My LHC worries

I'm concerned about the LHC? "Why?" you ask, "it's not going to destroy world." I know that, but that's not what I'm worried about. What concerns me is this photo I saw from the CERN control room. Do you see? Do you see? Their control room computers are running Windows! These people should be dab hands at using Linux and writing custom control software for it, so why have they chosen Microsoft?

But, on a more serious note well done to all the people that got the LHC up and running today. Let's hope it all carries on without any hiccups and we get the first collisions soon.

Mac life

Last week I crossed over from a loyal PC person to being a Mac user! I needed a new work laptop as my previous Dell was getting on a bit and not quite able to hack the fast pace of life as we live it today. Seeing as several of my friends and colleagues (not to mention all the new research students in my group) have gone the way of the Mac, and were generally very happy with them, I thought I'd join them. So now I have a swish new Macbook Pro (although I was told that a newer version was being released in June I couldn't wait.) So far I've been very impressed. I've had some issues with the keyboard not being as I'm used to ("@" and "~" are in a different place for a start, there's no "Home", "End" of "Delete" keys [although via a bit of googling I've found replacement for these - Ctrl a, Ctrl e, and Fn backspace respectively]), but other than that it's all been good. I'm sure I'll find more annoyances in the future, but at the moment I'm just liking the way it's Linuxy but with everything still working straight off.

In the land of the one screened computer...

...the two screened computer is king.

I am now basking in the glow of two computer screens - ok, I'm only basking in the glow of one as the other ones not been set up properly yet, but I still have the extra screen on my office desk. I can now view two desktops at once, oh yes! I can code and check the web at the same time! It's going to open up virtually limitless prospects for looking at more than one thing at once! Does it mean I'll be twice as propductive though? Probably not.