Kind: Articles
Traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body.
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First Part Of My Dissertation
Gave a presentation about my dissertation today in a poster session which is worth 0.825% of my mark for this year. Seems insignificant, but they say that it all adds up. In any case, it went very well; people seemed interested in the technical side of my ideas and nobody bothered to ask any questions …
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I Am The Mario Kart God
I've just beaten Mario Kart: Double Dash's "All Cups Cup" (the cup you gain access to having already beaten all the other cups - including the Special Cup - at the maximum engine power) at 150cc! Which makes me a happy bunny, 'cos now it's unlocked all the tracks... backwards! Another excuse to waste lots …
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Being Charlie Kaufman
Just watched Adaptation with Claire and Paul. Absolutely fantastic - a post-modern marvel. Put simply, it's an adaptation of a book entitled The Orchid Thief - a true story about the author, Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), meeting John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a horticultural specialist who collects endangered orchids, set to the backdrop of Charlie Kaufman, …
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Artificial Intelligence For Dummies
I've just written an artificial intelligence gamebot, designed to pseudointelligently play simple board games which involve a finite upper number of moves and a board of tokens - for example: Connect Four, Noughts & Crosses, Go!, or Othello. It uses the (appropriately-written) rules of the game in order to pre-anticipate a vast number of moves, …
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Pretend You’re A Traffic Police Officer
...and one day, on your beat, you catch a guy driving the wrong way down a residential one-way street. Well; that's not very good, so you flag him down and investigate. Upon reaching the car, you discover that he is driving the wrong way down the road as a result of a lack of due …
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Rage Against The Monkeys
I've been thinking about a popular mathematical document easily available on the web, More Monkey Business, which uses the maths behind the otherwise inconceivable "infinite monkey problem" (if a million monkeys at a million keyboardsetc.... also known as Usenet...) as a gateway to argue against molecular biology's evolutionary theory, which states that life 'came together' …
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Windows Longhorn Continued
It turns out that Windows Longhorn is a lot like the child of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but (at this early stage) less stable. Just what we've come to expect.
On the other hand, it's a lot faster than I might have expected (considering its dependency on the .NET framework). If you play with … -
AbNib, Version 1.1
I've taken a step towards fixing AbNib. It now works correctly with Alec and Andy's LiveJournals, and loads significantly quicker by not updating the live-feed of everybody's journals at the same time. Yay. Also, have swopped out Claire (who was never updating her blog anyway) for Bryn, a proper Welshman: give him a read!
I'd still … -
Alcohol, Psilocybin, Troma, Caffeine, And Other Things That Are Bad For Me
Troma Night on Saturday was another good one: we think we've got the recipe of attendance numbers, film content, and other silliness just right now. I've even promised to update the Troma night web site when I get round to it.
Claire, Paul and I took some magic mushrooms, acquired from Little Amsterdam, Aberystwyth's first sex … -
The Matrix: Revolutions
Watched The Matrix: Revolutions last night at the Commodore. It was pretty much what I expected: great special effects and a less impressive plot than all of it's prequels - improved only by having experienced the plot 'asides' of the comic books and stories and by the (sucky) computer game and (great) Animatrix. Unfortunatley I …
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Some Days You’re The Statue; Some Days You’re The Pigeon
I'm at the office. It's almost 5pm. So far today I've achieved what should be estimated as approximately 7 days work. Some days the code just flows. I like being me.
On the other hand, it may be that I've just written the wrong 7 days worth of code - as in; the 7 days worth … -
The Most Expensive Pizza Night With Friends… Ever
Vauxhall Corsa: £2,515
Ford Fiesta Zetec: £2,745
Petrol to get the above two cars, containing Bryn, Claire, Kit, Adam, Liz, and me to Shrewsbury and back: £20
Three stuffed-crust pizzas, one plate of mixed snacks, six soft drinks with free refils, two double chocolate sundaes, two portions of chocolate cake, one portion of cheesecake and one portion of … -
Shedloads
I have shedloads of work to do: a whole heap of stuff for Bovini, a bit of catching up with my self-imposed tight schedule for my dissertation, a worksheet on formal methods for software engineering [PDF]...
...and then there's all the other stuff: gotta do my laundry, remember that it's my dad's birthday next week, write … -
Bluejacking
Both The Register and the BBC have stories today on bluejacking - that is, the practice of sending unsolicited messages to open Bluetooth relay points, typically mobile phones. There's even a web site dedicated to bluejacking.
One of my personal favourites is the cinema. It's fun to fire off pictures of fridge magnet letters with my … -
Semi-Legal
Having read the BBC's article about cannabis reforms from Class B to Class C drugs, and a new "semi-legal" stance over (ab)users, I can't help but think that, for the purposes, "semi-legal" is best defined as "it's fine, unless you get caught doing it".
And isn't exactly the same as with other crimes. Like burglary, say? …