nocto

it looks like they’re revamping student funding yet again. as i went to uni the year they brought in student loans and stayed there seven years this is a subject that’s always of interest to me.

four years out of postgraduate studies and my student debts are pretty much paid off. my low interest student loan costs me way less than i spend on beer these days (or even did in those days).

my major problem is that it seems that they will still be tieing the funding available to students to their parents income. it seems ridiculous to me that for most people the decision to continue in education as an over eighteen year old adult involves dependency on your parents.

i’m not a fan of the american system of students paying for their entire education up front, though it has some good side effects like encouraging industrial sponsorship which is still a relative rarity in the uk. starting your working life in huge quantities of debt doesn’t seem like a sensible undertaking. i don’t on the whole see the problem with a graduate tax system a la australia though.

something i do have a problem with is the idea that ever higher numbers of people should go to college. if a degree is an expected acheivement for everyone then it is no longer a choice to get one. i don’t think a degree as a prerequisite for every job is sensible. if tertiary education is compulsory, even de facto rather than de jure, then it should be funded by the state rather than by the individual just as primary and secondary education are now.

but it was my choice to take post secondary education. not my parents choice. and i’d have appreciated a way to take it without government enforced dependency.

why is the low graphics version of the bbc news homepage hideously ugly and 1995 like?

i wish they’d make a decent css version of it. as well as looking better it’d remove the relationship between content order on the page and content order in the source code. that’s the kind of thing that plays merry hell with things like screen readers for the blind which i presume is the type of audience the bbc is after with it’s low graphics site. (though it’s not that bad. just not as good as i expect from the beeb.)

it must’ve been 1994 that they made a fly on the wall documentary about a student house in manchester. years before big brother came along. i remember when it was because i was just leaving manchester uni as that crowd of pseudo celebrities arrived. mainly i remember not having a telly and not knowing or caring what the fuss was all about.

now they’re doing a webcam student house at durham uni. free accomodation and free beer are on offer.

i’m incapable of ignoring a silly name generator. I don’t know why they’re so irresistible. today my fairy name is voodoo demonspider

• behaviour: a wicked and mischievous child.
• seen when: only when the dry seed cases pop.
• habitat: in places hexed and tainted by black magic.

they know me so well you see.

in the trouble with em ‘n en and other shady characters we learn more than we ever wanted to know about strange html entities and also that

the web has also destroyed one of the greatest features of nearly every press since gutenberg: the ability to publish pleasing type.

however i’m most entralled that there are no less than fifteen different types of space defined in unicode. they’re all listed on this unicode test page. i must be missing the point in defining all these spaces. an em space is 12 point wide. an en space is only 6 points wide. can’t we just put two en spaces in to make an em space? we could use the zero width breaking or non breaking spaces in between to get the effect that we’re after. it seems a waste of numbers to me. unicode is only a 31 bit character set after all….

i’m pleased to find that my browser can display russian, ancient greek and chinese but disappointed that i can’t see sanskrit. i don’t know why i’m disappointed. i can’t read any of them after all.

the list of the characters supported by unicode includes those used by the languages “unified canadian aboriginal syllabic” and “ogham” among many others.

today i am mostly in need of:

• an option for javap that tells me what file in my classpath it picked the class up from.
• some way for my editor to tell me i’m editing the wrong damn version of the file. alternatively a way for javac to tell me i’m recompiling files where nothing has changed would help.

grrrrr.

more than five billion instant messages were sent using yahoo in september, up 115% on last year.

at least half of those were me going “grrrr, this bloody system’s not working properly again!”. i need to investigate alternatives again.

scary. i can’t believe this really happened. or to be more accurate, i would like to believe this didn’t happen but i can’t.

a man at philadelphia international airport was prevented from boarding a plane by a united airlines official:

the first reason, she said, was that godfrey was reading a book with an illustration of a bomb on the cover.

very scary.

natwest have withdrawn access to my account statements from my yahoo. nice of them to tell me so. they’ve just vanished and natwest are no longer in yahoo’s list of addable financial institutions. and i can’t use natwest’s own online banking most of the time because they’ve deemed my chosen platform not secure enough. is it reasonable to change my bank because i’m fed up with the crappy online offerings of the one i’m with?