2004 Archives

New Mobile Phone

My new mobile phone finally arrived at the weekend. I’ve texted my new number to everybody in my phone book, except for people I don’t want to have it <grins>. If you don’t have my new number, but you think you should, you have three options:

1. Use one of the online services in which my number will be recorded. If you know what these are and how to access them, you can get my new number for yourself.

2. Talk to somebody who already has my new number, or get it from me sometime (call me on my landline, e-mail me, ICQ me, whatever…). Easy.

3. If all else fails, leave a comment here and I’ll get back to you.

The Marvellous Breadfish

Tell me, have you seen the marvellous breadfish?

Our Web Developer’s “Line Of The Day”

Yet again my concern for the value of an Internet Computer Science degree from UWA is raised, as a dippy co-worker with two years of such a degree behind her asks me for help:

“Dan,” she begins, “How do I make a table in PHP?”

For those of you that don’t know quite as much about web design as she should, PHP is a programming language used, amongst other things, for developing dynamic, flexible web sites which integrate with other data sources. This weblog, for example, is powered by PHP. It is most frequently used to output HTML, the language of the web.

“I think you mean HTML,” I reply, seeing what she’s trying to achieve – the alignment of two text fields with their corresponding labels. She’ll need a simple two-by-two table. The code for this is as follows:

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>
      Top-Left Text
    </td>
    <td>
      Top-Right Text
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>
      Bottom-Left Text
    </td>
    <td>
      Bottom-Right Text
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

What are they teaching them these days? I remember learning this at about age 14, using Netscape’s examples. This girl has been studying Internet-fucking-Computing at degree level for two years and hasn’t been shown this?

Don’t even get me started on the fact that she shouldn’t be using a table for the purpose she was trying to use it for.

Update 2023-12-07: In hindsight, I made a knee-jerk reaction in writing this blog post. I should have treated this junior developer as what I’d now call “one of the lucky 10,000” and been more-supportive and a better teacher. We’re all learning, and back in 2004 I clearly had a lot of learning still to do.

Illness, Alton Towers, And Troma Night

Found myself ill again on Wednesday and Thursday last week (in partial explanation to my lack of weblog posts). I think I gulped down some green-and-lumpy orange juice before I went to bed on Wednesday night and as a result found myself quite sick. Even after I’d recovered, I spent several days with almost no appetite at all. Eyrk.

Still went ahead with my plan to go to Alton Towers, though. On Friday, Claire, Paul and I braved the 6½+ hour round trip there and back. Bryn, sadly, ~~chickened-out~~ wasn’t able to come, so we gave away our second free ticket (using, as we were, buy-one-get-one-free vouchers) to somebody at the gate (it’s amazing how mistrusting people are: “We’ve got too many tickets,” I said, “Who wants a free one?”… it took awhile before we got a volunteer!).

Air is a good ride (I hadn’t been there since it opened). The rest of the park remained good, as always. Claire won a stuffed toy white lion from a guy who couldn’t guess the month of her birth (he guessed November, which is what we’ve now named the lion). Paul spent most of the day taking off his glasses (to go on the rides) and putting them on again (in order to see again). A good day was has by all.

Oh, and Troma Night was good, too.

Ghost In The Shell 2 : Innocence

Paul will, yet again, have kittens: Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence seems to have been released.

The Village

Went to see The Village last night – very good film, well worth seeing, so long as you take a few things into account:

1. Unlike what all the previews would have you believe, this is not even remotely a horror movie – it’s a story about innocence and about what people will sacrifice in order to hold onto what they believe in.

2. It’s very good, but you need to go see it knowing as little about it as possible. That’s why I’m going to tell you almost nothing more about it.

Seven out of ten. Could have earned an eight from me if it had done a few key things better, in order that I wouldn’t have been able to predict the end from about half an hour in. I particularly enjoyed the pacing – nice and slow, no hurry to tell the story… although the ocassional “memory” voiceover was completely un-necessary for an audience that actually has a brain… felt like “dumbing down”. Bryce Dallas Howard‘s performance is brilliant – spot on: also good performances by William Hurt and Adrien Brody.

Go see it. But don’t expect whatever it is you’re expecting.

Aber Graduates Earn Least In UK

This is just fucking weak: the average salary of an Aberystwyth graduate is just £12,968… the lowest in the UK. And on this crappy ‘probationary period‘, that’s still more than I earn. Fucking shitty.

Feeling unmotivated now. Not getting enough work done.

Programmer’s Day

Apparently it’s Programmer’s Day, so Paul, Bryn, Claire and I put together an old low-end Pentium into a dual-booting Red Hat/Windows 98SE box, and racked up some classic games of the 80s and 90s. Fab.

There’s actually some debate about whether Programmer’s Day should be included as a Wikipedia entry… as there’s not a lot of evidence that anybody actually supports it, except for a few hardcore geeks (most of whom discovered it on Wikipedia or a site that uses it as a source) and some Russians who started a petition.

In any case, we had a lot of fun, and we’ll be doing it next year.

Homosexual Intercourse Exposure To Be Reduced By Highland Cattle

In this news story on Ananova, it is reported that a Dutch town is hoping to reduce occurrences of gays using their park for sex by filling it with Scottish highland cattle, which will apparently “scare them off”.

It’s a weird world.

Lottery Scratchcards And Illicit Hallucinogens

Damn weird: last night I dreamt that I found a lottery scratchcard which had not been completed – just two of it’s sixteen panels had been scratched off. While I’d not be fool enough to buy one (the mathematics is simple – the lottery is a stupidity tax), I’ll happily play one I didn’t pay for, and so I scratched off the remaining panels. The scratchcard was a £1000 pound winner. I claimed the money, and spent it all on LSD. Coincidentally, I can’t remember much of the dream after that…

JavaScript Random Quote Generator

A friend sent me an e-mail yesterday asking if I knew of a simple random quote generator that she could embed on her web page. So I’ve written one, and I’m making it available here on the off chance that anybody else wants it too. It’s implemented in JavaScript, and works simply by including a separate .js file within the document. The ZIP file contains both the .js file (which will need to be edited in a plain text editor such as Notepad, to insert your own quotes) and a .html file, which provides an example of it’s usage. Unzip both to a folder and double-click on the HTML file to see it in action.

Download QuoteGen (ZIP file, 1.07KB).

Violently Ill

Argh.

The worst part of being so horribly ill is the moment when you’re dashing to the toilet before you pebbledash the floor with your arse… and at that moment you realise that your stomach is about to eject it’s contents, too. What a paradox.

In any case – it’s not all bad news: the Ship & Castle has been re-opened. It’s now run by Ian Blair, the man behind The Mill. They’re still doing real ales (albeit a very slightly reduced selection), and the redecoration of the place has given it a lighter, more ‘open’ feel. Sadly, the jukebox has been changed, and several of the better rock ballads CDs have been replaced with “Now XX”.

Are these two bits of news related? Perhaps.

Gonna go throw up again…

Happy Fun Weekend

It’s so much nicer coming back to the office on a Monday after a weekend both relaxing and productive, with lots of happy fun time with friends. Managed to tidy the flat, do heaps of laundry, have a successful Troma Night (three films, a decent crowd, and everybody hung on in ’til the end despite knackeredness), a sedate but moderately successful Geek Night (Carcassonne and Chez Geek). All good.

Plus, I managed to find time to learn a fair bit about mod-rewrite, the Apache module that lets you do all kinds of useful things like canonical URLs, content negotiation, proxying content, fallbacks, etc. (as used on Scatmania to make the ‘nice’ URLs you see with the date and post name embedded into the pseudo-folder-structure). Fab. And managed to help Bryn with his new web site, which I’m sure you’ll all be seeing later this month.

And in actual news, BBC News reports that a Swedish man has been issued with a £90 ticket for illegally parking his snowmobile in Warwick, despite claiming never to have been there and that his snowmobile was in his shed in Bollstabruk at the time.

The Scary Baby Conspiracy

Now here’s an idea for an Illuminati: The Game Of Conspiracy “Illuminati” card – The Scary Baby Conspiracy. Suggestions for the Scary Baby Conspiracy’s unique win condition and any special rules are welcome (from anybody who actually knows what Illuminati is). Fnord.

On which note – it’s Geek Night tonight! Hopefully we can have a couple of games of Carcassonne and perhaps one of Hacker.

A.I. Nuts, Again

Do you remember a week or two ago I wrote about a guy who patented the “Ethical Rules Of Artificial Intelligence”? Well – it looks like he’s read my article and placed his own comments. I’m quite surprised and impressed that he took the time (away from his heavy schedule of philosophising or book-signing or whatever) to come and read my counter-arguments to his ideas, and placed comments of his own (albeit mostly pre-fabricated stuff).

Here’s to you, John LaMuth.