Articles – Page 56

Cerrie Burnell – All About Me

This morning, I saw the BBC News Magazine article about Cerrie Burnell, who’s apparently a children’s television presenter (I’d never heard of her before, but that doesn’t mean anything – I can’t remember the last time I watched any kids’ TV). The article centres on the fact that Cerrie was born without a right hand (her right arm stops at the elbow), and states that some parents are finding it awkward to answer the questions that their inquisitive children are asking about it (“Where did her arm go?” etc.).

After reading most of the (brilliant, really supportive) comments in the Have Your Say at the end of the article, I thought I’d look up some more information about this presenter I’d never heard of (y’know, because that’s what you do). Her Wikipedia page was a little sparse, so I tried the link on it to her homepage (as provided by CBBC).

There, it lists a handful of questions that kids will ask, along with fun answers. Do you have any brothers and sisters? Yes, I have a younger brother and a cousin I’m close to as well. When is your birthday? It’s the 30th August. If you had a super-power, what would it be? I’d like to be able to grow a tail and turn into a mermaid. You see the kinds of things I’m talking about.

What’s your favourite game? Twister.

I laughed out loud. And then I felt bad about it.

And then I blogged.

My Last Month And A Bit

So needless to say, I’ve been busy! The giveaway might have been that I haven’t blogged much – here’s a short summary of some of the things I’ve gotten up to:

Fake Christmas

Yeah, it really has been a while. So we had a “Fake Christmas”: this year – well, last year, I suppose – many of us Aberites planned to spend Christmas with our families, so we had an extra celebration a little earlier while we could all see one another. There was food and (lots of) drink and an exchanging of gifts, followed by copious quantities of Guitar Hero: World Tour, which Ruth, JTA and I had bought for Claire.

Thanks to Rory for the photo.

Real Christmas

Claire and I went up to Preston to see my folks for Christmas. Many board games were played, including the truly terrible Wost-Case Scenario Survival Game (it turns out, the survival challenge is sitting through this dull, uninspiring game). Was good to see my family for the first time in ages, though, give my sister Becky her long-belated birthday present (I’d always expected to be visiting “any time now”… for the four months or so previous since I’d gotten it), etc.

Because I’d been so busy (see Lots of Work, below), I actually took Nena, my main home desktop PC, up to Preston with me in order to get on with some more work over the Christmas break. My dad commented that there’s no shortage of computers at his house – I didn’t need to bring one! – but I pointed out that it was simply faster to unplug mine and bundle it into Claire’s car than it would be to set up my development toolchain, environment, etc. onto any other computer… by a long way.

Between Fake and Real Christmas, I found myself gifted a variety of fabulous board games, cookware (still haven’t found an opportunity to use my blowtorch yet – except to play with it, that is! – but my blender consistently proves useful), computer bits, clothes, books, and booze – which was all quite rapidly consumed.

New Year

Back to Aber for New Year, and counted it down at The Cottage with friends, including a proper countdown using a little Ruby application I knocked up for that purpose. I was dis-satisfied with the exclusion of the positive leap second (which I planned to take advantage of) in any of the official televised countdowns, as well as with the fact that the transmission and digital-decoding delay would throw off our accurate appreciation of midnight by about five seconds, so I developed a tool that should have been accurate to closer to a quarter of a second and ran it in a nice, huge font on my monitor (and counted midnight twice, of course).

For the second time (the first time was in 2000), I’m taking a break from alcohol, and this time Ruth is joining me, and so I stopped drinking at midnight. I’d originally planned this to be a year-long break, like last time, but I’m no longer sure: needs more thought. In any case, it’s certainly working well thus far, and I’m saving money and theoretically reducing my (previously, frankly ludicrous) alcohol tolerance without impacting my social life, so it’s a win regardless by this point.

Birthday

I turned 28 with a minimum of hoo-hah. Birthdays are fine and all, but I’ll wait until my thirtieth before I find an excuse for a party.

Flatland

In a form on Yet Another Fake Christmas, Claire and I visited her dad and his wife. They’ve just gotten themselves a Nintendo Wii with Wii Fit, which we played with a little and loved so much that we’ve since gotten a copy ourselves.

It’s a lot of fun, although it’s hard to believe that the “exercises” it has you perform are particularly effective unless you do no other physical activity whatsoever. However, it does a good job of teasing you if you’re overweight, which I suppose is worth something.

Lots of Work

I hadn’t realised quite how busy I’d been for the last four months – and particularly for the last month and a half – with a web application I’ve been working on. It’s been a pet project benefitting a variety of organisations for the last six years or so, and my team and I have been slogging away at it for the last few months to make it suitable for a far wider audience. Suddenly, following the deployment of the latest version, almost a fortnight ago, I’ve found myself with a surprising amount of free time. The other day, Claire and I hung out with JTA and just sat and read the paper and discussed what was going on in the world for about half an hour before I started thinking, “Hey, isn’t there something I’m supposed to be working on right now?” before realising “No, no there isn’t!” Sheer bliss.

And Catching Up

Which has finally given me time to catch up on my neglected RSS reader. I finally feel like I’m up-to-date! All that remained was to post a blog entry – this one, in fact – to let everybody who hasn’t seen or heard much of me of late know that I’m still alive!

So, that’s the last month and a bit for me! How’re you doing?

Sleepless? Priceless!

Time for this iteration of a software project: 4 months
Time left after the client changed their mind about the “must have” requirements: 2 months
Amount of sleep within the last 40+ hours: 4 hours
Number of JOIN clauses in an eleventh-hour SQL statement that suddenly fixes everything: 12 (LEFTies, RIGHTies, INNERs… and also a UNION)
Time internal deadline missed by: 55 minutes… which isn’t actually that bad, considering everything that went wrong in the 55 minutes before them
Money earned: nil
Feeling after delivery complete: priceless*.

* also: knackered – guess I’d better get some sleep!

A “Never Mind The Buzzcocks” Moment

Remember Let Loose? They reached #2 in the singles chart back in 1994 with Crazy For You? (you’ll remember it when you hear the chorus, I promise) Turns out that since disappearing off the face of the Earth, the guitarist has been running a fabulous little bed-and-breakfast in a tiny village in Essex.

He didn’t look too hurt when my boss and I, sat on his couch, asked about the silver and gold CDs he had framed and mounted in his living room, and, when he revealed his identity and, neither of us could remember who Let Loose were or what they’d ever done. And I think he’d forgive us for not recognizing him: I probably wouldn’t have guessed it was him on the Identity Parade round of Never Mind The Buzzcocks, even having seen the music video.

I quite liked Crazy For You. I had it on some compilation CD at some point. I’d somehow completely forgotten about it’s existance until I looked it up again on YouTube. Thank you, YouTube!

Economnomnomics

Here’s an idea: what if bills came with a sweet treat, like a lollipop or something. Or perhaps if the bill itself was printed on editle paper, like ricepaper, using a food dye-based ink. Aside from the improved biodegradability of the paper, it’d also make you look forward to opening your bills and nibbling at them. Better yet, it’d encourage you to pay them, because then you wouldn’t need the paper copy any more and could eat them.

It’d certainly make large bills easier to swallow, anyway.

Psychologically speaking, it’d play upon the Reciprocity Norm, an observed phenomenon in which people who are given something are more likely to give something in return: when charities give you a free pen in the envelope they send you, or when Hari Krishnas give you a flower at an airport “as a gift” and then ask for a donation, they’re playing upon this principle. Would sucking on candy delivered to you as a “gift” from your electricity company make you feel guilty for putting off paying the bill for a few days longer than you should?

Fight My Battles For Me

Just a quick announcement to plug an awesome album now purchasable on a CD in a shiny case: Fight My Battles For Me by Pagan Wanderer Lu. You can buy it for a tenner at the online store on old-school optical media.

My copy arrived this morning.

It’s full of re-recorded versions of a lot of PWL songs that you’ve probably heard before (and if you haven’t: why not?), but what makes it special is that it’s such an obviously lovingly-prepared and passionate collection of what makes Mr Lu so ace. I’ve falled in love with The Gentlemen’s Game all over again: the one song that’s most likely to get PWL lynched by folks who can’t appreciate that it isn’t actually a piece of racist propoganda. Later on the disc, there’s the re-re-re-release of his iconic (You & Me And) Winston Churchill, and the anthem-ish The Tree Of Knowledge. Not had enough? There’s still The Memorial Hall, ——–, and one of my favourites, England Expects.

Altogether a great album that you should be buying, rather than reading this blatant plug. Get on with it.

What Does This Bug Report Mean?

A bug report just came in from a client I’m responsible for at work. It reads:

…Main menu – home page – The ‘g’ of outstanding debts is permanently underlined.
Correct.

I’m not even sure what this message means. It looks like the client is telling me that the letter ‘g’ at the end of the word “outstanding”, which appears in the main menu of the software I’ve been writing for him, is underlined. I’m pretty clear on this bit of his message (although I’m as-yet unable to get the same effect on my own computer). What I want to know is, what does he want?

Is he saying that the letter ‘g’ is underlined but that it shouldn’t be? Or that it’s correct that it’s underlined (in which case, why is he filing a bug report?). Or is he asking, in a convoluted way, for it to be made to be permanently underlined (in which case: why – it doesn’t seem to make any sense?).

What a great start to the New Year’s work.

HttpOnly Session Cookies using ActiveRecordStore in Rails 2.2

If you’re using CookieStore to manage sessions in your Ruby on Rails application, Rails 2.2 provides the great feature that you’re now able to use HTTPOnly cookies. These are a great benefit because, for compatible web browsers, they dramatically reduce the risk of a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attack being able to be used to hijack your users’ sessions, which is particularly important on sites displaying user-generated content. You simply have to adjust your environment.rb file with something like:

config.action_controller.session = {
:session_key => ‘_session_id’,
:session_http_only => true,
:secret => ‘your-secret’
}
config.action_controller.session_store = :cookie_store

Unfortunately, the Rails developers didn’t see fit to extend HTTPOnly cookies to those of us using ActiveRecordStore, where the XSS risk is still just as real. To fill this gap, I’ve produced a very simple and only slightly-hackish plugin which overrides the functionality of Rails’ CGI::Cookie to force all cookies produced by Rails to be HTTPOnly, regardless of the session store being used.

To use it, download this file and extract it into your application’s vendor/plugins directory, and restart your application server. You can test that it’s working using Tamper Data, FireCookie, or whatever your favourite cookie sniffing tool is.

The Fife Diet from Kamikaze Cookery

I’ve been following Kamikaze Cookery (three geeks doing cookery… with science!) for a while now, and it’s got some real potential, but what really sold me on it was their recent series on the Fife diet (yeah, I know, it’s been out for ages, but I’ve been busy so my RSS reader’s been brim-full and I only just got around to watching it).

If you haven’t come across Kamikaze Cookery before, The Fife Diet videos are a great place to start.

Kissing At Midnight

In a fleeting thought, as I passed the greengrocer hanging our mistletoe outside his shop this morning, I found myself thinking about the unusual situation I’m in, in that I’ll this year be spending New Year’s Eve with both of mygirlfriends.

Who do I kiss at midnight?

Thankfully, the solution is clear – this year at least – thanks to the fact that midnight will happen twice this year (there’s a leap second). With some careful orochestration of who kisses whom when, they can have a midnight each, and use each of their other midnight’s to kiss their respective other partners.

Like I said: a fleeting thought – I don’t lie awake worrying about this kind of thing. That would just be weird.

‘Nena’ – Christmas Comes Early For Dan

I thought I’d say a little bit about my new home desktop computer, because it occurs to me that I hadn’t said anything about it yet.

Dualitoo, my PC of the last few years, kicked the bucket on Friday a few weeks back, at a most inopportune time – I was due to write heaps of code over the weekend as part of a dangerously-close-to-overrunning project. But, as Rory said, ’tis the season of hardware failure, and with Ruth‘s laptop dying a death and Paul‘s overheating problems, I should have expected that maybe my turn would be next.

It’s probably no coincidence that it died the very next day after the storage heaters in The Cottage came on for the winter, one of which was directly behind the poor box. When it failed to turn on (fans spun, but no keyboard lights, monitor output, or even beep-codes), I started swapping out components for spares (many of them not “spares” so much as “parts of Claire‘s PC”). Power supply was the first thing to try, because in always-on boxes in a dusty environment, they’re usually the first thing to go. After it turned out that the PSU was fine, it was on to the expansion cards, then the RAM, and so on (I’d already disconnected all the IDE/SATA devices just to free up room in the case in which to wave my huge hands around).

Sadly, it turned out that malfunction was in pretty much the worst place it could be: either the processor or the motherboard, and – not having a spare of either that would be compatible with the other, I had to write off both. This left me with a defective computer requiring significant repair right before what was supposed to be a busy weekend of code.

On Saturday morning, I resolved to fix the problem – I couldn’t afford the downtime not to! – and so, not wishing to lose further time waiting for delivery of mail-order components, I decided to see what Aberystwyth could supply me with “over the counter.”

I dropped into Crosswood Computers, on Chalybeate Street, first, and stated my unusual requirements. I needed, as economically as possible:

An ATX motherboard and a processor at least as powerful as that which had died (Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.4GHz) – I didn’t want to feel like I was paying for a downgrade
With two IDE ports: my old board had four IDE devices attached to it, as well as one SATA hard drive – unless I was to ditch some of these I’d need two IDE ports on the motherboard, which is getting hard to find in this age of SATA
And a stack of features that are commonplace: 4 DDR2 slots, PCI-E (don’t require SLI or CrossFire-compatability, I guess: I never got round to using the SLI on my old board so I probably wouldn’t on my new one), onboard LAN, etc. – I still had perfectly good RAM, an aging-but-still-workable graphics card and so on that I’d like to still be able to use!

Crosswood were able to find me one – yes, just one – board and processor that fit the bill: that dual-IDE request is hard to meet. It’d have cost me about £140, which is more than I was comfortable paying for the hardware in question, which was – in the end – pretty much identical to that which had broken. I wouldn’t mind paying that kind of money if I felt like I was getting an upgrade, but to pay that just to “get running again” (plus, of course, all the hassle of un-mounting and re-mounting a motherboard, moving around all those stupid little brass screws, etc.) felt like a bad move.

Before having to rethink things, I thought I’d try what is Aberystwyth’s just-about-only-other computer shop, Daton (can’t link to their actual domain name because they’ve let it expire and it’s now an ad farm). I’ve always had mixed experiences with Daton – they’ve surprised me with bargain computer bits before, but they’ve also managed to unimpress me: for example, with the network cabling they half-heartedly lay at my old workplace. My conversation there on this day could be summarised thusly:

Dan: Hi, I wonder if you can help me. I’m looking to buy a motherboard and a processor for it: ATX form factor… either Intel or AMD – I’m architecture-agnostic these days… but crucially, it must have two IDE ports.

Daton Woman: Uh. Hang on. /goes into back and repeats everything I’ve said to Daton Man, then returns/ You’ll probably have to bring your computer in.

Dan: No, there’s really no need. I just need to buy a motherboard and processor from you. What do you have in stock?

Daton Woman: Well, we’d really need to be able to see your PC to know what’s wrong with it…

Dan: I don’t need you to tell me what’s wrong with it. I know what’s wrong with it. That’s why I’m asking for a motherboard and processor. Now can you sell me some, or should I shop elsewhere?

Daton Woman: …and we’ll have to order the parts in to repair it.

Dan: /sighs and leaves/

I trekked back to Crosswood, and on the way, I spoke to my mum on the phone – it’s come to that time of year when I call her up to hunt for tips on what my sisters are “into” these days, so I have a clue as to what they might like for Christmas. While talking to her, I mentioned the fun and games I was having with my computer problems. “Would you like some computer parts as an early Christmas present?” she asked. Suddenly my options were expanded.

By the end of Saturday, I’d built Nena, my new desktop PC. She carries on the hard drives from Dualitoo, alongside the RAM and – of course – the peripherals, but the rest is all new. She’s running an amazingly cool-running Intel Core 2 Quad Q6660 (2.4GHz quad-core) on an Intel-chipset motherboard from ECS. I got myself a new graphics card (a sexy-as-fuck Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT), too, replaced my two IDE optical drives with a shiny new high-speed SATA dual-layer DVD rewriter, and gave myself an extra 750GB of hard drive space (taking me up to 1.25TB – plenty for films and games and whatnot) with an extra hard drive. She makes light work of Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3 and Call of Duty: World at War, which is nice, because I might find time for more than a half-hour game of one of these ace games someday when I’m less busy… although by that time, my system’ll probably be out of date again.

Nena, of course, fits in with my current home computer naming scheme of “female one-hit wonders,” joining Tiffany in our living room.

What have I learned from the whole experience? Well, I’ve learned that:

It’s perfectly possible to get hold of all kinds of great computer components at short notice, even in Aberystwyth, and doing so only cost me about 3% more than I’d have expected to have paid online, and got me the goods instantly.
However, amazingly, nowhere in town could supply me with a case, so I had to loot one from my employer, SmartData, who had a spare (I couldn’t be bothered stripping down Dualitoo‘s case only to have to spend the next half hour removing and moving all those annoying brass screws: plus; her power button was dodgy).
I should have ditched my aging IDE optical devices long ago.
There’s a huge difference between an Nvidia 7-series and an Nvidia 9-series, and it blows your socks off.
Daton Computers don’t trust their customers enough to sell them what they’re asking for.
Crosswood Computers provide sound, helpful advice, and – if you’re friendly and buy enough stuff from them – are more than happy to “throw in” cables and adapters as freebies (I realised that I’d need SATA power adapters and data cables, one of those PSU 6-pin adapters you need for powered graphics cards if your PSU doesn’t already have one, and so on), which the chap at Crosswood was happy to just give me without charge, even though I didn’t buy the PSU from him in the first case.
The quad-core Intel processors actually seem to run colder than the dual-core ones.
My mum is ace.

OMG Child Pr0n (or is it?)

What a mess this is turning into! I am of course referring to the UK-wide internet censorship of a Wikipedia page (the one about the Scorpions album, Virgin Killer – if that last link doesn’t work, you’re among those affected).

The thinking is, according to the Internet Watch Foundation, that the cover of the 1976 album constitues child pornography and therefore we all need to be protected from it. It’s all a little controversial, though, because they’re not suggesting that Amazon US be blocked, for example.

But the worst of it is the amount of news exposure it’s generating is actually drawing traffic to the banned content. I wouldn’t ever have seen the album cover if it weren’t for the ban, for example, after which I realised how trivial it is to see the offending Wikipedia page. And that without the offending content appearing in a Wikinews article about the ban!

It’s hard to justify this kind of policing. In accordance with Wikipedia’s own policies, it is not a creator of content so much as a distributor: it takes content that is already “out there” and, in theory at least, legal, and disseminates it in an approachable form.

I’ll be interested to see how this plays out.

Environmental Awareness and Yes, I’m Still Busy

The Technium‘s just hosted a seminar on environmental awareness. Walking past the conference room a few minutes ago, I noticed that the folks running the event had managed to leave running the projector and all of the lights, despite the fact that it had ended some time ago. Ah, the irony.

Went to a céilidh at the Morlan Centre last night with Ruth (as my date and – generally – dancing partner) and Sarah (who had a few words of her own to say about the event), and had a fabulous time: lots of dancing around in complex and silly ways, forgetting which partner I’m supposed to link arms with next at any given time and eating lots of cake. Also, lots of failing to win at the tombola. I can’t remember how to make binomial theorem work, but I’m pretty sure my odds of winning at least one prize when one in five tickets is a winner, if I buy ten tickets, should be reasonable, right? If anybody else can work out the odds and explain it in a way that I’d understand, bearing in mind that I haven’t done any real maths in years, that’d be cool. I could re-learn, but I don’t have time (nor a calculator with a “P” button!).

What else? Matt P, Ele and Helen visited town, which was nice; my main desktop PC, Dualitoo, broke down in a horrible way, which wasn’t so nice; and I built a new desktop PC, Nena. All of this has been responsible for putting me back a few days further in my already cramped schedule of volunteer coding for the next month, but a meeting I had last week has re-filled me with faith that Things Will Get Less Hectic [TM]. That’s my mantra right now: I’m seriously looking forward to having more time in my life for the important stuff like video games and hanging out with people. Someday, someday.

LiveJournal-to-Google Reader v2.0

I’ve just (finally) gotten around to releasing a brand new version of my LiveJournal-to-Google Reader proxy server, which makes it possible to easily read your LiveJournal friends’ “friends only” posts in your Google Reader account (or whatever other RSS reader you use that doesn’t normally make this easy).

I’ve announced the new version on the new LiveJournal-to-Google Reader blog. Hopefully users will feel able to subscribe to that, rather than this, blog, if they want to hear about updates to the tool. /runs a quick SELECT COUNT(*) on the database/ There’s over 900 of them, now!

Regular blogging will resume when I get a spare five minutes.

Congratulations Alec & Suz

Alec and Suz‘s wedding was this weekend, and I went along to the wedding reception on Saturday evening, along with Claire, Jimmy, Liz and Simon. We turned up stylishly early, and took advantage of the bar while we waited for anybody else we knew to appear (okay, so there was the bride and groom, of course, although they were generally pretty busy socialising with all their other guests, and a handful of others like Andy and Siân).

All said, the night was amazing. The venue the happy couple had chosen was County Hall, the Marriott hotel across the river from Westminster Abbey and a stone’s throw upstream of the London Eye, which is an amazingly beautiful hotel in a great location. The balance of traditional and modern wedding reception themes was strikingly cool. Oh, and Alec and Suz both looked fabulous, if a little exhausted.

It was great to catch up with so many folks I haven’t seen even remotely enough of late, like Bryn, Matt R, Matt P, Liz, Andy, Siân, and Sundeep, as well as hanging out with folks I still see regularly, like Ruth and JTA. It was also fab to re-meet folks I’d only ever met in passing before (in Aber, like Caroline, or in the bigger wider world, like Simon).

And so we drank and danced the night away to a (generally) great selection of music. Liz has an impossible supply of energy and kept dragging Aber-folk up to the dance floor, and getting down to the bangin’ choons with the old gang filled me with a sense of nostalgia. I’m pretty sure I even saw Jimmy dancing when there wasn’t a girl dancing with him, which is a first, although he’ll certainly deny that ever happened.

Also of note was the hotel’s response to Matt P’s arrival. Matt P turned up late in combat pants and a t-shirt, and carrying a backpack, and strolled in to the five-star hotel, and I’m pretty sure that – as I helped him change into the suit he was carrying, in the gents toilets – at least one member of staff came in to check what somebody dressed like that was doing in their hotel. Fun and games.

There was other stuff. Having travelled as far as London it made sense to do a couple of touristy things, too, as well as to meet up with a London-based potential new volunteer developer for a software project I’m working on, but the wedding reception will remain the highlight of the weekend, and perhaps the social highlight of the year. It’s occurred to us that with QParty last year, Alec & Suz’s wedding this year, and Ruth & JTA’s planned wedding in 2010, that we’re lacking an excuse to get the usual suspects together for any reason in 2009. As it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll see a wedding or similar event on behalf of, for example, Andy & Siân, we may have to find some other reason to have a get-together in the coming year. Claire’s looking into the possibility of a group holiday (like the Pembrokeshire fort trip early this year), which is an option, and Matt R proposes Cardiff Is Amazing 2009, a party which (so far) has no more premise than can be inferred from it’s name. Nonetheless, Alec & Suz’s wedding has reminded me how much I miss many of the people I used to spend time with on a weekly basis, and I’m keen to see one or both of these plans come to fruition.

Oh, and – congratulations, Alec and Suz! Have a great honeymoon, and enjoy the rest of your married life together!