Articles – Page 97

Freshers’ Fayre

Freshers’ Fayre was a success, as Kit reports. Although it must be said that he’s probably right to be concerned that this may be the last year we’re able to pull such a stunt. Which is a real shame. We worked really hard – harder than we ever do at the jobs from which we took a holiday just to make this possible – to sell burgers and hot dogs and bacon rolls and things to freshers, and we raised a considerable amount of money to donate to Aberystwyth Nightline.

On which note, both Claire and I sustained thumb injuries as a result of our efforts – see the picture! Mine was caused by sheer stupidity – picking up a hot pan I melted my thumb to the handle, and required a trip to A&E. Claire’s was caused by damn blind stupidity – while seperating two frozen burgers, she levered them apart using a bread knife, and in doing so took a large bite out of her thumb when the knife slipped.

On which note, what idiot decided that the Sports Centre’s emergency first aid kit should be stored behind a double-locked door to which nobody on site has either key? Our designated first-aider eventually had to run to his car and collect his own first aid kit in order to stop Claire’s bleeding. Had the injury been significantly more serious, we’d have gotten to a point of having to improvise a tourniquet to save her from bleeding to death while she waited next to the locked door. Ah well.

And there’s another thing – how could the union justify telling us that we couldn’t cook indoors because “no food or drink is allowed in the building”, forcing us to rent a generator and stand in the rain for hours on end, then allow Spartacus to sell sandwiches in the foyer… and then, better yet, let some of the clubs and societies give away beer to their members. The mind boggles.

I’ve had three days of meeting lots of 18-year-olds, fresh to the University, setting out for their degrees and away from home for the first time. I feel old again. =o)

But happy.

Dan, thumb bandaged, slices buns (carefully)

That Time Of Year Again

Well; it’s that time of the year again… the time of year that I sell hot dogs and burgers to Freshers at the Freshers’ Fayre [this time last year], alongside Kit, who’s visiting for that purpose.

This year, I think we’re better prepared materially – as in, we’ve made preparations for if it rains, we’ve got all the equipment ready to pick up, etc. – but I think we’re less well-prepared in other aspects: for example, we didn’t think about a cash float until yesterday. It’ll all be fine, of course – I’m working with a great team who’ll pull everything together no matter what, and this day – the first day of the fayre – is rarely as busy as the other two: giving us a chance to make any alterations to our plans. Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel a little bit apprehensive. Ah well.

Fantasy Terrorist League

You know what’s become quite popular among the masses since the take-off of the Internet? Fantasy leagues. Yes; that’s right – those things previously reserved for pub regulars and geeky play-by-mail types. Now, the internet is full of Fantasy Sports Leagues, Fantasy Share Trading, and so on.

For those of you not in the know; when playing in a fantasy league you are allocated a number of points (frequently represented by pseudo-currency). These points can be spent on, for example, famous football players, or companies, or whatever, and as the perceieved values of these commodities change (e.g. the footballer scores more goals, or particpates in more winning matches… or the companies share value changes), the value of your team/portfolio adjusts accordingly. You can then sell the successful players or shares (ideally at their “market peak”) in order to finance the purchase of others, plus a small profit for yourself. Some fantasy leagues take this to it’s logical extreme, and actually play gambling for real money (with the values of the commodities scaled down by a factor to accomodate the wallets of the participants, of course – few people carry around enough spare cash to finance a premier league football team).

So; here’s my idea: Fantasy Terrorist League. It’s a web site where, once you’ve signed up an account, you’re given a number of ‘points’ which you can invest in the many terrorist organisations that are active the world over. The value of these terrorist groups decreases gradually over time, unless they get media attention. Value of groups goes up as they are featured in the news. Value of groups rises dramatically as they perform other acts: for example, taking a hostage might be worth 5 points per hostage taken (2 bonus points for a successful execution); detonating a car or truck bomb might be worth 10 points (with bonus points available for damaging foreign embassies); a toxic gas attack or biological terror might get a group’s value up by 15 points; a plane hijacking could increase a group’s value by 20 or 30 points. The points weightings will be variable, too, based on difficulty (it’s a lot more difficult now to hijack a plane than it used to be, apparently) and popularity (“Oh great; HAMAS did another suicide bombing… by the time the PLO get around to detonating one it’ll be worth nothing! I knew I should have invested in those Chechen rebels…”). Of course, I wouldn’t run such a site as a real gambling site (last thing I’d want is somebody with, how shall we put this – insider information – using it to gain a profit to support their activities), but I think it’d be a fascinating social experiment to run as a true “fantasy league”.

If you think this is in bad taste: fuck off. o_|/ It amused me for awhile when I thought of it.

Geeky Winnage With Bluetooth

Geeky winnage! This evening I wrote a pair of applications enabling me to use my new Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone as a remote control for WinDVD, the DVD playing software I use on my computer.

Not just a geeky project, this is fuelled by a genuine need: every Troma Night, when the pizza arrives, we end up scrambling for the keyboard in order to pause the film, or I find myself wandering back and forwards, trying to set the volume to an audible-to-all but not-deafening level. With the aid of this new funky toy, I can do this from my seat. Toy.

I’m looking forward to other ideas for uses for this technology. Tools already exist to allow you to control your media player and PowerPoint presentations using a Bluetooth mobile phone, but I’m sure that there are more useful applications that I can use in order to improve my own, personal geeky life.

Toy.

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.

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 young woman 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.

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.

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.

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.