The links below don't work. I've left them there as a reminder of how bad the web can be. Yahoo deleted my account and all my posts were lost. A salutory lesson.

• Heat, George Monbiot
• Wasp, Eric Frank Russell
• Middlemarch, George Eliot
• Airframe, Michael Crichton
• Karl Marx, Francis Wheen
• Prey …

I've just heard about the absurd idea to abolish parking charges at NHS hospitals. If this were to be done, it would (if I remember correctly) remove £78m from NHS treatment, surely a bad thing.

The poorest people don't own a car, so parking charges don't affect them. If the …

fmt -w 50 -s message.txt > message-short.txt

Add in line breaks so that no line is longer than 50 characters.

This is how I'd like various web apps to work.

Common

• Should support OpenId.

Wiki

• The URLs to the pages would be constructed in accordance with DesigningURLs. Each page would be assigned a serial number. This number would never change. There would be no renaming of URLs.
• It should be …

To get an XSL stylesheet to output XML with JavaScript in it, do this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="xml" doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
        doctype-system="http://www.w3.org …

I find myself in favour of a national DNA database that holds a DNA record for every UK citizen. Isn't this an infringement of civil liberties? I strongly support civil liberties such as freedom of speech and due legal process, but I feel that privacy issues belong in a seperate …

I'm a subscriber to the web feed of Willem Buiter's blog on the FT website. They've recently changed it so that in the feed you only see the first bit of the post; to see the whole thing you have to click on a 'more...' link that takes you to …

I'd heard lots of talk about Ayn Rand, and I'd already read Anthem online, so I ordered Fountainhead from Bath Central Library using their online reservation system. The system worked really well. Ultimately of course, books will be like music, where you just download it. Hopefully books will be licensed …