Just a quick post this time… Picked up my new Yamaha R1 yesterday (the last was hi-jacked!). Feels good to be back on a superbike again! Took it down to Brighton with a friend who picked up his new Honda Blackbird and ended up coming back home through a blizzard on the M25! No pictures yet but I’ll try to take some at the weekend if it’s nice enough.
Question from here and here (and probably lots of other places on the net by now!).
“A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?”
Rob sent this to me this morning. I said ‘No’ the plane wouldn’t take off. I understand completely the point that the thrust from a planes engine does not act through the wheels of the plane, and I used to fly so I’m fairly sure that I understand the principles of lift/drag etc.
The issue is that the question has been specifically worded to cause to differing opinions in two types of people.
The practical thinkers will assume that the plane is using it’s engines and that the thrust will simply push it forwards, regardless of the conveyor’s speed, as the frictional force between the conveyor and the wheels is negligible and the thrust from the engines acts upon the air and not the wheels. They will say the the plane does take off, and they’d be correct.
However, the theoretical thinkers will ignore the real-world practicalities of the situation because it would never exist. Instead they abstract it to a simple object with a given speed, which is being kept motionless by something exserting a force in the opposite direction. They correctly calculate that the net speed of the object will be nothing and therefore there would be no airflow over the wings of the plane to allow it to take off. They are also correct.
In reality, both answers are equally valid depending on your point of view and how you interpret the question, which has been worded very badly (on purpose, I’m sure).
This reminds me of a question once asked by my physics teacher. If popeye is sitting in a sailboat and blows on the sail, will the boat move?
Owen just published a list of his current FireFox extensions, so I thought I’d join in.
Adblock 0.5.3.042
BetterSearch 1.9
BugMeNot 1.3
ColorZilla 0.8.3.1
del.icio.us 1.0.2
dragdropupload 1.5.4
Ext2Abc 0.4
Fasterfox 1.0.3
Flashblock 1.5
FxIF 0.2.2
Google Images Re-Linker 0.3
Html Validator 0.7.7
IE Tab 1.0.7
JavaScript Debugger 0.9.85.jw2
ListZilla 0.7
MeasureIt 0.3.5
Nuke Anything Enhanced 0.53
Quick Sum 0.1
SessionSaver .2 0.2.1.031
Tab Preview 0.3
View Rendered Source Chart 1.5.02
Web Developer 1.0.1
Xinha Here! 0.6
Earlier today I searched the internet for a 2006 wall planner – kind of like the Sasco wall planners that you see on office walls. I didn’t find what I was looking for, apart from a couple of sites wanting to sell me the real thing and a couple of dodgy looking JPGs, so I spent some time during my lunch hour creating one. It’s done in Microsoft Excel format and there are both horizontal and vertical versions. Feel free to download them using the following links.
2006 Horizontal Planner
2006 Vertical Planner
The holidays are official UK holidays taken from the DTI’s web site.
If you find these planners useful, please consider making a small donation
I’m not entirely sure about the colours or layout, so if you have any suggestions, please leave a comment and I will see what I can do.
Update: 19/10/2006 – Due to popular demand, I have created a set for 2007 as well
I was a very lucky boy this year… I must have been on Santa’s ‘nice’ list for sure! I got:
Today’s my first day back at work after Christmas. I have to say it’s a pretty slow day, but I guess that’s to be expected.
I’m proud to announce that I managed my new-years resolution of getting up and getting to work earlier today. I hope I manage to keep it up!
As just reported by The register, a recent Microsoft update causes problems with Internet Explorer 6 if you’ve previously run version 7 (beta) in ‘standalone’ mode.
This hit me, but I was blaming it on a recent install of the Opera web browser as that and the update coincided, so apologies to Opera. The problem I was experiencing was that when typing in a URL in the address bar, or opening a bookmark, IE was launching the default browser (which could look like a new window if IE was set as the default). Kind of cool, but not when you use apps that require IE and use popup windows 
The solution is to delete the registry key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{c90250f3-4d7d-4991-9b69-a5c5bc1c2ae6}
What is it with kids (14-18 year olds I mean, god I must be getting old!) these days. They see a bike and they feel that they must try to get you to ‘do a wheelie’ for them.
“Yes mate, OK, I’ll just chew my sprockets up and stretch my chain because you want to see a wheelie shall I? I’ll just spin my wheel up on this cold, wet road and shred my expensive tyres on your say-so. Tell you what, I’ll do a wheelie for you, even though I’m 3 feet behind a car, filtering through rush-hour traffic. No doubt you’ll forget about it 5 minutes after it’s happened, but that’s not a problem because there’ll be another biker along 5 minutes later for you to harass.”
Yes, I can do wheelies and yes, I enjoy doing them, but only when I want to do them and when it’s safe enough to do it! You want to see a wheelie every 5 minutes – You grow up, get a bike, and learn for yourself!
Molly E. Holzschlag, Group Lead at the Web Standards Project (WaSP) has posted an open letter (partly because their feedback system no longer works!) to Disney Store UK on her blog, regarding their recent redesign.
It seems that whoever redesigned the site doesn’t have any idea about web standards and semantic design, as all trace of the previous, well-written site, which was used as an example in numerous case studys about modern web design best practice, has gone. Instead we’re now served up a table based design that “regresses back to all the bad habits that have hurt the progress of Web development and design.”