Oxford University Press resources only available to lecturers

http://www.oup.com/uk/orc/bin/9780199208043/

This is quite stupid.

All the resources that I want… but only if I’m a ‘lecturer’ whatever than means. I wonder what dastardly deeds I could do with figures from the book if I weren’t a lecturer. Thank goodness I don’t have a scanner with which to scan them.

In their favour, I imagine this is a form of greed or coercion (not necessarily bad things). They want to:
i. Get statistics about the adoption of the book for courses.
ii. Have contact details for people who are using this book for teaching purposes

and therefore they make things slightly more difficult if you don’t do this. (Alternatively, they might say they make things slightly easier for people who do these things).

Anyway, if I could remember the UK laws on fair use I would be distinctly tempted to produce and post these materials myself.

Xpath contains

I always forget which way round the arguments to xpath’s ‘contains’ function go. So for posterity:

contains(haystack, needle)

Stagecoach: why not use maps or text.

Stagecoach buses: Why don’t you have maps?

Also, did you know that plain text is easier to read than pdf? Plain text is even easier for computers to use.

If a computer could read your timetables, someone, perhaps even you, could use your timetables to create maps of bus routes. But alas you must use pdf files.

Things that are bad about perl

perl