Now that I have moved to London, there will be less pictures of Bath and its surroundings and more of scenic parts of London instead. I still have some pictures from my time in Bath to post, but those should all be done soon.
Meanwhile, time to start posting the pictures of London. Starting with Greenwich, including the Old Naval College:
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| Maritime Greenwich |
Keynsham to Bath via the Bristol and Bath railway path:
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| Keynsham to Bath |
After reading a recent article in the press about Mathematics A-level in the UK compared with other countries, I decided to look again at the statistics for maths A-level as I had done in previous years (see previous discussion).
The number of Mathematics A-level candidates has certainly gone up for the last 5 years. The Guardian thinks that the number of Maths candidates is at all-time highs, but I disagree. My numbers (from the UK Mathematics Foundation report in 2005) are for England only, but show a larger number of maths candidates back in 1989. Hmm, so where did the Guardian get its numbers from ‒ ah, the TES quote Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI) as saying that mathematics entrants are at an all time high since records began 20 years ago; I guess my "approximate" source goes back further than the records that TES and the Guardian are quoting from.
Bath is looking particularly glorious this morning, with a covering of snow and bright sunshine.
Kye 1.0 is now released. There are no significant changes in this release. As no bugs have been reported (or encountered by me), and the game is substantially complete and has not needed any major changes in a while, it is time to make a 1.0 release I think. I have made a minor fix to the Windows instructions but that is all.
Go to the Kye page here, or if you already know the game and just want the latest version you can head straight to the download page.
MirrorBrain is now offering .zsync files for its downloads . This is exactly the sort of model that I originally had in mind for zsync: file distribution services making .zsync files automatically to enable people to download new versions faster and to reduce their own bandwidth costs.
BAILII has come up with a more unusual use case; they are offering .zsync files for their (in some cases large) RSS feeds. That probably only becomes generally useful if RSS feed readers were to support it; but it would be handy at least for feed aggregators to reduce bandwidth use (and indeed if feed aggregators do use it then it could give a useful bandwidth saving there alone).
And OpenSUSE are using zsync in their new libzypp backend for package downloads. I need to find time to have a look at the code for that...
Another of the walks in the Bath area that I do on a fine day is to walk out along Lansdown ridge, and walk back via the Cotswold Way. It's only suitable if the weather forecast is for several hours of clear weather, since if it does rain while you're on the Cotswold way you will be trudging through mud for miles.
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| Lansdown and Cotswold Way |
zsync 0.6.2 is now available from the download page. This fixes a few bugs that have been spotted in the previous version:
- fix for using zsync client on files >2GB on 32bit systems.
- fix redirect handling.
- improve some edge cases dealing with unusual seed data patterns.
- optimise by stopping reading seed files if target file is complete.
- fix infinite loop in zsyncmake when given a truncated (invalid) .gz
- fix --disable-profile to configure.