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If you’re at all interested in Green Computing, can I commend the proceedings of GreenCom07. There are some excellent papers that should be good reading for anyone who’s interested in data centres, power and heat-aware software design, hardware architectures or saving the planet one CPU cycle at a time.

You can also play “pick the odd person out” when you review the Program Committee.

I had a need to convert from (unprotected) WMA to MP3 on the weekend so I could edit together a family podcast — something that previous generations might have called an episode of a very amateurish radio show.

I thought I might have to buy something like Microsoft’s mostly harmless and unnecessarily expensive Plus Pack, or use a scary-looking utility from a scary-looking downloads site. After trolling the Internet for utilities and advice I was almost resigned to taking the scary utility option. About the only place I trust that turned up on searches was Audacity’s site, which simply says that WMA is a patent minefield it doesn’t want to play in.

The answer that didn’t turn up anywhere near the top of the search results that should have was iTunes. In iTunes’ preferences, set the “Importing” tab’s encoder to give the output format you desire, and set sub-options to match your taste. Dragging WMA files into your iTunes library now converts them to the format you’ve configured. Just remember to set that format back to something sensible if you’re going to rip a CD.

Included with our daily-delivered Denver Post this morning was our first free sample pack.

Shampoo? Dish washing detergent?

It was two Advil sleeping pills, resplendent with 1000-word warnings about potential side-effects and operating heavy machinery.

Sheesh.

Update: Here’s the following Sunday’s haul of news and advertising.
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Tandem running in ants is a form of recruitment in which a single well-informed worker guides a naive nestmate to a goal [...references elided...]. The ant Temnothorax albipennis recently satisfied a strict set of predefined criteria for teaching in nonhuman animals [...references elided...]. These criteria do not include evaluation as a prerequisite for teaching [...references elided...]. However, some authors claim that true teaching is always evaluative, i.e., sensitive to the competence or quality of the pupil [...references elided...]. They then assume, on the premise that only humans are capable of making such necessarily complex cognitive evaluations, that teaching must be unique to humans. We conducted experiments to test whether evaluation occurs during tandem running, in which a knowledgeable ant physically guides a naive follower to a goal. In each experiment, we interrupted the tandem run by removing the tandem follower. The response of the leader was to stand still at the point where the tandem run was interrupted. We then measured how long the leader waited for the missing follower before giving up. Our results demonstrate T. albipennis performs three different kinds of evaluation. First, the longer the tandem has proceeded the longer the leader will wait for the follower to re-establish contact. Second, ant teachers modulate their giving-up time depending on the value of the goal. Finally, leaders have shorter giving-up times after unusually slow tandem runs.

From Current Biology. 

I wonder sometimes in the supermarket, while shopping with and losing children, if I’m just a giant ant.  Then I count my limbs and think “naah!” Ants wouldn’t sigh out loud like I do before trudging off to search for lost tandem followers.

(This post an excuse to experiment with Adobe Contribute)

Setting aside the strange use of many terms, and the prevalence of management buzzword-speak syntactic sugar, one of the most misused words I’ve encountered since I arrived in the USA is misnomer.

The irony is delicious.

It’s not quite as impressive as this might be, but the fast image capture time on the D40 turned out some nice shots tonight.