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So… what did we get up to this weekend? Well. On Friday evening we didn’t do very much, we went to bed fairly early because we had to be up rather early on Saturday morning! We got up at about 5AM on Saturday to be at Colchester Station at 6.24. We were going on a train tour, which Philippa’s Dad had bought for us as an early Christmas present! We travelled about 600 miles in one day (including the return journey), all the way up to Grassington in Yorkshire, and got back at about 11:15PM. It was actually a very relaxing day – although travelling can be quite tiring, I didn’t find it so, and it was just nice being able to sit back, relax and chat for the journey!

At Grassington, there was a “Dickensian Christmas Festival” going on — all the villagers had dressed up in Dickensian costumes, and there were plenty of stalls and things around the village! There was a lot of Christmas spirit too, I really felt like I was getting in the mood for Christmas. As we were served all of our meals on the train we didn’t need to have anything to eat there, which meant we were able to spend most of the time looking around! The only downside was that the village was absolutely packed.

The food on the train was absolutely fantastic too — they managed to cook a full Christmas dinner on a train! That’s pretty impressive by any standards really. You can have a look at the same tour for 2007 (click on ‘Christmas in the Yorkshire Dales’ at the bottom), I don’t know whether we will go next year but we would definitely like to go on another one at some point!

Aaaaanyway. Yesterday. We went to Church in the morning, had lunch, went to church in the evening for an candle-lit Advent Service (which I rather enjoyed).

So, that was the weekend! And that’s all from me for now…

Apologies for referring to the Jackson 5 in the title (if you didn’t know what it was, which would be perfectly excusable). But I wanted to mention a new PHP Framework I’ve found, called Code Igniter.

I’ve been casually developing a sort of gallery system recently — in a similar vein to Matthew’s — and … well, it was getting messy. The problem with PHP is it’s flexibility: it allows you do some some really cool stuff … but it does allow your code to become a total mess. Granted, you can have a total mess in any language, but with PHP it’s just so easy!

You really need to use some sort of MVC pattern to make sure that your code is organised and tidy. You can do this yourself, or you can use a framework. I prefer using a framework, as it means a lot of the work is already done for you (although, of course, for smaller projects you don’t always need it – hence me not using it for this gallery initially…)

This is where Code Igniter comes in. In a similar fashion to Ruby on Rails, it divides your application into nice sections. You have a directory called “controllers”, another called “views”, and another called “models”. You just put the relevant bits of the application into those different directories, and bingo! You have an MVC application. It’s also got some really cool features to do with loading properties and libraries, and a whole bunch of other helper libraries.

If you do PHP development and are looking for a lightweight framework, I would suggest giving it a look 🙂

So! We come to another “The Weekend” type post.

Well. On Friday, um, uh…. my memory doesn’t extend that far back. On Saturday, we went into town for a bit. And then we came back home. In the evening, we went to ASK for dinner, which was very nice! I can particularly recommend the honeycomb cheesecake, it was lovely.

On Sunday, we went to church in the morning. And then in the afternoon we … um … didn’t do a huge amount. In the evening, after having dinner we went round to Wivenhoe to see Alex, which was nice! And we watched “Torchwood” there.

On the subject of Torchwood… I thought yesterday’s episode was good. Although it was a bit dark, I thought with a few modifications it could have been a Doctor Who episode. I wasn’t that impressed with last week’s Torchwood though, on similar lines to the fairy one – no explanations!

Aaaanyway, that’s all from me. All for now…

Just a quick post to say that I have finally got around to upgrading to Ubuntu 6.10. When I say “finally got around to”, I really mean, “Finally got the flipping thing to work!”

It just kept failing with a message saying that the bzip process had failed… it turns out this was because I had some dodgy archives in my sources.list (when I say ‘dodgy’, no, I don’t mean that kind of dodgy!). All I had to do was copy over a ‘clean’ sources.list and it started working fine (I got the clean sources.list from the Ubuntu Forums).

It turns out that quite a few people have had problems with upgrading, but now that I’m over that initial problem, everything seems to be working fine for me! It’s using a newer version of Gnome, which means that it looks nicer, and it does load up faster!

Anyway, that’s all from me… I’ll update if I have any more problems 🙂

Ok, so… this is the blog post that I was half way through writing earlier! This time, I’ll try not to lose it …

The first thing is, I’ve been listening to “Love” by the Beatles recently (it arrived on Monday). I’ve been very impressed. The tracks have all been re-worked by George and Giles Martin. Some of them have been done a lot more subtly than others — ‘Yesterday’, for example, sounds almost exactly the same as the original. Some of them I really like what they’ve done though. I have to say, I’ve really been enjoying listening to it! Although I think some Beatles ‘purists’ might not like the messing around with the tracks, I think it’s been done very much in the spirit of the Beatles and they’ve done a really good job.

Anyway. The other thing I wanted to mention is really kind of random, but it’s just something I’ve been thinking about a bit recently… do we really have free will? Scott Adams has mentioned this on the Dilbert Blog quite a few times… he seems to think that we don’t. And, would you believe it, I think he may have a point.

I believe that on a biological level, us humans are basically machines. Highly complicated and intricate, mind, but nevertheless machines^* With a machine (such as a computer), if you give it the same input you will receive the same output. Machines are not random. What I’m trying to say is… if (in another life) there was another me with exactly the same DNA, circumstances, experiences (etc) as me — would the new me make exactly the same choices that I have done?

Is our behaviour predictable — just on a highly, highly complex level? It’s an interesting question.

Of course, if people don’t have free will… that leads to all sorts of problems. How can people be held morally accountable if there is no free will? And a whole host of other things… how can God hold people responsible for not worshipping him if all they are doing is what they are ‘programmed’ to do? (How can I even know there is a God, I might just be ‘programmed’ in a certain way!)

I think my answer to that at the moment would have to be something like… even if our responses are ‘pre-programmed’, we don’t know what those pre-programmed responses are. They are far too complex for us to predict, so to all intents and purposes people have at least the illusion of free will. Of course, being highly complex machines, we may even be able to change what our ‘pre-programmed’ responses might be. We are beginning to see advances in the field of computer science where computer programs can actually modify themselves. Of course, it will be a long time before this is actually usable, but still, it’s a possibility.

Also, it might shed some light on a few things in the Bible, for example this passage in Matthew. How did Jesus know that the other cities would have believed had the same miracles been performed in them? Well, aside from the obvious answer (he was God!) — maybe it was something to do with the fact which humans have predictable responses which only God is intelligent enough to be able to comprehend [it should be noted that the Bible does not explicitly mention ‘free will’ – although, of course, it does not explicitly mention the trinity either…]. Of course, that just brings up more questions…

Aaaaanyway. Enough of me. What do you think?

^* Of course, as a Christian I also believe that we are more than the sum of our parts. But let’s not get into that now 🙂

P.S. – apologies for the philosophical nature of this post. Normal service will be resumed as soon as we have figured out what is normal anyway.

I typed out a long post in here, but it got lost in the statelessness of the web 🙁 I have no idea what happened, it looked like the page refreshed but usually when that happens Firefox remembers what you’ve input.

I can’t be bothered to type it all out again, so this is just to let you know that you’re missing something but you don’t know what :p

So… the film we went to see on Saturday night was the new Bond film, “Casino Royale“. I didn’t quite know what to expect, as it had received mixed reviews from the critics – most of them seemed to love or slate the film because of the reason that it was a bit different from traditional Bond films!

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. “Die Another Day” was dreadful, so to say that this film was better than the previous one doesn’t really say much, but … this film was better than the previous one! Daniel Craig does make a good Bond, and he carried it off very well! The plot isn’t all fast-paced and based around gadgets — in fact, a large chunk of the plot is centred around a poker game which Bond is playing in against the villain of the film. I can understand why some might not like it for a Bond movie, but I really liked it – it had drama and tension, two things which have been a little bit lacking in the world of Bond recently. Also, the villain didn’t want to take over the world – in fact, as far as Bond baddies’ ambitions go he was a bit lacklustre – but I think it added to the film.

There were a few things which I wasn’t too sure about though. The film was long. Very long. Too long for a Bond film, I think. It wasn’t so much the length, it was more that it had several “Ah, this is the end” moments – and then continued on! King Kong did that. Return of the King did that (hmm, both Peter Jackson movies – there may be a trend here!)… I don’t think Bond films should do that! Although it did make the story line more interesting I think they could have done it better.

The other thing I didn’t like was — they didn’t exactly make it clear where the film sat in the Bond chronology. I mean, it was fairly clear that the film was set in the present day, and that Bond was new, ergo ‘James Bond’ is just the name an agent (or group of similar agents) take up as part of the job… but I think in some of the other films they’ve hinted that ‘James Bond’ is the same character all the way through. Anyway, I don’t think it’s worth analysing in too much detail – it is James Bond after all 😉

The other thing I wanted to review was “Eyes Open” by Snow Patrol. I think it’s relatively new, although I’m not sure exactly when it was released! Anyway. I’ve been listening a bit to Virgin Radio at home, and they play “You’re All I have” and “Chasing Cars” quite a bit — for good reason, they’re great tunes! — so I decided to buy the album. I was actually really impressed. I really enjoyed listening through it – there seems to be quite a diversity of style there (from quite mellow stuff to more driving), and it’s all nice and melodic.

I know, I know – I’m terrible at reviewing music! But the point is, if you like their stuff which has been played on the radio, you’ll like the album 🙂

It’s that time of the week again! That’s right, another lovely “The Weekend” post for you all to enjoy 🙂 so… what did we get up to this weekend? Well. On Friday evening we didn’t do very much really! On Saturday we went into town and bought a few new bits and pieces (I bought a new CD – more on that later). In the evening we went to the cinema (once again, more on that later!).

On Sunday we went to Fordham in the morning, and then came back home for lunch. In the afternoon, for the first time we actually used the free gym we have where we live! It’s actually pretty good – it’s fairly well equipped, although small. So hopefully we’ll get more of a chance to use it (well, me at least – Phil is OK because she has quite a long walk to and from work every day).

And… that was our weekend! Not very exciting, I know, but still. My follow-up post will include a couple of reviews…

I was looking for the Ubuntu URL for the previous post, when I stumbled across the fact that Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgy” has been released. It looks good, I’ll probably upgrade this weekend!

And if you’re not using Ubuntu already, why not? 😉 (you don’t have to leave a comment and answer that, by the way!)

I used to think that installing Microsoft products was fairly easy. In fact, even though I am a self-confessed fan of *nix operating systems over Windows, if you’d have asked me a while ago I would have said that installing Windows was easier than installing a Linux operating system.

But I now have a much different opinion…

My sister doesn’t have a computer, and I had one sitting in the spare room, so I decided to give it to her. The snag was, of course, that at the time it had FreeBSD running on it. Great operating system for servers, not brilliant for people who don’t know much about computers! So, I thought I would reinstall my copy of Windows XP on it, and give it to her. In the past, I’ve never had a problem installing Windows on computers (I’ve installed 95, 98, 2000 and XP several times each on various different computers without any problems). This time, though, something was different: the filesystem wasn’t formatted with a partition which Windows could recognise (Windows can’t read Unix partitions, although Unix can read some Windows partitions).

When I tried to start up the setup, it just came up with a blank screen. “Ok”, I thought, “I’ll try removing the Unix partition.” I booted using my Ubuntu live CD, and used fdisk to remove the partition, and in its place created a Windows (FAT32) partition. Great, I could boot into the installer! But when the Windows installer had copied the files and rebooted, I got the message: “Error loading operating system”. I did a bit of searching around, and found a few things I could try. None of them worked.

So, I tried rebooting using my live CD again, and this time complete removed any partitions on the disk. This time, when Windows rebooted during the installation process it came up with the message “NTLDR Not found”. Again, did a bit of searching around but couldn’t find a solution to the problem.

In the end I had to boot using my live CD and use the Unix ‘shred’ utility to complete destroy any data on the hard disk. Then, Windows actually was able to install properly. All in all, the process took a few hours over several days and a lot of cursing at Microsoft!

But it doesn’t end there. At work, we recently bought a new laptop which had Windows Media Centre Edition on it. Don’t ask me why we bought a laptop with Media Centre on it, I think it was just because it was cheap! Anyway. We didn’t want Media Centre, so we uninstalled it and instead attempted to install Windows XP Professional. Sorry, no. It got to the installation screen, and then came up with a message saying no hard disks were installed. What? Windows just booted of that freakin’ hard disk, how can you say there was no hard disk?!!!

Long story short, after much frustration we eventually had to take it back to the place where we bought it and get them to re-format and re-install.

Anyway, going back to what I was saying about the difference between Windows and *nix installations – in both of those scenarious above I tried a *nix distribution, and it worked flawlessly. Linux seems to have much better hardware support out of the box than Windows, and supports a wider variety of filesystems etc. The bottom line is, if you want your installation to “just work”, I’d recommend using a Linux distribution like Ubuntu (it should also be pointed out that my installation of FreeBSD was absolutely painless as well). Microsoft just make too many assumptions about your computer when they do an installation, which can make it a nightmare at times (we all know that to assume is to make an ass out of you and Windows Me).