As every other British blogger has pointed out now (sorry I’m late, spent the weekend in Edinburgh flathunting), the idiots at Odeon have shut down Matthew Somerville’s Accessible Odeon website. While, legally speaking, the site was a tad dubious, it was certainly not in any way harmful to Odeon’s business - the fact that anyone not using Internet Explorer on Windows couldn’t use their main site meant that he had (at his own time and expense) given them a way of accessing their cinema times and thus gave them extra business. While IE still holds the dominant market share, it is now falling (more on that later), so Odeon will be only be shutting out more and more potential cinema-goers. Odeon’s attitude is at odds to that of National Rail, who tolerate his alternative timetable site and have promised a revamp of their own. If Odeon had had any sense they would have ditched the interface designers and hired him in as a usability consultant.

Actually, I was curious as to who had designed it - according to Odeon, the usability criminals in question are Lateral, who (wisely) do not boast anywhere on their website that they designed the Odeon site. Though their other work is of a similar ilk, such as this Levi’s site with another frustrating interface.

Anyway, back on to the topic of Internet Explorer - one of the likely reasons for the drop in market share are the security flaws that have bedevilled it recently, with Microsoft recommending that users disable less secure functionality, and some security firms recomending ditching IE completely for something better, and avoid having to run updates every few days.

So, we can all switch to a new browser and the most we suffer is not being able to get tickets for your local Odeon? Well, not quite, as several banks (luckily for me, not mine) still do not fully support non-IE browsers for their online banking, so users are forced to still use IE for that particular purpose. Which is pretty stupid - for a site where your security is absolutely paramount, you’re being forced to use an insecure piece of software.

The performance of my (admittedly old - PIII 500 running Win98) computer has slowly got worse and worse over the past month or two (and I mean bad - the mouse pointer taking ages to move, webpages taking 2-3 seconds to render after loading), and one reason, I’ve found is NTL’s Broadband Medic software, which manages my connection.

When I got broadband from NTL originally, the program to handle connecting was called CorrectConnect, and did its job fine. But a couple of months ago it insisted on downloading a new program. It’s about a hundred times slower (takes an age to load up every time I need to do anything with it like reset the connection) and sits in memory doing absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. I’ve found that shutting it down (and a background process called Motivesb, which you have to stop using Ctrl-Alt-Del) after it’s started the connection causes no ill effect whatsoever. But I’m still wondering - “Why take a neat, speedy piece of software and replace it with something hideously slow that doesn’t do anything extra?”

“I regret if my language offends anybody, but you know the point of language, it’s like the skin of a fruit or a nut, the fruit wants to draw attention to itself and invite people to peel it, and then to look at the fruit inside and to see whether it’s good to eat, whether it agrees with you.”

Blimey - the British High Commissioner to Kenya is David Brent in disguise.

(His point on corruption is a fair one, though, I’m just pointing out his ridiculous language)

I don’t know what in the news is the least surprising - that the Butler enquiry was a whitewash (no-one to blame, how convenient), or that the BNP is full of racists and thugs.

This film sounds amazing. A pity it never got made. :-(

The plaques on the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, designed by Carl Sagan, are intended to describe Earth and the human race to any alien race that encounters it. It has some familiar features, like a naked couple and a map of our solar system, but also a weird explosion-like diagram which I never understood, until now. This Wikipedia article expounds the details and makes you think - just how do you communicate with aliens, and convey basic things like distance and time.

The plaque uses the frequency of the hyperfine transition of hydrogen for the unit of time (explained by a diagram), and binary notation to express numbers, which should be interpretable by aliens. The explosion diagram is the distance of the Sun from 14 known pulsars, annotated with their current frequencies, which change over time, so hopefully they can work out when the probe was launched as well as where from.

It’s exceedingly unlikely that the plaques will ever be found, and even with such a universal encoding it will still be very hard to decipher (and some of the symbology, like the arrowhead, is definitely anthroprocentric), but it’s still a very humbling experience reading about it. Great care has been taken to make sure there as few barriers as possible that will prevent understanding it, but it is still mind-boggling to try and think about what logical and visual assumptions, which we take for granted, that any alien race might not understand. We may not be physically alone in the universe, but our entire system of thought may be so different that we are metaphysically stranded forever.

As a footnote, the copyright notice for the Voyager Gold Record is quite amusing.

Google have set a little puzzle as a recruitment drive, and for a bit of a laugh, I tried solving it (it comes in two parts), without cheating. And (with the aid of some admittedly atrocious quick ‘n dirty Java code) I’ve just got both answers! In under an hour! Hurrah!

Annoyingly, no prize, just a redirect to a recruitment page.

Not gonna post the answers though they’re around elsewhere online - email me if you’ve got terribly stuck…

Although alternate history is slightly self-indulgent, and is almost entirely subjective and whimsical, I still have a minor interest in it. So to my joy, I’ve discovered the Today in Alternate History blog, where the day’s events in various alternate universes. In a nice touch, the dating system varies, depending on the dominant culture in the universe (Chinese, Islamic, Ancient Roman and Native American calendars are all used in addition to the Western one).

Some scenarios are a bit clichéd (Nazis winning WW2, etc.) and others so alternate that they’re fantasy (e.g. Aliens colonising Earth in the 18th Century), but they’re still quite interesting. My favourite is probably the one about Pete Best becoming a world superstar:

June 9th - In 1984, John Lennon, an obscure musician who had once been in a band with international sensation Pete Best, writes a tell-all book about Best, detailing their crazy life in Hamburg, Germany, and their rough-and-tumble beginnings in Liverpool, England. The book, I Want To Tell You, is an international best-seller.

The ones that don’t feature as part of some long story arc, but as simple entries on their own are also quite neat:

June 4th - In 1896, Henry Ford is killed after losing control of his new automobile. Americans take this lesson to heart and ban the horseless carriage from the streets of the nation.

or just plain silly:

July 12th - In 1937, famed blaxploitation star Bill Cosby was born in Philadelphia. After getting his break in the 60s spy show I Spy, Cosby went on to star in such black action films as Shaft. He defined the role of black action hero that later actors Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy would seek to emulate.