There is one good thing about the .info top level domain: it’s very simple to block the spam linking to it. Just one quick rule in wordpress to block any comment with a link to a .info domain and my comment spam has been cut by about 95%.
Thanks .info!
Some things bring me the stupidest joy. Tonight: an owl hooting in a tree near my place, the first time I have heard one nearby. From the nature of the call and the geographic location it was very likely a male Powerful Owl (Ninox strenua).
Yes I guess this makes me an uber-nerdy bird watcher; or should that be listener?
I was waiting at a bus stop recently when I reached for my wallet to pull out some money. I have a fairly extensive track record of dropping loads of coins everywhere when I do this and this event continued this great tradition resulting in the spilling of a one dollar coin and a fifty cent piece. The one dollar coin was reasonably well behaved and landed within ten centimetres of my feet; the fifty cent piece — being the annoying dodecahedral menace that it is — absconded onto the road.
Picking up the one dollar coin was a no-brainer; hey it’s a buck. Now over the years I’ve managed, somehow, to develop a reasonably well honed risk-reward brain function. There was fifty cents a fair way toward the centre of a very busy Elizabeth street with large, heavy buses constantly passing by amongst a multitude of smaller but just as deadly cars. I decided it was best to forfeit it and I was quite proud of this decision!
Not more than five seconds after arriving at this very sensible course of inaction an elderly lady beside me hobbled over onto the road and expended a great deal of effort to bend over and retrieve the silver specie. Bless! I thought to myself. What a nice lady — of course I’ll let her keep it when she offers. Except that she didn’t. She pocketed the treasure and with nary a sideways glance resumed her position next to me, not more than two arm lengths away. Flabbergasted is probably an accurate description.
That was the second time within a fortnight that I had been swindled by a woman, although the previous incident was far more costly and, in turn, far more embarrassing. And no, you won’t get that one out of me 
In some aspects of my life I feel like the proverbial cat: when I am inside I want to be outside, and when I am out I want to be in. I know not from where this decisive indecision comes from. Often I find I can oscillate between my two states of indecision freely, some mad pendulum motivated by chaos alone it would seem. The thing that gets me though is sometimes, just sometimes, I walk through the door to the other side, turn around, and find the door shut and unyielding; locked forever and never to be open again no matter how longingly I peer through the window.
Then one day, beyond prediction and imagination and without context: a house is built around me while I thought I was outside, giving me two places I want to be rather than here. A new turmoil to be sure; one that leaves me reeling: wondrous, breathless and afraid.
Yesterday saw the conclusion of the 2007 iteration of the National Computer Science School. The NCSS is a week long event held at the University of Sydney that sees a cohort of 70-odd senior high school students from around Australia (some from as far away as Broome) develop a search engine and web site from scratch. That’s right, a search engine, fully featured with crawler, indexer, stemmer, stop lists and recursive descent query parser. It’s a truly amazing feat considering that the implementation language for the search engine is Python, a language which most of the students have not used before.
My involvement revolves around a series of four lectures that I give to the students involved in designing the web site hosting the search engine, in which I cover topics such as:
On the Thursday night of the school we hold a programming competition over two hours where students break up into teams of three to tackle a series of programming and web design questions. Scott and Matt from Atlassian were kind enough to volunteer as mentors for the night. The mentor’s role during the competition is to provide encouragement and direction to the team that they are assigned to as well as to discuss career options within the IT industry. It was particularly awesome to see Scott and one of his students working feverishly with pen and paper (and later a laptop) over dinner, discussing how to implement a recursive descent parser.
The event culminates in an all night work-a-thon on the Friday night where students and tutors stay up all night to complete their work followed by a presentation to parents and the client the next day. This is the most satisfying part of the experience for teachers and tutors as we get to sit back and enjoy the efforts of these talented students. I was absolutely thrilled to see students using fully CSS based layouts for their web site designs. One team even managed to add a touch of AJAX to their search form with search suggestions as you type, with no input from me I might add!
Huge congratulations are in order for Drs. James Curran and Tara Murphy whose tireless efforts every year are critical to the success of this event and to the many tutors who attend to guide their teams through the grueling program that is the NCSS.
