GRC.com has a really interesting analysis of the recent DDoS attacks they suffered.

Here's the House of Commons Trade and Industry report on Local Loop Unbundling - its quite informative (and also quite amusing to see the sort of tricks BT have been pulling).

More work on the web pages, uploaded the software section, made all the pages HTML 4.0 compliant - see!

Line from this article that caught my eye was "Train companies are promising to run four out of five services on time." Which almost sounds reasonable until you consider that if you use the train to get to work each day, then on average you are going to be getting in to work late, and getting home from work late, once every week.

Moby has got quite an interesting weblog online which is worth a browse.

One of the great things about search engines, due to the imprecise action of using them, is the weird links it throws up while you're looking for something else, like Assassinations foretold in Moby Dick.

Police said they could not name the parrot for legal reasons.

Mental.

UEFA cup final finishes 5-4 to Liverpool in an incredible match, then the news comes on and John Prescott's fighting in the street. I'd be a bit wary of chucking eggs at him, he's a big lad.

Via slashdot, an article on covert table building on the International Space Station.

I've been delving into ODBC recently. First encounter was via Perl's Win32::ODBC module, all the info you need is on this page. Up and running in no time.

ODBC via C++ on Win32 is a bit of a nightmare though, particularly if you don't want to use any of the MFC database abstractions and use it directly. Partly the nature of the beast, it obviously can't be as easy to use as the Perl equivalent, but there isn't much useful examples/guides out there. There's a snippet of simple code here, but the MSDN library seems to be about it for documentation.

The new logo for Nintendo's upcoming Game Cube. Its quite similar to the old logo, bit more minimalist, somewhat reminiscent of the N64 logo used in Perfect Dark.

Douglas Adams dies of heart attack.

Got my pink slip (no, not that sort of pink slip) through the post this morning detailing the year's income and taxes for my job. If you're the paranoid sort, or you find it hard to believe quite how much tax you're paying, you can check the numbers using Digita.com's tax calculator, and here's the Inland Revenue's official Rates and Allowances.

From BBC News, a planet eating star.

Hmm. Had a look at some stats behind writing a stock day trading prediction program today. A quick stock scan via Nasdaq.com revealed the likes of ITWO returning a 18% return on investment if you managed to buy at the day's lowest price and sell at the day's highest price. With the marvels of compound interest, if you could guarantee this level of profit per day it would lead to you earning the entire world's wealth within a year.

Of course, being able to predict, or spot, the high and low points of a stock price during the course of the day from, to all intents and purposes, random permuations in the value of a stock is near enough impossible. But is it impossible to predict low and high points, that while not optimum, that would give a profit every day, and thus through compound interest, bring a ludicrous profit? Hmm, money for nothing, just like alchemy, turning base metals to gold.

Though it doesn't explain how the Black-Scholes formula works (see log below), it does explain a lot of other stuff - I give you How Stuff Works. The articles seems to be quite well written, take for example the informative How Lock Picking works.

NetScrap has not been going too long but their aim is to be a repository for those 'humourous' emails (and stuff in general) that you get sent to you every now and then, occasionally in floods if the particular mail is any good and passes more people's quality filter. For example, Cultural Differences Explained (offensive or insightful?)

Brilliant.

I'm referring to Banzai, which I've just watched and played for the first time, competing against a mate over ICQ.

I was enjoying a few beers in the pub last weekend and decided that I'd had enough of working for a living and would become a millionaire instead (well, I think the figure I settled on was five million). I figured I could do this by writing a day trader predictive stock program that would make my millions for me.

Its *kind* of been done already. Well, there's a formula known as the Black-Scholes formula which can be used in option prediction. The maths and the terminology behind it is a bit hairy but it allows calculation of the value of an option (e.g. you get an option to buy or sell a stock at the current trading price in 3 months time) based on volatility of the stock and the purchase price, strike price (price in 3 months time), dividend and length of the option. Quite frankly, most of it goes over my head. There's a calculator for it, along with a fairly technical explanation, here. Scientific American has a more comprehensible article on it, but BBC Horizon has a easy to understand summary - the following quote is taken from it: "Myron Scholes and Bob Merton joined forces with the greatest dealers on Wall Street, and started a legendary company - Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). Relying on mathematics, the company traded and borrowed on a scale never seen before. But the mathematical model was based on normal market behaviour and unforeseen events were about to send the markets wild. The calculations in LTCM's models became hopelessly out of kilter, and when the company collapsed last year, it nearly brought down the entire global economy."

This site, UK TV Guide, lists absolutely everything on UK telly - terrestial, OnDigital, Sky, the works.

Listings of subtle and deceptive weird shit.

What happens when you actually follow up a week's worth of spam.