Category: Uncategorized

What does your website look to those who are colour blind? Have a look through the eyes of this website – it’s quite an eye opener! The reason I mention this is because I think accessibility is important to the modern WWW, and the more web designers that start embracing the Web Accessibility Initiative the better!

And to completely change the subject, I’ve listened to a few of the “Ape That Got Lucky” radio programmes on Radio 4 recently. It’s absolutely hilarious. I don’t know if they’re available as podcasts but you might be able to use the ‘listen again’ feature. The book titles were the best — I think my favourite one was “Here’s looking at Euclid – A study of geometry in Humphrey Bogart films”. A close runner up was “What are you looking at? Taking a sideways look at the history of the squint”.

All for now….

I’ve been learning some Python recently. I have to say, I rather like it: it’s very flexible, very quick to develop, and very powerful. It’s also object-oriented, which is a real plus in my book (although you don’t have to use the objected oriented features, for example if you’re writing a small-ish script). It’s very useful for quick automation scripts – you get the power and flexibility of Python, without the bloat of a high-level language such as Java or the … um … ‘quirkiness’ of shell scripting 😉 And let’s not mention perl or PHP… (I’m not trying to start a flame war, honest!)

I had to write a script the other day at work which epitomises the usefulness of shell scripts: we use a ‘continuous integration’ build system called Cruise Control. This generates a new directory each time it makes a build. What I wanted to do was have all but the ten most recent builds cleaned out. Given that I didn’t know anything about python before I started, I managed to knock something up in about half an hour. The documentation is pretty extensive as well! And there’s a good beginner’s tutorial.

All in all, it’s a subject which I hope to write more about, perhaps post up a few tutorials, examples, that sort of thing.

Well, thank goodness for that – the Chinese Government haven’t blocked my website.

How do I know this? The Great Firewall of China. Obviously they don’t consider me a threat… little do they know that’s exactly what I want them to think!

Muahahahahahaha!!!!

Normal service will resume as soon as we’ve figured out what ‘normal’ is.

… there is one thing which annoys me about it. When a page loads, there is a point after the request has been made and before the page has rendered where it completely locks up. Well, not completely – if I’m on another tab I can usually continue doing stuff. But I can’t switch tabs until the page has loaded, etc.

This isn’t really a problem when pages load up quickly – this is only a problem when (like today) the good ol’ interweb seems to be taking its sweet time.

I don’t mind waiting, but please – at least don’t freeze up while loading!

And, so, once again, what you’ve been waiting all week for: my “the weekend” post! So. What did we get up to this weekend? Not a huge amount really… on Saturday we went shopping in the morning, and in the afternoon went to a few estate agents to start the process of looking for houses! That’s right, we are officially starting our “house hunting” process. We still have a few months left on our contract in the place we’re in now, so it’s not urgent, which is good – we can afford to be a little picky for the time being!

In the evening we rented a DVD – “The Devil Wears Prada”. It was quite an interesting film, worth watching, although having said that half the time I was screaming at the protagonist “NO YOU STUPID WOMAN! STAND UP TO HER!!!!11111one”. Well, not literally screaming, but … you get the picture.

On Sunday morning we went to Fordham, and in the afternoon we did a bit of Moore Course work. We’re currently on the last unit of this particularly module! I have to say although we have both enjoyed it, I don’t know whether we’ll be doing another module any time soon… it does take up quite a lot of time! But still. The exam is on Easter Saturday, so we will have to do a bit more work on revision before it’s fully over. Good times…

In the evening, Philippa went to a girlie night at Anne-Marie’s, and I went to a lad’s night at Alex’s to play poker. It was great fun! I’ve never actually played poker before… we didn’t play for money, we played for M&Ms. I really enjoyed it, and I’ll definitely be at the next M&M poker night! 🙂

Right, it’s getting late so I’m off to bed. All for now.

I’ve done a new mix! It’s dnb:

1. Black Sun Empire – ?
2. Kinetic – Mystery
3. Blame – Spartacus
4. Trevelyan & Icarus – Fruit X
5. DJ Flatliner – Moody Horizons
6. DJ Evol – Praise Jah
7. Jamal – Real DJs
8. Zero Tolerance – Conquest
9. FX909 – Desperate Angel
10. Black Sun Empire – ?
11. Roni Size – Sorry For You

You can download it here!

This weekend was pretty busy. Well, aside from Friday night, but I won’t talk about that! On Saturday morning, we did a few bits of shopping. In the afternoon, Julie (one of Phil’s friends) came up from London, so we spent a nice afternoon chatting, and then we went to the Bengal Spice for dinner (and, needless to say, had a very enjoyable curry!). Julie headed off at about 9:00, and then we headed round to Jon & Sarah’s to meet up with them and a few other people (including Andy B, Naomi, Liz, and Simon) for drinks. And also watched some of the lunar eclipse (which didn’t really turn out to be very exciting, I was hoping the moon would go an unusual colour).

On Sunday, we went to church in the morning, and then went to the Stanway Harvester with Sarah, Jon, Naomi, and Andy B for lunch. In the evening, Alex came round for dinner and we watched “Top Gear”, and then watched two or three episodes of Scrubs.

Right, I think that’s just about everything for the time being… all for now!

…or not, as the case may be.

If you haven’t already heard, James Cameron is making a documentary about how he’s found the grave of Jesus and family (the “Holy Family”). Actually I don’t know if he’ll be claiming that he has found the grave personally because I believe it’s been around for quite some time now, but still.

The point of this post is basically to say, the whole thing has been quite thoroughly debunked already, in fact the whole thing looks less convincing then the “Da Vinci Code” (yes, it’s really that bad). But it’s useful to have such links just in case 🙂

Sorry about not updating much recently – it’s been relatively busy! I guess the main news is that last Monday (not yesterday, the one before) I went for a job interview, and I was offered the job (and accepted it) on Wednesday 🙂 The job is for a software development consultancy in Ipswich, they’re a bit bigger than the company I’m at now and I think it’s a good step up for me in terms of my career. Unfortunately due to a relatively long notice period I wont be joining them for a while (middle of May), but I’m looking forward to it nonetheless!

So… apart from new jobs, what else has been happening? Not a huge amount really. On Saturday we didn’t do much during the day. In the evening we went over to Wivenhoe to meet up with Alex, Elisa, Phil P and Esther to have fish & chips and then go to the pub for a while. That was a very enjoyable evening, almost like old times actually!

On Sunday we went to Fordham in the morning, and then came back for lunch. We didn’t really do a huge amount for the rest of the day actually – mainly stuff which isn’t very exciting to talk about, i.e. cleaning / cooking / preparing for this week’s Moore Course meeting…

Yesterday evening, my parents came over for dinner, which was nice!

And… I think that’s just about it for the time being!

OK, I know I’m a week late, but something struck me about valentine’s day a while back and I just missed mentioning it on the actual day :p

Would anyone be up for having an “Anti-Valentine’s Ball”? i.e., a sort of ‘cheesy tunes’ like event, but instead of playing all the loved up songs playing stuff like “Every day I love you less and less” by the Kaiser Chiefs and “Monster” by The Automatic (“What’s that coming over the hill – is it a monster?”).

I’m up for DJing at it 😉