Discussing companions with Julie this morning...

You know, The Doctor used to have multiple companions at once. And some of them were *gasp* male!

This hasn't happened since Doctor #5 though (except for a few episodes of RTD-Who which had Jack or Mickey along for the ride). I wonder if it even occured to Steven Moffat or RTD to have that kind of an atmosphere rather than a single Doctor-Companion structure to it?

I'm working today. Have a poll!

[Poll #1547520]

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-5-2010

• Mephedrone: the anatomy of a media drug scare
  (tags: mephedrone drugs media)
• When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools
  The lack of knowledge amongst maths teachers staggers me.
  (tags: education math learning teaching children)
• What men are really thinking
  In response to a post about how men are really boring and don't have interesting conversations with their girlfriends.
  (tags: funny relationships women sex men stereotypes)
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Chapter 1: A Day of Very Low Probability
  (tags: harrypotter funny rationality)
• Girls today are three times more likely than boys to be non-heterosexual. Why?
  (tags: sexuality lesbians homosexuality culture)

Cool! Tech!

princealbert and poisonduk both picked up an O2 Joggler over the weekend.

It's basically a small touchpad computer, designed for you to use with your O2 mobile account to display a calendar, send you reminders, etc.

However, more importantly it's also capable of streaming photos and music. And when princealbert took his apart he discovered a dual-core Atom setup, complete with n-series WiFi.

And it's currently on sale for £50. Which for a music streamer with speakers is pretty damned impressive.  They _have_ to be selling that at a loss.

I ordered mine at the weekend, so it'll probably arrive on Wednesday (due to the bank holiday).  I'm looking forward to having a play with it and see what works..  There are already guides online to getting it to boot Ubuntu...

A new annoyance with C#

According to the C# specification:

In a virtual method invocation, the run-time type of the instance for which that invocation takes place determines the actual method implementation to invoke. In a non-virtual method invocation, the compile-time type of the instance is the determining factor. In precise terms, when a method named N is invoked with an argument list A on an instance with a compile-time type C and a run-time type R (where R is either C or a class derived from C), the invocation is processed as follows:

• First, overload resolution is applied to C, N, and A, to select a specific method M from the set of methods declared in and inherited by C. This is described in Section 7.5.5.1.
• Then, if M is a non-virtual method, M is invoked.
• Otherwise, M is a virtual method, and the most derived implementation of M with respect to R is invoked.

all of which boils down to - non-virtual methods take priority over virtual ones, even if the virtual ones are a better fit.

Which means that if you have two methods on a class:
virtual void DoSomething(string myString)
and
void DoSomething(object myObject)

and you call:
myClass.DoSomething("Hello World");

then it calls the object version rather than the string version!

OhForGoodnessSake.

I love the internet

Having, during discussion with simont and call_waiting in my previous post about c# method overload resolution, reached a reasonably good understanding of what the compiler was doing, I did what any sensible person would do. Something you couldn't easily do 20 years ago. I emailed one of the compiler writers, Eric Lippert, and asked him why it worked that way.

And he emailed me back saying, yes, it was a deliberate decision. And here was his blog post from 2007 explaining it.

Now that's service!

Imperfect Storm

Apparently there's a geomagnetic storm going on right now. Which means that you can see the aurora from it really well from the ISS. As this picture shows:


The astronaut who took it takes a lot.

People have some very odd ideas

For instance, Russell Watson (Operatic Tenor) decided that covering Barcelona (by Freddy Mercury and Montserrat Caballe) was a good idea. And then decided that an even better idea would be to cover it with Shaun "Off my face on drugs since 1981" Ryder (of the Happy Mondays and Black Grape).

I've just finished listening to it, and if you have Spotify you can do likewise, here.