My Blog
The personal blog of me, Tim Trott. What I get up to, photography, news and so on.
Bad spelling ’should be accepted’
Thursday 7th August 2008
Common spelling mistakes should be accepted into everyday use, not corrected, a lecturer has said.
Ken Smith of Bucks New University says the most common mistakes should be accepted as “variant spellings”. He lists the 10 most commonly misspelt words, which include “arguement” for “argument” and “twelth” for “twelfth”.
Mr Smith says his proposal, outlined in an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement, follows years of correcting the same mistakes. Mr Smith, a criminology lecturer, said: “Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I’ve got a better idea.
“University teachers should simply accept as variant spellings those words our students most commonly misspell. “The spelling of the word ‘judgement’, for example, is now widely accepted as a variant of ‘judgment’, so why can’t ‘truely’ be accepted as a variant spelling of ‘truly’?”
Mr Smith also suggested adding the word “misspelt” to the list and all those that break the “i before e” rule - weird, seize, neighbour and foreign. He said he was not asking people to learn to spell words differently.
“All I am suggesting is that we might well put 20 or so of the most commonly misspelt words in the English language on the same footing as those other words that have a widely accepted variant spelling,” he added.
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This post is filed under What is the World coming to? by Lonewolf at 10:33am
Monday 28th July 2008
What happens when a work colleague goes on Holiday? Quite often a practical joke happens to their desk, be it individually wrapping everything in newspaper, turning everything upside down, unplugging everything or maybe they still haven’t found what we did…
On this occasion we planned a special trick for the return from a 2-week holiday of our latest recruit.
Take one broken keyboard (one too many spilt coffee) donated by IT, remove all keys, line with tissue paper, sprinkle cress seeds, replace keys, water and wait a few days - voilà! A cress keyboard!
I’m sure he saw the funny side after the initial shock!
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This post is filed under Me, Myself and I by Lonewolf at 6:43pm
On the future of Lonewolf Online…
Sunday 20th July 2008
I am finding myself thinking long and hard about the future of this website, I’ll explain why in a minute, but first a little history.
I started this website way back in early 2005 as a bunch of static html files, by late 2005 early 2006 it had evolved into a PHP based database driven site much like the one you see now. I had written every line of code to create a dynamic website, created my own photo gallery software, created my own blogging tool, administration pages, guest book and more. I had created a platform on which I could create multiple websites using the same code base.
Eventually I found myself writing new functionality into my site that replicated that of other blog tools (Wordpress) and in the end I ditched my own blog code and integrated Wordpress into my site. Hopefully the merging of the Wordpress site and my existing site is seamless. I have since created a few more sites using Wordpress as a content management system with great success.
Now I find myself in a situation where I need to write more functionality to various aspects of my site - content management, gallery maintenance, comment handling and so on. These are all features that Wordpress has built in, so here is my pickle: do I write new code to incorporate the new features into my existing framework, or do I switch the whole site over to a Wordpress back end system?
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This post is filed under Site News by Lonewolf at 11:09am
Sunday 6th July 2008
Yeovil Air Show hosted by RNAS Yeovilton (HMS Heron) on Saturday 5th July 2008, featured as its theme the role of the Royal Navy in the 21st century.
Throughout the day we were treated to many displays from the Royal Navy starting with a great demonstration of the Eurofighter Typhoon, probably the loudest aircraft at the event. Shortly after the Eurofighter we saw an aerial acrobatic display in gliders from Team Silence Twist, a demonstration of a Hawker Hunter and then the Royal Navy helicopter display team the Black Cats performed their show using two Lynx helicopters in a high speed, close quarters, demonstration.
Following the Black Cats was the latest version of the VAAC Sea Harrier, put thought its paces, and a C-18 Globemaster joined in to deliver a Sea King helicopter in a routine mission.
We were also treated to displays from the Merlin and Wasp helicopters (the newest and oldest helicopters in the Royal Navy), and displays from a P51 Mustang, Sea Vampire, F86 Sabre jet, and formation flying from FR Aviation. Unfortunately due to strong winds some of the lighter aircraft, including a Spitfire and several WWI bi-planes, were unable to fly, but none the less we still saw loads of aircraft taking to the skies.
The show finale featured a mock invasion, which resulted in a full-scale battle in front of us, starting with the identification of an unidentified craft approaching the base. The Merlin helicopter (Cyclops) acted in its role as the eyes for the other craft and coordinated the defence, while a Sea King (Excalibur) provided aerial support. A Hornet jet was scrambled and provided air support until the enemy troops landed and moved in on the base. At this point four Lynx gunships took to the skies and started gunning down the enemy forces (simulated by a lifeboat towed by a land rover!) before the craft was boarded by commandos from Excalibur. A Chinook joined in and deployed ground based troops and armoured vehicles, including artillery, then the war began, ending with the wall of fire, a simulated cluster bomb. A fantastic demonstration from the Royal Navy!!!
Despite gale force winds and torrential downpours at the end, we all had a fantastic day, so a big thank you to all the service men and women from HMS Heron for hosting and performing for us on this day.
You can see a few of the pictures from the day attached below, or you can go straight to the gallery and see them all.
Attached Thumbnails
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This post is filed under Photography by Lonewolf at 9:13pm
Enable Remote Desktop Connections on Vista Home
Sunday 29th June 2008
It is very annoying when a Microsoft product does not work, but something even more annoying is the fact that it does not work intentionally. This is the case with Remote Desktop on Windows Vista.
Remote Desktop Connections (RDC) are a tool provided in XP and later versions of Windows that allows a remote user to take control of another machine as if they were sat in front of it.
I have been using Remote Desktop Connections (RDC) for years between two XP computers (one Home and one Pro) they can connect to each other in either direction. Very useful because I have my main XP Pro machine in the home office, and a XP Home laptop connected through wireless. I can lye in bed with the laptop, sit in the garden, in the lounge or anywhere else, and access all my programs, documents and internet through RDC.
That was until I got Vista Home Premium and I found out that Microsoft has intentionally disabled this feature! Citing some security issues that “anybody can connect and take over a pc” they disabled incoming connections. Instead I have to setup a request, save it to a USB stick, go over to the other pc, load the invitation and connect. This must be done each time I want to connect. How annoying is that?
While I accept that it is a possible security risk (you do still have to know a username / password to connect) I would have preferred the option to allow incoming requests anyway. I am on a private network so why can’t I allow incoming connections???
The solution
Browsing the net I found a great solution to this problem on fransblog, a simple patch which allows full connectivity. Just download the zip file, extract and run a batch file as administrator. Job done, it now works perfectly first time.
Thank you Frans!
I am now (a little) happier!
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This post is filed under Windows Vista by Lonewolf at 12:14pm
Sunday 18th May 2008
On Saturday 17th May 2008 over 2000 Japanese performance cars descended on the small Wiltshire village of Castle Combe to take part in the annual Japfest show hosted on the circuit. As well as club stands from every major owners club, there were stands from some of the top tuners and trade stalls with lots of shiny bits to buy.
Although the skies were overcast (and very dark at times) the weather stayed dry and we had a great day, although it wasn’t as good as previous years. Driftworks put on two drifting demonstrations, most of the owners clubs had track times and thankfully there was nowhere near as many accidents this year as last.
During the day I managed to take over 1630 photos filling 2x 2GB compact flash cards and a 1GB card shooting in JPEG format, I have since whittled that down to 124 pictures which you can see in my Japfest 2008 pictures gallery. A small selection of photos are attached to this post as a preview.
You can also see my Japfest pictures from previous years: Japfest 2007 and Japfest 2005
Attached Thumbnails
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This post is filed under Events, Photography, Trackdays by Lonewolf at 1:45pm
