Gnuplot in Action

I've used gnuplot for a long, long time without ever truly getting to grips with its intricacies - but I'm rectifying that with the aid of Philipp Janert's Gnuplot in Action. So far, I've learned three interesting and useful new things in the first thirty pages: a good sign!

Uninstall woes

Having bowed to pressure from the family and installed Microsoft Office 2007 on one of the family PCs, I figured that there is no further need for the copy of Microsoft Works that came pre-installed on the machine. But when I tried to remove Works, I was prompted to insert the installation CD!

WTF? Why on earth should this be required? Most malware is easier to get off your system than this piece of crap.

Anyway, I can't comply with the request because the CD was not supplied with the system when we bought it. Grrr...

Flickr fun

I'm a Flickr devotee, and was interested to discover their App Garden - a place where home-grown applications that use the Flickr API can be promoted.

One that particularly caught my eye is Command-Line Flickr - a retro, textual interface that allows you to browse photostreams and even render individual pictures as ASCII art! Strange but rather cool.

Here's the photo from yesterday's post, rendered in ASCII:

Frozen Britain

The BBC website has an interesting NASA satellite image from yesterday, 7 January, showing the extent of the snow cover across the country.

Let It Snow...

We are deeply in the grip of winter at the moment, with plenty of snow on the ground, schools closed, etc. I was at home with the kids today and took my camera outside for the first time in a few weeks, to grab a few shots of interestingly-shaped accumulations of snow. Here, it looks like the nesting box in our back garden has acquired a quiff!

Happy Birthday, Python!

It appears that Python turned twenty a couple of days ago.

I hope that the next twenty years will be as successful as the first twenty...