Spidah's Web

Laura Robson

2008-07-06T20:04:00.002+01:00

Congratulations to Laura Robson on her Girls Singles Wimbledon Final win. The only time I actually watched a full match of hers was the final, so I didn't actually really know what to expect from her (I'd only seen a few highlights when she had been playing at the same time as another big match).

I was quite surprised, about both of the players (Noppawan Lertcheewakarn was the other player), as they had power to match the professional players. Quite looking forward to seeing more of her in the future, hopefully winning more finals!

Why I Use Opera

2008-06-23T18:30:00.003+01:00

For about the last eight or nine years I've been using the Opera web browser instead of Internet Explorer or Firefox. I've been throughly satisfied with it since then and highly doubt I've ever switch to another browser for my day-to-day usage. There are some sites that just don't work in Opera, however, so I still use Internet Explorer every now and then (mainly just for a game site).

There are many reasons why I've stuck with Opera over the years. The main reason is that it's pretty fast and snappy and I can happily leave it running in the background. I tried Firefox several times but it was always so sluggish and slowed down progressively over time. I haven't actually tried Firefox 3, but I seriously don't see any need for it.

The newly released version of Opera (9.5) is even better. I had been following it with their "weekly" previews, but due to some changes breaking some pages for a while I ended up just using the 9.2 releases until they'd fixed the problems (ie. released 9.5). When it was finally released I made sure to install into a new directory (always had the weeklies seperate, so it was no different from that) just incase there were any problems and I could easily just continue using 9.27. I had to make a few changes to the default install, mainly as I don't really care for the new default skin (or any of the default skins actually), so I installed the skin I like (Operatic Orbit), plus also made some changes to the keyboard layout as the new defaults are more to cater for people coming from other browsers (like Firefox) and I'm used to the old Opera keyboard shortcuts.

It seems much snappier now. Opera 9.27 took roughly 8-10 seconds to start up from cold, whereas 9.5 takes about 3-4 seconds. Opening links from other programs (like a rss feed reader) used to take about 6 seconds on 9.27, but now are near instant on 9.5. I've never really noticed any of the claims that Opera is leaner on memory, as whenever I check the memory usage in the task manager it's usually in the 80-90 MB range (I know it's not a conclusive test, but it's the only test I can do quickly and easily). Opera 9.5 is still the same, with a current usage of 98MB and the browser having been open for 12 hours, three tabs open, one (gmail) for the whole 12 hours, and lots more tabs having been opened and closed during the day. However, it doesn't really appear to make any difference to my system, unlike other programs which use the same amount of memory in the task manager but make my system really slow. Also, 9.5 seems to close quicker too, with the process freeing it's memory and exiting before 9.27 would be even halfway done.

All in all I must say that I'm quite happy with Opera 9.5. The new speed increases on startup and opening tabs is very welcome, as it stops other programs from locking for too long while it waits for the browser/tab to open.

08/05/2008 - Thursday

2008-05-08T12:18:00.002+01:00

A couple of weeks ago my parents computer picked up another bit of spyware. The symptoms were the desktop picture had gone and was replaced by a failed Active Desktop page (white background, big yellow exclamation mark, and text saying that it had failed), and the desktop kept crashing out shortly after loading, only to attept to reload again, but fail, and continue doing this for some while (some times it didn't try to reload, other times it'd keep doing it).

I attempted to see what was running on the computer through the task manager, but that was "disabled by the administrator". I don't know whether this was done by whatever was causing the desktop crashes or if it was something else on there, but it was a problem. So I booted into safe mode, and the desktop was still crashing out. I tried to open the task manager again so that I can start a command shell, but it was disabled here as well.

I knew I had Spyboy Search & Destroy installed on the computer, so I rebooted into safe mode with command prompt, started Spybot via the command prompt, and let it do a scan. I wasn't sure how old the definitions were, but it might have been able to find something. It found a fair few things (unrelated to the main problem, but problems themselves), as well as the task manager being disabled. I didn't actually know it could be controlled by a value in the registry. I "fixed" those problems, then rebooted back into safe mode to see if I could access the task manager again. I could, great!.

I rebooted into safe mode with network access, quickly rigged up two network cables and a switch to give the computer network access (it was using wireless at the time, which doesn't appear to work in safe mode; which isn't surprising really) due to the distance from the router, and started Spybot again. I then updated the defintions and let it run another scan. I kept running the scan until it didn't find anything wrong (hah!), then rebooted into normal Windows to see if it had done the trick. It hadn't as the active desktop was still failing and the desktop still crashing out. I tried to change the active desktop back to a normal picture, but that didn't hold after a reboot.

I rebooted back into safe mode and did some scans with other spyware products (Sunbelt Counterspy, and Lavasoft's Ad-Aware). Both of them found different things, but neither of them actually fixed anything. The next time I was in normal Windows I opened up Internet Explorer and took a look at what add-ons (BHOs - Browser Helper Objects) were installed and running (I can't remember now why I looked there, but it helped). I noticed two odd ones that shouldn't have been there. The first was called 'xxyyvstr.dll' and the second was 'ssdOHqXP.dll' (or something like that; I didn't note the names down until after I had got rid of them, and I could only really remember the first one correctly). I attempted to disable them, but they didn't stay disabled. This made me think that one or both of these were the problem.

So I downloaded the BHO remover from Novell (http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/18177.html), ran that and deleted the two BHO's. When I deleted the second BHO I noticed that the first one had come back again. So I deleted that again and noticed that the second one had come back again. Bah, something is running that's restoring the BHO's.

I did a quick file scan to see where the files lived and both were in the C:\WINDOWS\system32 folder. I attempted to delete them but they were in use and couldn't be deleted. I rebooted into safe mode again and tried to delete them from there, but they were in use there too. I use a bit of software called Unlocker (http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/) which lets you unlock lock files so that they can be deleted or moved (ie. video files that are locked by Explorer because it's building up a thumbnail preview). So I ran Unlocker on the xxyyvstr.dll file and it said it was locked by winlogon.exe (a core piece of the Windows OS). I attempted to unlock the file so I could delete it, but all I managed to do was mess the winlogon.exe file up and it started a forced reboot.

After it rebooted I started Unlocker again and told it to delete the file on the next reboot instead. Rebooted the computer again, but the file was still there and locked by winlogin.exe. Obviously the files are being loaded and locked before any delete events are executed. I was now stumped for a while. I couldn't do a system restore as the system restore feature had been turned off (a good kicker for me to leave it enabled in future!). I was considering doing a recovery from the Windows install cd, and if that failed then I'd backup the files and reinstall Windows. It was then that I remembered the recovery console available on the Windows install cd. I quickly put the cd in, rebooted, entered the recovery console, changed into the system32 folder (cd system32) as it starts off in the WINDOWS folder of the system drive, and deleted the two files (del xxyyvstr.dll and del ssdOHqXP.dll).

I ejected the cd, rebooted the machine again (just type exit and hit enter from the recovery console to do it automatically), and crossed my fingers. Windows loaded up, the desktop appeared, the failed active desktop appeared too, but then the desktop stayed on and everything else loaded. Woohoo! I changed the desktop back to a normal picture then ran the BHO Remover again and deleted the two BHO's. This time they didn't come back again.

Since then, I did a scan through the registry (using regedit.exe) for any traces of the two files, but I could only find one. This was located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify\xxyyvstr. I deleted it as I don't want any traces of it still left on the computer.

So, if anyone else has anything like this and those two files are on your computer, just follow these instructions:

Get your Windows install cd (I've been using Windows XP, but I guess there's something similar on a Vista install cd, or a Windows 2000 one. For other versions I don't know - sorry!), put it into the cd drive, reboot and boot from the cd.
Enter the recovery console, select the Windows drive (usually option 1), and enter the admin password if you've entered one.
Run these commands:
cd system32
del xxyyvstr.dll
del ssdOHqXP.dll
Eject the cd and then type exit.
When it's rebooted, run the BHO Remover program and delete the entries for the two files.
If you want to get rid of the registry key, open regedit.exe (Start - Run), navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify\xxyyvstr or just search for xxyyvstr. Right-click on the found key on the left and delete.
All done!

If you don't have access to a Windows install cd to use the recovery console then I'm afraid I have nothing to help you. I couldn't find a way to remove the files without it.

01/03/2008 - Saturday

2008-03-01T21:59:00.004Z

So the UK picked their Eurovision entry for this year, and somehow managed to pick the wrong one. The only interesting and good one was Michelle Gayle's song, yet the Andy bloke got picked. No matter, the UK aren't going to get many points anyway.

24/02/2008 - Sunday

2008-02-24T21:28:00.002Z

Wow, I hate computers sometimes

Last weekend I had some stupid weird problem with my computer. I rebooted it (as I do every Sunday morning), started up the programs I usually have running (winamp, utorrent, etc.), then fired up the defragger to clean up the C: drive (another thing I do every Sunday morning). This is where the problems started. Everything ground to a halt and the music went sporadic, like there was a ton of disk access. I left it for a couple of minutes to see if it would clear itself, seeing as I wasn't running anything that would cause all the disk access (I hadn't actually started the defragger at the time, so it wasn't that causing it). I got bored of waiting, so I decided to just restart it and try again. So I hit the reset button, watched the BIOS flash past, then it stayed at a black screen with the hard drive light on constant. So I tried it again. Same thing. Tried it a third time, and this time it flashed up that there was a disk read error. My mood suddenly dropped as there was some stuff that I hadn't backed up yet and I didn't really want to have lost it due to a dead drive.

Invisible hard drives

I have two drives in my computer (a 300 GB and an 80 GB) and I wasn't sure which was causing the problem, although I was guessing it was the 300 GB one as that's the drive that has Windows on the C: partition (it has four other partitions on it). I restarted the computer again and entered the BIOS to see if it's not seeing one of the drives. It surprised me as neither of the drives were visible (in hindsight I should have tried replacing the IDE cable, but I didn't think of that at the time). This was kind of confusing as I was expecting at least one to be there (if not both).

Getting my hands dirty

I decided to dive into the guts, unplug one of the drives, and see if the other one then becomes visible. I did the 300 GB drive out first as it was the easiest to get to. Turned the computer on and entered the BIOS and the disk was visible. Rebooted again and let the BIOS continue and it came up with the message about it being an invalid system disk, which was good. I plugged the 300 GB drive back in and unplugged the 80 GB drive, turned it back on, entered the BIOS, and, surprisingly, the 300 GB drive was also visible! Rebooted, let it continue, and Windows booted perfectly fine. Strange.

Kinky drives

I rebooted again and entered the BIOS yet again and took a look at where the drive was placed on the primary cable. Turns out it was the slave device. This got me a bit confused as the 80 GB drive was also the slave device when it was plugged in (different plugs on the cable too). The 300 GB has always been the master device as I hard set it with a jumper, and the 80 GB has been the slave (no jumper = slave for the drive). Why was it suddenly showing them both as the slave device? Maybe this was the problem? If both the drives are attempting to be the slave device then it was obviously confusing the BIOS and it thought that there were no drives at all.

Cable select

I decided to put both drives into cable select mode and let the BIOS and the cable work out which drive should be the master and which should be the slave. Changed the jumper on the 300 GB drive and put one on the 80 GB drive (luckily I have spare ones), plugged them both back in, turned it on, entered the BIOS, and only the 80 GB drive was showing as the slave device (no master device at all). I was getting annoyed by now (it had been about three hours since the problem started, due to going for a shower, stopping for lunch, etc.) so I switched the plugs over to see if that made any difference. Turned the computer on once more, entered the BIOS, looked at the drives, and both of them were visible with the 300 GB as the master and the 80 GB as the slave. Hurrah! Rebooted, let it continue, Windows booted and everything is visible on both drives. Hurrah again!

One week on

It has been a week now and the computer has been restarted a couple of times (had to fiddle with the network card settings to get a better network speed) and there was a very brief power cut at the beginning of the week (brief being less than a second, but long enough to interrupt the power), and everything is still working fine. I rebooted it again this morning before running the defrag and everything is still working fine. I have absoutely no idea what caused the drives to play up, nor why switching the plugs over managed to fix it. Maybe the cable is slightly faulty, but it's working for the time being. If it happens again then I'll swap the cable over with the secondary cable and see if that works (at least it's cheaper to buy an IDE cable than it is to get another drive).

23/12/2007 - Sunday

2007-12-23T22:09:00.000Z

It has been just over a month since my last post. I've been saving up a fair bit to say, so this will probably be a longer post than my usual ones. Then again, I might find that I have less to talk about than I thought!

Merry Christmas

Well, I should start off by wishing everyone a merry Christmas, even if you don't celebrate it. I think it's pretty stupid that our government is allowing places to drop the idea of it being Christmas and just call it a holiday. This country is a christian country and thus we celebrate Christmas. If you're a foreign person living in this country then you don't have to celebrate it, but don't get your knickers in a twist just because they country you're living in wants to celebrate it.

Spam

My email address surprisingly hasn't found its way into many spam databases, so I was usually getting around 20 spam emails a day. However, twice in the last week I've been hit by a lot more spam than usual. At the beginning of the week I managed to get 50 new spam emails, but they're the same four spam emails repeated. Today, however, I hit a new record. So far today I have 105 spam emails, again with the same four emails plus some more. The emails are for winning an iPod, winning an iPhone, a £150 voucher for Tesco, Gala bingo, getting cash in 24 hours, and a GHD christmas box (whatever that may be). Oops, I've now got 106 spam emails! I don't mind getting spam, as Gmail does a wonderful job of sticking it in the spam folder. I've had a few spam emails slip through to my inbox, but they're just a case of clicking the "report spam" button and never seeing them again. I've also noticed that Gmail has got a bit smarter when dealing with spam received through a public mailing list which uses a single email address which Gmail liked to mark as spam if I reported one bit of mail as spam. Now it seems to let the real emails through but still bins the proper spam emails.
UPDATE: At midnight I had a grand total of 128 spam emails! Slightly higher than the normal 20 odd. I wonder if it'll continue?

Monarchy

I've been watching the recent five part series into the private lives of the monarchy. I know that I'm not really a huge fan of the monarchy, mainly because I couldn't really be bothered about them rather than thinking they shouldn't exist or anything, but it was a great series to watch. You got to see a different side to what they get up to instead of just hearing about the various things in the papers. Some of the things that have been printed in the papers have been different from how I saw the events happening in the program. I'm quite happy that I took the time in the evening to watch it instead of just turning my tv off like usual.

Other Stuff

I'm sure there was a lot more that I wanted to talk about, but I really can't think of what they were now! So I think I'll leave it at that for now. If I remember anything else then I'll make sure to edit the post!

22/11/2007 - Thursday

2007-11-22T10:12:00.000Z

I fail to see why the England Football manager, Steve McClaren, has been sacked following the defeat last night against Croatia and the subsequent failure to qualify for Euro 2008. Understandably the manager should be able to control the team and to orchestrate a victory, but there's only so much a manager can do with a rubbish football team like the one that England has.

I would like to see most of the current players dropped and new, fresh, talent brought in as replacements. This might allow the team to play together better instead of only trying to only get the ball to one injured player. Sure, that injured player was able to pass the ball once which resulted in the equalising goal, but they still lost.

I won't deny that I am happy to see England dumped out of Euro 2008. They play like a bunch of sissies. Croatia played a much better game and were excellent from the beginning. England should watch how they play and take some tips on how to be a team.

16/11/2007 - Friday

2007-11-16T20:07:00.000Z

It's Children In Need tonight, and in typical usual fashion, the Spice Girls have to mime their boring song which somehow got to be the official song. Why the hell can't they just sing live?! We all know that they suck at singing live, but it's CIN and they should do it anyway. I'm still not sure how they got to do the official song. The song is damn boring and makes me want to turn the tv/radio off whenever I hear it.

The best part so far has been the girls from Holby City. Lola (Sharon D Clarke) sang lead vocals for Respect and she has a lovely and very strong voice. I wonder if she has a singing background. The backing singers were Maddy (Nadine Lewington), Kyla (Rakie Ayola) and Maria (Phoebe Thomas). I love Maria's character (and the actress herself) so it was nice to see her scantily clad ;)

24/10/2007 - Wednesday

2007-10-24T12:09:00.000+01:00

I switched broadband packages yesterday. I now have an upload speed of 1Mbit (up from 768kbps). It's not that much faster, but it has actually made a difference. The max download speed is actually less than what I had on the previous package, but it's still faster than what my telephone line can actually handle (due to the distance from the local telephone exchange).

It didn't go without problems though, but then I was kind of expecting something to go wrong as there were problems when I switched last January. Instead of the line speeds being changed to the new speeds they actually got changed to the slowest speed (512kbps down, 256kbps up). When I phoned the technical support to tell them they told me that it wasn't actually due to be switched over until the next day. This was fine and I wasn't too annoyed as I still had an internet connection, but it was just annoying that I had received an email telling me that the switch had been completed but it wasn't actually going to happen until the next day. I decided to email the support people and let them know that their system was sending out false positive emails. A little while later the dsl dropped out then came back on, and when I checked the router status page the line speeds were back to what they were before the switch. Then the dsl dropped out again and failed to come back three times then managed to come back. I checked the router status page again to see that the line speeds were now what they were supposed to be on the new package (14.5mbit down, 1mbit up). I then got a reply email from the support people saying that they're sorry for the problems and that he had reconfigured the line for me to be the speeds that it should be at.

So it seems like it was supposed to be switched over yesterday but something just went wrong. I'm happy now anyway as I have a stable connection and it was all sorted out pretty quickly. Thumbs down for the flaky switching process, but thumbs up for the quick and helpful support people.

20/10/2007 - Saturday

2007-10-20T16:55:00.000+01:00

It has been nearly a month since I posted something. I've actually been pretty busy working on my Healtheriser website. It's getting pretty close to its first public release, but there is still quite a bit to get done before that can happen. Hopefully I'll have it done in a week or two, then I can start to work on the other features that will make up the real release. Fingers crossed!

The main reason for doing a new blog post is to wish on England for this weekend. Tonight England take on South Africa in the Rugby World Cup. I'm kinda expecting South Africa to win, but I hope that England can put up a good fight and maybe even win. They started out a bit sloppy in the group stage, but after getting through to the quarter finals they've been playing a lot better. The scores have been low, but there has been a lot of good play.

Also, Lewis Hamilton is in with a chance of winning the Formula 1 Championship in his rookie season tomorrow. All he has to do is finish and finish ahead of Alonso and Räikkönen. Hopefully he'll be able to win the race and then the championship, but I'll be happy with him just getting the championship.

So come on England and Lewis!

24/09/2007 - Monday

2007-09-24T23:58:00.000+01:00

I've just finished watching the full series of Taken which has been showing on the Sci-Fi channel for the past 10 weeks. The series started off a little slowly as it advanced from the 1940's up to 2003 (I think), but once it hit the more modern times it picked up speed and got a bit more interesting. I thought it was a good series and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys sci-fi shows, although I can see that not everyone would be able to get into the series (my mother for example).

23/09/2007 - Sunday

2007-09-23T17:58:00.000+01:00

Today I took part in the Hovis London Freewheel cycling event. I found a small advert for it on the tfl website at the beginning of the month and it looked like it would be fun, so I told my family and got them to register as well. My mother, sister, and her boyfriend joined me on the 14km car-free route that took us from London Bridge to St James Park (and back again) along The Thames.

The ride itself was enjoyable as we were surrounded by the other 38,000 people that registered. Even though there were a lot of people there, we still managed to travel at a decent speed and did half of the route in roughly an hour, and around the same time coming back.

There was a festival going on at St James Park which involved music and entertainment which consisted of people juggling, bmx stunt shows, and childrens bicycle rides. Hovis also kindly offered free sandwiches at the festival, so at least we didn't have to pay outrageous prices for food like you usually have to do in Central London!

We took a few photo of the event, but it was generally harder to take photos of the actual route as we were riding along with the crowd and never really felt like stopping to take pictures. However, we did manage to take some at the beginning and at the half way point. I've uploaded all of the photos that were taken and you can see them on my Zooomr page.

12/09/2007 - Wednesday

2007-09-12T21:42:00.000+01:00

I know that I'm not a great fan of the English football team (I generally cheer for the opposing team when they're playing) but I'll have to admit that they're playing pretty well at the moment. The team currently playing (Robinson, Richards, Ferdinand, Terry, A Cole, Wright-Philips, Barry, Gerrard, J Cole, Heskey and Owen), which I think is the same team that played Israel on Saturday, have bonded quite well and worked together. There have been times when they've looked pretty sloppy and let chances get through, failed to take advantage of their own chances, and missed plenty of shots on goal, but they've managed to score 3 goals in each game to win 3-0. This should really be the team that continues to play together, rather than bumping them off to bring on the rubbish "big name" players. I say it like that because when those players are on (ie. Beckham and Rooney) England lose. England don't need them and do far better WITHOUT them playing. Get rid of those two rubbish players and England will likely continue to play well and win more games.

09/09/2007 - Sunday

2007-09-09T21:29:00.000+01:00

TV

Not Going Out and After You've Gone were excellent. I'm glad that they returned. Casualty has also returned for a new series after only being away for a few weeks. It's now on for another (roughly) 48 weeks and they're introducing some new characters as well as getting rid of some.

Healtheriser

I'm still working on the measurements tests although I think I'm nearly done with them. I need to clean up some other code as well as write a few more tests for something else (which isn't fully tested properly).

I also managed to fix a problem which had been plaguing me for a little while now. When I ran my tests using my standard way (autotest) they all completed perfectly fine, but when I ran them the standard Rails way (rake test) the integration tests would complain about accessing the fixtures data and the functional tests (controllers) gave a failure of "SQLite3::SQLException: SQL logic error or missing database".

I tried searching for anything that would help but I couldn't find anything that made the slighest difference. The changes that were suggested seemed like they weren't even taking effect. I even tried creating a new website project and adding a blank controller and test and noticed that the failure occured even then.

This had me stumped for a while until I stumbled across the cause. In tracking down why the fixtures were still being instantiated I realised that I had installed a plugin called PreloadFixtures which preloaded all of the fixture files before the tests are run in an effort to speed up the tests (they're preloaded and kept for each of the tests instead of each test loading and then destroying them). This was causing all of the fixtures to be instantiated, which is one of the problems that I was seeing. I moved the PreloadFixtures directory out of the plugins directory and ran the tests again to see if it helped in any way, and I was shocked to find that ALL of the tests now ran perfectly fine and completed!

So if anyone else has a problem with your functional tests throwing an error of "SQLite3::SQLException: SQL logic error or missing database" and you can't find any other way to fix it, please take a look in your plugins directory and see if you have the PreloadFixtures plugin and consider disabling it to see if it helps.

02/09/2007 - Sunday

2007-09-03T00:00:00.000+01:00

Wakoopa

It has been 14 hours since I did the weekly restart and the highest process id is now 3404 and has been that all day. Before the Wakoopa update it would have been around 60,000 by now (the 30k number before was because I did the update a while after restarting). I'm happy that I managed to find what was causing the high numbers!

TV

Not Going Out returns for a second series this Friday. Kate is no longer in the show, but has been replaced with Tim's sister. Hopefully it'll be just as funny as the first series, if not more funnier! After You've Gone also returns for a second series this friday (it's on before Not Going Out). I haven't read much about the new series, so I don't know if anyone new features. I used to turn my TV off pretty early on Friday evenings but not any longer!

Exercise

At Christmas I was bought an exercise set which contained a step machine. This was fine for eight months (with around one month of nearly every day use) until it decided to break. The plastic wheel that holds the cable in place and allows the step arms to move had bent which also caused a metal bracket to twist:

I emailed the customer support people and they sent out replacement parts for me to install. I was expecting to just get a new bracket and wheel, but they also sent a new cable and the main bracket that holds the wheel (the thicker one that the wheel is inside). I was expecting to receive them on Monday (it was sent Thursday evening) but they arrived on Saturday (hence why I know what they sent). I installed them (after finding another spanner to turn both nuts) and gave it a little try to see how it felt and it seemed fine. I haven't given it a proper try yet as I do different exercise on the weekends, so the first try will be tomorrow morning. Hopefully it'll all be fine and nothing else will go wrong with it!

29/08/2007 - Wednesday

2007-08-30T00:24:00.000+01:00

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

2007-08-20T22:10:00.000+01:00

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

2007-08-19T00:48:00.000+01:00

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

2007-08-16T00:37:00.000+01:00

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

2007-08-13T21:48:00.000+01:00

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

2007-08-07T01:48:00.000+01:00

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

2007-08-04T10:30:00.000+01:00

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.

29/07/2007 - Sunday

2007-07-29T22:56:00.000+01:00

Fan

Last Saturday (the 21st) I bought a new fan for the processor in my computer. I had to buy a new one as the existing one was playing up, slowing to half speed most of the time and sometimes going slow enough that I could read the label as it spun round. It was also running slower than usual when it was being "normal" resulting in more noise (it got real noisy the slower it spun) and a higher processor temperature.

Before the fan started playing up I was seeing typical idle temperatures of 40-43c for the processor and 38-40c for the motherboard, and full load temperatures of 55-60c for the processor and 42c for the motherboard. Once the fan started playing up the idle processor temperature went up to 45c minimum, with the temperature rising the slower the fan spun, and a full load temperature of 60-65c.

With the new fan the temperatures are much lower. Idle temperatures give 35-38c for the processor and 30-32c for the motherboard, and full load temperatures of 50-53c for the processor and 30-32c for the motherboard (I sometimes forget to check the motherboard as I've been monitoring the processor more as that's where the fan is).

The new fan is also slightly louder than the old fan, with a rating of 28dB (decibels). I'm not entirely sure what the rating of the old fan is as I haven't been able to find specs for the exact model I had (I could only find slightly similar), but I would guess that it was around 20dB (as that's what the similar one is). It also has a much higher airflow with 21 CFM (cubic feet per minute) compared to 5 CFM for the old one (similar model again). I think it's also spinning around 600 RPM faster (4600 RPM), although I can't remember what the old one was spinning at, especially as during its last few weeks it had stopped reporting the speed it was going at correctly (sometimes it would show a speed, othertimes it would just be 0). It's also a thicker fan, just less than double the old fans depth.

All in all I'm very happy with the new fan as it's making my computer run quite a bit cooler, plus I've got used to the slightly louder noise.

Healtheriser

In other news, I'm still working on the Healtheriser. I had the idea to change the way that logins are handled before I get stuck in with the rest of the code, considering that I'm currently the only person using the website. The change is to allow multiple OpenID logins to use the same user account. When you login for the very first time you'll be given the option of creating a new user account or linking your OpenID login to an existing OpenID login. If you create a new user account then you'll be able to login like normal and use the website. If you decide to link to another OpenID login then you will be able to login to that user account without actually using that OpenID login that was used to create it (if that makes sense). It's useful if you have multiple OpenID logins and don't want to always remember which one you used when creating your user account (I know that OpenID is all about a single login, but you can get OpenID logins from using AIM or having a livejournal blog, plus you can aggregate your OpenID login from a different website).

It has taken a few days to get most of it done as I changed the main login code to handle linked accounts but I forgot to change my mocked (faked) login code in the tests, so I was expecting the results from the real login code, but the mocked login code was giving different results as it hadn't been changed. It took me a little while to realise that that was the problem and I was able to fix it pretty soon afterwards. I've also been doing it using TDD (Test Driven Development) for the first time, where I write a failing test with the results that I expect, make sure that it fails, then write the real code to produce the correct results. Doing it this way has actually made me write a few bits better than I would have done if I was just writing the main code straight away.

I highly doubt that I'm doing the TDD the correct way though, but it's working fine for me at the moment. I've been doing it all from the integration tests (test stories) so that I know all the things work from the users point of view. I haven't done many other tests though, like testing the model and testing that each action works correctly. Once I finish the changes to the login I'll read up on the other testing again as I can't remember the flow of it now (tut tut, but I'll get there eventually), and hopefully I'll have some solid tests in place. My current code to test ratio is 1:0.9, so I do have a lot more testing to do!

26/07/2007 - Thursday

2007-07-27T02:30:00.000+01:00

In my last post I said that I hadn't laughed as hard in a while as I did while watching The 40 Year Old Virgin. Well tonight I laughed even harder while watching Wild Hogs. When you bring together four great and funny actors as the main characters, along with Ray Liotta and other known actors as the remaining characters, you just know you're going to have an excellent movie. I laughed pretty much all the way through.

23/07/2007 - Monday

2007-07-23T09:54:00.000+01:00

I've watched a few movies recently that I've been meaning to write about, so I might as well do that now. I'll start with Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix. This was OK for a movie, but once you try to compare it to the books it goes downhill pretty quickly and you pick the movie totally apart. It felt far too rushed for me, like I was being pushed through the movie rather than walking along with it. Quite a lot of the good bits were cut out of the movie, and several parts were changed probably to make it more "dramatic". It was good to watch, but just try not to think too much of the books.

The next movie is 28 Weeks Later. I thought this was pretty good, although quite a lot of the lines between the main characters are whispered, which makes them a bit hard to hear, then followed by action, which leaves you deafened after straining to hear the whispers. I didn't think that it was as bloody as the first one (28 Days Later), but the characters are better in this one. The ending of it is great though.

Finally, there's The 40 Year Old Virgin. I thought that this was a hilarious comedy that kept me laughing from the beginning all the way to the end. I haven't laughed at a movie this hard for a while, so it was refreshing. I thought that the jokes were well planned out, and the various scenes that he ended up in were great. I'm glad that I watched it.

19/07/2007 - Thursday

2007-07-19T19:39:00.000+01:00

Here's a brief video of my Ruby on Rails editor. I quickly add a new template, then add an autocompletion entry for it. I create a new action using the 'def' template, then render a partial using the newly added template (via the autocompletion). After that I open the index view, then go back to the controller.

The editor also stores the last project, the open files, and the last opened file, and these are restored when the program is opened (or when the project is opened). It also remembers what folders are opened and restores them as well.

13/07/2007 - Friday

2007-07-13T23:59:00.000+01:00

Time flies when you don't have much to show for it. Since my last post I've been working on my editor and got it to a stage where I'm now using it. There are still a few bits that I want to add in (like code templates) and a few other bits that I might think about adding in (although they're not needed for my use and I don't see anyone else ever using the program), but other than that it's going good, despite a few bugs I've found and fixed.

I also started on the Healtheriser website again now that the editor is useable. The first thing I ended up doing was sorting out a bug that got introduced after updating the software running the website. I made it harder for myself as I misunderstood the solution for the problem, so I made a lot of changes just to realise after that I only had to rename two files. So I took the time to revert the changes I had done and just renamed the two files. I think I'll write some more tests for the existing stuff before I get started on newer bits. The weight entry is pretty clean as I was using it a lot, but I would like to have the tests there just to be sure. Plus it helps me get better at writing the tests.

I watched the entire series of Threshold yesterday. It's a pity it got cancelled at the thirteenth episode as it was a great series that was throughly enjoyable, plus it left it wide open as to whether they won or lost. While watching all thirteen episodes I didn't once check to see how long there was left of an episode, which is very rare for me! Plus the nine hours and 19 minutes of watching only felt like three hours, which kinda shows how into the series I was!

I also decided to sign up to Twitter for fun. I added a bit to the sidebar that will show the five latest updates. I'll attempt to update it as often as I remember, but I'll probably end up forgetting about it. At least you can do updates through Google Talk so I can just start that and then send an IM to the Twitter bot and it'll add the update for me. Saves having to add another bookmark and remembering to visit it each time, in which I have a pretty poor track record!

03/07/2007

2007-07-03T04:24:00.000+01:00

I just finished watching Transformers. It's an excellent movie with excellent CG. The plot isn't so hot, but what the plot lacks the CG makes up for (like the US Government people suddenly going from hating the Autobots to working with them without any plot reason for them to work with them). The slow-mo fights scenes made it all exciting. There could have been more fighting between them, and I'd gladly watch four hours of the Transformers fighting! This is a movie that will get a lot of playing when it comes out on DVD.

30/06/2007 - Saturday

2007-06-30T17:04:00.000+01:00

Doctor Who

The season finale of Doctor Who was an excellent one! I thought that the last scene of The Master and The Doctor was a powerful and sad one, especially for The Doctor. I also thought it was quite funny at the end finding out that Jack Harkness is The Face Of Bo!

What A Country

England and the UK is a great place to be living in right now. Yesterday there were two car bombs found near each other in central London, luckily found before they could go off. At the beginning of the week there were news reports of lots of people around London getting killed by gangs. And now a blazing car was driven into the main terminal at Glasgow Airport in what is being seen as a deliberate attack. So this is a great place to be living in right now!

23/06/2007 - Saturday

2007-06-23T20:58:00.000+01:00

It was an exciting penultimate episode of Doctor Who tonight. The Master is back in all his glory and leaving a wake of chaos behind him, and The Doctor is pretty much helpless at the moment until he comes up with some kind of plan that'll sort most (if not all) of it out. I think that John Simm plays a good Time Lord, and if he hadn't signed up for being The Master then he could have played a good Doctor. He has the right facial expressions and body language, and even though he's playing the bad guy he's still pretty funny. The preview for the season finale looks to be a good one.

16/06/2007 - Saturday

2007-06-17T09:13:00.000+01:00

I really enjoyed the episode of Doctor Who that aired this Saturday. I knew that The Master was making a return, but I didn't realise at first that it would be the professor! As soon as Martha saw the watch fob I realised that it was going to be him. It should be interesting to see how The Doctor gets out of this one without his Tardis!

15/06/2007 - Friday

2007-06-15T01:11:00.000+01:00

This is what I've been working on recently:

Ruby IDE - Hosted on Zooomr

I was getting frustrated with a few bits in the editors I've been using for doing my websites so I decided to do my own simple one that just does the features that I want. It's coming along good so far, although there are a few problems that I have to sort out, plus I have to code quite a lot more features into it before it's really useable! I haven't done desktop coding for a while so it has been fun to spend a lot of time doing it again.

05/06/2007 - Tuesday

2007-06-05T17:37:00.000+01:00

You can now stalk me! It's tracking my blog, my last.fm profile, my del.icio.us links and also my tumblr links. There are a few other social websites that I use that could be added but it only lists a couple of other sites which I don't actually use. The four that I've added should be more than enough to track most of the stuff I do, so stalk away!

31/05/2007 - Thursday

2007-05-31T10:37:00.000+01:00

There has only been one Lynx Axe commercial that I've laughed at. It's the one where the guys dad goes into the bathroom, sees the spray can, decides to give it a try, walks out the bathroom, then the guys girlfriend/fiance/wife/whatever sniffs then air, says the "bow chicka wow wow" line, shimmies over to the dad, and rips off his shirt. With this commercial you know what it is about, but with all the other ones I've seen you just have the girl saying the line to the guy and then some moronic dancing thing, and you've no clue why she was doing it in the first place (well, you obviously know it's for Lynx Axe now, but you wouldn't know it seeing it for the first time!). All the other adverts have just been plain retarded.

Now someone has done a "music video" of it. I present it here for everyone to laugh at and then think how low the world has become.

30/05/2007 - Wednesday

2007-05-30T21:33:00.000+01:00

Zooomr has been on the road to launching their new Mark III version. It has been a very rocky road with a previous attempt failing and the second attempt taking longer than expected. The road looked straight towards the end with Mark III being launched and things working fine. For around 15 minutes that is. Then they suffered a server crash which took out the database. Luckily they had very recent backups and the photos are all intact, but without the database there's no way of actually having a working website.

Earlier today they posted a blog post saying that they were working on getting a new server to replace the failed one so that things could get back online. There are many apologies in the blog post yet I feel that none are needed. I know myself how hard it can be to get a complex website out on time, especially if there is only one guy doing the coding. I've also watched Kris and Thomas while they've been working and I know how passionate the guys are about getting everything sorted out and working.

Good luck to both of them, they've got a lot of support from their users, and also support from Sun Microsystems, so hopefully they can get it all sorted soon and then they can relax and unwind a little!

29/05/2007 - Tuesday

2007-05-29T17:36:00.000+01:00

There was a report on the news on Sunday about the government wanting to give more power to the police so that they can stop and ask the details of people that they feel are suspicious on the account of terrorism laws. This caused some outrage among the members of parliament and some ethnic communities citing that the new laws would alienate said ethnic communities. The way I see it, if a community feels that the laws would alienate them then they obviously know that it is their community that causes most of the terrorism in the world. I have nothing to hide and would never feel alienated if the police stopped me and asked me what I was doing and where I was going. I would actually be happy that the police are doing their job.

24/05/2007 - Thursday

2007-05-24T11:52:00.000+01:00

Zooomr is gearing up for the launch of Mark III. It has been a long time coming with problems on the first attempt at launching it, and the site is currently offline while Kristopher finishes it off. It's supposed to be launched later today, so good luck to Kris in getting it done!

I also noticed today that Gmail have increased the attachment size limit from 10 MB to 20 MB. I've only ever needed to attach a file larger than 10 MB once and obviously I had to upload it somewhere else which wasn't really a problem. It's still nice knowing that I can do it in the future now!

21/05/2007 - Monday

2007-05-21T18:12:00.000+01:00

I was just watching the news report about the Cutty Sark burning. The was quite a blaze and the pictures of the shell after make it look a real sorry sight to see. At least the sails and other parts were removed due to the renovation that has recently started.

There is a video of the BBC news report on YouTube, but I don't know how long it will be up due to it being a copyrighted broadcast. I'll look later for an official video from the BBC to use instead.

20/05/2007 - Sunday

2007-05-21T01:14:00.000+01:00

I finally got rid of the bug I've been working on for the last couple of days. I got rid of it by changing the code to work around it as I just couldn't track down what was causing it to go wrong. I would identify an area of the code that I thought was the problem, debug it for a while, attempt to fix it, only to find that there's now a bug in another area, or the bug just changes location. This frustrated me for several days before I came up with a good idea which semi-worked, but didn't, for some reason that I'm still not sure of. I was storing a true/false value which defaults to false when I create an object, but for some reason the value was changing to true all by itself (I wasn't changing it to true myself anywhere in the code), which caused the rest of the code to fail as the value needs to be false at some point before it can become true.

This did take me to the solution that I came up with though, so it wasn't a full wasted six days of confusing work. I can now move on to the rest of the program as I hadn't even got that sorted (I needed this other bit first before I can really do the rest). Hopefully I haven't forgotten where I was going with this!

18/05/2007 - Friday

2007-05-18T12:15:00.000+01:00

Haven't really done anything majorly new recently. I started on something new but it has bugs in it already (something that I've used before in the past and worked fine then but doesn't want to work properly now for some reason) and I've spent the last couple of days trying to work out exactly what is going wrong. I managed to fix one bug only for another bug to appear in a different area. I'm finding it hard to debug properly as the debugging causes the problem code to be run more times than usual, as the code is to do with drawing text and the debugging interrupts this drawing and when I resume running it causes the text to be redrawn again and the loop continues. This resulted in lots of rubbish data as the bug wasn't happening at the beginning of something, it happened after more text was drawn, but the debugging didn't let it get past the first bit of text.

I think I know what has to be changed now though. I got annoyed with it late last night so I gave up until today. Hopefully I will be able to fix the bug and get on with the rest of it as I'm doing this program to allow me to do my website work more easily (it's a very basic code editor as all the others I've tried are just too bulky for me).

12/05/2007 - Saturday

2007-05-12T23:59:00.000+01:00

So Eurovision 2008 will be held in Serbia. Congrats to them even if they did win because of the block voting. Unsurprisingly the United Kingdom finished nearly last, although I was actually expecting us to get 0 points. That's what you get for having most of Europe hating us :)

10/05/2007 - Thursday

2007-05-11T21:08:00.000+01:00

Commiserations to Switzerland who failed to make it into the final of this years Eurovision, even though they had a great song. The songs that did make it were good songs, but there were a few better ones that failed to make it too. The one country that I was happy for getting through was Moldova who have a great song as well.

I ended up watching the semi-final online so that I could record Holby City on one of the other computers in my room. To watch the online video stream I had to install a plugin which connected to the actual video stream. I then had to open Windows Media Player which connected to the plugin to play the video. The only thing wrong with it is that it was buffering too much and also skipping chunks of the video. I tried closing WMP and using VLC to do it, but that couldn't connect to the server (the plugin). In the end I had to open WMP, connect to the server, open VLC, connect to the server (which actually connected and displayed the video stream), then hit stop in WMP but leave it open. I was then able to watch it fine in VLC without any buffering or skips. Yay for VLC!

08/05/2007 - Tuesday

2007-05-09T16:41:00.000+01:00

For some reason the BBC decided to move Holby City to Thursdays so that they could put the new Holby Blue on in its place on Tuesdays instead. For me this is one stupid decision by the BBC as they obviously had the Thursday slot free so they should have just put Holby Blue on then instead of disrupting the Holby City schedule (it has been on Tuesdays since it started I think). That and the fact that I watched the beginning of Holby Blue last night and was totally disappointed by it. It didn't do anything to grip me to it and it also had the feel that me as a viewer was viewing what was going on from outside, instead of actually being there like with Holby City and Casualty (and even The Bill from the few times that I've watched some of it). This resulted in me changing the channel less than half way from Holby Blue so I doubt I will ever watch that again.

Good news now. Deadliest Catch has returned! The Discovery Channel usually has the show on every day at 1pm so I've been watching it while having lunch (watching the repeats too as it's a good show and I always miss something), but now the new season has started at 9pm. Luckily this doesn't clash with anything else that I watch in the evenings so I was able to watch it. The new season looks to be a lot more intense with one boat already sinking before the season really gets started. It also followed more with the US Coast Guard as they were searching for Survivors (they found one). Previous seasons have only hinted at the US Coast Guard's involvement by just mentioning them and showing the helicopters on land, but not actually showing them in action (other than one helicopter checking out the ice). I think this is good as obviously the trawlers and the coast guards have their work mixed together with the Bearing Sea being as deadly and unforgiving as it is.

06/05/07 - Saturday

2007-05-06T00:09:00.000+01:00

I wrote yesterday that I was trying to simulate the OpenID website talking in my integration tests. This evening I sat down and attempted to do it better as I wasn't happy with the tests still doing some OpenID related work. I'm pleased to say that I actually got it working. I had tried this approach before but it didn't actually work, but that was because I was doing it in the wrong place. I stuck this in my test_helper.rb file:

require 'session_controller'

class SessionController
  def create
    redirect_to home_path
  end

  def complete
    @user = User.get($mockuser.openid_url)

    if @user.nil?
      @user = User.new(:email => $mockuser.email,
        :nickname => $mockuser.nickname,
        :gender => $mockuser.gender)
      @user.openid_url = $mockuser.openid_url
      @user.save
      session[:return_to] = edit_user_path
    end

    @user.last_login = Time.now
    @user.save

    session[:user_id] = @user.id

    redirect_back_or_default(dashboard_path)
  end
end

What this does is reopens the SessionController class (the controller that handles the login) and overrides the two methods create and complete so that they run different code to the original methods in the SessionController class.

The create method just performs a redirect as the OpenID code would redirect the user to the OpenID website at this point. The complete method is a bit more complicated as it first checks if the user exists, if not then it creates a new user object, saves it, then stores the users profile page, after that it updates the last login time, saves the user to update it, stores the users id, and finally performs the redirect.

To glue all this together I just have to set $mockuser from within my actual test. For example

def login
  $mockuser = user
  get 'login'
  assert_response :success

  post 'session', :openid_url => user.openid_url
  assert_response :redirect

  get 'session/complete'
  assert_response :redirect
  assert_redirected_to dashboard_path
  assert_equal user.id, session[:user_id]
end

which logs in an existing user (I have a different method for logging in a new user as I haven't attempted to combine the methods yet - although I just thought of a good way of doing it!).

This makes all the tests pass plus it doesn't involve any OpenID related code. You might say "well, your tests always assume that the user can login! you don't test for invalid users trying to login". My reply to that is that the OpenID website handles all the checking to see if you are who you say you are. If you are you then the OpenID website redirects back to my website telling me this. If you are not who you say you are then the OpenID website redirects back to my website and tells me that also. Users are only logged in (and created if they're a new user) if the OpenID website tells me that you're real. If it says otherwise then you're redirected back to the login page which displays an appropiate message. I trust that the OpenID code works fine in that regard and that it would never lie about a user being real when they're not, so that's why I'm not too bothered about it.

04/05/2007 - Friday

2007-05-04T23:34:00.000+01:00

I've been working on tests for the first bit that I've done for the Healtheriser. I know I should have done them first but I had never really got into the swing of it. Over the last week I've been reading a book that does a website using the TDD (Test Driven Development) technique and it allowed me to start to get my head around it. I'm also now starting to understand integration tests, which is like simulating a user doing various actions on the website one after the other (like logging in, viewing a page, adding something, editing it, viewing it, deleting it, adding something else, then logging out), which is different from the other tests that only tested each individual part and not how they fitted together.

I ran into one problem with writing the integration tests though. I'm using OpenID for logging in and that involves another website to authenticate you are who you claim you are. This doesn't really work well with integration tests as they're not running as a real website so the OpenID website can't contact back saying who I actually am. In my other tests I could easily fake that I was logged in as I have access to the session variable where I can store the user, but in the integration tests I don't have write access to that variable, I can only read it, so that way would fail.

I did a quick google search and could only find one solution. It requires mocking a few of the OpenID library methods to return what I want them to return instead of it contacting the real OpenID website. It still does do a bit of OpenID work as I've no idea how to mock the begin method of the OpenID checker, which attempts to find out what it should do with the given openid url. I think that's the only activity it does and it doesn't actually contact the OpenID website for the openid url, but I'm not entirely sure. I'll see if I can edit it later so that it doesn't do any checking at all.

Anyway, he's the code that I used to mock out most of the OpenID stuff. I have it in a seperate method in my testing DSL as I use it in two different places (not just a single login method). It expects to be passed a model object which contains at least a variable called openid_url. It also does some of the optional OpenID values, but that can be deleted out if you don't need them. You can also easily change the name of the openid url variable, it's only used on the last line of the method.

def stub_user(user)
  OpenID::Consumer.any_instance.stubs(:complete).returns(
    OpenID::SuccessResponse.new(1, {}))
  OpenID::SuccessResponse.any_instance.stubs(:status).returns(
    OpenID::SUCCESS)
  OpenID::SuccessResponse.any_instance.stubs(
    :extension_response).returns(HashWithIndifferentAccess.new(
    :nickname => user.nickname, :email => user.email,
    :gender => user.gender))
  OpenID::SuccessResponse.any_instance.stubs(
    :identity_url).returns(user.openid_url)
end

Just call the stub_user method before doing a get request to the login page, then the post request to complete the login.

28/04/2007

2007-04-28T02:42:00.000+01:00

I just wanted to recommend two movies that I've watched recently.

First up is Mr Bean's Holiday. If you've ever seen an episode of Mr Bean and liked it then you'll love the movie. He hasn't changed at all since Mr Bean finished in 1995 which is all down to Rowan Atkinson being such a great comedian and actor. I laughed for most of the movie which made it seem even shorter than the already short 85 minutes.

The second movie is The Guardian. It's about the US Coast Guard and it's pretty believing. There are times when you're shivering with them, and times when you're cheering them on. The ending was great, not expected, but it is hinted to at the beginning.

27/04/2007

2007-04-27T01:16:00.000+01:00

It has been a while since I posted any healtheriser pictures (I don't think I've posted any of this new version!), so now is a good time to post some. I currently have adding weights and listing weights done and I'm happy with them so far, so now I can move on to doing the sizes (I just need to do the edit page and make sure that the weights delete).

Healtheriser - Add Weight - Hosted on Zooomr

Healtheriser - List Weights - Hosted on Zooomr

26/04/2007 - Building apache 2.2.4 and subversion 1.4.3 on Ubuntu

2007-04-26T15:48:00.000+01:00

I've mentioned before that I compiled and installed Apache 2.2 and Subversion 1.4 on my Ubuntu machine due to the fact that the pre-built versions were pretty old. I recently upgrade the box to Ubuntu Fiesty (from Edgy) and that somehow installed Apache 2.2 and Subversion again (even though I had removed the subversion package before, and also removed the older Apache 2.0 package). That prompted me to remove them and to also update my own versions as I actually wanted to put Subversion in a different place to where I put it originally. While I was doing it I made a note of what I did so that I had instructions to follow if I need to do it again in the future (or just need to build a newer version).

If you follow the instructions then you will download Apache 2.2.4, Subversion 1.4.3, NEON 0.26.2, and also Berkeley DB 4.5.20 (as for some reason Subversion couldn't find the previously installed versions).

========================
= STEP 1 - DOWNLOADING =
========================

Download svn:

  wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.3.tar.gz

Download apache2 2.2.4:

  wget http://apache.openmirrors.org/httpd/httpd-2.2.4.tar.gz

Download NEON:

  wget http://www.webdav.org/neon/neon-0.26.2.tar.gz

Download Berkeley DB
  wget http://download.oracle.com/berkeley-db/db-4.5.20.tar.gz

======================
= STEP 2 - COMPILING =
======================

Extract sources:

  tar xf subversion-1.4.3.tar.gz
  tar xf httpd-2.2.4.tar.gz
  tar xf neon-0.26.2.tar.gz
  tar xf db-4.5.20.tar.gz

Build and install Berkeley DB

  cd db-4.5.20/build_unix
  ../dist/configure --prefix=$HOME/bin
  make
  make install
  cd ../..

Build and install apr 1.2

  cd httpd-2.2.4/srclib/apr
  ./configure --prefix=$HOME/bin
  make
  make install
  cd ..

Build and install apr-util 1.2

  cd apr-util
  ./configure --prefix=$HOME/bin --with-apr=$HOME/bin \
    --with-berkeley-db=$HOME/bin
  make
  make install
  cd ../../..

Build apache2

  cd httpd-2.2.4
  ./configure --prefix=$HOME/bin/apache2 --with-apr=$HOME/bin \
    --with-apr-util=$HOME/bin --enable-dav --enable-dav-lock \
    --enable-proxy --enable-proxy-http --enable-rewrite \
    --enable-ssl --enable-mods-shared=all
  make
  make install
  cd ..

Build neon

  cd neon-0.26.2
  ./configure --prefix=$HOME/bin --with-ssl=openssl
  make
  make install
  cd ..

Build subversion

  cd subversion-1.4.3
  ./configure --prefix=$HOME/bin --with-apxs=$HOME/bin/apache2/bin/apxs \
    --with-neon=$HOME/bin --with-berkeley-db=$HOME/bin \
    PYTHON=/usr/bin/python PERL=/usr/bin/perl
  make
  make install
  cd ..

======================
= STEP 3 - AUTOSTART =
======================

Copy apachectl to /etc/init.d

  sudo cp apachectl /etc/init.d/apache2ctl

Autostart apache2ctl

  sudo update-rc.d apache2ctl defaults

I copied apachectl as apache2ctl as I'm used to typing that for Apache 2 when I also had Apache 1 on there. I just like having a seperating version number in the name.

Berkeley DB, the Apache 2 apr and apr-utils tools, NEON and Subversion are installed into the $HOME/bin prefix, but I put Apache 2 into the $HOME/bin/apache2 prefix so that it's seperate and easier to work with (it uses more folders than the normal that you find in a /bin directory). I also have Apache 2 build with all the modules built as shared and all enabled, plus also build the proxy modules and ssl support.

13/04/2007 - Friday

2007-04-13T19:08:00.000+01:00

On my webserver I'm still using Ruby 1.8.4 as that is what Ubuntu has in their software repository, however it is quite old (December 2005). I wanted to put 1.8.6 on there as that's the latest and I prefer using newer versions of software, but I wanted to keep the existing one incase there were any problems, so I installed it into my home directory. Here are the steps I took to get it set up.

Apparently Ruby needs a supportive application called readline, so first we will do that.

wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/readline-5.2.tar.gz
tar zxf readline-5.2.tar.gz
cd readline-5.2
./configure --prefix=/home/spidah/bin
make
make install

Once that is complete you can grab and install ruby:

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
tar zxf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6
./configure --prefix=/home/spidah/bin --enable-pthread --with-readline-dir=/home/spidah/bin
make
make install
make install-doc

You will need to make sure that the bin directory is in your path (mine turns out to be /home/spidah/bin/bin). To do this just edit your ~/.bash_profile file and add

PATH=~/bin/bin:"${PATH}"

to the bottom. Now you can either source your profile (source ~/.bash_profile) or close the console and open a new one. Once you have done that running

ruby -v

should return

ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13 patchlevel 0) [i686-linux]

or similar. You can also check that it's finding it in the correct location by running

which ruby

If you want OpenSSL support then you need to do a little bit extra. From within the ruby-1.8.6 directory do:

cd ext/openssl
ruby extconf.rb
touch *.o
make
make install

I don't know which .o file needed to be touch for make to build, but it was just easy to touch them all.

As I was changing to a newer Ruby version and also putting it in a different location, I thought it was easier to also install rubygems in the new location so that everything is in the same place. I'm not sure if it could be used from the original location, but I'm not really bothered.

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/17190/rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
tar zxf rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.2
ruby setup.rb

and that's it! I also wanted to copy all my gems over, so I did this:

cd /usr/lib/ruby/gems
cp -r 1.8 /home/spidah/bin/lib/ruby/gems

and waited for that to finish. Once it was done I could go into one of my rails apps and boot the mongrel server without any problems.

06/04/2007 - Friday

2007-04-07T17:37:00.000+01:00

I was ill today so I spent most of the day in bed sleeping. I obviously didn't get anything done today, especially on the Healtheriser, but I'm feeling better today so I should be able to get some done tonight.

I'm also going to a quick video of what is there so far. There's not much to really look at as you can only login and then go to a pretty empty dashboard page or edit your settings. I should be able to get weight entry added tonight (well, hopefully!) so that the dashboard will at least have something to display. The dashboard will also display all the latest entries (weights, sizes, meals and exercise) as well as your latest target weight. Doing stuff like adding new entries, editing old ones, deleting them, and viewing reports (graphs) will be done in the various sections themselves. This will probably make a bit more sense as things are implemented and I can show them off.

05/04/2007 - Thursday

2007-04-06T01:08:00.000+01:00

Today I was planning to add weight entry to the healtheriser website. I didn't get that far as I stumbled across a few bugs in the login code that I thought I had fixed. This obviously took precedence over adding new features.

As the website uses OpenID to handle its logins you don't actually "signup" for an account (other than at the OpenID provider that you pick), so your account is created when you login for the first time. I'm also grabbing a few optional values from your OpenID login like your email, nickname, and gender so that these values can be stored for you from the beginning.

The first bugs turned up when I made a change to only allow certain values to be updated when submitted through a login. One of the values that I disallowed was the OpenID login url, which meant that the login code failed to save the account as it couldn't set the OpenID login url. I made a few changes to set this manually and that was sorted.

Then I was having problems getting the optional values that were being sent to me when logging in. I'm not sure if this was ever working right from the beginning, I never actually noticed, but I doubt it was. This was another quick and simple change once I actually worked out why the values weren't being saved (no error messages, just empty values being saved).

After I fixed those I decided to make the timezone list better as it wasn't actually working right when editing your account. I ripped out the city list one and just went with a simple "GMT-9", "GMT+4" list that holds all the timezones (all the ones that are displayed in the Windows XP timezone list). I also added in a daylight savings value as I had forgotten about that.

All in all a pretty decent day as I fixed the login bugs and got a working timezone list, although it would have been better if I had got the weight entry done. At least I'll be able to do that tomorrow!

04/04/2007 - Wednesday

2007-04-04T23:02:00.000+01:00

This entry is about CSS menus, so skip this if it doesn't interest you!

On and off for a while now I've been trying to get a decent looking centred horizontal tab menu for my websites. I did create one that looked good, but it was limited to being on either the left or the right side of the page (or the container that it was in). I wanted one that was centred in the middle, but this just wasn't possible with the old CSS as the tabs were actually floated li elements inside a ul. I was also turning the hyperlinks into rounded top tabs using Nifty Corners Cube, so I couldn't just display: inline; the li's as the a's need to have display: block; for the corners to be properly rounded, and if you combine the two then it looks like a mess.

I tried one method of centring the tabs by having left: 50%; on the ul and then right: -50%; on the li's. This actually centred the menu, but unfortunately it caused the horizontal scrollbars to appear even though there was no content in the extra area (shifting the ul over by 50% was the cause, as it is a block element and the width stays the same). When I noticed the scrollbar I attempted to find a better solution as the scrollbar was annoying.

I tried switching it over to using a definition list to "define" the menu, but this suffered from the same problems and also introduced some new ones.

Eventually I found a real solution, one that I probably should have seen, but I didn't actually know that it existed. Instead of floating the li elements so that I can use display: block; on the a elements, I was able to display: inline; the li elements and then display: block-inline; the a elements. block-inline does exactly what it says: makes the element act like a block, but keeping it inline. With the li's inlined and the a's block-inlined, I was able to use text-align: center; on the ul element and everything is now in the middle!

I managed to find the display: block-inline; bit of css on a website, but I can't remember which it was now. Every other website that I found about centred css tab menus were using funky padding to make the a elements clickable like block elements.

Here's an example of the menu that I have:

<ul id="nav">
  <li><a href="/dashboard" id="menu-dashboard">Dashboard</a></li>
  <li><a href="/weights" id="menu-weights">Weights</a></li>
  <li><a href="/sizes" id="menu-sizes">Sizes</a></li>
  <li><a href="/logout" id="menu-logout">Logout</a></li>
</ul>

And the CSS that makes it into a centred menu:

ul#nav, ul#nav li {
  list-style-type: none;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

ul#nav {
  font-size: 80%;
  text-align: center;
}

ul#nav li {
  display: inline;
  margin-left: 3px;
  text-align: center;
}

ul#nav li a {
  background-color: #0e5fd6;
  color: #fff;
  display: inline-block;
  padding: 5px 10px;
  text-decoration: none;
  width: 100px;
}

ul#nav li a:hover {
  background: #cdffa1;
  color: #006a35;
}

ul#nav li.activelink a, ul#nav li.activelink a:hover {
  background: #fff;
  color: #003;
}

This gives the tabs a blue background colour and white text, which changes to a light green background colour and a darker green text when the mouse hovers over the hyperlink.

I give all the a elements an id attribute so that I can switch the currently selected tab by outputting some extra css in the head of the html. This way I don't need to add an extra class attribute to the selected tab, which would make the menu creation more harder (I did it this way before though). The CSS for the selected tab would look something like this:

ul#nav li a#menu-dashboard, ul#nav li a#menu-dashboard:hover {
  background: #fff;
  color: #003;
}

which gives the selected tab a white background and a bluey black text on both the normal and hover states. Here's a picture of what the tabs look like (only showing the three states of the tabs, not an actual centred menu):

The Dashboard tab is the selected tab, Weights has the mouse over it (not visible in the picture though), and Sizes is a normal tab.

01/04/2007 - Sunday

2007-04-02T01:32:00.000+01:00

Doctor Who started again on Saturday (as you probably know by now!) with a good episode. The new assistant seems alright, but I'm not sure if there is going to be family baggage like there was with Rose. Hopefully not, but it all depends on how well the family is written into the story.

I made the dalek cake on Saturday to celebrate the new series. It turned out better than I was expecting, although it was slightly misshapen (it leant backwards instead of being upright). I should have made the head section higher than the sloped front section as you really couldn't see where the head was supposed to start, but it still looks like a dalek though! Here's a photo of it:

Doctor Who Dalek Cake - Hosted on Zooomr

You can see the rest of the photo series here (from the setup to the finished cake). I didn't take any pictures while I was putting the sweets on though, so it suddenly jumps from a chocolate icing coated dalek to a finished dalek. The chocolate icing was pretty strong and eating it kinda made me feel sick after, but it tasted nice anyway.

30/03/2007 - Friday

2007-03-30T10:59:00.000+01:00

The third series of Doctor Who starts tomorrow. I'm not too sure what the new assistant will be like, but she has got to be better than Billie Piper! To celebrate Doctor Who starting again we'll be making a dalek cake (courtesy of Blue Peter). I'll take pictures as it goes along.

I found a great laptop for all the girls! Although I doubt anyone would actually buy one and show it off!

A tool for programmers and command line people is Console. It's a command prompt replacement (in a way) for Windows which lets you create new command prompts in a tabbed window. This saves having multiple prompts open and is especially handy if you usually have multiple ssh windows open (just put each one into a seperately named tab and you'll never forget which one is which). It's not a real command prompt replacement as it actually spawns a hidden command prompt to which it sends the commands you type. You're also not limited to cmd.exe as a command prompt. If you have Cygwin installed then you can use bash instead, or any other command prompt that you have.

I'm getting a massive load of visitors to this blog! Over the last few days I've had around five people visit. Not five people per day, five prople in total. Some days have seen zero people visit. Maybe I should really make an effort to post more with handy links and stuff so that I can get people back! Although, most of the visitors I've had have found their way here through google searches for "transparent desktop icon text windows xp" or something similar. They end up here sometimes because of my post about ClearIcon (which I still use!). I'm not that bothered though as I'll still continue posting even if no one visited!

24/03/2007 - Saturday

2007-03-24T21:31:00.000Z

I bought a new hard drive which arrived on Thursday and I spent all Thursday and Friday reinstalling all the software that I use (after reinstalling Windows of course). It took a while as I was copying over existing data from my old hard drive (which I was reusing as something else) and I also wanted to reorganise where things were going. Luckily I'm now pretty much done, I just have two or three things left which I don't really need at this moment. I now have 400 GB of storage, 320 GB on the new drive and 80 GB on the existing drive.

It snowed briefly at the beginning of the week and I took some photos. They look like I've messed with them and introduced motion blurring of the snow, but that's really the speed at which it was coming down! I haven't uploaded the photos yet, but when I do I'll provide a link.

I also took pictures of the lunar eclipse, but my camera is hardly good enough to pick up any detail, and for some reason the moon was moving and appears several times in a few of the pictures!

20/03/2007 - Tuesday

2007-03-21T01:09:00.000Z

I poked through 90,000 songs played on last.fm today. Not long until I hit 100k! I might put up some stats later, like top artists and songs.

The healtheriser is coming along nicely. I finally got a menu design that I'm (mostly) happy with, which lets me get on with writing some of the code to make it work. I'm currently doing the login part as it's pretty useless without being able to login and store data. I should have that all sorted in the morning and I'll be able to move on to some of the required sections like weights and measurements. I have other sections planned, like meals and exercise, but these aren't my core focus right now. I'm also planning to add a forum later on so that things can be discussed (that's if the site even gets used by anyone other than me).

Eurovision 2007

2007-03-18T10:00:00.000Z

We picked the UK's Eurovision entry last night and I must say that I'm happy with the one that got through. Scooch (link to their myspace page) sang a great Eurovision type song that just HAD to go through. If you didn't see it last night, then imagine the Fast Food Rockers group (did the Fast Food song) and dress them up as flight attendants, then you have Scooch.

14/03/2007 - Wednesday

2007-03-15T01:21:00.000Z

Global Warming is a hot topic these days (no pun intended) with the government banging on about what we should be doing for the future. We're supposed to be using energy-saving lightbulbs come 2011 and have cut CO2 emissions by 60% come 2050. Energy-saving lightbulbs are ok, but show me one that outputs the same amount of light as a normal lightbulb and I'll replace every bulb in the house with them! I've never actually seen an energy-saving lightbulb that matched a normal bulb for its brightness. For me, I'd probably have to use three or four times the number of normal bulbs to get the same room brightness using energy-saving bulbs. Can anyone tell me how this is supposed to end up more energy efficient?

One thing that I heard on the news the other day is that big businesses, with huge profits, get given grants to lower their CO2 emissions, whereas small businesses, with small or no profits, have to pay themselves to lower their CO2 emissions. How exactly is that fair?

Comic Relief is here again. I've been watching Fame Academy and still fail to understand how the "judges" manage to keep their jobs. If two of the judges say that someones performance was good then the third judge will nearly always say that their performance was really bad. Also, one of the judges said that one of the celebrities has had great performances all the way through and had found nothing to fault him on. That was shocking to hear as the celebrity couldn't sing to save his life, couldn't hold a note, and mainly just spoke his way through the songs. I'm not faulting the celebrity as he tried his best, it's the judges that have no sense.

I also fail to understand how Girls Aloud and Sugababes were allowed to sing this years Comic Relief song. The song is a pisspoor remix of Walk This Way and neither of the groups can perform it in a decent way. Also, neither of the two groups can actually sing live, and the first time I heard the song properly was when they were singing it live on Fame Academy. I suppose they'll also be singing it live on Comic Relief on Friday, unfortunately.

I've finally come up with a "decent" name for my health website. It'll now be called Healtheriser! I've been trying to come up with a logo image to use, but as I'm really not that good with image editing it has taken a while. It takes ages for me to get something that doesn't look like trash, then it takes even longer while I fiddle with parts of it trying to make it look better. I've come up with something that I'm mostly satisfied with, although I might still need to twiddle the text colour. It was while editing the logo that I came up with the name! I did have the name as "Health Machine", then "Health Watch", then "Your Health", but none of them looked right on the logo as the two bits of text could never be properly centred (due to an image that is in the centre), so I wanted something with one word and came up with Healtheriser. I know it's not really a word, but hey, who really cares? Now all I have to do is finish off the buttons (I was working on a new kind of button, but might end up with the other ones instead) and I'll have a start of a page to look at. I've been putting off actually doing anything for the website until I had something to really look at, so now that I have some graphics for it I can then get started on the meaty part which is writing all the code for it. It should be fun as I have some pretty funky ideas for features that I hope I'll be able to pull off.

13/03/2007 - Tuesday

2007-03-13T09:22:00.000Z

Doctor Who returns to our TV screens on the 31st March. It has been sorely missed since the second season finished in July last year. Lets hope that It's a lot better now that Billie Piper's character isn't in it to make it look trashy!

Heroes is on a break until the 23rd April. They just love putting shows on breaks when the show has just hit a major plot point!

05/03/2007 - Monday

2007-03-05T19:31:00.000Z

Ok, so it has been a week since my last post. I was trying to blog more but I really haven't had much to blog about recently! I've been doing the design docs for my health website recently so that I actually have a plan to follow for once. This has resulted in writing down all the interactions that take place so that I know what is left to implement before a feature is complete. I should be starting on actually implementing stuff soon as I'm nearly finished writing everything down (it's easy when most of the features follow the same interaction!). I'll try to blog more about it once I've actually got something to show.

Why is it that whenever a football team does badly it's the manager who is fired? West Ham lost on Sunday 4-3 to Tottenham and it looks like they'll be going back down to the championship, and all I keep hearing is that the manager is likely to be fired. It is the players who let the team down each time they play, and no matter what the manager attempts to do, if the players don't want to play a good game then the team will lose. For West Ham to have any chance of survival (well, for next season at least) they need to fire all of the first team players and actually get some players that want to play. The West Ham players are good at partying though, but that doesn't help them play football.

It's the same with the England football team. England lose most of the time because the players just want to be paid lots of money so that they can spend it all on cars, car fines (because they're not good at driving cars and either speed or crash), alcohol and women. If the manager fielded a team of good football players then England are more likely to win a game. I'm also glad that David Beckham isn't being allowed back into the team. It's stupid to waste a place just for someone whos only "skill" is kicking dead balls. That place should go to someone who can actually play football.

26/02/2007 - Monday

2007-02-26T22:22:00.000Z

The weekend was pretty much uneventful. I did manage to flesh out the data needed for the health website, so at least now I can think about how the site itself will work with the data. I also saw an article today on some OpenID stuff that was quite helpful. It also linked to an OpenID server that I can run locally so I can use that for testing instead of using a real OpenID server. It will also be useful if my internet connection goes down!

I don't usually pay attention to adverts but I saw one tonight that I absolutely loved. It was a new Budweiser advert. Some dude has installed a rubber floor so that they never break a bottle of bud again, and it shows them doing tricks with the bottles bouncing them to each other. At the end his girlfriend is at the door holding a pizza and a dog that was on the sofa jumps down to go greet the woman, and ends up bouncing high above her and straight out of the door. When I saw that I nearly choked for laughing as it was something that I wasn't expecting at all.

I was just logging into my webserver machine through ssh when I decided to check the uptime as I couldn't remember how long it had been on (10 days, 15 hours, 24 minutes if you're curious). I saw that the load average was "0.00, 0.00, 0.00"! Getting it down to 0.00 was due to getting rid of Apache 2.0.55 and getting Apache 2.2.3 working with Subversion. Before switching I was seeing load averages of around 0.18 when the machine was doing nothing at all. I'm happy that it's now actually doing nothing at all!

24/02/2007 - Saturday

2007-02-24T14:33:00.000Z

I wonder if it's possible to get addicted to nicotine by using the nicotine patches that you get for weening yourself off of smoking. I know it's possible to get addicted to the substitute drugs they give you to get off of cocaine and heroin, but what if you're not addicted to nicotine to start with? I suppose it's highly possible as the patches are designed to give you the same amount of nicotine so you don't actually smoke (at least the strong patches do - there are different strengths so you eventually cut down and then stop using them), so you could get addicted to it. It was just something I was wondering while I was sitting on the toilet this morning.

Apparently I'm red-green colour blind! I was just taking some online tests where you're shown the circles with different coloured blobs in them and you're supposed to see a number that's hidden in it. I could only see the ones that I was supposed to see and not the ones I wasn't supposed to see. No wonder my webpages always have crappy looking colour schemes ;)

Unlocker is a piece of software for Windows that lets you unlock locked files and folders. Don't you just hate it when you're trying to delete a file or folder (or move or rename it) but Windows thinks that it is in use and it doesn't let you do anything to it? I know I used to, but then I found Unlocker around two years ago. I hadn't needed to use it for a while but I just had to as Windows thought something was using a folder I was trying to delete (I had just burnt the folders contents to a DVD disk and I wanted to get rid of it). With Unlocker you just need to right-click the folder/file in question, click on the Unlocker menu item, then click unlock in the box that appears (listing all of the locked files and folders). Bingo! The file or folder is now unlocked and you can continue using it like normal. It even tells you which program has it locked, but usually this is explorer.exe so you couldn't touch it otherwise unless you restarted Windows. I thought I would write about this bit of free software as it tole me that there was a newer version available, otherwise I probably would have just used it and forgot about it!

RocketDock is an application launcher that sits somewhere on your screen and lets you launch various applications quickly and easily. You can add any shortcuts you like as well as a few other things (like a clock, recycle bin, seperators) and you can even get it to notify you of what applications are running. There is also an option for minimising windows to the dock, but I don't actually find that useful. There are plenty of dock launcher programs out there but this one is actually fast and responsive, even after it hasn't been used for a while.

23/02/2007 - Friday

2007-02-23T12:56:00.000Z

I'm curious. Someone (I know who you are actually) always visits this blog my going onto google and searching for "spidah blogspot". What I'm curious about is why do you keep searching for it and why not just create a bookmark instead? It would be a hell of a lot easier!

In other news, the past few days I've had really slow browsing speeds but only the download speed has been affected. I contacted my isp's email support yesterday telling them of the problem and eventually they figured out that there was a problem in the telephone exchange that affected browsing speeds. They didn't have an ETA for it yesterday but it seems to be fixed now. At least I hope it's fixed and not just a temporary speed burst! Now I can visit a few sites at decent speeds (400 KB/s+) instead of the sub-dialup speeds I've been having recently (0.4 KB/s anyone?)!

I forgot to mention a "celebrity" in my post the other day. She's a small and rubbish singer called Britney Spears. Apparently she hasn't been in the news much recently so she decided to shave off her hair as she knew it would guarantee her front page space. She has also been in and out of rehab for some reason. Why was she even in rehab to start with? Do all "celebrities" go into rehab when they have no singing career?

21/02/2007 - Wednesday

2007-02-21T22:31:00.000Z

Heroes has started on the Sci-Fi channel in the UK. It's pretty weird watching the first two episodes again when I've already watched up to episode 16. It has been around half a year since I saw the pilot episode and it was fun to watch it again as there were a few things that I had forgotten.

Stargate SG-1 is gearing up to the end of the last season and it looks to be a pretty interesting end. Hopefully the last episode will contain some past characters and I really hope that the series gets closed off and not left dangling in any way.

There have been a lot of z-list celebrities (meaning they're not actually celebrities) in the news recently. Things like Victoria Beckham ate a pea in Hollywood (shock horror! She'll ruin her "diet"!), David Beckham going to an American soccer club (can't call it football as they can't play football to save their lives) saying that he's not going for the money but everyone knows he's going for the money, Kylie Minogue talking more about her faked cancer (so she could get more publicity) and how she is "worn out" now and can't continue her concerts (poor diddums), Coleen whatshername (Wayne Rooneys' slut of a girlfriend) saying how she's so popular and isn't with Wayne for his money (which she is as she was nothing before meeting him, and she's nothing now as well), and finally, Jade Goody in all the papers and magazines selling her story of how depressed she is and having to go into Rehab (she had to get back into the papers and get people back on her side after the stupid Celebrity Big Brother show). Most of these "stories" I skip entirely as they're not news at all. About the only things I read in the papers these days are the jokes!

That's it for the moment. Stay tuned for more in a few days probably.

16/02/2007 - Friday

2007-02-16T23:24:00.000Z

In an effort to blog more I'm going to attempt to blog daily. I doubt I'll have much to blog about each day but I'm sure I'll be able to find something. I think I'll also start doing some more technical posts about various things (like websites, programming, etc.), so not all of you will be able to follow fully, but nothing lost if you can't follow along!

I had a scare last night and this morning. I was attempting to compile Apache 2.2.4 and Subversion 1.4.3 so that I could run both my websites and my svn repository using a single Apache install. I couldn't get Subversion 1.4.2 to work with Apache 2.2.3 so I had to use Apache 2.0.53 for the svn repository and Apache 2.2.3 for the websites (so I could use mod_proxy_balancer). This was fine except I noticed that the Apache 2.0.53 process was using a lot of cpu time when it was pretty much sitting idle 99% of the time. I couldn't work out why so I did a google search to see if anyone else had had this problem. I ended up coming across a page detailing how to compile Apache 2.2.4 and Subversion 1.4.2. I spent the day grabbing the sources, extracting them, getting the right configure lines, compiling, trying, going back to configuring and repeating from there. I switched the subversion source for 1.4.3 instead of 1.4.2 and I skipped out the "optional" steps that I couldn't even get to work right anyway.

Eventually I had Apache 2.2.4, Neon (can't remember the version) and Subversion 1.4.3 built in my home directory and working just fine (doing both websites and svn). I removed both of the old Apache installs from starting at boot time and added the new one to start instead. I then had to restart to check that the new Apache started and worked properly when the machine started up. There was a kernel update waiting to be installed so I decided to install that as well instead of leaving it in the updates (it had been in there for about a week and it was getting annoying). This eventually downloaded and installed (was a slow download) so I restarted the computer. It restarted, went to the initial Ubuntu boot screen with the progress bar, moved ever so slightly, then went to a black screen with a flashing cursor top left and the hard drive was making a weird noise. I left it for about a minute thinking that the hard drive was messed up (it happened to another hard drive I had that came with the bunch of three computers I got just before Christmas), tried to ctrl+alt+del out, then powered it off manually. I tried it again, same thing. I got annoyed then and just pulled all the plugs out and ignored it.

I thought I would give it another try this morning to see if any error messages came up and then see if I could salvage anything from the hard drive and install a spare hard drive in there instead. So I turned it on, it went to the black screen with the flashing cursor again, but this time I left it for longer. After about two minutes it started doing a disk check. I thought, "Ok, it'll find something wrong with the disk and then it'll tell me". Alas, it didn't and it then booted up into the graphical part (GNOME) and logged me straight in! Obviously the kernel update had to do something during boot time and it was that that caused the black screen and flashing cursor. I just assumed it was dead when I just had to leave it longer. At least I don't have to go hunting for a spare hard disk and then spend time installing everything again then trying to get my website and programming data from the original hard drive!

I think there was something else that I was going to write about but I can't think what it was now. I guess it obviously wasn't that important!

Uninteresting update

2007-02-12T21:57:00.000Z

I was going to write a list of what has changd in the Your Goals website since I posted about it last, but when I checked who had signed up for it all I saw was myself. So I really couldn't be bothered to write about something that no one uses. I'm thinking of taking it offline and removing these posts about it.

Big Kahuna Reef 2 revisted

2007-02-04T12:33:00.000Z

I just went through the main pack for Big Kahuna Reef 2 again. I've been doing the other packs for a while but decided to try that one again. This time I managed to get 3,418,963 points with a time of 04:46:27, which makes it 1 hour, 50 minutes, 51 seconds quicker than my previous attempt, and 634,422 points more (2,784,541 and 06:37:18). I'm pretty happy with that, seeing as the first attempt was the first time of playing the new version. I've gone through hundreds of levels since then in the other packs and know how to handle the "powerups" properly now :)

Life and Goals

2007-01-30T01:50:00.000Z

I'm still alive! I've been busy working on a project and haven't wanted to say anything about it until it was ready, which I finally feel it is. I've been working on it for around the past month and although it's a simple project I have been using it to try out some new things, so not all my time was spent adding the features to the project. I also redesigned it a few times until I got something that I liked.

The project is called Your Goals. It's a simple website that allows you to track goals. I've currently got goals added for exercising (a good way to kick me into shape!) and various TV programmes that I sometimes miss. It can be used for anything though, as long as the goal happens at least once a week. You can get a better feel for the website by looking at the tour page. The login is done via OpenID which is a different way of managing a single login over multiple websites. More details are given on the signup page.

That's about it for now. I already have a few ideas about how I can make the goals website better, plus I'll now be going back to the health website I was originally working on. I put that on ice for a while as I needed to rethink how I was approaching the whole thing, and I've since realised that I was going about it the wrong way, so I'm going to have a nice long thinking/designing session which I hope will allow me to do it easier.

More photos

2007-01-24T10:45:00.000Z

I just uploaded some snow photos that I took this morning and it reminded me that I forgot to do a post about the Tower of London pictures I uploaded a while ago. You can find the snow pictures here and the Tower of London pictures here. The Tower of London pictures were taken in June 2006 but I forgot to upload them until the beginning of this month. I still have some photos from Kew Gardens that I took in July 2006 to upload, but I'll get around to doing them eventually!

Dates and whiteboards

2007-01-16T04:10:00.000Z

I hate dates. The "16-01-2007" kind, not any other kind. For something I've been working on recently I've had to do a lot of date manipulations as the date needs to be correct based on a given time zone. This would be easy if the date support in Ruby on Rails made any sense, but unfortunately it doesn't. They're a real pain to work with and have frustrated me for a few days now. Luckily I seem to have finished messing with the date part now; or at least I hope I've finished!

I love whiteboards. I bought a whiteboard from ebay last week and it arrived on Saturday. It's only a small one (600mmx400mm) as all the larger ones are pretty expensive, but it does the job that I wanted it for. I've already taken up a corner with a to-do area where I can jot a few things down so I don't forget them, which leaves the rest free for scribbling down ideas. It currently has a design on it, but that will be changing tomorrow as I've already done that design. It would be nice to have a larger one but I don't really need a larger one at the moment.

Short quick grammar quiz

2007-01-10T15:21:00.000Z

Found this linked from another blog: http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/cgi-shl/quiz.pl/its_there_quiz.htm

It tests whether you know how to use "its", "it's", "there", "their" and "they're" correctly. I managed to score 10/10 which is great :)

Webserver Updates

2007-01-04T22:32:00.000Z

The last time I talked about my new webserver machine I said that I was hoping to get it sorted so that I can host more than one website on it. Well, now it is hosting two websites just fine, so I've got that sorted out. It was actually easy to do as the instructions I followed to get it working with one website also let it work with more than one website as you just have to create a link to a file in the right place and it works correctly.

I've also got Subversion running on it as well, but I had to install an older version of the webserver software to get it to work. This isn't a problem as I was actually expecting that, but it's all working fine so I'm going to leave it at that.

On another topic (and a technical topic), when editing the file that make up the website I was first editing them on my main computer, checking them into subversion, then updating the website on the webserver computer from subversion (via a ssh shell), then finally checking it out in my browser on my main computer. Then I switched to just using the ssh shell to edit the files I wanted using nano, saving, then just checking them in my browser. Today I went looking to see if there was a ssh/sftp plugin for Eclipse (the IDE I was using to edit the website files when they were on my main computer) that would allow me to remotely edit the files in an environment I was comfortable with. I finally found one, so now I just have to get Eclipse to connect to the webserver machine then I can start changing the files and they're updated on the webserver machine whenever I hit save. All I have to do now is save and then refresh in my browser to see the changes. It's the same number of steps as the ssh shell and nano route, but with that route I had to have a few ssh shells open to be able to easily switch between files. With Eclipse all the files are in a single window which makes it all a lot easier.

45th

2007-01-02T11:08:00.000Z

My name ranked 45th in the top 100 boys names of 2006. The top three were Aiden, Jacob and Ethan, in that order. The top three girls name are Emma, Madison and Ava. Strangely enough, I don't personally know anyone who is called one of those names!

Torchwood Finale

2007-01-02T02:41:00.000Z

The first season of Torchwood concluded tonight with a double-bill. I can't write anything about it at the moment as my mum and sister haven't seen it yet and I don't want to spoil anything. I'll write up my thoughts and ideas after they've watched it on Wednesday. A second season was confirmed in December 2006 and the filming starts in spring 2007 to be shown later on in the year.

UPDATE: I forgot that I was going to update this after my mum and sister had watched it. The last two episodes of Torchwood were two of the best ones I think. Owen was damn annoying as he'd only known Diane (Diana?) for a few days before she went back through the rift but he was acting like he had known her his whole life. Gwen is always annoying anyway, so she wasn't any different :) I did think that the special effects for Adabbon were a bit poor as it didn't really look like it belonged in the picture. Other than that, the episodes were good. It was also good that The Doctor arrived at the very end to take Jack off somewhere, but hopefully he'll be back for the second series as it would be pretty bad without him!

Songs of 2006

2007-01-01T00:34:00.000Z

Here are the top 10 artists and tracks that I've listened to during 2006, according to last.fm. The numbers aren't exactly correct as they differ from my top artists/tracks and the years artists/tracks (one song that I only listened to this year has around 500 plays less in the yearly chart to the overall chart, so roughly add 500 to most of the numbers and they're about right).

Top Artists:

1    Ruslana                      4,165
2    Alizée                       3,196
3    Linkin Park                  2,865
4    Fort Minor                   1,328
5    Hilary Duff                  1,237
6    BassHunter                   1,070
7    Groove Coverage              1,058
8    Bubba Sparxxx                1,008
9    Doctor Who                   819
10   Ben Moody Feat. Anastacia    604

Top Tracks:

1    Alizée – J'ai pas vingt ans!                  2,554
2    Ruslana – WILD ENERGY                         2,240
3    Bubba Sparxxx – Back In The Mud               1,008
4    Doctor Who – 2006 Full version                607
5    Ben Moody Feat. Anastacia – Everything Burns  604
6    Kivimiehet – Elämä Raiteillaan                585
7    Daz Sampson – Teenage Life                    444
8    BassHunter – Boten Anna                       376
9    Linkin Park – In the End                      339
10   Linkin Park – Faint                           294

Happy New Year

2006-12-31T17:32:00.000Z

I want to wish everyone I know a happy new year. I hope it's better than the year just gone by :)

Connection Problems

2006-12-29T01:05:00.000Z

I'm currently having problems with my internet connection if anyone was wondering why I haven't been online as much as I usually am. It started on Wednesday evening with the adsl dropping out every now and then, and it continued all through Thursday and into the evening. The adsl drops out, then when it comes back, I tell the router to connect again, which it does (well, some of the time), but then when I attempt to load a webpage the adsl drops out again and I have to repeat the process over again. Sometimes I can't get the router to connect, so I spend ages rebooting the router or pulling out the phoneline and putting it back in to force a new connection. It's starting to get annoying now though!

UPDATE: It seems to be fixed now, hopefully. I phoned up about it and the guy on the line had me on hold for a few minutes while he was checking the exchange and he flicked a switch that reset something (something about a build up). This fixed it for a few hours but then it started playing up again. I then received a reply email from the support people saying that they had taken a closer look at my connection in the exchange and noticed that the exchange was sending at a faster speed than I was connected at (sending at 14.5 mbps when I was connected at 13 mbps) which was causing data loss and corruption. They changed the speeds to match and it has been fine so far. Lets hope it stays fine for a while now as I want to check if the other problem has been fixed (about people phoning causing the connection to be dropped; possibly caused by extra line noise).

Christmas Presents

2006-12-26T01:07:00.000Z

Quite a decent haul this year and even things that I wanted :) I got the usual clothes that I ask for (t-shirts, socks, jogging bottoms) as well as a few other bits like a long sleeved t-shirt (I only have two of them, now three) and a khaki type pair of black trousers (although I need to lose a bit of weight before I can get into them! woopsy!). I also got a 4-port Doctor Who Tardis usb hub for my computer which is great, an electronic sudoku pad, a microwavable duck bed warmer (heat it in the microwave for 90 seconds and it warms up and you can use it like a hot water bottle), and a few other bits that I can't remember right at this moment in time. The main part of my presents was an exercise set which is made up of a mini-trampoline, a skipping rope, an exercise mat, a stepping machine and a set of dumbbells. I also got a wrist exercise squeezers set, but I'm not sure if they were part of the exercise set or if they came seperately. Oh, I also got a fluid bottle and three juggling balls, not that I can juggle!

For my sister I bought a 16 piece cutlery set (eight forks and eight knives) as hers always seem to bend, an indoor aerial for her bedroom tv, a set of seven socks, and a pink steering wheel cover.

For my mum I bought a set of two gas lighters (for lighting things like ovens and candles, the long reach one, not a cigarette lighter) as she sometimes has trouble lighting the oven, a red jumper (picked out by my sister as I didn't know what type she wanted), and a set of seven socks (same as my sisters).

Finally, for my dad I bought a 16 ounce rubber mallet and a stanley knife set with 18 spare blades.

Now you'll understand when I said that my presents might have been cheap to buy, but at least they'll be used!

Merry Christmas

2006-12-25T09:05:00.001Z

Merry Christmas everyone!

New Server

2006-12-24T20:37:00.000Z

On Friday evening I took in three computers that were going to be dumped. I've since installed Ubuntu Linux (Edgy version) on it, as well as the necessary server software (Apache etc.). As of a few hours ago the server was visible to the world, but I'm going to be making a few changes to it to make it a bit more usable for me. At the moment it's only running one website (my health one), and I want to do a few more websites, but it can only support one in the state that it's in. I know what to do to change it but it's a lot more harder than what I've done to get it working so far, so I'm going to leave it for a few days to make sure that it's working fine as it is now before attempting to change anything. Hopefully it'll be up and running by the end of the week, and then I just have to make sure that the website looks ok (which I've also been changing).

Opera 9.10 released

2006-12-18T14:24:00.000Z

Just in time for Christmas, Opera have released Opera 9.10 for download. It's the same build as the latest weekly beta (8679 if you were wondering), so if you're running the weeklies (like me) then you don't really need to install it.

The bleary eyed monster

2006-12-17T22:42:00.000Z

Ever wake up in the morning really groggy and bleary eyed and it takes you some time to become alert? As it gets dark your brain releases melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate your sleep cycle, which also makes you tired in the evenings so that you can get to sleep more easily. It is also produced while you're sleeping, so when you wake up your body is still full of melatonin which makes you really sleepy and groggy when you wake up.

There's a simple solution. Within a few minutes of waking, all you have to do is expose your eyes to natural sunshine for a minute or two. The sunshine burns away the melatonin and makes you feel alert in a lot less time than it would take normally. Most people usually drag themselves to the kitchen to have their morning cereal and to drink coffee to make them alert, but they do this in the dull light, so the melatonin doesn't get burnt away quickly. Just look towards the morning sun with your eyes closed and let the sun take care of your morning need, then you won't need to pollute your body with caffeine that gives you a stronger downer than it does an upper!

Dancing Christmas Tree

2006-12-17T22:38:00.000Z

Qnext

2006-12-14T09:48:00.000Z

I saw a link to Qnext today so I decided to check it out. It's a communications bit of software and lets you do VoIP, video conferencing, chatting, file transfers, remote access, and more. It looks quite nice, although it doesn't have much fancy graphics stuff like some applications (I prefer functionality over funky!).

You can download it here and install it (it uses Java). Once it has installed let it start and it will probably want to update its messages, so let it do that then click the restart button to start it again. Now you will be able to pick a username and password. I didn't bother entering any information in the three optional screens as I just wanted to try the program, but I might go back and fill them in at a later time. Once that is done the program will start properly and log you in. In the top left corner of the screen is your UID number, and a connection icon to the right of it. Hopefully this will be green, but if not then you need to open some ports in your router or firewall (it does support uPnP though, so if you have a proper working uPnP firewall or router then it will automatically open the ports that it needs; yay). You just need to open ports 5235 to 5237 (which is funny, as my router shows 5238 being open!).

After it has started you can get to use the program. You can add other QNext users, or you can connect to various IM networks (Yahoo, AIM, MSN and ICQ) and chat on them. The main things like file sharing and video and audio conferencing seem to only work with QNext users, but I could be wrong (it's logical though that they'd only do it with their own users). You can also browse for things, but I haven't used that yet to see what it does.

That's all the information I can give you so far! I don't have any friends added on there (I don't know anyway else who uses it) so I can't do some of the funky things like the file sharing, photo sharing, music streaming (jukebox style), or video/audio conferencing. If anyone wants to get it and try it out with me then that would be great! My UID is 221971.

London Weather

2006-12-07T17:29:00.000Z

I was about to go to the shops earlier when it started hailstoning so I took a video of it.

There was also a tornado in North London! Several people were hurt but there were no deaths.

Design limbo

2006-12-07T01:31:00.000Z

I got tired of the design for my health website so I decided to give it a proper overhaul. I started with a background image to go in the top right corner and knew that I wanted some kind of gym picture. I took a stroll through a bunch of "stock" photos but I couldn't find anything that I really liked. I ended up doing a google image search and going page after page until I found one (on about the 18th page). So I saved the image, opened up photoshop, and set about trying to make it fit.

I'm not that great at editing images, mainly because I don't really know how photoshop works and how to do different effects. I took a stab at it anyway and ended up searching on google for fading effects, as the picture cuts off on the left and bottom and I wanted it to blend in with my sites white background. I tried doing a mask layer and drawing a gradiant, but that only worked for one edge, and I couldn't find a way to have two mask layers on two duplicate layers of the treadmill picture. I eventually found an easy way to do what I wanted: make the background layer editable, fill it with white, then select an outline on the treadmill layer, feather it, inverse the selection (so you select the left and bottom bits), then just hit delete. It automatically fades out and looks ok.

That's all I've done with it so far. I'm not sure if I like the fading though as it still stops a bit abruptly. I might have a play and see if I can come up with something a little better. I still have a main logo to create (using the existing apple logo though) and then it's just twiddling with the style of the page to get things looking nice. I won't take a screenshot of it just yet though, as I have borders turned on for a few bits of the page so that I can see where they're going, and it doesn't exactly look nice. Plus I've started on a top navigational bar which isn't finished yet, plus I'll be moving a few bits around and re-thinking some other bits.

Christmas Decorations

2006-12-04T02:16:00.000Z

I put the christmas decorations up for this year. Started late afternoon, had nearly finished the living room by dinner time, did the kitchen after dinner, then finished the living room off and did the passage. I took some pictures of the decoorations on the floor (both kitchen and living room, but not the passage) and then when the decorations were actually on the ceiling and walls. I created a photo set of the pictures, which is fun as it's the first time I've got a photo set working with zooomr!. There are 13 photos in total and some of the "after" photos are a bit dark as I took them in the dark with only the flash. You can still see the picture perfectly though.

Big Kahuna Reef 2: Chain Reaction

2006-12-01T15:01:00.000Z

I've been a big fan of Big Kahuna Reef since I first played it a few years ago. I recently found out that there is a Big Kahuna Reef 2! I downloaded the trial, started playing it and I was instantly hooked. You can now make powerups when you clear blocks and these powerups make it a lot more fun to clear the board. Powerups I've seen so far are single sticks of dynomite, bombs, groups of dynomite sticks, and nukes. I'm not sure if there are any others in there, but these are pretty fun to start with if there are more! There are over 750 levels in the standard game plus you can download more level addons from the website, making this one enjoyable game to while away the time!

Update: I meant to say this earlier, but the tiki now actually does something! In BKR1 when you filled the tiki bar it wouldn't really do anything, other than it counting as a bonus on the win screen. In BKR2, when the tiki bar fills it spews out a couple of sticks of dynomite to places that need it (where you have unbroken blocks). This also happens if you're keeping the tiki bar full as the combo goes up (it's full at 100, then it's "full" again at 200, and 300, etc.), so it comes in handy for when you're getting a bit stuck with locks and covered blocks. It's also great fun when you get the tiki bonus, use some of the dynomite to clear some paths, make a 6 combo, get a bunch of dynomite, use that, then you've filled the tiki bar again and you get more dynomite. You can probably guess that I like this game ;)

Update 2: I just finished the quest game (100 levels) which unlocks the tiki bonus pack (not sure how many levels; it was 50 in the first game). Here's the win screen for the quest mode (note this is just my first go at the game. will probably get sub 6 hours in a few games time).

Types of weight loss

2006-11-30T20:10:00.000Z

We all think that any weight loss is a "good thing", but sometimes it actually isn't. There are several kinds of weight loss but there's really only one kind that actually works. Three kinds of weight loss are:

Water loss
Muscle loss
Fat loss

Water loss

Water loss is what makes your weight fluctuate the most. Your body is made up of, on average, 50% to 60% water with the rest being taken up by muscle and fat. You can probably guess that water plays a major role in your weight. Two cups of water is roughly equal to one pound of weight, so if you don't drink your needed eight glasses minimum a day then you can lose a fair amount of weight.

Muscle loss

Your muscles don't stay, no matter how hard you wish them to stay. Your muscles deteriorate over time so your body needs to rebuild them. Exercise helps build up new muscles, but if your body can't rebuild your existing muscles then you're going to lose them. Protein is what your body needs to rebuild muscles (as well as for your brain, red blood cells and your central nervous system), so if you're not getting enough protein then your body is less efficient at rebuilding muscles, so they will deteriorate and you lose weight. This can also happen if you don't eat enough carbohydrates, as your body will then convert the protein you eat into the fuel it needs, meaning that you don't have the proteins your body needs each day.

Fat loss

This is the best weight loss to have. It's very easy to gain weight and it's very hard to lose weight. Your body needs to consume food, convert it to energy and burn it during the day. If you eat too much food each day, or the wrong kind of food, then your body won't be able to burn it all and it will get stored as fat so it can be burned at a later time. Unfortunately, this new fat generally isn't burnt off as your body will continue to receive too much so fat will continue to be stored, making you fatter and heavier. If you count calories (generally 2500 a day for women and 3500 a day for men) then you can still gain weight even if you're well under. How? Well, you could be eating full fat foods, or foods that are just unhealthy, and your body won't be able to burn it all so it gets stored as fat.

Conclusions

I'm far from an expert on this, but I've found that if you eat to within the last 500 calories of your limit, while doing a fair amount of exercise, then you can slowly lose weight. The best weight loss is fat loss and it takes time to burn off far. On average you should be able to lose two pounds a week, anything more than this is unhealthy and you're likely to just put it back on again. You should also try to weigh yourself under the same conditions so as to rule out other factors. Pick a time and day to weigh yourself each week and try to do it at that time. It could be in the morning just after waking and just after your morning trip to the toilet, but before you have anything to drink or eat. You could also do it every monday evening just after getting home from work.

Whatever time you pick you should try to make it the same each week. Always try to do it after going to the toilet and before you eat or drink anything, this way you'll get a more true reading as liquid and food will add to your weight (I can lose two pound just by emptying a full bladder before weighing myself, or I can gain a pound just by drinking two glasses of water before I weigh myself).

I can get rich on this

2006-11-28T18:17:00.000Z

It has been a while since I added the Google ads to this blog so I thought I'd take a look to see how much I've "earned". It is such a huge number that I'll soon be able to buy a mansion, or even a whole country!. My "Total Earnings" comes in as a whooping USD 1.05! That's one dollar and 5 cents. Wow.

Food Cravings

2006-11-27T18:43:00.000Z

Here is a good page on food cravings and what you really need. Example: if you crave chocolate then you really need magnesium, and you can get it from things like raw nuts and seeds, legumes and fruits. I don't know how correct the list is but it seems interesting anyway.

Helsinki Complaints Choir

2006-11-27T18:37:00.001Z

A bit old, but funny nonetheless.

I've Got Wind!

2006-11-24T15:33:00.000Z

That's what England will be saying tonight! There will be, supposidly, 60-70 MPH winds with a 40% chance of damage. This should be a fun night! If I notice anything interesting outside my window then I'll take pictures or a video, just to share it with all the people who read this blog (all 3 of you!).

UPDATE: Well, the forecasters lie. The strongest wind last night was maybe 30 MPH at most with only short bursts of rain. There has been more rain during the day today (I was out in some) but it hasn't been that windy. They said it was going to hit here but we've just had winter showers. Sometimes I don't know why I listen to the forecasters!

Lights, Camera, Action!

2006-11-22T20:33:00.000Z

I'm now a director on YouTube. It's a shame I didn't set it up before posting the fireworks video as I can now upload videos longer than 10 minutes. Oh well, no harm done. I can at least upload videos longer than that now. I'm planning on doing a few videos, which could hit over 10 minutes, so I'll now have a place to put them.

Christmas Presents

2006-11-22T16:27:00.000Z

Other people might think of me as being cheap, but I went shopping for christmas presents today and got half of them from a pound shop! I'll be going back tomorrow to look for the rest as I didn't have the arm room to hold more presents. The ones I got are nice presents, not some cheap nasty things. They might not be expensive flashy presents that look good when you open them but then you find you never use them, these are real presents that are likely to get a lot of use out of them! I prefer those kinds of presents over the other kind.

UPDATE: I now have £3 left with which to get a last present for my mum. I started off with £20 and have bought 10 presents and the material to make my own christmas cards. Pretty good going to have got all that in only £17!

Health Machine - It now does weights!

2006-11-16T03:23:00.000Z

I worked on the health website a bit this evening and got the weight displaying working properly on the users page. I had to make a few other changes so that it pulled the right measurements out and, also in the right order, but it's all good now. I even added in the target weight bit and the difference. I was thinking of maybe having it display a happy picture, like balloons, if you're under your target, and a picture of dumbbells, or something similar, if you're over your target. Just to make it look a bit less boring (there's too much text). Anyway, here's a picture for you:

Opera Developer Tools

2006-11-16T00:11:00.000Z

Nice! Opera have released the developer tools that have been in the works for a while now, and they're great! There's the DOM Console (DOM is Document Object Model - Basically how the page is made up using HTML), the DOM Snapshot which is like a source viewer, and the CSS Editor which you can use to mess with the layout from within a loaded page.

I was using Firefox before to do things like live CSS editing and checking out the DOM, but now I can just use Opera! Opera is my default browser, and I don't really like using Firefox, so being able to do all this from the browser that I love is excellent. The only thing that I'll have to use Firefox for now is debugging javascript and checking out AJAX calls (Web 2.0 stuff) if I ever have to do that again.

Galaxy Doughnut

2006-11-15T21:02:00.000Z

I quite like this picture. Not sure what it is exactly. The original title was "the galaxy on its side".

Health Website Update

2006-11-15T02:51:00.000Z

I've made quite a few changes to my health website since I last talked about it, so I thought it was time for an update! Well, it's slowly coming along, which is good. I've spent a while getting it looking right as it was bugging me, that's why I haven't progressed as far as I had hoped by now. Anyway, it's now in a state where I can start adding the useful things back in, and I've started on that with weight entry. It doesn't display the entered weights yet as I wasn't sure how I wanted it to look, plus I didn't have any way of adding the weights in at the time!

Pictures are better than text, so here are a few:

This is the home page of the website. Pretty boring really. I might spruce it up later with some images or something.

This is the signup page. I find it quite funny that the note areas are much longer than the sections the note is for!

This is the signup page again, but this time showing errors. All I did was tried to signup without entering any details. It also gives errors if something is the wrong length, or contains invalid characters, or if the password and password confirmation don't match.

This is what is currently displayed once you've signed up and logged in. It's not show any of my latest weight measurements as I haven't actually got that far (just adding weights). I might change the look of this later on, it all depends on what it looks like once it's display weights and measurements.

Finally, this is how you add weights. It's showing stone and lbs as that's what I selected when I signed up. You can also select kg's if you want. It automatically selects "todays" date as you would probably be entering the weight just after taking it, but it can be changed if you're adding in previous weights.

Zooomr

2006-11-12T15:17:00.000Z

Zooomr is a photo hosting site, much like Flickr, although much faster. The free account lets you upload 100 MB of photos a month, which is a lot more than the 10 MB a month that Flickr gives you! I also took advantage of a special offer they have for upgrading to a pro account if you have a blog (and you upload an image to zooomr and make a blog post using it). I can now upload 4 GB of photos a month! I doubt I'll even use the original 100 MB a month, let alone 4 GB! Still, it's nice to have it if I ever decide to do a mass upload (like holiday pictures).

Strangely enough, all future pictures that I take and want to put online will be done using zooomr. Zooomr is much like flickr when viewing a photo, but zooomr does a few extra things like GeoTagging (you can select the location where the photo was taken using Google Maps), and adding hotspots to pictures (I think anyway, I haven't actually tried it).