There's a bug in my website, dear Lisa, dear Lisa...

...but it's fixed now. Yay for accessibility guidelines. My website looks good in Lynx.

Lava tubes and rilles

If you've been following discussions on sci.space.tech recently, you'll have seen a lot of discussion of the idea of using lava tubes as the basis for a (permanent) Moon base.

Lava tubes are long tunnels formed by flowing molten lava. They are well quite common in volcanic areas of the Earth, and can often be a mile or more in length.

We know that they exist on the Moon - one of the Apollo missions landed near to a feature called Hadley Rille. A rille is a valley created when the ceiling of a lava tube falls in. If you consider that Hadley Rille is visible from the Earth, given a moderately powerful telescope, you gain some idea of the size the Hadley lava tube must have been. You could comfortably put a village down inside it. We don't get lava tubes that size on Earth because the Earth's gravity is too strong.

Some rilles we have observed have gaps in them - sections of lava tube which have not collapsed. So we could postulate that in many places on the moon, there are these lava tubes: massive, naturally formed tunnels. But why are these tunnels so interesting for the purposes of colonisation?

For more information see: http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/planet_volcano/lunar/sin_rilles/lava_tubes.html http://www.asi.org/adb/m/04/02/01/02/

Trebuchet

I was very bored today. So, noting that my little brothers were playing medieval armies with their Lego, I built siege weaponry. Mwahahahahaha.

Sunday afternoon

I walked through the village as darkness fell this evening. I walked a route I have walked a hundred times, but this time I saw things I had never noticed before, or if I had noticed them had not paid any attention to. I saw birds flitting from tree to leafless tree, and heard many more chirping away unseen in the hedgerows. I saw the yellow streetlights coming on one by one as the daylight seeped away, and people closing curtains at lit windows. I saw a young couple in walking boots and waterproofs strolling through the fields together in happy silence, and two ladies walking their three dogs. I saw a little bird watch me from a gable, silhouetted against the sky. I heard the bells ringing from the Abbey, drowning out the ever-present background drone of traffic for a few short minutes. I saw a red telephone box in a puddle of light from a streetlight above it, bright lights in the hotel bar spilling into the street, the first few green leaves of a new cereal crop pushing their way above the soil. I saw the Abbey lit up by its floodlights, and the Catholic church sleeping in silent darkness. I saw a hill crowned by tall trees breaking the curve of the horizon. I saw two geese fly low above me, and heard their honking, like distorted car horns.

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn Is to love and be loved in return."

I'm lonely tonight.

Samurai

It's not my website that's broken. It's Internet Explorer. Use a decent browser. More detail later. Lizzie and I went to see a movie on Saturday afternoon! We'd been meaning to for months, but had always been too busy to get round to it. We went to see The Last Samurai in Oxford, and I enjoyed it lots. It's an action film, but it's very thoughtful (or at least seems to be): much more Saving Private Ryan than Blade. I will be buying it on DVD. I also updated my website, paring down the content of the XHTML files to the bare minimum (no more tables)! So that means that it's all the more important that your browser supports CSS2. I also changed all my file extensions to '.xml'. Because I do all my testing on non-broken browsers (i.e. Mozilla Firebird and Opera), I didn't notice that IE doesn't look at XML doctype definitions to see whether it can render the document. Basically, IE is broken. I'll fix it next weekend.

Dodgy coffee

I thought I'd found a bug in my Java code. But it was my fault. Debugging takes way too long.

Cutting it fine

I just received a letter from the Year in Industry, inviting me to interview at a little company called QinetiQ. It looks pretty exciting to me: once again, there are aspects to their R & D work that seem quite relevant to what I want to do! Upon opening the letter, I saw that they want me to respond to them by tomorrow. That seems to be cutting it fine. Then again, it's postmarked the 2nd and it was sent first class, so it should have got to my home on Tuesday. Oh well, maybe it's just my parents not getting through the post fast enough. Tomorrow's our Parents Evening here at school.

Subversion

I just discovered Subversion. It looks like it'll be a pretty amazing piece of software in a few months once they get the teething problems sorted out. I especially like the idea of being able to access it through WebDAV: it brings the possibility of running it through a firewall, which you can't do with CVS. In fact, it seems much more feature-complete than CVS.

The BBC needs to learn their lesson

BBC News Online: Linux cyber-battle turns nasty. I noticed this article this morning, and immediately commented about it on Groklaw. If you read it, you'll find that it is quite easily potentially libellous towards Linux users as a whole, and really based purely on PR statements made by companies which have a vested interest in discrediting Linux users! I can't believe that the BBC haven't learnt their lesson after the Hutton Report: they really need to make sure that the news they report is backed up by hard evidence. The reporter could have at least made sure that he investigated the flip side of the story: Linux users' reactions to the MyDoom virus being written to pin the blame on them. Like many other Groklaw-ers, I submitted a complaint about the story to the BBC.

Typing away

I've been firing of lots of e-mails this morning already. First off was to my contact at the Year in Industry. It's now been two weeks since I (tried) to contact MBDA Missile Systems, and they haven't even sent me an acknowledgement of receipt of my application. I'm naturally a bit concerned, and that's what I've told her. I can't help but worry that they've thought, "This guy's so rude, we're going to ignore him." And I really, really want the placement. Then I e-mailed a couple of my friends: one who used to go to primary school with me, and one who I got in contact with through shooting. Interestingly, all three people I e-mailed this morning were female. On the subject of YinI, apparently some company called QinetiQ want to interview me... *goes to look at website*