Today is my last day in my current job, and tomorrow I move out of Cambridge, back to London. It’s been a lovely two years working at CARET, and I’m going to miss it (and my salary!) dearly. But new horizons await me.

I’m off to Edinburgh University to start a Masters degree in September, in the meantime I’ll be preparing for it back home in London. I’ll have less Internet access there, and I’ll be concentrating on course preparions, so my blogging output will be reduced over the coming month or two, but I’ll do my best to occasionally communicate via teh Interweb.

In the meantime, have a play or two of Catch the paper, an accurate simulation of my last day at work…

Is anyone else’s Technorati profile really fucked? Mine is, I keep getting an ‘invalid profile’ message, as if someone is falsely claiming my blog as theirs. When I try to log in I just get dumped back to the login page again and again, and I’ve tried asking for a password reset email but it never comes through. It’s been like this for a couple of days now…

More: Something about the new site is broken, I can now sign in but it keeps on forgetting whether I’m actually logged in or not, switching between the two. I’ve managed to see my profile OK once or twice, but when this happens is unconnected to whether I am logged in or not.

We thought we’d stopped Vikings coming over here, stealing our money and sleeping with our women, roughly 900 years ago.

The Daily Mail slips further and further into self-parody, as they give 11 Reasons to sack Sven (via New Links).

Interestingly, the work on chatbots passing the Turing test (or humans failing it), keeps on progressing, as someone writes Jenny18 (via Boing Boing and gromblog), a robot program that simulates a dumb, horny blonde, and manages to convince an awful lot of cybersex enthusiasts she is a real person, effectively passing the Turing Test.

As I’ve pointed out before, this actually is humans failing the Turing Test, rather than any computer program passing it. The chat logs (NSFW) are amusing as so much of the “erotic” conversation is hilariously illiterate and not particularly erotic. Anyone familiar with my friends will be amused particularly by this one - now we know what “other priorities” really means.

Is it just me, or has Gmail stopped working on Firefox for Windows? I have version 0.8 at home, 0.9 at work, and neither displays the main page after login any more - I just get a blank page. I can log into my account on IE fine though.

You would have thought that, with the launch of the “Preparing for Emergencies” pamphlet, that as well as having the official address of preparingforemergencies.gov.uk, some bright spark in the Home Office would have also thought of registering preparingforemergencies.co.uk at the same time. Especially as this kind of thing has happened before.

The spoof site is fairly amusing - the modification of the main logo is a bit disturbing though.

Wordcount (via Ben Hammersley) is a nice Flash application that ranks the 86,000 most-used words in the English language, sizing each one according to its frequency, and allows you to explore them in a linear fashion. But the interface is infuriating in some respects - buttons too small, and navigating along the line is horribly slow - why isn’t there a » button to speed along 10 places at once?

Still it does come up with some nice sequences, like: “Scandinavia shocks Dougal” (#14074-14076), “Palestinian Owl advertisement” (#6460-6462), “Despotism clinching Internet” (#30523-30525) and “Charming fuck workshops” (#5597-5599). I could have invented a new Internet sport here…

BBC News Magazine reports on the efforts of scientists to recover sound from 19th century wax cylinders using scanning microscropes and digital conversion.

While this is great - we’re managing to recover knowledge that we have lost - there is a certain irony that the old, analogue wax cylinders are, in a way, more durable than the digital copies that they are creating.

The durability problem is not like the problem the cylinders had, namely the possibility of hardware failure. The cylinders which were too delicate to play on the equipment they were designed for, which is how we lost the information on them in the first place. While the hard drives used to store the digital versions might get destroyed, the researchers have probably backed them up somewhere else (we hope). The emergence of peer-to-peer technology for durable storage (which I wrote on in my BA dissertation) is emerging, so that the risks of hardware failure are even further reduced.

Instead, the problem is of software failure. The scientists were able to get the sound off the discs because it is recorded in an analogue manner - the ripples and waves on the cylinder grooves bear a direct relationship to the sound waves produced. Decoding this was easy (in principle at least, I’m sure the work in actually doing so was quite a feat). But now they’ve digitised them, they’ve encoded them in a particular way. Who’s to say 100 years time encodings we take for granted, like JPEG or MP3, will be decipherable? Future historians and digital archaeologists will just look at the 1s and 0s and be completely baffled as to how they relate to what you can see and hear.

This has already happened, as the BBC know all too well. The 1986 BBC Domesday Project was meant to be a permanent multimedia archive of Britain in 1986 (marking the 900th anniversay of the Domesday Book). Instead, 15 years on, the discs were indecipherable, as no-one had the BBC computers needed to read them. Fortunately, the Camileon project have since managed to reproduce emulator software that can read it, but in time the emulator itself may become obsolete (one day, will we need PC emulators to run the BBC emulator software?).

Fortunately, the potential problems has been recognised now (the problem of hardware failure was never really anticipated by papermakers or wax cylinder manufacturers in the past), and so we have organisations like the Long Now Foundation (who date everything in 5 digits to avoid the Y10K bug), the Gutenberg Project, and the UK’s Digital Preservation Coalition devoted to making sure we don’t get a series of Domesdays in the future. The science of data preservation is a growing one with no one solution or consensus existing; Camileon provide a useful list of publications on the subject - the ones on the different methods used and attacking emulation as a strategy are particularly interesting to read.