technology

Bovini: A Week Well-Spent

It’s been a busy week. I’ve spent a lot of my time at the office, trying to get the replication model for Bovini working – causing much stress as it failed time and time again. For those of you without a grounding in computer science theory, replication is the art of making data be identical (and editable) in several places at once without the fundamental problems that this goes on to cause, such as data identity conflicts.

In this particular case, we have two master copies of a database, and five smaller copies of a particular one-fifth of the data each (plus a little shared data), split around seven UK sites, and who’s computers can only be made to talk to one another between the hours of midnight and 4am each weekday. So: not only does the program I’ve been writing (and sweating on, crying over, and shouting at, this week) have to pull all the data back together and spread it out, it also has to detect whether two users at different sites edit the same piece of data during the same day, work out who’s most likely to be ‘right’, and ‘fix’ the data accordingly. Or, if it’s not sure, know who to ask for assistance. It’s a clever program.

And now it seems to be done. And working. Great!

Unfortunately, working like a dog on this little project has only taken time (and energy) away from my preferred software project – Three Rings – a program I’m writing for free for National Nightline. I’m likely to have a busy weekend catching up!

Regardless, tonight… will be a night for relaxing – Bryn, Claire, Paul, Kit and I are going to spend the evening in the Ship & Castle, drinking Real Ale and playing Chez Geek. A perfect way to end a week.

Pathetic Motorways

I kid you not – there’s a web site dedicated to the pathetic motorways of the United Kingdom, with reasons why they’ve been nominated as pathetic, photographs, maps, and the history of each road. Perhaps the oddest site you’ll see all day.

The Most Terrifying Thing A Web Developer Will Ever See

Want to see something quite terrifying: DHTML Lemmings. I kid you not – this is scary shit, particularly when you realise that it’s all being done client-side, using script, over the web: no Flash, no Applets, no ActiveX <spits> – just pure unadulterated CSS and JavaScript. I got scared.

Online Banking

NatWest phoned me today in response to my complaint the other day that their online banking service refused to support Opera, my web browser of choice, seemingly for no good reason. I threatened to take my account elsewhere. Regardless, they’ve promised to look into it and try to make the site Opera-compatible, and I’ve said I’ll give them ’til Christmas.

Let your feet do the talking, people. It’s the only way that big companies (and banks) pay any attention at all.

Excellent Article On Music Piracy And CD Sales

A must-read! An excellently-written and concise article in dot.life about the falling sales of CDs being blamed on file-swappers, playing devil’s advocate. Go read it, people!

Royal Welsh Show

I’m writing this from the (badly-protected: just had to go to a page with a particularly funky JavaScript to break out of their front-end browser) BBC Wales bus at the Royal Welsh Show, where Alex and I are working on behalf of SmartData.

Suppose I’d better get back to work and let these kiddies have the ‘net connection back…

Friday Morning

Wow. Seen the Quake IV Leaked Screenshots [mirror]. Due for release on the last day of the year, based on these stills alone I’d say that it’s going to be something quite spectacular… and will involve a terrier…

Off to work…

Paul In Aber

Paul made it to Aber. Woo and indeed hoo. He, Bryn, Kit, Claire, and I went to the beach and drank beer and ate pizza to celebrate. Then Claire and I took turns in an inflatable dingy and I got soaked as a wave leapt over the side. You’ll probably see their reports of this on their journals, soon, too.

The wiki I was coding got finished. Sadly, only a few of you who read this will ever be allowed to see it, but it’s pretty sweet.

Plothole appeared in the story on Andy’s LiveJournal – he has me drinking tea, which, as everybody knows, isn’t going to happen on account of (a) caffiene being a really, really bad thing for me and (b) I don’t particularly like tea. Have reported this to him and await feedback.

This made me laugh: type Weapons of Mass Destruction into Google and you’ll get this page. I laughed lots.

Late

Running late for work. Was supposed to get up and take laptop to Daton as part of an insurance scam, but I’m still at home after having woken up late. Still, Claire’ll be at work until about 1am today… in Newtown… so there’s no benefit to me coming home early. I’ll work late.

Updated Troma Night at long last – this web site chronicles the things I get up to on termtime Saturday nights.

Suppose I oughta go get this laptop sorted and put my paycheque into the bank, then get my lazy layabout arse to work.

Scatmania Launched

Well; I finally did it. I finally got myself a weblog. After weeks of peer pressure by such friends as Paul, Alec, and Kit with their shiny LiveJournals, I decided to have one of my own.

Just to remind anybody who doesn’t already know that this isn’t, technically, my first weblog. My first one ran from 1998 to 1999 – before the term ‘blog’ was coined, and before it became fashionable to ramble on about yourself online. The “Avatar Diary”, on my old, old web site, was a source of perpetual interest from all kinds of people for some time. Well; until I got a scary cyberstalker (really, it scared me, and very little does), and then I packed it in.

I suppose now I’d better get something more productive done. I’m not getting paid for this.

AvAngel.com Censorship Lifted

After a bit of a battle between Information Services at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and I, resulting in the semipermanent blocking of the Unversity’s right to see www.penbryn-hall.co.uk, and the temporary blocking of AvAngel.com (Woohoo! I’m officially censored by the University), access to the site from the University’s network is now re-opened. Thanks to everybody who gave me the support I needed to go and tell them where to shove it…

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #49:

Tear apart a pile of stolen computer keyboards to make a cool name plaque for your door, with real pressable buttons for each letter of your name, and not-pressable ones that say Enter, and Compose Character, and Do, and Lock, and, my favourite of all, stolen from an old dumb terminal, Rub Out. Also Blu Tack on some old network cards and a circuitbord. My room here is really starting to become a home…

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #47:

Steal some old VT-320 keyboards from the skip outside the Llandinam Extension and smash them up to make a cool nameplate for your door out of the keys. It reads:
[D][A][N][I][E][L], then lower, [Enter], and then by the lock, [Lock]. Not bad, I thought.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #41:

Discover a major security flaw in the university network, that provides any user with half a brain, a computer in their room, some practice, and a lot of patience, the means to get the password of anybody else on your local workgroup, leaving them exposed to malicious attacks, e-mail theft, use of their print quota, and all kinds of other problems. It’s such a serious problem that I’m not going to go into further detail here, in case this e-mail gets into the hands of somebody on the network. Later, discover that this loophole has already been discovered and is abused by at least one third year student. I’ve arranged for John (who aided me in discovering the problem) and I to meet with network services management to inform them of the problem – simply because we feel threatened by it

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #35:

Raid a skip outside the computer labs, filled to the brim with semi-defunct equipment. Steal several cables, some dumb-terminal keyboards, and a PSU (which was funtional, but later caught fire). Spend much of the remainder of the afternoon taking broken monitors from it and throwing them from great distances into the skip again, just ’cause you want to see if you can make them implode and blow a hole in the side of the skip. Fail. Spend much of the evening trying to get an old 8086 your flatmate pulled from it to work. Succeed… to a degree… it just doesn’t *do* much!

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.