Back in the 19th century, education was something you might go to school for, and but more likely practiced for as an apprentice or "junior". There was an expectation that you would be learning new skills through your life as you progressed through from apprentice level to senior or master. Fast forward to today and there seems to be an expectation that once you leave school, or possibly leave college, your learning days are over ...

Just a short post this time, to ask the question: Is it reasonable that in England, a court trial takes as long as it does?

I have and continue to take an interest in education, and following the recent BBC TV programme "The Classroom Experiment" I've decided to put some thoughts into words, and in particular I would like to challenge the assumption that we know what school is supposed to be doing.

WWW: Watch continues the story started in WWW: Wake about the emergence of an artificial intelligence on the world wide web and the girl, Caitlin, who helps mentor it in this journey. By the end of the first part of the book, Caitlin and the intelligence have "met" each other and Caitlin has decided to help the intelligence, who has chosen the name "Webmind" and which she has decides to dub "male".

WWW: Wake is a sci-fi book centred around the emergence of an artificial intelligence through the medium of the world wide web, and its interaction with a human, a girl called Caitlin who has been blind from birth. This book is the first in a series of three novels; it will be followed by WWW: Watch and finally WWW: Wonder.

On a casual glance at the title of this book, you might imagine it describes papers or letters that the author thought ought to be in the Bible, but you would be wrong. It is the story of one man's attempt to reclaim the factual basis of the Old Testament of the Bible. For many years now, archaeologists have dismissed the Old Testament as being irrelevant to their subject, because its stories didn"t match up with the archaeology they saw.

Some time ago, I stumbled across a website called The Political Compass, whose authors use two dimensions, not just the popular one (left vs right) to define political leanings and find my result was not close to any of the national political parties in England.

I was in a local restaurant recently looking at absolutely torrential rain, and wondered how many people, seeing that, thought "global warming". Certainly a few years ago people were merrily predicting that we would be seeing a mediteranean climate of warm dry summers and cold (dry) winters, but in my mind that was never going to happen.

The Kent Retargetable Occam Compiler was started a long time ago now to provide a high quality compiler for those wishing to use the occam language. With knowledge of ARM assembler, I decided to try a port of KRoC for the ARM processor. I didn't finish it, but did get as far as generating smaller chunks of machine code.

A php project now hosted on sourceforge that I created to manage conference proceedings and papers for the WoTUG community, hosted on its website. The program manages complex relationships; it is possible, for example, for a paper to be included in more than one conference, and to have attached to it multiple files (for example, PDF and PS versions of the paper).