the corner office

I ran into Google's 'may harm your computer' glitch earlier today. When I saw that all search results had the same warnings I figured something had gone awry at Google, and soon forgot about it.

I read tonight that it was down to human error. I think that's quite reassuring, actually. It's comforting to think that there are still humans in an engine room, occasionally cocking up.

When the BBC refuses to air a charity appeal by an association including charities such as the Red Cross and Oxfam to assist with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, all in the name of 'impartiality', then you have to question the value of whatever principles they're professing to uphold, and whether this is actually about principles in the first place.

People are suffering. They need help. How the suffering was caused is irrelevant. End of story. Shame on the BBC.

An annoying preference conflict in Eclipse 3.4 (and possibly earlier). I had a problem in that despite having ticked 'Preferences | General | Editors | Text Editor | Insert Spaces for Tabs', my Java code was still being generated with tabs.

Turns out that to really get spaces for tabs functionality, you also have to edit your code formatter options. Maybe the default profile is more intelligent, but I have a custom profile, and I also had to go to 'Preferences | Java | Code style | Formatter', edit my active profile and change 'Indentation | General settings | Tab policy', which had been set to 'tabs only'. Changing this to 'spaces only' solved my problem.

Bah!

The inauguration was on a TV at work, but the sound was turned down. Someone turned up the volume at one point and ironically, the only words of the inaugural speech I heard were a rather rousing '... and we will defeat them!'

Plus ca change and all that. And Obama mania (among Americans and non-Americans alike) is getting to be a bit much now. For sure, today's a great day in the history of America, and Obama is a man who appears capable of true greatness, but some perspective please. The dude being sworn into office is still just a politician, not the messiah.

Sad to read that Tony Hart has passed away. Many happy memories of his shows when I was a kid (and Morph, it goes without saying). I remember one show where Tony Hart said something along the lines of 'you know, they say a real artist can draw a perfect circle unaided', and then off he went and drew a near-perfect circle. I tried to draw circles many times after that... I never managed a perfect circle, but Tony Hart probably played a large part in my love of drawing and art as a child.

If you're a public figure receiving a salary and make racist remarks, you get disciplined and probably fired. If you're third in the line to the throne, and make racist remarks, like young Harry did, what can anyone do? Abolish the monarchy?

O noez! The spivs and speculators iz comin' back! Short-selling will be allowed again after being suspended last year when people thought that naughty speculators were causing banks to collapse. However:

Short-selling was also blamed for steep falls in HBOS shares and trading in the stock was subject to an FSA investigation last year.

Yet the regulator found no evidence that rumours were spread about the bank in a bid to manipulate its share price.

It probably wouldn't surprise anyone if there were some dodgy goings-on, but I think it's also pretty obvious that the ban had as much to do with finding scapegoats and deflecting blame as anything else.

2008 over, just like that, and we're into 2009. Happy New Year.

Everyone says 'I don't do New Year's Resolutions' and I'm one of those people. But secretly everyone does have resolutions - it just takes off some of the pressure so that if you resolve to say, floss more often, and then don't manage it, you'll feel less guilty and ashamed when you look at the floss dispenser at the end of Jan 2009 and see the layer of dust that's covering it.

I, however, also like to give myself a different kind of wiggle room. My resolution each year (over and above the flossing), is to Be Happy. I think it's a perfectly noble resolution to have, is wonderfully open to interpretation, long after the fact, and it's not a particularly hard one to live up to, as long as you keep reminding yourself about it occasionally.