Ages ago I was trying to find a cool start page which I could set for my homepage; I’d grown bored of Reader because it stopped me going to other websites. I stuck with /r/funny for a while before switching to the Onion. Ultimately they weren’t giving me what I wanted, so I decided to make my own.

So I made this RSS quilt type thing, and it’s pretty perfect for me at the moment. By default it uses data from the combined RSS feeds of Reddit, BBC, the Guardian, and Ars so it’s a pretty nice pool of information for me. It only shows the headlines too, and that’s all wanted. Putting the body of the articles on would take up way too much space.

Dark items are newer items, whilst lighter items are older. Eventually they get so old they’re barely visible – but you can mouse over them to see it clearly again. Not that I’d want to, if it’s that old I’ve probably already read it. It checks for updates to the feeds every four minutes too, and then inserts them nicely into the page (in an element that you can see, so it’s not inserting elements at the bottom of the page where you won’t notice). It adds new elements in italics too, just to make them extra prominent.

Article order is always randomised

You can change the feed by clicking the modulo symbol in the navigation bar. You’ve got to put the actual RSS feed URL into that though. You can also nab the bookmarklette (click the question mark in the navigation bar) and that will hopefully find the RSS feed for the website you’re looking at when you click it.

Using it in full screen mode is cool. 100% filled with information, pretty much.

Not quite finished yet though, still a couple extra things I want to add: some option (without adding more text to the page) to say “I’m tired of seeing this story, get rid of it” and have that data locally stored in the browser. If the article is a picture post, or at least has a prominent picture in it, then show the picture rather than the headline. Add options to change the gradient from black to lighter to other colours. Dynamically insert an entire new feed (this shouldn’t be that hard, just need to rejig some logic around).

Intellectual heights known only to YouTube

YouTube’s comments really suck. In fact, most of the videos suck too, but every comment is pretty much awful. This is problem most likely came around because of the size of the community just exploded, there’s no reason to be held with any respect.

Places like reddit are still in that point where they don’t have too many users, so the quality of comments is still pretty high. Talk in text speak and you’ll be down voted to oblivion. Whereas on YouTube that seems an okay thing to do.

Each video – even really obscure videos – always seems to have a new comment thread made within the last day or so, making it impossible to have an actual, productive conversation.

There’s also a problem with threads… If you click “reply” to most threads, you just start another thread… Sometimes it works as a nested comment, like expected.

So, to fix the problems we need a smaller community, with more power for each user to vote on the smarts of each comment… We obviously can’t get rid of 90% of the YouTube community, but why can’t we just ignore it?

I was thinking someone should make a Greasemonkey script which removes all the comments on videos, and replaces it with comments maintained by someone else’s service. The new service obviously won’t be adopted by 99% of the current YouTube raff so we’ll get a smaller, more sophisticated society of people commenting on videos.

I like this idea. Someone should do it, or maybe I should.

Edit: Looking into this more, you can probably use the Disqus API.

I make it a policy of mine that if three people in the same week ask me about something, that I should just make a blog post about it. This week’s apparent hot topic is HTTP redirection; there are tonnes of ways to do it and I’ve just been giving out a link about 301 redirects in various languages. Most people want to go with .htaccess method.

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.domain.com with your actual domain name.

The website’s a little out of date though; it no longer has to be a Linux server (did it ever have to be..?), so long as you have mod-rewrite enabled in your Apache conf file, you’ll be fine. Like the quote says, this just makes sure that anyone that comes to your website is using the www subdomain. (Sidenote, if you have  a choice of no sub-domain vs. “www.”, go without the sub-domain.) So, someone going to “neopets.com” will instantly (without them even seeing a page refresh) be taken to “www.neopets.com”.

That page doesn’t give much of an example of what all that code is doing though, so I’ll go through it here so that you can modify it better for your own use.

The “Options” line is an options directive, allowing you to set pretty much all of the options you can set in Apache conf files (so long as you have the right permissions; also, higher up directories override subdirectories). Here, we’re telling Apache that we want to follow system links (links to other directories, even though they’re no physical, like a shortcut). Your redirects most likely won’t fall apart if you don’t have that line.

The rewrite engine is where the awesome happens. The next line just turns it on.

The “rewritecond” is the evaluative part of the redirect. It checks to see if the URL that the user is looking at is the same as it’s argument. You can get the syntax for that evaluation from the rewrite engine’s man page, but essentially it’s just:

rewritecond %{variable_name} patterntocheckagainst

It uses a regex argument. If you don’t know regex, you’ll probably want to go and look at some tutorials first.

The [nc] at the end just makes the URL case insensitive. You can have multiple possible rewriteconds by using [or], and having another condition on the next line.

Last is the rewriterule, syntax here. Again though, it’s regex. It’s a useful skill for any one that codes in anyway, so you may as well learn it.

Again, there are flags, wrapped in square brackets. The [r=301] is telling the browser (and more importantly search engines) what type of redirect it’s doing; 301 is a permanent redirect. It’s just a HTTP status code, make sure you pick the right one. 307 is a temporary redirect.

If it’s still a bit over your head though, you could always contact me and get me to do it.

Growing up on LiveJournal and Neopets (gosh, I can’t believe it’s been so many years since I’ve used those websites) I think it’s understandable for me to forget that the Internet is actually full of people. Sometimes I think that subconsciously I imagine all this content online to have just appeared from no where, or written by people on other continents who will always remain a stranger. Even some of the people I’m friends with on MSN that I’ve never met are dehumanised in my mind.

That’s why it’s refreshing to bump around the Internet and find people who not only seem to exist, but live pretty damn close to me. I found these strangers through total serendipity. I was looking at the Fizzpop event page for today (which I can’t go to – I wouldn’t be able to get back home), and then ended up at the Digital Brum site.

They’re listing web related events around Birmingham, some of which I’d love to go to, if only to give me something really interesting to do, maybe meet a few more interesting people. Then I found out about Digital Brum which lists a whole load of other events happening around Birmingham.

Ultimately I ended up at the Birmingham Social Media Cafe website, where they were listing past attendees. An entire list of people in interesting positions, most of them with links to their products and blogs. There are some people like Rob Day who’re 16 years old and have two projects that are looking really awesome in the pipe line. Kind of makes me feel like I’ve wasted my teenage years. This is totally the age of the teenage entrepreneur, and so I’m disappointed in myself for not doing anything amazing. Still though, it’s inspiring for me to do something now.

Found Calum Brannan’s blog too. He has a meeting table. A meeting table! It’s weird how small things like that really get me excited about eventually working for a company. Hopefully a small company. He’s working on Youmeo, which really looks interesting. I was thinking the other day how annoying it is to have both my Facebook and Twitter to update. (A few people who attended that event are working on Youmeo on second glance. I’d love to work on a team project…)

All in all, I’m mad hyped about eventually having a career. At the moment (well, especially at the moment, whilst university is finished till October) my work load isn’t that big. Heck, I sleep in till one o’clock most days just because I have nothing to do. It’d be really nice to get a job at a web start up or something. Places like arc90 who have amazing ideas in their lab (but they’re American).

I guess I could actually full time start freelance work; looking for new clients from nine to five, rather than taking on the clients that come to me (which is only a small number really). When I’m not looking (I’d probably get bored with eight hours of cold-emailing people from job boards), I should be developing my knowledge on general stuff. There still stuff about WordPress I’d be interested in poking around more with.

I’m going to make tomorrow busy.

I’d probably be the person my friends would think most likely to lobby for laws net neutrality, but they’d be wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I’m massively pro-net neutrality and think it’s vital for the continued growth of the Internet and innovation. What I don’t agree with is further legislation.

In England, our current state of play is that the government thinks everything is fine, despite BT capping and throttling. I agree with them. I don’t think that the government should step in and force private companies to follow their morals. The government has no say in how BT should be running their company.

But I’m paying for an 8Mb connection! That’s what I should get.

No, you’re not paying for an 8Mb connection, you’re paying for the service laid out in the terms and conditions you signed up for. Terms which you said you agreed to when you made the contract for your service. Those conditions openly say “we’re going to throttle your connection to 896Kbps for streaming videos”, and everything else Ars is complaining about. If you don’t like that, there’s plenty of competitors who offer different terms. Use them.

There are hidden terms like this all over England; buy one get one free (the cheapest product is the free one) — free calls between 7am and 7pm (if you start a call at 6pm, and then go past 7pm, you’ll be charged for the entire call) — 30% less fat! (30% smaller bag). It just enforces that it’s important to read the small print. That’s all the onus there is, and all that there should be on businesses.

Whilst I don’t think there should be harsher laws about how terms are written, I do think it’d be a good idea for businesses to voluntarily add a simpler version of their terms. Just to make their customers happier. I can’t seem to find it, but I once found a website who had the normal legal text – hard to understand by anyone that’s not a lawyer – but by the side they had simple explanations. In someone like digg’s case, by the side of…

By creating and posting Content to Digg, you warrant that you own all rights to the Content, agree that the Content will be dedicated to the public domain under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, available at http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ and that you will not object to the use of the Content by Digg in any context. To clarify, the above does not apply to the Content on external sites linked to by the original submission.

They could have “this just means that anything you give us is going to be put into the public domain, so anyone can do anything with it.” Digg’s ToS is actually pretty easy to read already, but other companies could really do with doing that too.

I don’t want to spend half an hour reading something before I can use a product!

That’s your choice, but the business has done everything they need to do in my opinion. You can’t complain when they suspend your account for doing something they don’t want, or when you’re hit with hidden charges. It’s your responsibility to read that stuff.

If the government can’t regulate, then who’s watching for consumer rights?

The consumers. If BT customer doesn’t like something they should leave BT, boycotting it. If enough customers are leaving (so it’s a big problem) BT will change. If you stick around with BT and put up with you, you’re sending the message that you’re okay with it.

That’s why I’m hopeful that if non-net neutrality comes into place, it’ll be fairly quickly kicked to the curb. There will always be some good guys in business. I’ve heard good things about Be. If there’s truly not anyone filling that need, then someone will pretty quickly notice it and set up a business there. (Hey, why not you?)

In sum, quit worrying about net neutrality, it’s here to stay. Government should keep regulating businesses, let the customers do that. (You can almost feel Ayn Rand in the room, amirite?)

Playing with Java and for some reason I’m getting this error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: AddingMachine (wrong
name: sum/AddingMachine)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(Unknown Source)
 at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
 at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
 at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
 at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(Unknown Source)
Could not find the main class: AddingMachine.  Program will exit.

I decided to Google it, like I do when ever I get an error of any kind. Then I remembered bing, and thought this is an ideal moment to try it out.

Bing being new isn’t an excuse that they can use to defend it; Microsoft has has years experimenting with search and should know just about as much as Google now, but they’re still making school boy errors. For instance,  this forum post is listed second in the results.

Bing should know it’s a forum, it’s pretty obvious. Then by that it could deduce that the person starting the thread is asking a question, likely my question. But there are no replies, so it’s clear that no one has answered it. Giving me that link is completely pointless. Google learnt that lesson years ago.

Back to the Java problem, I tried doing java -classpath . AddingMachine rather than just java AddingMachine and I get the same error…

Fix’d: I just copy-pasted the source from the java notes page I’m looking at. And the problem lied in it have a package sum; line. Just remove it.

Edit for protip: This is an error you’re running into because of packages, used to make java source files easier to manage. You should definitely check out this tutorial on packages if you’re having problems; Java Package Tutorial.

I’m leaving it a little late, but I wanna look through party policies, more specifically MEP policies. The people I have a choice of are listed for the West Midlands.

Is it wrong that I’ve mentally already ruled out Bushill-Matthews because he doesn’t have his own website? I guess it could show that he’s not exactly technically competent, and that’s really something that’s important for me to be expressed in Parliament especially at times when file sharing policy and law is being made. However, it looks like a Conservative policy to have all their MEPs on the same site, so I guess I can let them slide. Conservatives are the only people using @aol.com and @hotmail.co.uk addresses. Don’t they see the security implications of not hosting their own email servers?

Finding out what a person is standing for is working out to be really hard… Most of these pages are like CVs, or just blogs of political news, recounting the news too, not even offering their view on the matter. Assuming though that every single one of their views is the same as the party they stand for, I guess I’ll look around the party’s websites.

But they’re not much help either. Take immigration, a blatant issue at the moment, one of the hot ones that everyone needs an opinion on. Labour’s immigration page lists various facts over what’s happened whilst they’re in power, but I really fail to see why they’ve listed a few.

In 2007, we removed an immigration offender on average, every 8 minutes.

It’s nice to know that there are that many in the country. How did they get by you? We’re an island, it’s not like people can just flee across the border. And if immigrants are up to swimming an ocean to get in, I think maybe we should let them in on merit.

Other than saying they want to give ID cards to immigrants (wasn’t that happening to everyone anyway?), and increasing the number of people who work at these borders (which everyone wants to do), I don’t think they’ve mentioned anything controversial to differentiate themselves.

Oh, I suppose when you look at the Conservative page side by side with the Labour one, you see where differences are. Labour don’t have an interest in setting a limit to the number of immigrants allowed per year, which I can understand. If we have a system where we only allow people in that we need, why set a limit? Once all positions have been filled, just stop letting people in. Tory’s do want an arbitrary limit though, the point there being that too many slip through, and if we just say no to them before even letting them speak we’ll have lowered their burden on our public services. The Government has nothing to gain by allowing millions of people to come into the country, if anything it’d just make their jobs harder. I don’t see the point in setting a limit. I think we should just let in people we need, but be very strict about the guidelines for “who we need”. If there’s not a job position already available for them, leave that job for someone that’s already settled here. I’m a little bit shocked by it myself, but I guess that’s a point to Labour…

There’s these border patrol people too; Tory’s want them to be apart of the police, whilst Labour want them to have “police like powers”. Semantics really. Just something to argue about. The police are already over stretched as it is, why give them another job which requires them to get rather niche training. Have a specialist team to do that. Increases jobs and they’ll be more focused. Labour win.

Both of those points aren’t relevant to this election though, European Parliament doesn’t have the power (or the need) to touch either of those things. But it really shows that I have no other information to go on, other than the party policies. I can’t find much about what the hopeful MEPs want.

I can’t find anything the Lib Dems have said about immigration… What? I can’t say I’m surprised they don’t seem to have written up, public policies for most things. I’m not going to bother looking at UKIP. I’d never vote for a less globalised world.

Lib Dem Liz Lynne’s site has a few sections on her website listing a few things; Iraq, business, various campaigns. That’s exactly what I want to be reading! I clicked through to the business one. The links on there link to search results… completely pointless. Meh, I had such high hopes, Liz! Looks like she’s about giving business more power over themselves, and deregulating some things though.

Liz was [...] on the Vibrations Directive and the Noise Directive, negotiating a number of key amendments to make them less onerous on businesses.

I like this pro-business stance. I’m really all for businesses creating their own morals, even to the extent of Ayn Rand’s ideologies, and so they’re the ones that get punished for them if there’s a mistake.

All in all though, the Internet doesn’t really tell you enough to decided on who to vote with. I’m going to keep researching, but unless something changes my mind, I think it’ll be Lib Dems for me, despite it being a wasted vote here (but hey, maybe enough people will think like me).

I plan on being busy tomorrow. Today wasn’t much of a productive feat either, despite me being back home. Apparently a change of scenery hasn’t inspired me to work. It looks like my main village is about to be nobled though, so I guess I won’t be playing Tribal Wars for much longer…

Tomorrow, I’m gonna head to dad’s around five o’clock, because I can get a lift at that time. I want to fix my bike up (it’s been out back for  a while now, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s rusted beyond repair but I want to try. It’ll give me something relatively cheap to work on. Then, I think it’d be cool to just ride for a while. Mostly to increase my fitness, to be honest.

Then, ride back to mum’s – since I don’t have a bed back at dad’s house yet (the spare room got filled with junk as soon as I moved away to university). Or, better yet, I wanna check out the library. I’m not sure if they have wireless there but if they do it’d be rocking. If not, no problem I can do computer science theory stuff I need to do anyway – I’m sure they have books.

I’ve decided to switch back to using WordPress.com for a while, and domain forwarding to it. So, all the links and stuff should still work. Only problem in the switch over was that my tags and categories got messed up so I’ll have to spend an hour or two just going through all of them to fix them up.

For those that don’t know, wordpress.org is the open source website, where you can run the software yourself. WordPress.com is a commercial arm (they have to make money somehow) where you pay for certain services, and have a lot less freedom.

I decided to “downgrade” because there’s blatantly something wrong with my server. I don’t think it’s anything on my part, more on the part of my VPS providers (since their websites were down too). After weeks of slow loading, and database crashes, I’ve decided to just go self hosted for  a while.

The blog should be way faster now, and always work. Downside is it cost me £7 to have the domain forwarded. And I can no longer installed plugins, or themes. I can only use the ones WordPress.com offers. I can’t show ads the way I used to (only to first time visitors, on certain single pages/posts). I wasn’t making much money off them anyway, so it’s not a big loss. And I’m a little worried with putting my information in someone else’s business. I’m really hoping I’m not surrendering any copyrights to this data by putting it here (I’ve not read up enough yet).

Other than it being managed by someone else, I don’t see any up side to WP.com. I’ll be switching out as soon as I get a better server.

Could be the DNS playing catch up still, but it doesn’t look like I can use my OpenID any more…

Maybe I’m just overly stressed tonight, but playing Splitter for the past 17 levels has given me the biggest headache I’ve had in days. I’m not sure why I carried on playing for so long whilst leaving that stupid music turned on! I know it’s flash game and that they need to stay small, and to do that they use looped music. But developers, please, make sure the loop isn’t obvious and god dammed annoying. It’s totally possible, Bloody Fun Day did it, so did Areas. Tonnes have. It is possible.

It’s not even noticeably annoying, until you’ve heard it for fifteen minutes and then BAM! average sized headache.

I'd much rather take my knife to him, thanks.

That stupid grin on the ball guy’s face? Grr! What’s he got to be so happy about? He could blink or something once in a while. I have no urge to help him in the slightest.

Physics engine games are always fairly fun for a while, until you get to the impossible levels that you can only hope to complete by chance after downing half a litre of Felix Felicis. Challenge is always good, but when you know you’re doing the right thing, just not at the exact right millisecond it gets really quite annoying. I spent six or so tries on the stupid level pictured above before angrily giving up and deciding to bitch about it on my blog.

I don’t like this game. I’m sure you’re all dying for one though, so here’s a walk through. At least this video has the common decency to mute the sound and overlay his own music.

The dwarf swings his pick-axe.  The dwarf hits!

                             ---
                            --
                            |
                           --
                                --
                              ---

                                                        ...-
                                                       ....--
                                                 G G  ..G.h..
                                                     h.dG@.%.
                                                      - --*..  -
                                                         -#.   |
                                                         #
                                                         |  |

Shamess the Bandit         St:18/01 Dx:18 Co:17 In:7 Wi:7 Ch:6  Chaotic S:2728
Dlvl:6  $:22 HP:5(58) Pw:0(0) AC:8  Xp:6/609 T:2456

I actually really don’t like FeedDemon. They’ve clearly tried to act like Google Reader in a lot of ways (or maybe Reader decided to be like them when they started) but Google does everything much better. Which annoys me.

I was really look forwards to venturing out beyond Google’s services and trying others but Google’s monopoly on awesome is held really tightly for some reason.

I didn’t like FeedDemon because:

• It doesn’t mark items as read after I’ve been looked at the item. After the item has been selected it should immediately become read, keeping an item as unread isn’t the default action that I’d want.
• Control + D to go to the next unread item. I’m sure you can change that, but by default that’s a dumb idea. What’s wrong with J (which works in some cases, but not others)? I typical action such as going to the next item shouldn’t require a combination key press. I know this sounds lazy, but I have to move my hand to press control, and that annoys me.
• It seems to be using Internet Explorer in the reading pane. Not so much of a big deal, but wha’?

I really do like the syncing with Google though. I know I wanted to get away from Google to start with, but it’s more about working in the cloud than fanboyism. I like all my stuff being synced. My laptop should really just be  a throw away device.

I also liked the monospaced, large reading area though. But for now I’ll just give Reader a quick CSS hack to do that.

For the past few years I’ve been using Google Reader as my homepage, since I go there every few hours really frequently. Today though, I’ve decided that I want to change the way I use RSS feeds. Instead of just lumping together all the things I want to read in Google Reader, and then being overwhelmed when there’s a few hundred things  a day, I just want to keep Reader for infrequently updated feeds. More a feed reader (web comics, forum threads I want to keep track of, WordPress trac posts I want to keep track of) than a content reader (TechCrunch, Valleywag, Mashable). For content, I can go to their websites.

I’ve also decided to try out FeedDemon.

That leaves my homepage empty now, and I’ve been thinking of sites to replace Reader. I figured start.io might be a good idea before realising that my bookmarks do that job in a much more organised and quicker way. I actually really don’t like iGoogle, and I’m not sure why. I have a perfectly good search bar with more functionality right up top of my browser.

BBC News is pretty depressing most of the time. I like to be caught up on the news, but death, war, and economic failure isn’t really the pick me up I want to see first thing in the morning. Maybe I’ll go with /r/funny. That’d be new content each time I go there, and it’d make me happy. I’ll go with that for a while.

I wanted to carry on a discussion about Card that was being held over at the LGBT reddit. I want to have it here because there my view points seemed to have been just pushed aside because I was sticking up for him and most people just decided to label him a homophobe and move along. It’s really all you can expect for a somewhat biased subset of people.

Card’s claim to fame is the Ender Saga, which I really hope you’ve all read. If not, let me know. I’ll freaking buy you a copy of Ender’s Game myself.

He has always been vocal about queers. In fact, his article he wrote about people calling themselves both gay and Mormon has been in my “Interesting prose” bookmark folder for a few years now, and I think it pretty much sums what he feels. He’s not homophobic in the sense that he’d go out and kill off some butt munchers, and I doubt he’d ever even nudge someone in that direction to do that. He just doesn’t like gay people interfering with his religion, and that’s totally acceptable. Most religions have conservative “rules” you have to stick to, beliefs you must hold, and that applies especially the Latter-Day Saints. If you’re gay you’re just not invited.

In the same way that if I’m asked to an invite-only party, and you’re not, you can’t go. It’s not that the hosts hate you, it’s just that they don’t really want you there. And why should they? It’s their event. Their religion.

Same goes for marriage really. It’s a Christian thing. What right do the government have to start meddling in it? The church and state should be separate; that’s usually said to stop religion messing with laws, but it’s also true to stop law messing with religion.

I’m not sure on Card’s views on civil partnerships – different but equal. Assuming neither partner in a civil partnership wanted children (for the sake of this paragraph) I think he’d be okay with it. After all, then it’d just be a legal thing and Judges wouldn’t be fucking up his religion in ways it never wanted to be, in ways that specifically are outlawed in their rules.

Up until this point I agree with all of the above; religion should sit in one corner, and politics should sit in another, and their paths should never meet. However, I disagree with Card – not angrily, because I understand why he disagrees with me – as soon as children step into the picture.

I don’t see why gay people can’t have children. I’m pretty sure that having two same sex parents doesn’t mess up a child in any way. The heterosexual desires are inbuilt in heterosexual children, and the same for gay children. It really isn’t a choice, I’m not arguing that here, and I’d love to as I find the article Card mentions he’s going to write “soon” (back last year, so I guess it’s around somewhere). It not being a choice is what I’m basing my opinion on concerning gay people having children. If it turns out that it affects the child in anyway I’ll seriously reconsider my stance on this. I wish I could go out and look at data for how gay parented kids turn out, but I’m guessing that they’re all written by extremists, on both sides so I won’t look. But this isn’t the place for that argument (and I will delete any comment bringing that argument up, email me if you really want to).

I also disagree with him that it’s wrong to allow children to see that there can be happy homosexual relationships, and that they can be just as successful (and as catastrophically dismal) as heterosexual couplings. As a (playing-around-with-the-ideas-of) Objectivist, I’d say that every human has equal rights, and the law should promote those individuals however it can to aid their safety. Morality on the other hand should be controlled by organisations, in this argument religions, and not the government.

PS. Although I’ve only read Ender’s Game so far (just waiting till I can afford Speaker) I’m pretty sure that Card doesn’t put much about gays in his books. There’s no reason not to buy his books. Whilst boycotting is typically a good way to get a business to change their ways, refusing to buy his books isn’t going to stop him believing in what he believes in, and so you’re just missing out on some of the best writing ever. I have amazing small attention span, and can happily sit through reading his massively long articles despite him saying stuff I don’t believe in.

Good idea, that doesn't work.

For me at least anyway, and I’ve only tried it on two WordPress installations running bleeding edge 2.8. I get this message, click allow, and then all pages work once. Caching on the first load.

Then, if I refresh the page, or go back to it later, everything loads without the style sheet and JavaScript – the cached stuff. To fix it, I had to go into Options > Advance > Network and then remove my websites from the list.

I guess they’re for some reason competing with Google Gears, which makes little sense. Why compete? Why not just advertise Gears? They do exactly the same thing from what I can see.

Update: A lot of people are getting here to find out how to use Gears in the Firefox beta. You can use all your extensions (even if Firefox says they’re not compatible) by editing a single option. Of course, if you do that you could end up crashing Firefox or something, but you can just start in safe mode and disable it again.

Type about:config into Firefox’s address bar and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.

Right-click anywhere. Choose New>Boolean. Make the name of your new config value extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.

Make another new boolean pair called extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set the value to false.

Restart Firefox.

Almost a hundred percent of the time our society works on the premise of being rewarded for doing something. To put that in little less vague terms; we make something, and then we sell it. People like having money to treat themselves to things, ergo people keep creating more things, to make more money. That’s capitalism.

I’ve known for sometime that’s not my thought pattern, not how I feel the world should be. People should be making money to make stuff, not making stuff to make money. That just leads to patterns and habits, which are always bad for development. Ender was brilliant because he noticed this – noticed that flying in formations is stupid, people get used to formations, but never change them, no innovation comes out of it. So lets not do formations.

To make that analogy make more sense, look at cars. People like cars, they get the job done. Consumers don’t have any problems with them, and will keep buying them. So the manufacture companies keep making them. Sure, this engine goes a little bit faster, but it’s the same technology. No innovation.

I want someone to develop a new engine, which doesn’t require petrol or diesel. Maybe we can up the game even more and say lets not have any type of fuel. But Shane! You need fuel to make the wheels move! I disagree. I’m no engineer (so maybe this was a bad example), but it looks like magnets can cause a pretty powerful motor. Oh. That’s cool. Why don’t I have this in my car? Because no one wants to risk losing money investing, and researching it, and potentially realising that in fact, magnets make a sucky engine. Why look into an engine that won’t make us money?

The liberal part of me really doesn’t want the government to interfere by forcing private companies to invest in innovation. The socialist in me (which seems to be growing more and more each day) really thinks that if they’re not helping humanity willingly, maybe they should be forced.

I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

–Ayn Rand

Just a note on how Chrome handles it’s rounded corners.

I found out about CSS3’s rounded corner support for Mozilla and Webkit browsers and happily started using it. Turns out though that Chrome currently doesn’t have the shorthand tag for it like Mozilla does – I’m sure it’s something they’re working on though (or maybe even just forgot).

What I mean is that whilst you can do this:

-moz-border-radius: 2px 2px 15px 15px;

For the radius to be applied clockwise starting from top-left, you can’t do that for Webkit at the moment. So you have to write it out long hand like:

-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 2px;
-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 2px;
-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 15px;
-webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 15px;

It’s a tad annoying, but at least Chrome support it, unlike some browsers.

Update: Lots of people seem to be getting to this post via Google, but not staying for long. Comment with what you’re looking for, and I’ll update this post this better information (helping you, and other people that come along later).

Realising I’ve been at my laptop pretty much 13 hours a day for the past month, I decided to take a break from it. Granted, the break was only two hours forty minutes, but it seemed much longer and I felt that I’d reached the high point of how relaxed I’d become, and actually felt myself becoming more stressed.

I guess I just don’t have anything else to do… When I’ve not been infrequently out with high school friends from back here I’ve just been bouncing between xbox and my laptop. In fact, whilst at the xbox I usually have my laptop open next to me… Offline hobby seeking required.

Oddly, I only got a 40 on this survey about having an Internet addiction, and I was totally truthful.

Since I’ve been back for Easter I’ve been working by sitting on the sofa, with the laptop in front of me. It was cool to start with; all comfortable and what not, but now it’s getting annoying not to mention painful. I think that’s mostly the reason my concentration has massively been waining more than usual.

There’s definitely a few things that a programmer needs, despite my thinking anyone could do it when I first started. A desk is one of them, with lots of space for my laptop, and a second monitor (lots and lots of screen space), and a notebook (I’m always doodling things that make no sense to most people, but really helps me program).

I can’t even call it “taking a break”, but I’ve given up on trying to work and decided to download Wrath of the Lich King. I’m not even sure if it’ll run on my 8MB shared memory for graphics, but we’ll see I suppose. I plan on deleting and uninstalling it after this month’s subscription dies out, which should be sometime soon.

Downloading it shouldn’t be a problem whilst at my mum’s either. She recently got her connection speed bumped up… I’ve never seen anything this fast before…

I wonder if this'll be constant...

Posted in Freelance, Programming, World of Warcraft ]]> http://blog.shamess.info/2009/04/18/a-desk-is-definitely-required-for-productivity/feed/ 0 Shamess wrath-highspeed-connection http://blog.shamess.info/2009/04/16/a-step-in-the-wrong-direction-for-paid-content/ http://blog.shamess.info/2009/04/16/a-step-in-the-wrong-direction-for-paid-content/#comments Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:49:47 +0000 Shane http://blog.shamess.info/?p=614 ]]>

I think it’s important that new generations look into alternate ways of doing everything – specifically in this post though I’m talking about ways copywriters can make money from their content. Businesses need to seek out people with ideas that don’t stick to the status quo because when people get into a habit or a life style, it’s hard for them to get out of it.

There’s this new company that’s in the talking stages with various websites, Journalism Online, who has noticed that advertising revenues just aren’t cutting it any more, and paper sales of publishers’ content isn’t selling as much thanks to the Internet. That’s a valid and real problem for the media world. Their solution? Charge people to read the content. That’s an outdated monetisation method that just won’t work.

The reason it’s been chosen is that Journalism Online is headed by three people all of which are from the biz. Former producers, former executives. They’ve been around for years and charging people for the content is what’s comfortable for them, it’s what they know. But it’s an antiquated system which doesn’t follow along with the ethos of the Internet; “I’ll get it from some place else for free.”

Ars seems to think this is viable because some other publishers are already doing this and quite successfully. The Economist charges more than $100 a year for subscriptions and that’s where they make the bulk of their money (which is odd in an industry where advertising revenue is the biggest earner typically).

The Economist’s demographic is high salaried, business minded, career orientated, older people. Eventually, those people will die. Younger people – the people who business always want to target – aren’t getting their news from paper-based publications; they’re getting it from the Internet. For free. And they become to expect that. Users get really annoyed when things change (Facebook homepage update, LiveJournal’s shift to Basic and Plus accounts a while ago, Twitter stopping sending SMSs to UK phones, take your pick for an example), and going from getting our news for free to having to start paying for a subscription for the same thing we’ve been getting for years makes us angry.

Journalism Online’s approach to changing websites that we use everyday will work for a short while – whilst the people that are used to paying are still buying. But when they stop, you’ll have no customers left.

This may be wrong, but it shouldn’t cause a system failure. Just saying.

<?php

//  A hard coded list of websites for now
$feeds[] = "http://www.reddit.com/.rss";
$feeds[] = "http://feeds.digg.com/digg/popular.rss";
$feeds[] = "http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index";
$feeds[] = "http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml";
$feeds[] = "http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot";
$feeds[] = "http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index";
$feeds[] = "http://www.hecklerspray.com/feed";

//  Pick one, and open it
$chosen = rand (0, count ($feeds) - 1);
$feed = file_get_contents ($feeds[$chosen]);

$dom = domxml_open_mem ($feed);
//  Nab all the items
$items = $dom->get_elements_by_tagname ('item');
//  Pick a random node
$chosenNode = rand (0, count ($items) - 1);

//  And get the <link>
$itemLink = $items[$chosenNode]->get_elements_by_tagname ('link');

foreach ($itemLink as $item) {
  echo $item->value ();
}

?>

After working on Summer09 all day (that’s its working title), I’ve decided to take a break now that the hours can now be called “small”.

I was Vimeo stumbling, happy that I have high speed internet access to watching videos in HD, when I found this.

If you’re too lazy to watch the video, basically what it is is a person once in a while opening their home/office/space to random workers, typically freelancers from the looks of things, in a really casual working session. I guess it’s a lot like a hackspace, but solely for laptop work. I love that there are places like this, and I really wish there were more of them.

I’ve looked through the workatjelly wiki for places in the UK that do these, but it doens’t look like there are any set up at the moment. For the moment I’ll stick with the hackspace stuff.

There’s a meeting on Saturday which I’ve nabbed a ticket for, and am definitely going. I’m just planning on taking my laptop so far, but if I can find the money to, I think I’ll hunt down a Maplins and get a arduino board (which I’m not even sure what it is) and generally geek out. I’m hugely excited if not slightly nervous about meeting a group of strangers.

After doing a few hours of market research (not exactly in depth, but a quick glance over my market) it turns out there is a definite gap. I’ve found a few websites (two) that offer exactly what I’m offering, and a few more that offer close to my service.

After playing with the former two (they give out two week free trails) it looks like they both designed fairly badly. They’re definitely not easy to navigate and both use confusing terminology. I’m not sure if they’re trying to avoid Microsoft’s names that have been used in their offline solution, but if they are they’re doing so needlessly. They’re not trademarked terms – they’re everyday words in the field – and changing them causes confusion for everyone. Especially when they use one term that’s already used within the field, but they’re using it for a completely different thing!

They’re missing out blatantly obvious features that seem simple to program in my head. I’m not going to mention them here, but I’ve done so in a OneNotebook. (Which is an awesome and under rated piece of software, by the way.) The feature I’m most excited about, and the one that I think business most need, is completely missed out.

One of the competitors I looked into even completely misses out on a vital feature for their service. And they’re the business that’s charging $250 a month for their lowest package, which could explain why my possible customer projections was so low for them.

They’re also imposing limits on their service which are totally wrong. I like to think that a forte of mine is knowing how to monetise services (in fact, it’s a consultancy job I’d love to do, and I plan to do more blog posts on my views for large, net properties), and I definitely disagree with how both these businesses are charging.

I couldn’t really find any other companies that do exactly what I want to offer.  Other companies I did find though are hoping to completely remove the need for my service for their customers. I can see why that’s a massively attractive prospect for the customer. This is a service where a business would just outsource this aspect of their activities. However, there’s absolutely no reason why (so long as I make my product awesome enough) these companies that I see as competition at the moment shouldn’t become my customers.

Sorry about this all being vague. I just don’t want my idea to be stolen so early in the game.

I mentioned Microsoft having a software based application that does what my service does, and I should probably talk about why they aren’t currently competing with me. Microsoft’s version is software based, where as mine would be cloud based. In the future I truly believe software will be completely removed from out computers, in place of a browser (not even a browser, probably) where we do everyone of our activities online. We can already do almost everything (*winkwink*) from Office in Google Docs, and that trend is only going to intensify.

Businesses like the portability of being able to do their processes without being locked into their offices at their desktops, or having to buy separate software licenses for their laptops, desktops, home desktops, etc, etc. The fact that they can access all their data wherever in the world is awesome too, in fact why not even have employees that live on the opposite side of the world? Presentation and meeting applications have been revolutionised by the Internet and web apps and can happen any where. They also don’t have to worry about the hardware, that’d be my job. They don’t have to worry about scalability either! My servers should be able to handle ten times more data than they want me to store and still run perfectly. Tonnes of reasons why web apps trump applications, and I’ve barely started talking about it.

It’s true that Microsoft are moving into that area though. So area Google. So are other companies. That doesn’t worry me. They’re not working on what I’m doing at the moment. Which is integral; why would they start working on their own products if they can just buy business? I’m not saying I want to run this business for a year and then drop it for a quick sum of cash – I’d request to stay on in the company in some influential point (not just “founder”) – I’m just saying that’s an opportunity that I’m not ignoring.

More and more software giants are starting to give a shit about web apps because they can’t be pirated. You can’t crack serial codes for an online account to something like you can for Spore. That means a sustainable score of revenue for them, rather than a short jolt of revenue on release, and then that stopping as you watch the seeder count increase on The Pirate Bay.

It’s taken me about five hours to work out that it doesn’t look like it’s possible for PHP to convert Excel files (xlsx or xls) to XML, or any other plain text and then to XML. I can see why some projects take much longer than they should, and why programming only takes up a little more than half of that time. The hours I’ve spent around Google today are probably going to be reflected in most days.

Anyway, I found a C library that does that, so I’m going to have to use it. That shouldn’t confuse the PHP code too much, but it makes me feel uncomfortable. Do different languages often overlap like that? Scrap that. Looks like that library creates XLS files, the exact opposite of what I want… (I got excited when someone linked to it in IRC, so I assumed.) Back to square one, eh?

The annoying thing is that if I was using ASP, I could totally do it from within the language. That doesn’t make me want to start using ASP though, to be honest.

I was looking through a Mashable post on some start-up companies which always gets me motivated. I want to be motivated because I wanna start working on that web app I want to release by the time I get back to uni in October. Seven months should be more than enough to program almost anything, but typically my heart isn’t in it. Hopefully it will be this time though.

I was reading that post and suddenly realised what I could make. I’m not going to release it here (because that’s how cool it is), but I am going to say that it’s focused on business, rather than social which I just assumed it would. Might not even happen, I’m gonna do some research and some screen designs and stuff.

Does it being business orientated mean that it needs to be less sans-serif and more serif? Less curved edges? WordPress looks professional, but more matured because of that. I dunno, I’m not a designer. I suppose that I’ll just make it bland until it looks like a finished product and then get a designer to come fix it up. (I’m more likely to make money from a finished project than an unfinished one, so why started shelling out money when it’s unfinished?)

Kevin Rose apparently draws out screens or something? Hopefully they’ll follow up the video he and Tim did. They’re basically talking about how investing works these days. Hugely interesting and enlightening.

Today marks a time in my life where I can do even less work that I’ve been doing so far; the Easter holidays. In fact, it’s more like breaking up for the year. The only reasons I have to return to university are two exams in May, after that I’m free to be where I like until October.

I’m not going to set out aims because I never reach them, and I look like someone that sucks at keeping to lists. Instead, I’m just gonna say somethings that it’d be cool to get done.

First thing is making an actual web app that actually does something and release it. My problem here is I always have ideas and then typically seconds later I read on Techcrunch that a start up has had an amazingly innovative idea that’s shockingly like mine. So, I’ll at least try and make a cool bookmarklet over the holidays. It’ll do something cool, honest.

I totally want to make my Tumblr the top search for shamess. It pretty much has everything to do with me; my tweets, my shared RSS stories, even this blog. It’s pretty damn nifty. I don’t know many people that use it though. Tumblr was actually an idea of mine too, which I guess I had an age too late. I was thinking of making an extension for Firefox that’d let me grab a piece of text/image/video and stick it on another site for later viewing. Then I found that’s exactly what Tumblr did, so I started out there.

Another idea I had a while ago was what start.io is doing. In fact, I already have that system on my localhost page, but I think I’ll likely switch to start.io now. Anything I don’t like about it I can just change using a Greasemonkey script (like showing the links in a different order depending on what time it is).

I picked up WoW again today, in all it’s lowest graphical settings, OpenGL glory. I played a hefty amount of hours before I wasn’t having fun. Maybe I should just limit myself to an hour or two playing? That’s the height of fun before I get bored and leave the game thinking “I can’t believe I just spent so long playing this dumb game.” That’s just a downer. It’s just so damn easy to forget that you’re supposed to be having fun.

Same as Tribal Wars, really. My tribe is proper hardcore playing, and up annoyed at me for lagging behind. To be honest, I have been trying, I’ve no idea what has caused me to fall behind so much. But either way they’re acting like I’m a bad person because I’m not up in the tens of thousands of points and have three villages. Really? I play the game till it stops being fun each day, if that’s before I reach optimum pointage, then that’s the way it is.

I came to this page and was immediately hit with a massive bout of exhaustion. That makes no sense, since I slept all night, if anything I’m over sleeping as of late. Despite that, I’m determined to explain why I’ve been so happy for the past few days.

First, my passion for working in industry, with a team of people, has totally been reignited. For some reason I found myself on Tumblr again, which I’m loving. Somehow I ended up at the official Tumblr staff account, and dawdled around people like Jacob Bijani’s tumblelog. I honestly spent an entire night, probably the best part of six hours, reading the latest ten pages. Wikipedia style, I kept ending up at random web pages he links to (and then pages those pages link to) and found masses of amazing stuff.

Ultimately that night I ended up at taking a look around tumblr offices. Gosh, how much I’d love to have a desk like that, have actual projects to work on, and people around me to do that stuff with. I mean, I’m all for being a lone programmer when I need to be, but sometimes it’s just cool to geek out of programming. I don’t really have anyone like that at the moment.

Second, I found an article on Wired (via reddit) on “hack spaces“. Pretty much a workshop for awesome people to meet up and work on stuff. Hardware tinkering, programming, tonnes of different stuff. They usually have a persistent space, like a rented room or something, where they can keep their stuff and just waste an entire day away. I hear that some are open 24/7.

Turns out it’s not just an American thing (it didn’t even start in America), but there’s a whole group of people all over the world. I found that there’s a hack space being created in Birmingham that I really want to be apart of. I’m not sure how I’m going to afford it; these things are funded by their community, with members paying a subscription. There was talk of it being about £50 a month, which I don’t think I’ll be able to make. Since I’ll be in Leicester most of the time, it might work out cheaper to just pay for meets I attend.

I’m massively excited about this.

The third thing is MCR  released a song for Watchmen. You’ve no idea how happy it makes me to hear their music again. Gerard’s voice just makes me grin like a lunatic. Honestly, standing in the middle of the street with a huge grin, lunatic. Considering it’s the thing that makes me happiest, I’ve no got much to say about it…

Last time I quickly ran through how to add a button to your Firefox bar by making your own extension, but all it did was open a cruddy, static alert box.

In an effort to remind myself how to manage preferences, I’m going to make it so the user can decide what text should be alerted.

First we’ll be needing to add some kind of options dialogue box. For now, I’m just going to add a pane to the options window. We need to make another overlay for the preferences in that case. Create a new text file called prefs.xul. Doing that is explained pretty well in the pane creation section of the Rietta tutorial.

That website it clearly out of date though, since it says this:

If you did not know what you want to merge with, the DOM Inspector is your best tool for looking through browser code and finding element IDs.

Which is no longer true; Firefox doesn’t ship with that DOM Inspector anymore. So, I’ve really no idea how to find the DOM element ID’s I’m supposed to be merging with.

Rietta do a good job of explaining how to link preferences with the inputs too. They don’t mention how to make your stuff get laid out nicely though. I think you can use CSS like normal (using style). There’s a page on tags you can use over MDC.

Once you’ve designed your overlay in XUL, you’ll need to actually overlay it by adding it in your chrome.manifest, like you did with the browser.

overlay chrome://browser/content/preferences/preferences.xul chrome://your-addon/content/prefs.xul

Open up your options window, and you should see your pane there now.

Mine definitely needs to be prettier. (The screenshot is for the addon I'm working on, not this example.)

When you change the data in your fields and press ‘Ok’ they’ll automatically be updated and saved. You’ll be able to see them in your about:config too.

Now we can go ahead and make our javascript file, save it in your content folder. This’ll just be like any other javascript function you’d normally write.

We need to use XPCOM in order to get and set preferences from inside a javascript file. That makes my javascript file look like this:

//  Gets the text from the store user preference and returns it
function getAndReturnText () {
  //  Installise the preferences service
  var pref = Components.classes['@mozilla.org/preferences-service;1'].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIPrefBranch);

  //  Message box showing the text the user entered on the options pane
  alert (pref.getCharPref ('extensions.timesink.possibleWebsites'));
}

Doesn’t do much at the moment, until we change the oncommand event we added to our button (in browser.xul). You also need to include the javascript in any overlays with you’re using it.

<script type="application/x-javascript" src="chrome://your-addon/content/mycode.js" />

After learning all that, I ended up with these tabs open, which may be more help to you.

The game I’m working on at the moment is a little bit of a clone of Uplink, an awesome hacker style game I played back in the day. I was too young to buy it back then (I think I was just playing the demo), and I sort of stopped playing it after a while.

I’m designing my game pretty much from memories of Uplink, but I’m a little bit stuck for inspiration on how to do a certain aspect (gosh, check me out being all secretive and careful with my words) so I decided to nab Uplink again and try see how they did it.

I decided to pirate it until I have money – I  know I’m strongly against the “I’m allowed to pirate because I’m poor” thing, but I genuinely will buy the multipack of their games when I do have money next. It pains me even more than it’s a small development company and not some multiconglomerate that I’m stealing from.

But the reason for my posting here is the comments on the torrent page. First, it’s ironic that people trying to download a hacker game don’t know how to install it. Second, it’s awesome to see that some of the people on there have already bought the game and they’re just torrenting it now for their own reasons. I’m against the “Oh, I bought a copy on CD, so now I’m allowed to bit torrent it” argument too, but it’s better than nothing. It at least shows that bit torrent sometimes does drive sales.

I’m creating a pseudo-file system for my game, using a MySQL database as the FAT. I thought it would be fairly simple at first, but as I was about to program it, I realised that my method I planned on using is hugely expensive. Since it’s a call that’ll be used hundreds of times each time the player plays for a short period I really can’t do with it being a resource intensive feature.

ER model of directory table (I'll change this to a prettier one when I have the energy and time to play around in GIMP)

Basically, it’s just navigating directories. Here’s how they’re stored in the database, according to the ER model to the right:

harddrive_directories (directoryID, directoryName, parent)

The foreign key inside the same table with the primary key through me for a second, but I understand that now.

My problem is when a user gives me a string like “/foo/bar/alien/”, and I then have to find the ID for the directory labeled “alien”. I obviously can’t just search for directories called “alien” because there could be a “/foo/alien/” or any other combination. (Though to cut out any needless directory traversing, it would be faster to do that; see if there are any directories called “alien”, if there’s only one work backwards, which is much easier to check if it’s what I’m looking for, if there’s more than one, we don’t have much choice.)

So, I look for a root directory called “foo”. There can only be one, so that’s fairly simple. Now I have foo’s ID, I can look up all of the directories called “bar” whose parent is fooID. And so on, untill I get to a directory called “alien”.

Now I’ve said it outloud, there’s really only n lookups (where n is the number of directories in the path), which isn’t so bad. Is there a better way of doing this though?

Since I’ve done absolutely no prep for this exam, I figured I’d do so in here. Here’s the mock. Usually I’d say break down what you’re being asked to do, but it seems like they’ve already done that for us.

Right clicking your project in the Solution Explorer to add a new item.

Create a website. First thing I’d do is insert the database class we need to be using. (Looks like an informal CC GNU GPL, so long as he keeps credit.) Do that by copying the text – all of it. Going back to Visual Studio, right clicking on your project, Add new item…, Class, Yes to the “Put it in the ‘App code’ folder”. Select everything, and paste the contents of that Word document for the table class (overwriting everything that was there). Rename that class to something more logical.

We also need to add the yabba database we’ve been given. Right click App_Data, Add existing item…, find and insert the database we’ve been given.

Add two fields, like it says, for the name and message. Validate inputs. I’ve no idea howwhy you’d use a function to validate two strings though, so I’m not going to.

Now, uhh… lets find how to use this database thing. I’m sure there was a class on it. Yep, here’s the presentation on it: Database and webservers. Written by Mathew Dean. Slide 13 gives you the code to connect to a database. And he talks about adding records here, on slide 2 and onwards.

Just to explain what this class actually does. When you create it, it nabs all the records and puts them into a hashed array (which has a key, and a value, rather than just an index number and a value). You add to that array like normal, using NewRecord, and then when you save it just updates the database according to that array of information.

Okay, I’m actually bored of this now.

Here’s the badly commented code for the first page.

    Protected Sub btnSubmit_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnSubmit.Click
        ' As if we're in C, variables at the top, for no reason. Regaurdless of if we need them. Which we don't.
        Dim Name As String
        Dim Message As String
        ' Make sure neither textbox is empty
        If (txtName.Text <> "" And txtMessage.Text <> "") Then
            Name = txtName.Text
            Message = txtName.Text

            'Connect to the database
            Dim MessagesDatabase As New DatabaseTable("yabba.mdb", "tblMessages")
            MessagesDatabase.NewRecord.Item("PostedBy") = Name
            MessagesDatabase.NewRecord.Item("MessageText") = Message
            MessagesDatabase.AddNewRecord()
            MessagesDatabase.SaveChanges()

            Response.Redirect("second.aspx")
        Else
            lblStatus.Text = "Something was empty. Try again."
        End If
    End Sub

Second.aspx is supposed to output all the messages. Have fun with that.

My button: look how cute he is!

What I’ll cover here is the steps that you should take to add a button to your Firefox toolbar, I think Thunderbird and stuff might be the same too. This isn’t a comprehensive guide, the links I link to are for that.

This is basically an article for me to dump loads of information I’ve accumulated. You won’t learn much just by only reading this article. Take a look through the links I give.

You’re basically making an extension, so you need the same file layout to start with. Here’s assuming you’re building your extension inside a folder named “extName”, call yours whatever you want though.

extName/
        chrome/
               content/
        chrome.manifest
        install.rdf

More indepth look at setting up the environment and folder structure.

Open install.rdf and paste the following:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<RDF xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
     xmlns:em="http://www.mozilla.org/2004/em-rdf#">

  <Description about="urn:mozilla:install-manifest">
    <em:id>addonname@whatever.com</em:id>
    <em:version>0.1</em:version>
    <em:type>2</em:type>

    <!-- Target Application this extension can install into,
         with minimum and maximum supported versions. -->
    <em:targetApplication>
      <Description>
        <em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
        <em:minVersion>1.5</em:minVersion>
        <em:maxVersion>3.0.*</em:maxVersion>
      </Description>
    </em:targetApplication>

    <!-- Front End MetaData -->
    <em:name>Addon name</em:name>
    <em:description>Description for addon</em:description>
    <em:creator>Your name</em:creator>
    <em:homepageURL>http://yourhomepage.com</em:homepageURL>
  </Description>
</RDF>

Change whatever stuff. Don’t make the minVersion less than 1.5, because you’re blatantly lying. Lots changed in 1.5 that doesn’t act the same way now. Don’t change that weird looking id. The first id needs to be changed though. It doesn’t have to be a real email address, but it does have to be in email address format. More indepth look at install.rdf.

Firefox’s appearance is created by using XUL (”zool”). We create our own XUL documents which we tell Firefox to merge with the base template. We say stuff like “add this chunk of XML to the status bar” and it merges that data. You can overwrite sections too. We call our XUL “overlays“.

Add these lines to chrome.manifest.

content     youraddon    chrome/content/
overlay chrome://browser/content/browser.xul chrome://youraddon/content/browser.xul

That basically says “the content of youraddon is in ‘chrome/content’, which is  direct relative to this file.” Here’s a more comprehensive explaination of what it means.

Time to make some images for your button to display. You need to make two, one 24×24 pixels, and a smaller version 16×16 pixels. I stuck them in chrome/content/images/ but so long as they’re in chrome/content/ it shouldn’t matter. Then you need to make a CSS style for those buttons. This’ll do:

/*  skin/toolbar-button.css  */

#youraddon-button {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://myextension/content/btn_large.png");
}

toolbar[iconsize="small"] #youraddon-button {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://youraddon/content/btn_small.png");
}

I think it’s standard to separate your content from your skinning, but I’ve not bothered with that. It’ll probably cause me all sorts of problems later.

Create chrome/content/browser.xul:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="chrome://youraddon/content/style.css" type="text/css"?>
<overlay id="youraddonBrowser" xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul">
<toolbarpalette id="BrowserToolbarPalette">
<toolbarbutton id="youraddon-button" class="toolbarbutton-1"  label="Your addon name" oncommand="alert ('hey');" />
</toolbarpalette>
</overlay>

Pretty standard XML styling. Define it as your overlay. Tell it you want to merge with the “BrowserToolbarPalette“, and add a button. That class is required to style it like a toolbar button. The label is the mouse over text. oncommand is the Javascript that will run when you press the button. That’s another article though.

I bookmarked and shared (foxmarksxmarks is cool) all the pages I ended up having open at the end of button creation, so go ahead and look through them.

I’ve been doing a lot more freelance stuff lately, and I feel like I’ve learnt something new (or a lesson has been stressed a lot more unto me) with every client.

Work off-line.

This definitely feels like more trouble than it’s worth, but trust me on this. I work with WordPress addons and fixes mostly, and I’ve found it’s always best to just grab their copy of WordPress, including their plugins and database, and run that on your localhost (or where ever). That way you’re running their installation warts and all (in case they changed some of the WordPress code without noticing or something),  so you’ll even have the same bugs as them.

Although WordPress mostly looks after itself with respect to the php.ini settings, if you’re working on something that doesn’t you may even want to yoink those settings and change your localhost to those. Same for .htaccess.

This way you know when you upload your changes it’ll work exactly the same way on their server as it did yours. There’ll be no nasty surprises because they have magic quotes turned on or their pages are redirected through another.

Whilst you’re at it, back all that stuff up.

Drag and drop all their files over FTP, export their database, nab their settings. Before you even start work, archive all of that. Put it in a /clients/ClientName/ folder and leave it there.

That serves two purposes; first you’re definitely not going to break their entire website accidental. And if you do, you’ll be able to restore, hopefully before they even notice. Second, you don’t have to keep nipping into their FTP server to find out how that old file was, or to revert back to the server version. Some people have tight bandwidth options and they won’t be happy about you using all that up.

Even after you’ve finished, keep the back up.

Honestly, you’ll be thankful you have. After you’ve done the job and your fix works perfectly on the live site you should still keep all the backups you made of their data for a little while. I’m planning on keeping mine for about a month or so. You might have missed a dire circumstance that you’ve broken, and in a few weeks you’ll get an “URGENT: YOU BROKE SOMETHING” entitled email.

Remember to encrypt that backup somehow. Just a simple password when you archive the file is enough. If your laptop gets stolen with hundreds of client’s MySQL passwords and things it’ll be fairly embarrassing phoning them all up and telling them they need to change them. I’d imagine that’d be more embarrassing than telling an ex you have herpes.

Whilst we’re talking about encryption, most servers have SFTP enabled and you should take advantage of that. I should expect most FTP clients have that feature, but I use WinSCP. It’s just the added extra security you can give your customers, and covering your back if anyone is ever listening in on your connection.

Keep track of your changes.

When you’ve finished your work do a diff or something similar on the work you’ve done compared with your old backup. If you’re client comes to you and says that since you’ve done your work some abstract thing on their blog has broken, you can go through that diff and either use it as evidence that it wasn’t you that broke it, or see specifically where you went wrong, and how you can fix it.

Also, it might be comforting to the client to see what work you’ve actually done. And you can always use it as a reference later on in other projects (”how did I make the post title change a few clients back..?”).

There are some others that I’ll add later.

I think that if my room was a little less messy, I’d actually be more motivated to work in it. I’m gonna try that. Also, maybe if I washed up all my dishes, rather than just leaving them on the side and washing them as I need them, I’d probably be eating more too. Yeah. I’ll do that.

Mostly because I’m bored…

After two trips to McDonald’s, my and my hearty team mates have acclimated a … certain number of stickers. Just for reference, here’s the ones we need.

• Mayfair
• Liverpool St. Station
• Bond Street
• Regent Street
• Coventry Street
• Strand
• Marlborough Street
• Bow Street
• Northumberland Avenue
• Euston Road
• King Cross Station
• Old Kent Road

No colours all filled yet, and I think we have all the common ones.

Twilight seems to be the new Harry Potter. In the way it’s taken off at least, in no way does it match it in storytelling, writing , nor even cover art for that matter. In fact, the only way it is in any way comparable to Harry Potter is that both series exploded from relative obscurity. There the comparison ends, and I feel dirty for bringing it up.

It tells the story of Bella Swan moving from sunny Phoenix to mouldy Forks. She looks on the move with dispassion, not being able to adjust to the drop in temperature she’s so used to in the desert, but that quickly changes as Edward Cullen moves onto the scene. This could have been an ordinary boy-meets-girl love story, but as it turns out it’s not, as Bella discovers Edward’s a vampire.

If anyone can tell me why this has any relevance to the book, please comment.

I’ll be honest: I only bothered picking this book up because I was waiting for my delayed train one day before Christmas and I felt like helping WH Smith shift one of the hundred copies of the book they had lying around. I also had to see why my friend, Nicola, hated this book so fiercely. Maybe she’s just over reacting, I thought as I thumbed noncommittally through the pages, Nik has high standards after all. But no, Stephenie Meyer really does come out with some incredibly stupid things, and should at the very least fire her copy-proofer.

To be completely honest, the first… twelve chapters were completely useless to the story. They could have easily been done in maybe two or three chapters with exactly the same sentiment. Because of how boring I was finding the first half of the book it actually took me a while to get through it. The tedious repetition of her going to school, coming home, making some fish based food, a quick phone call to Jess (who seemed to bond with Bella very well, despite them not actually seeming to have much in common), before heading off to bed seemed to go on for pages and pages, which nothing at all happening.

Maybe that’s standard practice for “love” stories, I just don’t see why 200 pages had to be taken up by it before anything remotely interesting happens.

Fortunately though, by the thirteenth chapter – definitely my favourite – things do start to get better. So much better in fact that I read the rest of the book in a day, compared with the two months it took me to read the first half.

Calling this a love story, or a romance novel, annoys me though. These people clearly aren’t in love. We’re told throughout the story that a vampire trait is how beautiful they look to their prey, mesmerizingly so. All Bella is experiencing is an attraction specifically designed to make her feel this way, to make her lured to him, so he can eat her. There’s nothing romantic about that. He only feels that way because for the first time in a hundred years he can’t read someone’s thoughts. He’s shielded from her ugly thoughts that he hears from every other human which probably turn him off from them. The only actually thing drawing him to her is her smell, another thing designed to make him eat her!

In sum? Skip the book. Watch the movie (it doesn’t have two hundred pages of high school drama).

You know what? stfu, valleywag. I know you’re the Internet’s answer to The Sun, so I’m just going to disregard everything you just said in that article. I mean really? Alex is “forgettable”? Please, Alex is far more interesting than Kevin. If I had to pick one of them to go out and grab something to eat with it’d definitely be Alex.

If it’s true about Alex wanting to leave Diggnation, then Diggnation is dead. No really. Just Kevin sitting on a couch, with Glen and Prager? That’s not interesting. Alex’s retorts and spontaneous jokes (which sometimes are so spontaneous they don’t make sense) are what make that show interesting. They can’t get another co-host, because they just can’t afford to. They’d have to come from in house, and I’m not sitting thrugh 40 minutes of Martin Sargent.

Anyway, whilst I’m here. My ‘Freelance’ label in my gmail has never been more active. It’s quite intimidating. Priorities say I have to finish that website assignment first though. Well, first food, then website. I’ve decided on just using CC and GPL content to fill the pages. Perfectly legal, if a little lazy.

I got home about seven today, with achy feet, and I decided I was in need of a nap. That nap lasted from seven till midnight, so I’m fairly alert now. I managed to get through sixty RSS items, and even wrote up some ideas on two of them (which you probably just read). Anyway, on my travels I stumbled upon very few interesting things. I did find out amazingly that awesome things happen when you live in San Fransico.

Prager, producer of Diggnation,  had a random guy just stumble into his apartment, use his bathroom, take his trousers off and try to go to sleep. Being a third generation news provider that he is, he decided to twitter and ustream it up. I saw that article on in Reader and thought “lol, some people are dumb”. Then realised that it was Prager (why isn’t his name headline news? that guy’s awesome) and lolz ensued and I was slightly less shocked.

Lifehacker found an awesome Greasemonkey script that keeps your place on long pages. (In fact Lifehacker didn’t find it, gHacks did but their website is ugly, I mean serious, more ad space than content.) I was actually just about to make a Firefox extension that allows you to click a place on a page which inserts a name link tag, so that you could then bookmark that. But since I’ve just found this, I guess it’ll do.

If you find that you do decide to read Watchmen, then you’ll be needing something like this comic book reader. Whilst I’m linking to comic book stuff, I rediscovered StopTazmo the other day, free manga for the win.

I’m just going to throw this idea out there; when TV show marketers are selling out slots for their product placement bits (whenever you saw a phone on 24, someone had paid for that to be there) do they take into account the number of expected illegal downloads the program will receive?

What phone does Elle use... Oh yeah.

Lost is one of the most expensively produce shows on Earth, maybe even the most expensive (the reason we’re not so much in Hawaii this year? because that was costing about half a million dollars each episode, probably more now). Heroes, Battlestar, and 24 are all probably ranking up there in the hundreds of thousands of pounds per episode too.

I’d be pretty annoyed if I was a network publisher and we weren’t capitalising from the ten and a half million people illegally watching TV by downloading it. Product placement must be worth more than traditional ads when trying to improve company image and recognition. Traditional ads are removed from every downloaded piece of TV I’ve ever seen, making the benefit to the advertisers zero. Whereas product placed adverts can’t be removed easily, and who would want to anyway? They’re not in the way. They rarely dilute the story. So all those millions of people are definitely going to see your business’ logo, which is what you wanted, right?

I expect that if they don’t incorporate those statistics into their pricing it’s because there’s no reliable statistics out there. ShowInsider grabs their data (I’m guessing) by monitoring how many seeds and peers a torrent has. That’s really not a very effective method that promises much accuracy. Some people hide their tracker data, they can’t be looking at data from private trackers, or just trackers that are too small to know about. There are a lot of fake seeders out there (MediaDefender-esk). Lost’s 1,700,000 downloads this week could easily be as little as a million or as great as three million. It’s just not possible to find out well.

Even if you do trust ShowInsider’s data, you still have absolutely no demographics on who’s downloading. It’s incredibly hard to find advertisers when you can’t tell them who’s watching your show (BMW don’t want be advertising to twelve year olds). I know that’s one of the reasons there was such a big overhaul in the distribution method over at Revision3.

Back in the day you used to be able to donate $5 a month (or however much, really) to get Diggnation earlier. What happened was that one guy donated teh $5 a month, ripped the video from the site, and posted it on his own, days before it was released to the general public on Rev3’s website. I don’t think Rev3 minded that so much (this was before there was advertising on their website) as it was all extra coverage for them, but the problem it lead to was who the hell was this extra coverage? Because they weren’t going to Rev3’s website they couldn’t poll them to find that information out.

That’s largely I suspect why things like Hulu and iPlayer exist now. ABC got annoyed with not having the demographics on their veiwers, so they decided to release their content in a way that they could. Piracy is so arrife because I can’t watch Hulu though…

Ages ago I did a post on how ad-funded services were likely to die off, and other methods of monetization that people could use. I didn’t even think about how all that would affect Google until I just noticed a post on valleywag regarding them making more of their services paid for.

That really doesn’t surprise me though; Google is the prefect company to be making money through freemium services. At the moment they’re focusing mainly on the business markets, which makes sense since they have more motivation to pay for a service and they’ll also need better customer support which comes at a price, and they know it. No feathers are ruffled there.

It just makes sense to charge those guys.

How about making money from us individuals using freemium revenue sources?

I’d be pretty pissed if Google Reader started limiting the number of feeds I can subscribe to, unless I paid $5 a month. It’s not that the service isn’t worth paying for – I love it, it’s been my  homepage for the past few years – but there are alternatives out there that I could easily switch to. If all else fails, I could just program my own. I wouldn’t put up with having to pay for it.

So how can Google make money from it, that isn’t advertising (which they don’t)?

We can just go back to the idea of charging businesses, or power users. I know that some of the blog author’s that I read use Google Reader for research and second-hand-news purposes (which most of it is on the internet, like this post for instance). I’m sure if Google paneled them they’d find a whole host of features that reports need and are willing to pay for in order for their job to be easier or for them to produce better content, finding news quicker.

There could be a feature for paid users only which gives links and citation data to other websites and even news papers which Google have archived. They have all the known internet at their finger tips, why not tell the people looking for it about it? They could order these links by the sentiments of the pages; are you looking for pages pro-, or anti-Apple? is the author liberal or conservative? Those kinds of things would help authors do their job, and I’m sure Gawker or Wired wouldn’t mind paying for it. Hell, if I could afford it, I’d get it for when I (very occasionally) do reviews on here.

So, again I’ve come to the conclusion that service providers should charge their business and pro-users, becuase they aren’t willing to leave. Give them a few nicher features and you’re good to go.

Now I’ve finished that freelance gig I was given (well, almost finished, I just need to convert the guy’s old pages to new ones) I can actually start on my coursework. Which is due in Friday.

It’s basically a website. So long as it’s valid XHTML and CSS, and has form pages, I’ve been told anything can pass. I’m actually not going to be putting much effort into content due to that. I just want to make sure that I have it finished. Maybe later, when I have more time I’ll add better content.

It’s basically a website about Leicester from the prospective of a fresher – someone how just needs some information about Leicester and where to go and what to do.

I’ve already done the actual template. I just need to add content. Laura and Chris have already taken photos, which we need to include in our website, so I’ll just use some of theirs. They certainly took enough.

In an idea that’s two parts to have a use for the account, and one part to keep track of my diet, I decided to use my twitter as a food journal! I’ve decided to list pretty much everything I eat, and I’ve done so so far. Most of the time a meal can be summed up in 140 characters, and you can text to update twitter, so it seemed the most ideal platform. I could do that on this blog, but I can’t text to update, and I’d rather this blog not be spammed up with “cheese on toast” every few hours.

Depending on how long twitter keeps your tweets, and if they let you search them (I’m sure there are tools), it’ll be cool to see what I’ve tried before and see how my diet changes. I’ll also put if I like that type of food so people can see and know what I like. It’s not exciting but meh, it could be fun, if not interesting.

In an idea that’s two parts to have a use for the account, and one part to keep track of my diet, I decided to use my twitter as a food journal! I’ve decided to list pretty much everything I eat, and I’ve done so so far. Most of the time a meal can be summed up in 140 characters, and you can text to update twitter, so it seemed the most ideal platform. I could do that on this blog, but I can’t text to update, and I’d rather this blog not be spammed up with “cheese on toast” every few hours.

Depending on how long twitter keeps your tweets, and if they let you search them (I’m sure there are tools), it’ll be cool to see what I’ve tried before and see how my diet changes. I’ll also put if I like that type of food so people can see and know what I like. It’s not exciting but meh, it could be fun, if not interesting.

Google seems to think that my blog is porn centric...

Was just checking today’s search results that found their way to my blog and find these…

Google seems to think that my blog is porn centric...

Was just checking today’s search results that found their way to my blog and find these…

Leaving the cinema after seeing Watchmen left me with a heavy, disappointed heart. Even though I’ve not read the graphic novel, I knew the epicness of it. I knew that if it were only it were a little more popular it would be a comic book foundation, like the X-Mens and Batmans of the world. Because of that, this film had a lot to live up to, and it didn’t put out. Watchmen is set way back in the days of the Vietnamese/America war, where the DC world splits from ours. Instead of calling a cease fire, American actually pwns ‘Nam with the help of Dr Manhattan and makes them the 51st state. Nixon stays in power and is currently in his fifth term as President and the tensions between America and the USSR reach boiling point. With the Doomsday clock set to five minutes to, Defcon 1 is initiated and the world is moments away from a nuclear holocaust.

The opening scene quickly pushes us through the history of the Watchmen; in what I’ve noticed to be a trend for DC, the superheroes help out a lot, then the pitch fork yielding townsfolk cry “vigilantly” and the superheroes fall, and eventually become criminalised. I’m sure the comic gets to take it’s time and look at all that plot carefully, but the film doesn’t have time, a massive problem throughout really. We’re then introduced to the second birth of the Watchmen; Rorschach, a key protagonist to the story, is psychotic – having lost his faith in humanity – and always has his trusty gapling gun. A true vigilante who seems to be in favor of the death penalty, but I’m just guessing. Laurie, aka Silk Spectre, daughter of an original Watchmen member who’s simply following in her mother’s footsteps. Adrian Veidt, known as Ozymandias in the glory days, is a genius and the only one who chose to reveal his identity, capitalising upon it. Dan ‘Nite Owl’ Dreiberg is Batman wearing Clarke Kent glasses. Dr Manhattan is quantum-naturalist who’s quickly losing touch with humanity. Finally is The Comedian, who is killed within the first scenes, only to remain Tarantino-esk throughout the film.

Rorschach, MacGyvering it up in this bitch. Yoinked from TVGuide.com

The film represents the book really quite well, albeit in a slightly more kosher way. (Squids aren’t kosher, right? Because otherwise that joke just doesn’t work.) It’s far darker than The Dark Knight, and definitely warrants its 18 certificate with activities ranging from bare, blue cock, to pregnant women getting shot, to rape, to people exploding in bloody masses. The books fans seem to be pleased with the number of easter eggs Zack Snyder – the director – slipped in, and I’ve not heard much outrage over the end plot device being changed either. The one used in the film definitely makes more sense anyway.

I find calling the “plot” anything more than a “sub-plot” difficult. This film clearly wasn’t created to tell a story about a potential nuclear war, but it’s very much a story about its characters. I really, really wish there could have been more about them, and I know Snyder did too. The two hour twenty five minute film really wasn’t long enough to get everything in, and even the three hour directors cut probably will still have the same problem. Because of that, this isn’t really a good movie.

You can’t bond with the “heroes”. We never really saw the relationship between them. Never once in the childhood flashbacks did I think “Oh, gosh. It’s a shame for them,” because I honestly didn’t give a shit. Laurie’s break up with Jon was heartless, and I never once gave a second thought to her relationship with Dan. I wish I could say these were spoilers, but you really won’t be shocked when you see the film. None of their situations really impressed upon me. And it’s not because they’re bad characters. It’s not even because they’re badly written scripts, it’s because we didn’t have enough time to get emotionally attached to them.

I’m definitely not saying that this should have been split over more than one film though. It shouldn’t have been made a film at all. It should have been left to paper where everything is explained so prictinely.

I switched to Debian four or so days ago, and it’s kinda making me feel stressed. I’m having to put a lot more work into the operating system to just make it work.

Firefox for instance – oh, sorry, Iceweasel – took a lot of Googling and about:configing before it felt the same as it did on Windows. Why some of those keys and things have changed is odd for me. Why has ^J for the download menu suddenly been switched to ^Y? Why use Alt instead of Ctrl for tab manipulation? Why doesn’t clicking the address bar auto-highlight it all? These just seem like weird changes to me.

I’ve installed a few extensions in Songbird. It says they’re installed but there’s no other sign of them. No way to run them. No obvious way to get to the iPod functions which apparently exist…

I’ve no idea what I’m supposed to be installing to get OpenGL to work. I need it to play Eve… (Which is apparently no longer in development…)

Installing things is also a little bit of work… I don’t know why more things don’t come with a set up wizard, like I’m so used to in Windows. Instead, I have to try and remember the switches for untaring things, putting them in the right place. Sometimes just guessing what I should be doing to run the damn thing.

This just isn't nice... It looks like it can't decide on what width to use for letters sometimes. Blatant attempts at adding extra pixels to make it more round.

Fonts are a weird, picky problem for me too. But I think that’s just because I’ve not played around with the defaults enough yet, to find one I actually like. Needs more anti-alias, and better kerning.

On the installation for Debian set up thing, I asked it to install a web server. That may exist, but I’ve no idea where to find it… My PHP pages aren’t giving me any errors, they just don’t seem to be outputting anything at all.

It’s just not new user friendly. I’m hoping that Ubuntu is much better in this domain, since that’s what it’s designed for really. So, I may be switching back to Windows some time soon. I don’t think my life can handle not having it as a primary operating system just yet. In the furutre though, I’ll defintely be installing another Linux OS on my next machine.

(23:29:39) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: my mates leant me a 40K book and basically gone “give it a chance”
(23:29:54) Shane: Whaaaaaaat?
(23:30:04) Shane: As if I’m being blown off due to war hammer
(23:30:24) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: no – your being blown off becuase i want to clamber into my pit and begin to read a book
(23:30:33) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: so that if the first chapter is shit he can have it back 2morrow
(23:30:42) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: and id blow you off for bits of plastic anyday
(23:30:45) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: wait.
(23:30:46) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: no.
(23:30:47) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: DOH!
(23:30:52) Shane: :D
(23:30:59) ***Shane finds some plastic
(23:31:02) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: ¬¬¬”

I was planning on watching Digg’s Townhall, but I saw the topics they talk about and they’re all the same. Mostly power users and duplicate content. In response to those Jay and Kevin will just say “Yeah, we’re working on those. You’ll see changes in the coming weeks.” Ad infinitum.

My Firefox seems to be getting laggy. Extensive JavaScript and Flash ads make my iTunes jump. I know it’s nothing to do with Firefox, and is probably more to do with my laptop being in near constant use for the last year without ever having much maintenance upon it. So, I’m thinking maybe it’s time to start afresh. Not just with a new Windows XP reinstall, but with a whole new operating system.

I think I’m going to be switching to Debian, before I do though, I want to make sure I won’t lose any programs that’re vital to me. I thought here would be a good place to go through them and check for alternatives.

Firefox – Not a problem at all.

Google Chrome – Not out for Linux just yet, but I only really use it for the Incognito option, which I could get a Firefox addon for. (Though, I’m sure it was a feature Firefox was going to have built in.)

Luke uses Chrome too when he’s at mine, just so our cookies don’t clash when he goes to the same sites as me. But there are other browsers for Linux if he desperately wants his own space. (Gosh, how much like a couple do we sound? He gets his own browser on my laptop? That’s on par with giving someone their own drawer in geek terms.)

Flash – According t their website, Adobe support Linux. Shockwave isn’t support on Linux, but I’m not sure where I use Shockwave…

MSN – I’m not especially a hardcore MSN user. Official MSN isn’t available on Linux, but the only features I really require are being able to talk to other MSN people, able to group contacts, a display picture and personal message, and file transfer.

There are a tonne of MSN alternatives out there, like Pidgin. I used that before and was okay with it. Pidgin’ll also let me sign onto Google Talk which I use all the time. I’d much prefer to be using one application rather than the two I have at the moment.

If I find out Pidgin doesn’t work so well for me, I could use KMess which was the first result for “linux msn” and seems to have all the features I mentioned about.

uTorrent – Not for Linux, but does run on Wine. I’m a little turned off by the idea of running an application to run an application though. Some people have said that they sometimes notice a jump of performance when running on Wine compared to natively on Windows. I certainly didn’t see that when I tried to play WoW through Wine though.

There’s always BitTorrent (which I thought used uTorrent as a backend, but I guess not). Or even command line, which I’ve been happy using before.

iTunes – Damnitdamnitdamnit. I knew if I was going to run into a problem it’d be with this SUCKY ASS PIECE OF SHIT.

iTunes isn’t supported on Linux. Completely uninstallable. Wine can’t run iTunes well. That basically turns my iPod into a brick. A £214 brick, which plays outdated music and has a spare 10gig just kicking around. This is actually a show stopper, much like WoW was back when I used to play it and couldn’t run it on Wine.

Lemme go see what #xkcd and #debian have to say about this problem.

Apparently, Songbird has some iPod support. I’ll install Songbird on my XP install in a bit to check how it pans out. If it all goes horribly wrong, I can just resync from iTunes, not losing any music. Problem potentially overcome.

Last.fm scrobbling – Songbird supports this.

PuTTY – I feel a little bit stupid for actually going to Google to search for this. Linux has native SSH support.

WinSCP – Nautilus handles this. WinSCP obviously doesn’t.

Microsoft Office 2007 – Here’s where I get worried again. This is pretty vital. Open Office is not an alternative.

Wine seems to make most parts of Office usable, at least. Some problems with how it handles objects (which are fairly new to Office), but nothing show stopping. If I do find something overly tedious, I’ll just take a trip to the library.

Norton Antivirus – Nope. But I don’t think it’s really needed.

14:42 < shamess> Don't laugh at me for asking this. What'd y'all use for antivirus and firewall stuff on linux?
14:42 < grawity> shamess: Nothing, usually.
14:42 < shamess> I thought that'd be the answer. But really, nothing at all?
14:43 < grawity> Well, there *is* ClamAV for scanning files, and iptables as a firewall...but they're rarely needed
on home machines.

I guess I’ll take my chances.

Dropbox – I actually don’t use this so much, but will probably be using it more in the future now that I’m getting other people to start using it. It’s downloadable in Fedora and Ubuntu, which isn’t helpful. But #xkcd said that Ubuntu has pretty much the same inner workings as Debian, so it could run just fine. If not, it’s not a huge loss.

Laptop drivers – I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro A-100 series. There’s no real way of knowing which drivers will and won’t work, however I’m going to run from live CD and that should check drivers and stuff. Not a problem, hopefully. A guy installed Debian on the same laptop as I have, and seemed to work fine when he updated a wireless setting.

Video/audio codecs – This is me trying to think of everything that could possibly go wrong now. The internet thinks that all my current files will still be playable. MP3’s will definitely, so will AVIs. That’s all I have really…

mIRC – I’ve actually just started using irssi on my server, so I’m not too fussed about that at the moment.

Notepad++ – Wine support only (though, good support). I’m not very attached to it anyway. Maybe this’ll give me a chance to start using VIM properly.

GIMP 2 – Full Debian support.

WAMP server – Maybe it’s about time I grew up and installed my own Apache, PHP and MySQL. I do it fine on my server.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2007 – Damnit again! Why are these big companies so obsessed with locking you into their operating system? I just paid a tonne of money to get this damn IDE, you’re not going to make much money off me installing your operating system too.

Wine looks iffy on this. Can’t boot Windows from a USB device because it doesn’t like losing contact with it’s boot drive, which is something that happens with USB connections from time to time. Maybe next year we won’t be using Visual Studio so much (hopefully) and it won’t be sorely lost. Maybe. I’ll email David Smallwood about it.

Smart Shutdown – cron.

MagicDisk – Don’t even need an application to mount ISOs on Linux.

WinRAR – Built in commands.

Foxit Reader – Available in Linux.

Skype – Linux version available.

TortoiseSVN - SVN command.

Audacity – Linx version availiable.

Driving test 3 is only worth a small handful of points now, so I figured it’s about time I did it.

Pick out the features we need to have:

• User needs to be able to enter their current balance, how much they want to pay off, and their interest rate
• Then a list box needs to be updated showing a month by month snapshot of their account
• Calculate how long it’ll take to pay off their debt

So it’s pretty obvious what we need to set up:

This is just how I've done it; be more inventive!

Remember to do validation on all three inputs, and give errors when there’s problems:

• They need to be greater than zero
• The need to be a numbers
• It can’t be blank!

Before you start outputting to the list box, you need to make sure that the user will actually eventually pay off their loan. The biggest problem I think they are having with this test is that they’re not testing to see if their loop actually ever finishes. To start with, you have to make sure that the user is paying more every month than is added to their loan due to interest.

If the user is paying £10 a month, but the interest is £11 a month, they’ll never pay off the loan.

InterestAmountEachMonth = TotalBalance + (TotalBalance * InterestRate)
If InterestAmountEachMonth > MonthlyPayment Then Error

Check for that first. Then give an error. If they are paying off enough though you can start taking it off their balance! Do something like this:

While TotalBalance > 0 Then
  TotalBalance = TotalBalance - Payment + Interest
  Update Listbox With New Balance
End While

You have to output what month number it is as well!

That’s pretty much it. Remember to do a test plan like last time too.

Things you should think about:

• Make it so the total amount owed never goes below zero (you wouldn’t pay more than you had to, would you?)
• Clear the list box when you do another calculation
• Put the validation into a function
• Make all the currencies output with the right decimal places, and with a £ sign. (Use .ToString (”c”))
• Why’re you using a while loop, and not a for loop?