The top brains at the University of Hertfordshire have come up with shocking revelation that ‘the choice of language [on application forms] generates a positive or negative impression’. Where would we be without academics, eh?

10 Best: Achievement, active, developed, evidence, experience, impact, individual, involved, planning, transferable skills
10 Worst: Always, awful, bad, fault, hate, mistake, never, nothing, panic, problems

There goes my CV then! At least I’m still allowed to write it in crayon around tea mug stains on the back of a court summons envelope.

Read the story here.

For those of you who weren’t already convinced that the UK is full of patches of complete eccentricity (which is like madness, but more traditional or accompanied by wealth), the release of the new Wallace & Grommit film, Curse of the Were-Rabbit has been retitled on posters in the Portland region of Dorset in England. Apparently there is the theory that the mention of the word ‘rabbit’ causes mines to collapse.

I have a friend living on Portland Island who I’ll be seeing in a couple of weeks. I’ve been there once, and, like most islands, the place is a bit odd, so I can well believe this story is true. There isn’t any mention of the film being redubbed, which may yet cause miner-related mayhem in Portland cinemas… Although, now I think about it, I doubt they have any cinemas on the island. Maybe they could beep out the word rabbit, or get someone with a nice thick dorset accent to re-dub the whole film replacing Wallace’s dulcet intonation of the word rabbit with the popular Portland alternative ‘undergound mutton’ or ‘furry things’.

Thanks again to The Register for the orignal story.

I’m a big fan of home-brew games. These are games that people have worked on themselves and are usually distributed either free or extremely cheaply. They’re usually quick fun ideas executed in ways that are perfect for mobile gaming. To me they’re one of the best reasons to get a handheld games machine, because there’s a lot of fun to be had very cheaply.

This creates a problem for manufacturers though: do you let people make these games run easily selling more base units, or do you try and block them and sell more full-price games?

Well, the answer that $ony has come up with is that they want to make their money out of games, so the PSP (PlayStation Portable) automatically upgrades its internal software occasionally whenever a new hole in its defences against home-brew software is discovered. That’s the problem for home-brew creators: they need to hack the console to let it play non-official releases. Its a real battle of the titans, on one side you have a whole planet of determined hackers who want to get the best out of their machine and use it to play the things that they want to (which is fair enough, if they own it they should be able to do what they like with it – although I suspect that’s not the legal perspective) and on the other side you have $ony trying to patch up holes as soon as they are found.

The firmware (the software inside the PSP that makes it tick) version 1.5 was found to have a flaw that home-brew programmers could use to get their code onto their machine. $ony have now upgraded the firmware to version 2.0, which automatically installs itself onto the machine through numerous official sources, so the holy grail for home-brew creators is to find a way to downgrade a machine from 2.0 to 1.5. Some people have worked out how to do this, but unfortunately for others, some hackers decided to put a trojan on a down-grade download saying it’s from ‘PSP Team’ which turns your swanky new PSP into a useless lump of silicon, AKA a brick. Current theories aren’t sure if the machine is recoverable from that state either. Very, very nasty.

The paranoid person in me suggests that maybe $ony did this themselves to scare people off from using home-brew software and to guarantee people don’t get to use anything that’s free on their PSP, but the voice of reason tells me that they’d have a lawsuit the size of Texas if they were ever found out and so the risk is too great. Still, it’s a nice conspiracy theory, and I always enjoy a good one of them.

More here.

Now that’s my kind of match up.

Florida’s swamps just become more appealing by the moment. Their long-standing reputation for having toothed-logs (otherwsie known as alligators) ready to consume unwary travellers, mob-hit victims, and stunned vampires (see Interview With The Vampire UK link US link) is now being enhanced further by their suitability as a breeding ground for the Burmese python.

The pythons love the climate and have inevitably found themselves a bit of serious hunting when they have grown big enough to need a lot of meat and consequently taken on the indigenous alligator population. In the latest clash a 6 foot alligator was eaten whole by a 13 foot python. We only know about this happening because the python’s stomach exploded, leaving the alligator’s tail sticking out in a very odd multi-tailed twist on the Isle of Man flag. It’s possible that the alligator was still alive when eaten and clawed through the stomach but was too tired to escape after killing the python. Blimey. It’s also possible that pythons will become the top of the food chain in Florida when they get big enough to take on the rest of the scaley bunch.

So, who’s for a trip to the Everglades?

More here.

When Hercules died he was put into the night sky as a constellation, so the story goes. Well, now we have a debate going on about Xena.

Those of you who’ve been paying attention to this sort of thing will know that I’m talking about the arguments in astronomy about whether Pluto counts as a planet and whether another astrological body, recently given the name Xena, is actually a planet instead.

Fair enough. Pluto was always a bit of a silly sounding name, because it made everyone think of the Disney dog which came later, but Xena? The warrior princess? UK link US link That’s a pretty strange choice… But they weren’t content to stop there. Oh no. They’ve found that Xena has a moon.

Can you guess what it’s been called?

Gabrielle.

Oh dear.

More info.

A bit of beginner’s info: whenever you type a name of a website into your browser, such as matazone.co.uk, your computer has a look at what is called the DNS list. This list links together names of websites with their IP address. The IP address is a series of numbers telling your computer where the information for that domain is stored. In other words, it’s the way to find the server where the website resides.

Since the beginning of the internet DNS has been run by the US. All of the DNS admin, and I assume the money charged for it, occured in the US for every country around the world. Understandably, with the internet being of massive importance to almost every nation on the planet, for commerce in the west and for communication in developing countries, quite a lot of places would like to have some more say about how DNS is run.

Guess what? The US isn’t very happy about this idea, but it looks like it’s going to happen anyway.

Nevertheless with just one day remaining, the pressure to seal a deal is intense, and it looks increasingly likely that by 5pm Swiss time on Friday 30th September 2005, the Unites States will be negotiated out of control of the internet.

This is actually a very important event in the history of the internet. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens next.

Full article here.

Yes, this is precisely as it sounds, the Italians have made a huge bunny. Hurrah!

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1541732.html

It’s 200 feet long and has been placed by a group of artists on a mountainside in the Piedmont region of Italy where it is intended to remain for the next twenty years.

The thing that troubles me about this is that it’s knitted. Do knitted items usually survive for 20 years on the side on mountains? The artists want people to climb onto it and relax, but surely it will get wet pretty easily and take a long time to dry out at an altitude of 5,000 feet? I’m not sure that they’ve thought this through.

There is also the possibility that human civilisation will end before the bunny is removed, prompting future archaeologists of the next earth civilisation to wonder what bizarre end-times cult tried to stave off the end of the world by building a huge bunny.

Am I the only person who sees things like this and wonders what future archaeologists will make of it all? We’ve probably destroyed the chances that decent written records will survive through the adoption of computers for nearly everything, so all they’ll have to go on is a multitude of plastic bags and giant bunny fibre remains.

Apparently there are 650 mountain gorillas left in the wild.

Given the number of gorilla costumes in the world, especially those used by gorilla-gram messengers, that may mean that at any one point there are more people impersonating gorillas than there are real ones alive outside of zoos. How strange.