Status-Q

[Original Link] A whole new type of malicious software. Thanks to Dave Hill for the link.

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Here's an interesting table. Ever get into a plane and think, "Mmm. Seems like a couple of extra inches of legroom compared to my last flight..."? Well here's a list of how far apart different airlines put their rows of seats on intercontinental flights.

[Original Link] "We are predominantly using [Linux] as a platform to deliver the Mozilla browser," says Michael Bowler, the bank's IT architecture manager. "The client operating system doesn't really matter from the perspective of delivering line-of-business functionality."

My Airport Express arrived today, and it's great. I'm typing this on my laptop, sitting on the sofa in the living room, listening to music on the stereo. But the music playing on the stereo is also coming from the laptop, which means that when the phone rang a moment ago, I just hit a couple of keys to pause iTunes. (I recommend Butler for that, BTW). Remember those old days when you had to find a remote control?

So here I sit, rather bemused as I look at the bookcase full of CDs. All of my music is on my hard disk, and while it may be a little while before I'm happy to invest heavily in music which has no physical incarnation, I do now think of CDs as archival storage. It's been a while since I actually had to open a CD case for the purpose of listening to the music inside. The iPod lives in the car, and the Airport lives in the sitting room. When I'm in the study, I have speakers plugged into the laptop via USB. I even find that I'm not listening to the radio as much as I used to, because all the programs I want are on the BBC or NPR websites and I can hear them whenever I want to.

Now that you're staggering under the overwhelming flood of coolness emanating from my lifestyle, I can reveal that I'm actually listening to Boney M....

[Original Link] Light relief in the run-up to the US Election.

Here's something that's been bothering me, and no doubt has kept you awake at night as well...

Take a look at the word for 'hot' in many European languages: chaud in French, caldo in Italian, calido in Spanish, calidus in Latin. So how did we end up with the word cold which means exactly the opposite?

Well, the answer, of course, is that our words for hot and cold have Germanic rather than Latin roots. Our cold is like the German kalt and the Norwegian kulde, but I can't help feeling this must have caused confusion throughout history. Interestingly, the Germanic word apparently derives from the Latin as well, but the Latin for frost, gelu.

So now you know.

[Original Link] John Udell has some more interesting reasons for using

Mozilla/Firefox.  (Interesting, that is, if you're an XML/Javascript enthusiast.)

Blogs are wonderful things. John read mine, saw my posting saying how I bemoaned the absence of my old Sinclair Z88, and fished an old one out of a cupboard and gave it to me.

I can now take a photo of it using a digital camera, which I'd never seen when I owned my last one, and post it on the web, which I'd also never seen.

It seems funny now to think that I typed tens of thousands of words on one of these, including my final-year undergraduate dissertation in Computer Science, and yet never typed 'www', '.com', or '.org'...

[Original Link] Chris Cummer extols the virtues of Chris Pederick's handy extension. He's right. If you do any amount of web development, this is well worth having.

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The wonders of one-way mirrors. This rather interesting photo has been doing the rounds - nobody seems to know quite where it's from...