29/08/2007 - Wednesday

100th Post

This is my 100th post on this blog so far. I created this one on the 2nd October 2006, so 100 posts in just under 11 months isn't too bad. I know I should post more, and I do try, but most of the posts I could do would just be the same all the time (about website updates and things like that). I prefer my posts to have a specific subject and usually be more than a paragraph long.

To celebrate this milestone I'm going to add averts onto the bottom of the posts (or at least three of them on the main page). It's a new feature of Blogger that I thought I would try out. I already have two advert blocks and I had actually thought about putting some at the end of the posts but my trial attempts didn't work out. Now they're doing it for me so I just had to turn the feature on and it should all work.

Computer Problem

For a while now I've been experiencing rising process id numbers which would hit 450k-480k after 7 days (my computer is restarted every sunday after a defrag). I had recently installed and updated a few pieces of software but wasn't able to track down which one was causing it. I just left it as I didn't really see any adverse effects. On Sunday, after restarting, a popup window informed me that there was a new version of a piece software that I had installed when this all started, so I decided to take a look at what had changed. One of the changes was about fixing a handle leak which would be a cause of the high pid's. After installing the new version of the software the highest pid so far is 38716, which is the pid of the software itself. So it definitely was the cause of the problem. If anyone uses Wakoopa (social website for software) and have experienced the pid problem then you should make sure to install the newer version of the software.

20/08/2007 - Monday

Your Brain is Yellow

Of all the brain types, yours is the most intellectual. You crave mental stimulation, and your thoughts tend to very complex. Your thoughts tend to be innovative and cutting edge, though many people don't understand them. You tend to spend a lot of time thinking about science, architecture, and communication.

What Color Is Your Brain?

18/08/2007 - Saturday

I've finished off quite a few tests for the Healtheriser recently. I've also started on a few more that I should actually have (the tests are also performed by other tests, but it doesn't hurt to make sure that it's throughly tested!). In a short while I should be ready to move on to implementing the measurements part of the website. It's pretty similar to the weights, so most of it is simple copying. After the measurements are done I think I'll make it available for public testing. I'll then see how it stands to being abused by people (if anyone uses it that is!). I have a lot more planned for it, so I'm not going to be stopping there (I have two planned already, with at least one more as a possible).

I also watched High School Musical 2 tonight. I honestly couldn't wait for it to end. The storyline is pretty boring, the acting not much better, the characters worse than the first movie (which I actually liked), and the songs just plain rubbish. The actors have also seemed to forget how to mime to the songs they're apparently singing. Not one of them was able to keep in time with the song. Zac Efron's head was also pretty funny. In both this and the first movie, his hair and eyebrows look totally plastic, like they're not even real. I can't remember one bit where a peice of his hair moved, and his eyebrows look like slugs. He's also not good at making a face that is capable of singing the words that the dubbed songs contain. When the song has full voiced words Zac has a mouth open like a fish. I want my 105 minutes back!

16/08/2007 - Thursday

It was my birthday today. A whopping 25 years old now. Doesn't feel that long though! For presents I got a pair of roller blades (more about these later), a "Horror Duck" (which I have to keep in the box as apparently they'll become collectables sometime!), an entry in The Great British Duck Race, and tickets to the cinema on Sunday to see The Bourne Ultimatum.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to use the roller blades right away as the blade on the left boot is angled slightly inwards which prevents me from putting my weight down on it and coming out with an ankle intact. The right blade is perfectly fine, but the left one just can't hold any weight (as soon as you put any weight on it the centre of balance is shifted and the boot tries to go over to the left, resulting in your ankle nearly getting snapped). The stitching on the velcro strap also came apart. The roller blades are being taken back tomorrow and hopefully the replacements will be fine!

13/08/2007 - Monday

I've finally finished watching Space: Above And Beyond. I first watched it when it was on TV some 11 years ago, but I didn't get much further than halfway through the series before I got busy with school and missed the rest of the episodes. A few months back I managed to get hold of two DVD's containing the episodes as recorded from TV (I don't actually know if there are official DVD's out there) and have been slowly watching them when I get the chance. Turns out that I only got up to episode 12, which was actually halfway through (23 episodes in total).

It was a pleasure to watch the remaining episodes as it was like being back in 1996 and watching them for real on TV. In the last episode I already knew that quite a few of the main characters would be injured or killed, but it was still sad to see it happen. I always felt like I had grown up with the characters as their personalities evolved with each episode (unlike other sci-fi shows where the characters hardly change between episodes).

I'm glad that I finished the series off, although I'm sad to see it end. At least I have it on DVD now so I can watch it again in the years to come!

07/08/2007 - Tuesday

I was a little hasty the other day when moaning about Sky Anytime and the BBC's iPlayer. On Sunday I was doing my weekly defrag and noticed that I had forgotten to delete Aquamarine from Sky Anytime. I started Sky Anytime to do it, and when I got in My Library to delete it I saw that the percentage was 14%. All I can assume is that because both Sky Anytime and the BBC iPlayer use the same downloading software, when I had the BBC iPlayer open trying to download in that instead of downloading the BBC's tv show it was actually downloading the one from Sky. I left Sky Anytime open after the defrag had finished and Aquamarine finished in roughly two hours.

After the success with Sky Anytime I decided to give the BBC iPlayer another go. Luckily there was a tv show that I had missed watching on Saturday and it was listed for download, so I clicked on it and waited to see if anything would download. After a few minutes the downloaded amount changed to 1 MB, and a few more minutes later it changed to 2 MB and 1%. I left it running for the rest of the day and it took roughly 14 hours to complete the 35 minute episode (which was about a quarter the size of Aquamarine). It worked fine and the quality of the episode was good, but it just took far too long. If it had the same speeds as from Sky Anytime then it would be great. Maybe I just have to wait until the BBC iPlayer comes out of beta and they'll obviously add more capacity for all the people that (might) use it.

UPDATE: Earlier this evening I went onto the BBC iPlayer website to see if they had Grownups for download as I forgot that it was on Sunday and I had seen an advert earlier today. Luckily it was on the "featured" page so I didn't have to browse through Sunday's shows. I started downloading it and saw that it quickly went to 1 MB. I then closed the program down so that I wouldn't keep looking at it all the time and got on with other things on my computer. Around two hours later the status window appeared informing me that the show had finished downloading. This was much better than the previous 14 hour wait! I'll have to make a note of other things that show on BBC 3 and 4 that I don't get chance to watching (due to watching BBC 1/2 or some other channel) and see how quickly they download.

04/08/2007 - Saturday

Recently I've been trying out the Sky Anytime on-demand program as well as the new BBC iPlayer on-demand program. Unfortunately, my conclusion is that they are both pathetically disappointing. The Sky Anytime program starts a large Flash 9 player window in which it loads its stuff, but it's really slow to load it, takes the cpu for a long spin at 100% usage, and is really sluggish. That's when it's running at its best. The rest of the time you get too many errors and messages saying that there was a problem with Sky Anytime. Attempting to change to your library while its failing to load a movie listing results in the program locking up for a few minutes, and then it has forgotten both of the things it was doing and sometimes just logs me out instead. The one movie that I tried to download and watch (Aquamarine) wouldn't even start downloading, so I just gave up. I hadn't found a lot that I wanted to download as it only had a small handful of the movies that Sky was showing on their movie channels.

The BBC iPlayer is slightly better than Sky Anytime in that the bulk of the usage is done through a web browser (which has to be Internet Explorer unfortunately). You're able to go back through the past seven days worth of TV shows, but it doesn't actually list all of them (again it only lists a small handful, and lists repeats of repeats while ignoring something new). I attempted to download an episode of Mock of the Week, which I hadn't actually watched before. I left it "downloading" for 30 minutes and it was still at 0%, so I promptly stopped the download and closed the program.

Maybe I'll try both of them again at some point in the future, but hopefully by that time they will have sorted all the stupid problems out so that they're actually useable.