines produce novels and which remain curiosities only available here on TIAH. The price for the downloads will be very reasonable – each serialized part will be US$1.50, the complete download will be US$5.00, and the trade paperback version will be US$12.00.

At those prices especially given the exchange rate between the Dollar and the Pound I’m sure to be downloading some of these. Best of all the first of his serialisations concerns the enigmatic alien beings the Mlosh in Warp.

In 1720, the alien race known as the Mlosh landed on earth. The warping effect that their presence has had on society leads a band of human racists to drastic measures in this alternate London of 1861.

Tags: alternate history, books