Archive for July, 2004

Day of Dance

Monday, July 19th, 2004 | Life

Well thanks to Temple Moor getting shunned by the last Offsted report as a cultural blackhole, we were forced into a day of dance today. Teachers kept bragged we got to do this while everyone else had normal lessons but the thing they didn’t seem to realise is that we would have prefered to do normal lessons that all this dancing. Especially as I only have three lessons on a Monday.

The super learning days are not over yet thought, there is another two to go – a trip to Leeds Met tommorow and interform sporting activities on Wednesday. Wow, it is going to be a long week. I did manage to get some photos from today though.

As a trivia point, this is post 15 – after this one posts will be getting pushed off the homepage. But anyway – the photos:

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Above is street dancing and below is tango:

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Summer Sun, well, cloud

Monday, July 19th, 2004 | Life

Well it’s Monday morning and I am pretty tired considering I got up at 7, left the house at half seven and walked all the way to Carl’s and back before arriving at school and eight thirty. Still at least there is only three days of school left. Today is the day of dance – more on that later including photos, horror stories and twisted ankles.

But anyway the real subject of this post is summer plans. It was going to be filming – lots of filming. But lack of scripts have put us back.

Also I was hoping I would have a car by now as Craig takes two hours to get here on the bus. Even though he says he can get here in thirty minutes. Maybe though script writing should be factored into our production time. We also have storage problems considering how much space video takes up but I am sure we will figure something out. And by figure something out I mean sleep through summer. Sounds like a plan.

Maze Radio launches

Sunday, July 18th, 2004 | Life

Although it has been around for ages, Maze Radio was not officially launched – that is until now. The homepage now offers links, the streaming audio works and plans are being put into, well actually, more plans are being drawn up. Whatever, it gives the overall effect that Maze Radio is now once again in motion. It’s it just so exciting!

You can now listen online at http://www,mazeradio.com. There is also information about the radio station and a forum. It’s still phpBB subSilver at the moment there is no intergration or customization at all. But it will come with time. There is also a link to Nerd Federation as many of our Maze Radio hosts are also part of Nerd Federation so we are using this as our offical blog base :).

What’s with the re-activation of Maze Radio. Well it’s mainly down to my new found facination with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. As well as the fact I am totally addicted to the game I just love Pressing Issues on Vice City Public Radio. I found myself just leaving the game running on my laptop so I could listen to the show. Then two things occured to me – one we should have a cool talk radio show like that. Two I happen to operate a talk radio station.

And so I decided to try and beathe new life into Maze Radio. We need listeners so get everyone you know and many more people who you don’t know listening to the show. If you have any ideas for topics too, feel free to post them in the comments section below.

The Dot Com Show

Sunday, July 18th, 2004 | Life

I said I would eventually get the stuff together and thanks to some quality nagging I have actually done it. Last Friday myself, JD and Andy put together our new rivial for the Dot Net Show on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/) hosted by the almighty Robert Hess. I think once you watch it though (not that we are going to be putting it online though lol) you will see its the best show ever.

Today is Sunday so only two days gap I don’t think is bad for me. Out of interest, today is Hooton’s birthday (I think) so happy b-day Hooton. Your now older than JD for exactly a month. Anyway so back to the subject, we did manage to get a picture of the crew…

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From left to right – myself with the trademark headphones, Andy at the back and JD on the right.

We also plan to bring you a host of new shows including Who show Carl S? and the Carlman show.

ASP.net url rewriting

Friday, July 16th, 2004 | Life

Perhaps the thing about Robert Hess and involving pictures and stuff is a pipe stream. I plan to do it tommorow but seen as tommorow is like 12 minutes away as I write I mean tommorow tommorow not just tommorow literally. Still, I may just be telling myself that I will do it tommorow and never actually get round to hit. Who can say what the future will bring?

I have spent most of the night trying to get an ASP.net url rewriting thing to work. Why oh why it couldn’t be simple like Apache’s mod_rewrite I will never know although I couldn’t get that working and resorted to using forcetype instead at the end so not much of a starter really. I tried to use the demos out of the box as it were though too with no success.

Anyway for those crazy enough to follow in my footsteps here are some useful web links:

http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/URLRewriter.asp?select=867132&df=100&forumid=4228&exp=0
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/030522.htm
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/020417.htm
http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/community/authors/scottmitchell/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/urlrewriting.asp

Hope you have more sucess than I did, if so, email me your code! 😉

Good old Friday

Friday, July 16th, 2004 | Life

I like Friday’s mainly because there is no more school, usually for the next few days although next week sees three activity days (pretend school days in other words) before breaking up for summer. We should really gather some plans about the filming that we are going to due during summer but until then it’s time for a 48 hour sleep.

Today wasn’t too much work though, we spent some quality time with a video camera, I will post more about our aspirations to become more like Robert Hess later. Check out the fansite we built at http://roberthess.4xd.net. I just pretty much wanted to get a plug for the site there.

The real news for today though is that after weeks and weeks of work, today finally sees the offical launch of Gamer Forge (http://www.gamerforge.com), which as you can guess is some kind of gaming site. I got hold of Grand Theft Auto Vice City which I am currently addicted to. Despite claims that it is old I would like to point  out that the second newest game I have, after Vice City is Max Payne – seeing a pattern? In case you don’t the pattern is that I have old games ;).

The review is less than fifty words below the 1000 mark so I am pretty pleased with it. Here’s an extract and everything:


Vice City Review Extract
 “It’s 2 am and I am still up.” “For the last six hours I have done nothing but play this game.” These are some of the openers I considered using in the review. But the truth is I couldn’t use them – because rather than tear myself away to start the review I found myself going on yet another mission. That is because Grand Theft Auto Vice City is quite simply addictive.

First impressions are not to be taken too heavily. The installation seems to destroy your hard drive with audio and when you first load up the game you may find yourself thinking “is this it?” But soon the gameplay comes into full swing and whether you are cruising round random roads on a bike or completing mission after mission, chances are you will be hooked.

Graphics are a tough one to mark for Vice City. When I first began playing the game my first though was they were less than impressive. The game seemed to have done nothing more than Driver did years ago and Grand Prix II did back yonder. But when it comes down to detail, Vice City has gone further.


Anyway, so I am pretty pleased with the site as it has a built in forum, completly static look almost and a great picture of me for the editorial section of the homepage :). Until next time – erm, I dunno where I was going with this really. Bye.

My exact double

Tuesday, July 13th, 2004 | Life

I was just watching the episode of the Simpsons where Homer gets chucked out of Moe’s and Marge is scared of flying. I managed to get a quality photo of Homer’s exact double :). That will provide some nice entertainment when I am next flicking through what is contained on my compact flash card. Out of interest they are bringing out a 2GB one soon!

I did have point for this post previously but I can’t rememer now – it was a few days ago that I had the idea and I wanted to space it out between the Antitrust. Ah well, how about writing about writing about how Craig disappeared – there is a topic for you rawpulse. Anyway I like these posts to have a point that can be found on a search engine lol so today’s problem is when we were trying to log in on the Chain of Addiction forum we got page cannot be displayed error.

The solution? Yeah I knew you would come clicking. Anyway the problem was in the configuration of the board. To solve it, go into the admin panel and click on configuration and check the domain and folder path. Hope it works!

A point about Antitrust

Monday, July 12th, 2004 | Life

Antitrust maybe many things, the one I am refering to is the movie. For those of us in the UK it was on Channel 5 last Thursday. It was quite a good movie too. The basic plot was Milo is brought into NERV, a huge computer software company that everybody hates and is getting hit with antitrust lawsuits. Anyway the point is, to complete Synapse their latest project which will link every device in the world together they need really good code.

Milo is brought into the company to  help although the only real way they can do it is to kill the worlds best coders, make it look like a themed attack such as racial, etc and then steal the developers code. It is working pretty well until Milo stumbles onto the plan and makes the source code publically available.

The point is though that this movie came out in 2001 and was likely to have been writen in 2000. And what have Microsoft done between then and now. Unveiled, the Dot Net initiative, an XML platform which allows every device to communicate with each other. Seeing the connection?

Tis a new day

Monday, July 12th, 2004 | Life

Well who would have thought we could sustain interest for more than 24 hours? Ah well we have like an hour to spill out in ICT although we could do to get some law revision done. Anyway I have loads to post but have stuff to do now. Back later.

MySQL Timestamp

Sunday, July 11th, 2004 | Life

Although officially I hate PHP, date() is pretty cool. The thing is that PHP uses a different timestamp format to the standard MySQL timestamp. Therefore the majority of timestamps stored in MySQL are actually stored as intergers. Or at least this is how phpBB do it. And that is how my latest site does it. But enough about quick plugs. What’s happening here?

Ah right, the thing about MySQL timestamp is that it updates to the current time everytime you update the column. Therefore when I had to make a change to the database to set a post to a different user, it updated the timestamp and moved the post to the top. Hmm, I posted this, maybe it evens it out or at least dislodges it from the top.

So, Malcolm in the Middle has just ended. Ok, here I am just trying to fill out space. Here’s a picture of Fonze again:

Remind you of anyone? Ayyyyy!