User:Edward

Edward Betts is a Geek and a Debian developer living in Holloway, London

My day job is coding Web Applications in Perl.

Interests:

Accidents and incidents on commercial airliners, Agile Methods, Alcohol as a fuel, American literature, Atomic Age, Augmented reality, BBC Radio 4, Category:Big Science, Broken arrows, Capitalism, Chip and PIN, City, Cold War, Command line interface, Cyberpunk, Dark fibre, Disasters, Dot-com, ETOPS, Economics, European Union, Ford Nucleon, Free flight (air traffic control), Free software, Generation X, Glocalization, Google, International organisation, Irrational exuberance, LaTeX, Limits to Growth, Microwave power transmission, Military-industrial complex, Moral panic, Noam Chomsky, Northern Ireland conflict, Nuclear accidents, Nuclear accident terminology, PearPC, Politics, Profit maximization, Public transport, Python programming language, Radioisotope thermoelectric generators, Relaxed stability, Science Fiction, Self-publishing, Semantic web, Simulated reality, Skyline, Social software, Socialism, Techno-utopianism, Technological singularity, Terrorism, Transhumanism, United Nations, Urbanization, Web development, Webvan, Yield management

Misc

• Check out my namesake -- ed.
• Books I've read: User:Edward/books
• Contribs: User:Edward/contribs
• IMDB Top 250: User:Edward/top250
• I used to have this home computer: Magnavox Odyssey²
• Wikipedia is full of Transhumanists.

Articles to extend and improve

Should write more on the article about Bloom filters based on the original paper and this article on perl.com.

Should extend Wayne's World, University of Colorado at Boulder, and University of East Anglia.

figures in parens are from http://googleflight.com/

• CoCom
• Farewell Dossier
• fix errors in Finder#Finder 10.3 and link to articles on Ars Technica
• Military robots - Packbot robots used in Afghanistan. -- [1] + Dragon Runner
• European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages - list the languages - Scots language
• Louise Woodward - TV trial
• John Koza - need to add stuff about the lottery, and biggest cluster of machines for one person
• Timeline of the future in forecasts -- add Ray Kurzweil
• Comma-separated values - criticisms from The Practice of Programming, Microsoft standard, annoying to parse
• RealMedia
• Memory management unit
• Pie chart
• New Journalism
• Liar's Poker -- book by Michael Lewis
• 1991 The low-fat McLean is introduced in the USA using a new additive from seaweed to bind the beef.
• Grey goo - add bloom, Bill Joy, Prince Charles, book by JCG
• Ignition
• Perl - should mention 'use strict;'
• Special case
• Swingometer - link to Peter Snow
• League table - sport and government statistics
• Aircraft safety card
• Slopping out
• Club Kids
• DVLA - Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency
• Anneka Rice - Challenge Anneka - mention the Romanian orphanage
• Doogie Howser, M.D. - family show? made by the same people as Beverly Hills 90210?
• Noel Edmonds
• Eurail Pass and Inter Rail
• Transportation in Europe
• Keyfob / Key fob - add electronic key fob
• 4G
• Happy hour
• Information leakage
• Car chase should add more about police car chase shows
• Pot Noodle - adverts
• Alexandra Park - still need to add more about the parks
• Luggage (redircts: Baggage, Hand luggage, Hold luggage) - see also Suitcase, Bag, Backpack
• Foreign aid
• Woodlands, Glasgow - mention the cartoon character statue, Lobby Dosser
• Third world debt
• Case modification - Case mod linked from Mod - http://www.computerbits.com/archive/2004/0500/casemods.html - http://snower13.no-ip.com/casemod/home.htm
• Areas of Glasgow - Shettleston[2] and Woodlands, Glasgow

Missing articles

People

• Jon Courtenay Grimwood -- Cyberpunk author, linked from BSFA award
• Katie Hafner -- author / journalist, linked from John Markoff and Freedom Downtime
• Thomas Frank -- author / journalist, linked to from Southern strategy and The Baffler
• George Gilder -- Prominent oracles of techno-utopianism included the archconservative libertarian George Gilder -- linked to from Wired Magazine, Futurology, Techno-utopianism, Digerati
• Dr. Gernot Zippe / Dr Gernot Zippe - Zippe-Type centrifuge / Zippe-Type
• Abdullah Chatli - leader of the Grey Wolves

Places

• Faliraki, Greece
• Costa Brava, Spain - linked to from Selva, Cadaqués
• Dennistoun[3] - area of Glasgow

Computing

• BSD/OS linked to from 386BSD, The Coroner's Toolkit, IPFilter, Berkeley Software Distribution
• The ports tree system used by FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and the like.
• Junction table -- database theory
• Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal -- programming essay, linked from Datamation
• types of Computer cases (Full tower, midi-tower, mini-tower, shuttle PC). linked from Pizza box form factor

Food

• food politics
• Food technology linked from Universidad de Chile
• Chip pan
• Self heating drinks can - need to think of a better name, uses Calcium oxide

Other

• Romanian orphanages - http://www.mtee.org.uk/statement.html
• Beriev A-50 Mainstay -- Soviet aircraft
• Central locking linked from Ford Escort
• Remote locking
• Poweriser - The Poweriser is the newest and coolest exercise and Xtreme sport on the market. The Poweriser starts where natural human ability ends. They become an extension of the leg giving a person the ability to jump high or make long running strides, and thats just the beginning. The Poweriser combines the idea of spring shoes, stilts, and pogo sticks and takes it to a whole new level. Add a dose of adrenaline and you've got the next extreme sport. The adult model 7090 and 5070 stand the user 18 inches off of the ground and gives them the opportunity to spring over 6 feet high and make strides over 9 feet wide. The childrens model 3050 will allow users jumping heights closer to 3 feet. These numbers may vary depending on each users ability. In less than 30 minutes the average person will be up and having fun on the Poweriser. [4]
• Babysitter linked from The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Goodfellas, Employment, Virginia Grey
• Mail train linked from Royal Mail, Ronnie Biggs and Rail transport in Great Britain
• human waste linked from Slopping out
• prison cell linked from Escapology and Slopping out
• Blobject
• One Day in September -- book and film -- linked to from Academy Award for Documentary Feature, Simon Reeve, Munich Massacre
• Badington Airport -- new airport in Coventry, England
• On 19 November 1984 a series of explosions at the Pemex petroleum storage facility at San Juan Ixhuatepec in Mexico City ignited a major fire and killed about 500 people.
• 1979 - A blowout at the Ixtoc oil well in the southern Gulf of Mexico causes at least 600,000 tons (176,400,000 gallons) of oil to be spilled into the waters, the worst oil spill to date. Some estimate the spill to be 428 million gallons.
• the discovery of Alaskan North Shore oil contributed to the 1986 fall in petroleum prices, cutting the revenues not only of OPEC but also of the USSR
• Brixton Riots -- [5] - BBC News article
• Euro-Mediterranean Partnership -- http://a9.com/Euro-Mediterranean%20Partnership
• Adam Smith's Four canons of taxation
• Bombay mix - spicy Indian snack food
• Secondary Modern School / Secondary modern school / Secondary modern
• Shrink wrap linked from Gramophone record and End-user license agreement
• Makro - wholesale retailer linked from List of supermarkets
• Flatshare / Flat share
• Letterhead - Headed notepaper - Address label
• Limescale linked from Hard water
• Cable management linked from Cable spaghetti
• Pret a Manger / Pret - sandwich retailer
• Crinkley Bottom
• Mr. Blobby linked from List of Amiga games and Noel Edmonds
• Health and safety
• Toolkit
• Fire blanket
• Portable media player - need to think of a better name, like MP3 players but with video
• Operation Trident
• Child lock - on car doors so the kids can't open them
• Military aid - USA gives military aid to Turkey and Israel

Articles to read

UN Security Council Resolution 242, United Nations, COINTELPRO, Global Positioning System, Children's literature, Operating system advocacy, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Diode, Red Army, Weapons of mass destruction, Third Geneva Convention, Nuclear fuel cycle, William Shakespeare, Macintosh Finder, Philip K. Dick, Public house, Game theory, Strategic bombing, Plastic, Balance of power, Ebola, Scots language, REXX, Nanjing Massacre, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Land Rover, Bank, HVAC, Funeral, Stonehenge, Earthquake construction, Countdown (game show), Motorola 68000, Dog intelligence, Grammatical tense, ECHELON, Smoot-Hawley Tariff, Ben Stein, Innu, Robert Peary, Wrought iron, Crucible steel, Damascus steel, Coke (coal), Blast furnace, Abraham Darby, Henry Bessemer, Bessemer process, Stainless steel, City-state, Urban secession, Fidel Castro

Books I should read

• Strategy of technology -- free online copy
• Engines of Creation -- free online copy
• Ravage (1943) by René Barjavel -- Jef recommends this author

Favourite authors

• Bret Easton Ellis
• Tom Wolfe
• William Gibson
• Vernor Vinge
• Po Bronson
• Lawrence Lessig
• Noam Chomsky
• Jon Courtenay Grimwood
• Steven Levy
• Simon Reeve
• Douglas Coupland
• Neal Stephenson
• Michael Lewis
• Orson Scott Card
• George Orwell
• Larry Niven
• Clifford Stoll
• Ray Kurzweil

Todo

• learn Lojban
• learn SAMPA
• write some articles for Simple English Wikipedia

Photos

Blue Screen of Death, Cable spaghetti, Glasgow Underground