Computing

It's freaking baking. It's about 30 degrees or something absurd.

This would be all fine and dandy, if I worked somewhere with air conditioning. As it is I'm wearing linen trousers, sandals and a t-shirt, and working in a room with all the windows wide open, and I'm still well hot.

The servers down the corridor are not happy. They're in a room that doesn't even have any windows to open, which isn't really a surprise being as there's probably close to Ã

...but it's still the same.

I've upgraded the blog software I'm using to a new version. If anyone's tried to view the site this morning and it's not worked right or looked weird, then that's why. It should all be OK now though.

Things should look and function pretty much the same. If there are any problems or anything doesn't work right, let me know and I'll look into it.

About the only real difference that might benefit you guys is that, after some fiddling, you can now use things called permalinks. This makes it easier to link to a particular entry as they can be called in a more "human-friendly" fashion. Click the title of this post and then look at the URL in the address bar for an example.

So... that's about it. Have fun.

When I was at school, some of the teachers still used blackboards. Some of them had whiteboards, too. At university they had whiteboards, blackboards, and sometimes they used video projectors and laptops and Powerpoint presentations. Clearly technology is advancing.

Some genius has decided that the way forward is clearly, to fuse whiteboards and laptops. By their powers combined, they are... ELECTRONIC WHITEBOARD.

And they suck.

You have a laptop. You have a projector. You have a fancy touch sensitive screen. You project the display from the laptop on to the screen. You have a "pen" that you point at the screen with, which acts like a mouse. Basically you are controlling your computer through a big touch sensitive screen.

So what sucks?

1. Writing on the screen with the pen is, literally, like writing stuff in MS Paint. It comes out all scrawly. Your writing, no matter how bad it is to begin with, will look worse.


2. Text recognition is pretty rubbish. If you write in nice neat un-joined-up letters, then it might just pick out what you're trying to say. If you write in joined up writing and try to get it recognised, as you may well want to, in order to avoid the scrawly mess mentioned in point 1, then you can forget it. My brief test involved my pretending to write a biology test on the board about cells. The statement "1) Where is the DNA stored" became "Dithers the data spore". Close. Oh, and you can forget about writing any numbers besides 4 and 8, it just won't recognise them.


3. Teachers will, inevitably, draw on them with whiteboard markers. Then try to rub it off. With hilarious black smudgy consequences. Ooops.


4. The pointy pen things break. One of them broke while being demonstrated by the guy from the company. Brilliant.

The biggest problem, however, is simply that it's all a big fat waste of time. I simply don't believe that students will learn any more for seeing stuff written out on a fancy pretend whiteboard than they would have done if it were being done on a good old fashioned blackboard. Mind you, I don't really see how having oodles of computers for the kids to use aids learning, and I'm working to support this, so maybe I'm a bit of a hypocrite.

Bring back blackboards. And the dunce hat. And caning. Oooh, in my day... uphill both ways etc etc.

I'm going home.

I am in the process of getting hooked on Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe. It's a horribly addictive old game in which you have to transport stuff around a map using trains and lorries and whatnot. You have to get coal to the power station, iron to the steel mill and so on. Sounds simple? Yes, it is pretty much. I figure a lot of people would find it quite boring too, but I'm getting well stuck in to it.

It's kinda funny, because many years ago I was going out with a girl whose dad was hooked on Transport Tycoon, and used to get yelled at by her mum because he was always playing it. Now I'm playing it and Alison is having to vye for my attention and drag me away from my computer. History repeating and whatnot.

Oh yeah, for the record I had a pretty good, relaxing weeked after my nasty week, so that was nice.

Anyone want a network switch? How about some extra RAM? I'm selling some stuff on ebay to get some cash for future PC upgrades.

In other buying/selling news, does anyone want to buy any Vicodin? I have no idea what the damn stuff is, but some comment spamming moron seems to think you might want to buy some. Various prescription drug names have now been added to the list of words that result in comments getting held in line for moderation.

Bye.

PS Buy my stuff!

Right. I'm back on the Wirral again. I've had the afternoon off work so I could come and see the dentist to have my teeth polished, my X-rays from last time checked, and the weird blue thing in my palate looked at. My teeth have been polished, my X-rays show I need a feeling, and the dentist wants to refer me to an oral surgeon about the blue thing in my palate as it might be a cyst. Well, 1 out of 3 ain't bad. Hmm. More on the filling on the 1st of June, and more on the cyst as and when we get in touch with a surgeon who can X-ray my palate.

So, I've just had supper with my mum and I'm about to head back to Leicester. Another 120 miles of driving. I think my mp3 player is about to run out of batteries too, so I can't listen to my ELO albums. Curses. I got Discovery (disturbingly, the Amazon page shows I am in the company of people who buy Olivia Newton-John records... hmm) at the weekend and I'm in the process of assimilating it. It's good, but it'll probably take a bit of time. Mind you, Out Of The Blue took me a while, and I now consider it one of the best albums I've ever heard, so there you go.

Alison and I watched Vanilla Sky at the weekend. It was OK. I guess in the realm of "it was all a dream" (if you've not seen it, I've just spoilt it, but come on... you're a bit late, huh?) type films it does a fairly good job of things - it certainly goes all out in making the dream dramatic and what have you. It just feels a bit shallow after all you've watched, to find out that that's what was going on.

I finished Half Life 2 as well. It was great. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I'm now looking forward to upgrading some of my PC hardware so I can enjoy it in it's full glory with some nice high detail settings. This, of course, requires money. Time to get saving.

Right. Time to drive back to Leicester. See you soon.

Alison got the job! She is going to start a GTP teacher training course at Beauchamp School in Septempter. It's like a years on the job training which ends up with her qualifying as a teacher. She's going to be teaching secondary school and A-Level biology. Excellent!

In other news, I finished a book the other day. It was a big anthology of Isaac Asimov stories, called "The Complete Robot". I'd link to it at Amazon, only I can't find it there. It must be some weird edition of it or something. Anyway. It was 682 pages of small print that made up about 30 short stories about robots, surprisingly enough. I'd been inspired to read it, after seeing I, Robot for the second time and reading quotes like this about it, and wondering what the original stories were like.

The book was a long read... It took me two renewals from the library to finish it. It was good though. It was an interesting read, and it was - admittedly - much more in depth than the aforementioned film. The stories in the book played much more with the 3 rules, whereas the film kinda copped out and just abused them. The film was similar to a couple of the stories, but the originals were a bit more subtle. The film also took some artistic license, like Susan Calvin (the smartarse lady in the film) being young enough to provide some kind of vague sexual chemistry for Will Smith, as opposed to being about 60 in the books. Hmm.

It was worth reading, though I guess I might not persuade too many of you, as I am something of a sci fi geek.

Speaking of which... I played some more Half Life 2 last night. (For those few of you who have played it, I'm up to the city levels, towards the end, after Alyx and I teleported back to the lab.) I'm leading a little squad of guys round the city, who help me in the firefights we get into, which is kind of cool. I'm mostly fighting regular soldiers at the moment, but I keep seeing these bigass monsters called striders which look like they'll be a problem when I get round to fighting them. I'm also really getting the hang of the gravity gun now. The city levels have these little crazy mines called hoppers which jump in the air when you get near them and then explode when they hit the ground. The trick is to catch them in the air when they spring up, then throw them. It's kinda neat to walk up to a mine, have it spring up in the air, catch it with the gravity gun, then launch it at some explosive barrels next to the little encampment of Civil Protection officers and watch them all go flying.

Physics rocks. Oh yes.

Alison got a call yesterday to say that she has an interview for a teacher training course tomorrow. She has to have several interviews with various people, observe lessons, and teach some 15 year olds for 15 minutes. Scary stuff, especially when she only has two days to prepare for it.

She spent all of yesterday evening preparing her 15 minutes of teaching. It's about food chains and food webs, which I just about remember for my GCSE biology days.

And while Ali fiddled away with Powerpoint and Clipart and all the rest of it, I was hard at work... playing Half Life 2 . This is the game... this is the big one... this is the one that tempted me back to computer gaming after my 6 month hiatus last summer - I quit to concentrate on my uni finals and get married. The game hasn't let me down either. It looks and sounds great, the levels are brilliantly designed, the enemies are scary, and the physics are delicious icing. There's something quite unique about pulling a radiator off a wall with your gravity gun and throwing it at a zombie... quite a rare and delectable experience in the world of computer gaming.

I need to get back to work now. Bye.

If I gave my wife Spam for our anniversary I don't think she'd be too pleased. I think the advert (if you've not seen it, it's at the aforelinked site) may contain some measure of irony.

In other spam news, some dumbass is spamming my blog comments with nonsense about free online poker. I've put a few things in place to prevent this, so it shouldn't happen any more. However, on the off chance that you make a comment with, say, "poker" or "texas" in it, then it will need validating by me before it shows up, so don't panic when your crucial comment about anything besides free online casinos doesn't show up immediately. Can't think quite when that might occur, but there we go.

No, it's not Mary Poppins. It's... Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time. The game that I've burbled on about wanting to buy, and which I've finally picked up on ebay. I'm over a year late in picking up this game, and to be honest I've been quite remiss in letting it pass me by. I'm not going to go into great detail about it, because as far as I know, there aren't many gamers in my (small) readership, and any among you have probably already heard about this game. Suffice to say, this game is a masterpiece. The graphics, the puzzles, the story, the combat... it's all brilliant - utterly superb. If there are any niggles, it's with the camera position and the controls, but I'm prepared to overlook these minor issues for a game with fiendishly clever puzzles, and that allows me to fight 4 enemies at once with a big hulking sword then rewind time with a magic dagger when I screw it up.

Anyway.

I went shopping on Saturday to spend a bit of my birthday cash, and picked up the Blink 182 and Franz Ferdinand albums. I'd previously ripped the Franz Ferdinand album (though I'm now making restitution for my copyright infringing ways, hence actually buying the CD) so I've heard that, but the Blink album will be new to me. I'm looking forward to it, especially after the recent news that they've split up for now. I also got X-Men and X-Men 2 on DVD. Nice. Looking forward to X-Men 3, but that's not due out till 2006. Oh well.

I need some new shoes sometime soon. My current trainers are disintegrating on my feet as I type. When I was in town, I found out that you can get shoes from a company called No Sweat that guarantees fair pay and treatment for their workers, much like Fair Trade does for food producers. I'm all for that, so I think I'll be picking up a pair next week.

Hello again... I've got lots in mind to post about, but I don't really have time to organise it all, so here's a little anecdote about something that happened to me yesterday.

I was in a classroom fixing a computer, as is my prerogative. There was a bunch of students in the room with a teacher supervising them. I'm busy working on one PC, when a girl comes across to me from the other side of the room and tells me that her mouse isn't working. I figure it'll be the standard problem that the mouse has gotten all dirty, but the students can't open them to clean the mouse because we glue them shut, because if we don't them the little blighters steal the balls. Anyway!

I go over to see this non-functioning mouse, and sure enough it's moving really badly and I can tell it's dirty. I start by unscrewing the base of the mouse with a big regular screwdriver. However, the mice that the network manager (my boss) is currently buying are horrible little things - presumably they're the cheapest available, as there's no other real merit to them. It's impossible to get the base off without prising it off with a thin implement. The best tool that I have found for this job is a tiny screwdriver that I have on my penknife, like the ones you get in Christmas crackers for fixing your glasses, you know?

So I take my penknife out of my pocket, open the corkscrew, and take out the tiny screwdriver that hides in there. At this point the girl sees that I am 'brandishing' a knife and starts yelling at the top of her voice "Miss! Miss! He's got a knife! He's got a knife in school!". So I'm panicking a bit and wondering what to do and thinking I'm about to get hauled over the coals on my third day for packing 3 inches of blunt steel which just happens to have three screwdrivers conveniently attached. Thinking quickly I tell the girl "It's OK, I'm allowed to have a knife in school to do my job", to which she says "Oh, OK then." and calms down as quickly as she freaked out, while the teacher looks on in a slightly absent minded fashion. I then get on and fix the mouse and go on my merry way.

Weird.

So... 3 days into my new job, and I've got to say it's much better than the last one. It's good to be doing something I enjoy, and it's certainly much better now that I get to leave my office and walk from place to place. My trusty Walker's pedometer informs me that I have made... 5511 steps today. Still a fair way off the recommended 10000 per day, but it's only 4:00pm, and either way it's a vast improvement on the 2500 I used to manage in an entire day at my last job. Anyway!

I've been periodically looking at my site to see if anyone's been commenting. Never mind that very few people have (curses), there is the more pressing issue that this site looks absolutely appalling in Internet Explorer 5. I designed it with IE6 and Mozilla Firefox (which you should download and use, as it's a far better browser than IE. Get into tabbed browsing and you'll never look back) and it all looked fine, but in IE5 it's just awful. So, if you're looking at this site and it looks rubbish, then get a newer version of IE, preferably one that makes even a half-hearted attempt to follow W3C standards for CSS and the like, or even better, use the aforementioned Fiery Fox of Wonder. Or something.

It's the start of the month, which means I have some spending money... I'm going to buy the Oscar winning work of art that is The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind on DVD. If you've not seen it, why not? You have to! It's a beautiful film. Perfect in a way that few manage. Rent it. Buy it. Come to my house and watch it with me. It's awesome. I'm also looking to pick up a game or two on ebay, probably starting with Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time. I know I'm a bit late to this party (the game came out last year) but I only just got the demo last week (in my pre-job-leaving fit of Internet leeching) and it's amazing. So I'll be picking that up.

Right. Back to Windows setup. Bye.

I have finally succeeded in getting Linux to boot from a USB flash drive. This in addition to be able to boot it from a floppy disk, a CD and a regular installation on a PC.

I have a degree (partly) in computer science.

I am learning Perl and Python and C.

I run Gentoo Linux more than Windows.

I have read Just For Fun by Linus Torvalds, am about to read The Cathedral And The Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond.

I really want one of these.

Sorry ladies, I know all this geekery must be driving you wild, but I'm afraid I'm already spoken for.

Man, I'm a flaming geek and no mistake.

The new Volkswagen Golf GTI advert is awesome.

You may have seen it on the TV by now. It's also available at numerous places on the internet, such as over at The Guardian's website. If you've not seen it, check it out!

It's a reworking of Gene Kelly dancing in Singing In The Rain, from back in the mists of time. It's been redone with a bunch of break dancers, kitted out in the same suit as he wore and with wigs and so on, with Gene's face composited onto the video. It's not a perfect job, and you can easily see that the face mapping is not seamless, and there's a stupid bit of editing when he jumps onto the lamp-post but at the end of the day who cares? It's just damn cool and never mind the little flaws.

It's a nice step forward for this kind of computer technology. They've been claiming for a while that they could do things like put Marilyn Monroe in a film using old footage and computer trickery, and this seems like quite a step in that direction. Not sure how useful it is to be able to "resurrect" dead actors, but I'm sure we'll find out.

In other advert news, there was an ad on the TV for ebay last night. Now, I'm a huge fan of ebay, and have bought and sold many things on there in the past, but it still seems weird to see it advertised on the TV. It's weird to see some parts of the internet, and specifically the web, becoming so... mainstream. I know it's been growing, and loads of people have been getting hooked up lately, but adverts on the TV for an auction site? That seems like quite a step to me.