The Great Building Project is progressing well: check Facebook for photos etc., also friend me using the email address on the Contacts page if necessary.

Work-wise we have some new interesting hardware arriving soon: a Dell R905 server with four quad-core Opteron processors (i.e. 16 cores in total) and 128GB RAM, for running large statistical analyses. This is a pretty serious machine. It certainly ought to let us analyse those multi-gigabyte datasets more quickly
and more easily. We use Stata and R generally, both of which can take advantage of multiple processors and talk nicely to our PostgreSQL databases.

I have been writing small pieces of code to solve the programming projects/puzzles at Project Euler: the idea is that you have to write a short program to (say) “Find the 10001st Prime Number”, “Find the sum of all prime numbers under 2000000″, “Find the sum of all even terms in the Fibonacci sequence not exceeding 4000000″ and so on. None of the programs are very hard to write: most of them are very simple; however, it’s interesting nonetheless.

• Take a picture of yourself right now.
• Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
• Post that picture with NO editing.
• Post these instructions with your picture.

I have just biked into work. Be grateful the web is not yet odour-enabled.

I also see that Stephen Fry appears in a short video celebrating 25 years of the GNU Free Software Foundation: he’s always struck me as a good free software, Linux and gadget fan, so this is interesting. The video itself is a bit dull, really, but it does bring out the fact that those of us promoting the use of free software and open standards are working with similar philosophy to those carrying out scientific research. That is, making our work public for everyone to benefit from.

Two days ago, Google released Google Chrome, a new web browser. That is, it does broadly the same thing as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. It looks very shiny and, based on a quick test I gave it in a Windows XP virtual machine, extremely fast. I think this is a good thing. Not because Google Chrome is necessarily any better or worse than Firefox or Internet Explorer, but because the more different browsers become mainstream, the more likely web developers are to adhere properly to web standards when designing and programming their pages. Even Internet Explorer, in its latest incarnation IE8, will apparently be “standards-compliant by default”. That’s better for everyone.

I spoke to Stripey again this morning. “I was thinking about you this morning”, she said. “Ah, that’s quite common, actually…” I replied, mischievously. She laughed, possibly slightly too much. She explained that she had been trying to figure out how she had been mentally referring to me, prior to us meeting. The only distinctive thing she had come up with was that she always noted the wing mirror on my bike. She told me that she had decided I was “The Mirror Man”. I nodded with approval at this. “Just like the Human League song, then?”, I said. She looked completely blank. Perhaps she’s not quite as old as me, then.

So there you go: I am … The Mirror Man.

A few hours later, there was only this:

With any luck, there’s only another six months to go

And so the annual pilgrimage to Wolverhampton for Lugradio Live happened. Excellent, as expected. The above photo shows me in the background, sat between Dave ‘Schwuk’ Murphy (yellow T-shirt) and Steve Lamb Of (Erm…) Microsoft. Some good talks, lots of interesting people to talk to: the Usual Crew, MrBen, Bruno, Neuro, Bryn, Oojah, plus the Lugradio presenters of course. Chatted with a few new people too.

During the Saturday evening party, I’m proud to say that karaoke was perpetrated. Until I can find an actual photo of me with the microphone, we’ll have to make do with this:

That’s right, I sang ‘Ghostbusters’. It went down quite well and had plenty of audience participation. Thanks for all your kind words, people If anyone has an actual photo of this, please let me know!

The official announcement was made today in this week’s episode and took many people by surprise: the crew had decided to give a “heads up” to long-time Lugradio ‘people’ in advance.

This means that Lugradio Live 2008 in Wolverhampton on 19-20 July will be the last recording and the last event (probably): we can go out with a shout. I will be there

Bruno describes this sad day very nicely.

Many thanks to all the presenters over the years: Jono, Aq, Sparkes, Matt, Ade, Adam and Chris. So long and thanks for all the fish. I mean, all the chin.

I don’t suppose anyone reading this has a recording of the programme, or knows where one might buy such a thing? e.g an audio book?

Update: thank you for the pointers. Especially you, you know who you are.

I decided that, if I was going to learn once again to solve the thing, I would need exactly the same book that I had originally. So I tracked it down:

Published in 1981, the then 12-year-old Patrick Bossert wrote one of the first books on how to solve the cube. Over the course of a few weeks or months, I learned his procedure.

Over the course of 20 years, I forgot it again.

However, upon reacquiring a copy of the book at the weekend, I reminded myself of most of the main moves in just a few hours. The algorithms were obviously just locked away in my memory, because I found myself “chanting” to myself the moves as I carried them out: “Up, round-at-the-back, Down, Along-right” etc.

I used to be able to finish the cube in around 2 minutes to 2 minutes 30 seconds, I think; yesterday I managed 3 minutes 40 seconds, which is not bad. And I’m sure I can do better…

Update 12.06.2008: Managed 2 minutes 24 yesterday

• N is a prime number;
• The last time my age was a prime was six years ago (i.e N-6 is prime and no other numbers between N-6 and N are prime);
• N is not a member of any twin-prime pairing: see the definition of a twin prime if needed;
• You can assume that N is less than 50

There is only one unique solution to the above.

And Happy 40th Birthday to Kylie, too.