Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I was flicking over the Ruby category of Amazon.co.uk’s computer programing languages books and came accross this listing…

Should I tell them? :p.

I actually had the thought to check out the library and see what they had to offer as I really don’t want to be spending money on a book. The answer is they can’t offer anything! EB don’t have one single book on Ruby programming apparently. I wonder if I can request some.

I think Eniac has emptied for the summer, haven’t seen anyone in here the last few times I have been in. Not that I expected to, who is going to come into uni labs over the summer? Well, some people might hit DEC-10, I know Matt did, but that’s DEC-10, everyone except me hates Eniac :p.

I had another early start and finish this morning, I was home before 7:30. I got registered with Labour Ready but he said it wasn’t worth hanging around as he wouldn’t be able to find anything for me today. I did allow me to get some development done though. Although it’s depressing thinking about how work could cut into my development. I don’t want to get home from work and think “I’m just too tired to do anything,” I refuse to be even if it means overdosing on caffine. I don’t actually like coffee so I may just eat the beans raw.

On the up side, it’s now only 4 days until I see Billy Talent! I’ve been playing their new album almost non-stop including all night when I sleep to try and get all the lyrics learnt in time.

Have a read through this BBC News article. I’ll quote…

A Populus poll for The Times newspaper and ITV news suggests 13% of UK Muslims believe the 7/7 bombers should be regarded as martyrs, with the other 87% disagreeing.

I saw worrying not suprising because I’ve seen the figures for an international survey which asked basically the same question. While I hadn’t seen the British figures I could guess from the figures I did see that we would be about that level. But anyway.

13% of Muslims in the UK support what happened on 7/7. That’s in the UK. I’ve seen the worldwide figures and I think it goes without saying that they are a lot higher elsewhere, obviously in the middle east.

Given there are about a billion Muslims, and it averages out to be about 25%, that means 250,000,000, or 4 times the population of the UK are in support of such actions taken on 7/7.

Furthermore, we have 1.5 million Muslims in the UK. That means over 202,000 Muslims in the UK alone support the actions of 7/7. This is not a small minority. This isn’t a bunch of extremists we can dismiss. This is 200,000 people in the UK alone. This should scare the crap out of all of us.

Nooooooooooo! They were so close. It was 0-0 in extra time. Over 28 minutes into the 30 minutes of extra time after which it would go to penalties which Germany would almost certainly win as they have only ever lost once at penalities in the World Cup (they beat Argentina in the last round on them) and Italy have only won once apparently.

Then Italy scored. Germany had a single minute to claw one back and beat them on penalties. Then Italy scored again! This sooo isn’t fair, I ignored the World Cup until last round, then I started to get sucked in. By this round I got myself pyched up enough to be screaming at the TV and then this happens!

If Germany had a chance to win the World Cup this was it. They were in the final in 2002 but Brazil beat them 2-0 and rightfully so, I can’t pretend Brazil didn’t outplay them because they were really on form. But being the host nation is always a massive advantage – look how far South Korea got in 2002. South Korea! So if they had a chance, it was this World Cup while they are the host nation. Guess not though. Despite that, they are a stronger team than they were in 2002 so it seems Klinsmann is bringing them back onto form.

Already back from work. Went down to Labour Ready today at 7, they said they couldn’t register me without a passport or birth cerificate as driving licence isn’t proof of ID (but a non-phone, hand-written birth cerificate is), so I had my dad rush one down, which they couldn’t use because it’s not a full one. So it’s 7:46 and I’m back home. I shouldn’t be up for a good few hours yet, let alone finished my day.

The Federation should have never have agreed to the treaty that prevented them from developing cloaking technology. Especially as, as seen on TNG they had some very powerful cloaking technology secretly developed. I mean, they couldn’t develop it but surely they could use what they have already done right? It’s like when The Doctor on Voyager deleted all that medical information because the doctor who came up with it tested it all on innocent Bajorans. Sure that was wrong but what is done is done and there is no reason to delete it.

Anyway, the point is, it may soon be out of the Trek and into the labs. Two mathematicians have published an article in one of the UK Royal Society’s scientific journals which shows how a cloak could and should work in theory. You can find full details on BBC News.

I randomly changed on TV.com to find them running an article entitled “a tribute to Aaron Spelling.” I decided to check it out and was informed that he passed away last week. It’s a shame as Aaron Spelling is an absolute legend. For those not aware of him, he brought us the following TV shows…

• Charlie’s Angels
• Love Boat
• Starsky and Hutch
• T.J. Hooker
• Beverly Hills, 90210
• Melrose Place
• 7th Heaven
• Charmed

That is of course no where close to a definitive list but it’s the ones I felt people would most recognise. Starsky and Hutch in it’s time was mind-bogglingly successful, 90210 was like the original Dawson’s Creek and Charmed is still going strong to this day (ok it’s ending but that’s amazing, so few TV shows “end” rather than “get cancelled”).

Hmm…

David Smith: oh yer ive got a a challenge for ya
David Smith: want to see if you can pull off making your own facebook inwhich anyone can join as i cant join the original
David Smith: should be intresting seeing what you come up with
Chris: something similar to www.unimatchup.co.uk no doubt

I really am trying to cut down.

I’m having my ups and downs with Linux. Last night I got Ubuntu to successfully install and boot up which I was quite pleased with and I’ve spent today configuring it. When it first booted up and I found I had nothing but a command line I decided it was best to keep it that way. Throwing yourself in at the deep end is a good way to learn things if it doesn’t matter if your drown.

So far things have gone reasonably smoothly. I’ve managed to configure my ethernet connection and get it on the network so it can download things and I’ve managed to get Apache, MySQL, Postgres, OpenSSH and an FTP server up and running on it so far although they aren’t working together perfectly yet. But I’ll be working on those problems soon enough.

Btw, if you ever need to edit a file on Linux use vi. Just type vi filename and it launch the command line type text editor dealie. Why does nobody tell you that? I had to pour through Linux commands pages from Google search results for ages to find that out. If I want to create a directory then there are a million pages available telling me how to do that. But when it comes to editing a file, it seems to be the hidden secret of the Linux world.

The only problem is, my computer isn’t massively quite, it probably makes even more noise than my laptop so I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep through it which means turning it off and on again every night. Until my parents go away to Canada, then it’s just getting moved to a different room and left on constantly :p.

I will get my old computer working as a test server! Well technically it’s my old, old, old computer but that is how fast things move these days ;). But yeah, I really want to get it working so I can install PHP5 on it and compatability test my scripts more. Plus if it’s networked the file transfers will be blindingly fast compared to uploading it to my VPS.

So far I’ve managed to get the old computer functioning in terms of hardware. I bid on some memory a few days ago which arrived this morning – £2 (including P&P!) for 128mb, I was well impressed. I managed to find the keyboard, mouse and power lead too so that’s all sorted. Also the second hard drive is now working which is what I did my Ubuntu install on.

The problem I am having now though is that when I tell it to boot up Ubuntu at Grub it runs the boot command then just restarts. I managed to find what I hope is a solution on the forums though. Apparently there is a problem with the server disk so I’m now downloading the alternative install disk ISO.