ktp.

I was rudly awoken by Dominic and Hannah shouting at me to wake up... constantly. That didn't put me in a great mood. This was because we were going swimming today. Then Davina decided to shout at me to get ready. So I ended up leaning up against the door for about 15-20 minutes while Davina tried to convince me to go out with them. I didn't talk to her during that, obviously, as it would only encourage her. Basic Skinnerism. Finally she left. She almost grasped that I was upset, but she couldn't deduce the reason. I didn't really want to go swimming anyway but there's no need to shout at me. Now I'm all upset and I'll probably not be in a better mood for a while now.

I did absolutely nothing yesterday, it was relativly crap. It was weird since I'd been doing so much every day so far. I want my uni letter saying I got in so I can go get student accounts and a credit card and buy some stuff off BME Shop. Look at the pretty translucent purple Kaos Silicon Eyelets. They're translucent purple double-flared eyelets. They're squishy too.

I tried to update the previous post but it didn't work - I figured out that I hadn't actually added ezboard.com to my allow list. It works now. I have the Puppet Master as my avatar now. Here's the avatar.

Wow, I was browsing an ezBoard board and I was invited to open a Windows executable from direct.something-line.us. I never thought ezBoard would stoop so low... to distribute malware. I've never been a great fan of ezboard.

I started reading Second Foundation today. It's exciting. Don't worry, I won't include any spoilers here, that would be evil.

ezboard corruption

I discovered I couldn't log into ezboard even in Firefox (with cookies enabled for ezboard.com and myezboard.com). I expect they're trying to access their cookies from the wrong domain or something. Maybe they want people to enabled all cookies so their advertisers can cookie the hell out of ezboard's users. Whatever the reason, it's annoying.
Update: I thought I'd enabled cookies for ezboard.com, but it seems like that was only a dilusion. I enabled cookies for ezboard.com again and it worked.

I found an interesting article entitled `What about when you're Eighty?' - the first in a series of articles on annoying questions people ask about body modification by the other the Lizardman.

Finally, two people begged for invites - no more Gmail invites are up for grabs. They begged because they already have Gmail accounts. Ah well, they can have extra accounts.

I did a quick and pretty minisite again. Yes, you can see it. Ask me on `MSN', otherwise no, as I'm not uploading it yet. I was thinking about redesigning my blog in a pretty XHTML-COMPATIBLE style. As it is the theme I have CLAIMS to be XHTML 1.0 Strict. But it isn't, it doesn't even have a bloody XML declaration. I hate liars. Hi, we're SCO, we own Unix. Hi, we're Microsoft, we need more fiction writers!

There's somebody on my street playing incredibly loud and basey music. It's annoying me.

Natwest and their evil tactics

I was looking into getting a Natwest student account as I heard they were offering a 5-year third-off railcard and I came across this little condition:
``- agree that your only student account will be a NatWest Bank account''
And I thought that was very interesting. Sure, I can agree to do that... I might lie though. It's okay to lie when doing otherwise would invade your free will/privacy. Unfortunately the whole privacy thing isn't possible when banks are involved.

I was searching for a Firefox extension that reads my .netrc for websites that require authentication (i.e. the webstats directory on SSQ) when I came across this blog post (some interesting related articles there), which linked to this Firefox extension, which is amazingly useful - the Web Developer's Toolbar does so many useful things. Not only will it be useful for developing but I expect it to be useful when browsing some misbehaving websites too. It can disable/invisibilise images, CSS, JavaScript, cookies. And it can show you the sizes of blocks and highlight images with no alt text, do stuff with forms, edit CSS and show the changes as you edit, validate (X)HTML, CSS, WAI. It's fantastic.

Firefox 0.9 is fantastic. I just downloaded it today (took me several hours). But it's nice and new and pretty.

I just got back from babysitting. Nice easy job... I've got plenty of web work to do tomorrow. Adding the new info to the cafe page and probably learning a lot about CSS. But fun. I may carry on with my Python implementation of xmagic - the tool I use to compile the SSQ website from a template and many XML files. I'm having a little trouble working out how to use xml.dom.minidom. It seems like your standard tree but still it's quite complicated. I'm using optparse to parse the options and a simple regular expression to get all the values that need to be inserted into the template (although a uniq(1)-like command would be useful, I may have to make my own). I haven't got to the point where I stick all the stuff into the template. That'll be after I get the XML parser working.

I bid you adiaux, until next post...

Free Gmail Invites for my fans

I got six invites on Gmail last night. I sent one to Erik and that left me with five. Now I don't know what to do with the rest...

Did somebody say `give me an invite'? Well, you asked for it... I shall now hand out two Gmail invites to the first two people to comment on this post (on the condition that I don't know them to already have an account).

Yes, you'll have to give out your email address... on the WWW (gasp). But think of the great rewards awaiting you.
For those technically-inclined individuals, you will need JavaScript and cookies enabled and some of the operations can take quite a bit of bandwidth (beware those connecting on 14.4kbps).
For those lusers out there, you will need a recent version of Mozilla Navigator or Mozilla Firefox with foo and biscuits turned on. No, you can't use Internet Explorer... (shh, nobody tell them that I'm lying).

If I can't find anybody who wants the other three cookies I'll put them up for auction. If nobody replies I'll assume nobody reads my blog and get a sandwich-board reading `FREE GMAIL INVITES'.

The WWW/La TTT

Wow, I was just looking at the server report for yesterday on SSQ and I noticed a lot of hits yesterday. I was kind of surprised. I mean I know it's a really great site, but oh so many hits! Anyway, I get down to the User Agent report (Easyspace call it `browser' - morons) and I find seven requests are bots, one is Konquorer (not me!) and six are MSIE.

I'm quite impressed, there was Googlebot, Pompos, msnbot, Gaisbot, ZyBorg, Ask Jeeves/Teoma and Netcraft.
Of the above bots, I found Googlebot, Pompos and Gaisbot to be the best behaved. Their user-agent string included the name of their bot as the user-agent with a URL to information about their bots in brackets. MSNbot was quite polite too although they should think about putting the bot FAQ in the page they link to rather than having to go further to find the information I want. Zyborg was very impolite, just take a look at the UA-string:
Mozilla/4.0 compatible ZyBorg/1.0 Dead Link Checker (wn.dlc@looksmart.net; http://www.WISEnutbot.com)
First of all, It's a bot, not a fucking web browser so why is it pretending to be Mozilla compatible? Second, the compatible part should be in the brackets. Oh, and if you include a URL, make sure it's to a bot FAQ - I don't want to look at the search engine that recieves the data, I want an FAQ!
But at least I got a link, not as much can be said for Netcraft and Ask Jeeves/Teoma. Not only did they perport to be Mozilla-compatible but they failed to include a URL to a bot FAQ.
I may have to write some emails...

The report is useful but an actual access/error log would be useful. It's good that they make a useful report out of all the data but I'd like to have access to the actual log. For example there's a report on status codes returned. One is 301 (Document Moved Permanantly), I can guess what that refers. But there's also 2 405s (Method not allowed) - I know that's just script kiddies/viri trying to use buffer-overruns thinking Easyspace are running MSIIS but it had better as hell give me URIs when there's a 404 or 403.

Aparantly there were two requests for /Core%20%20files/ (probably a robot with an out-of-date link) but I'd still like to see which UAs tried to access it.

The most hillarious thing about the page is that it says it's HTML 2.0. I put it through the validator and it checks out - it is valid HTML 2.0.

Oh yeah, here's a redundant article on how MS Word sucks. I've been saying this for a while now, but does anybody listen? Noooo...
He goes on to propose something equally crazy:
"I concluded that the program is out of control and needs to be scrapped. Users should all be given some new program for an upgrade charge of $10 just to get everyone on the same page."
I agree it is out of control (or rather under somebody else's control), but why would anybody want to get something equally as crappy for $10? Why not get something better for $0?

lol! I just made a very amusing discovery - I found that the UA-string of Firefox causes Easypspace to classify it as Netscape - i.e. they thing everything that starts as "Mozilla/x.x" but doesn't have "compatible" in brackets is Netscape! Firefox proclaims itself to me Mozilla because, strangely enough, it's Mozilla code, engine, etc.. It is a baby of Mozilla yet it's classified as Netscape, morons.

Oh yeah, I just found the error report for last wednesday - it has a list of failed requests in the /Artists%20files/ directory yet I have no way of knowing whether it was a bot, somebody who has old bookmarks or a website with links to those files. Fucking useless! Anyway, I put up a 404 page at /err/404.html and added an entry into .htaccess. I'm thinking about a favicon - they're supported by most browsers (including w3m-el!) so it's more prominent in people's bookmarks. I'm also thinking about one for myself, you know, for my minisite which shall feature my bio I posted the other day, the CV page I made (very pretty but kind of sparse when it comes to information) and an index file linking to them and my blog.
We'll see. Anyway, ttyl.

A good day, etc.

Muahahaha, it paid off, eventually.

"""
I use Word for text so that I can type it up. We are a very small charity with avery small budget and we do not run to posh programme that allow us to create pdfs. For that we have to use designers which cost us money. However, your suggestion of an html version or rtf version is reasonable and I will try to do something to alter this next year.

regards
The Office dogsbody which includes website, accounts, databases, secretarial work and editing 1000 event details for the Big Draw Guide.
"""

Low budget? USE LINUX (and other Open Source software)! Want to save documents as PDF? There are many open source applications out there for that purpose. But I'll save that for somebody else, they seem to be helpful enough.

We went swimming today. The first time I took Roisin down the slide I bumped my cocsix on the floor. It hurt.

I got an invite on Gmail. I sent it to Adam as I love h-... as I promised to.

I'm watching Six Feet Under right now. Yay.

I'm finding that considering I have to do so little every day I have so little time. I can spend ages doing various things and the finding no time for other things I want to do.

Oh yeah, when I get Debian Sarge (very soon after the 15th September) I'm going to install GCJ and Kaffe so I can get a little experience with Java before I go to Uni. I don't want to but I suppose it'll be better knowing the language before I get there.

A good day, etc.

Muahahaha, it paid off, eventually.

"""
I use Word for text so that I can type it up. We are a very small charity with avery small budget and we do not run to posh programme that allow us to create pdfs. For that we have to use designers which cost us money. However, your suggestion of an html version or rtf version is reasonable and I will try to do something to alter this next year.

regards
The Office dogsbody which includes website, accounts, databases, secretarial work and editing 1000 event details for the Big Draw Guide.
"""

Low budget? USE LINUX (and other Open Source software)! Want to save documents as PDF? There are many open source applications out there for that purpose. But I'll save that for somebody else, they seem to be helpful enough.

We went swimming today. The first time I took Roisin down the slide I bumped my cocsix on the floor. It hurt.

I got an invite on Gmail. I sent it to Adam as I love h-... as I promised to.

I'm watching Six Feet Under right now. Yay.

I'm finding that considering I have to do so little every day I have so little time. I can spend ages doing various things and the finding no time for other things I want to do.

Oh yeah, when I get Debian Sarge (very soon after the 15th September) I'm going to install GCJ and Kaffe so I can get a little experience with Java before I go to Uni. I don't want to but I suppose it'll be better knowing the language before I get there.

TTT-ejoj

Yesterday I started re-writing a very short bio in Esperanto. Today I polished it off. It's probably full of terrible grammer, but then so are most of my blog posts in English. I also added a lot of CSS to make it look pretty. I think I did quite well in the CSS department. You can see it here.

Oh yeah, I swapped the table for some divs on the pages at the SSQ website.

I also found the Web Accessability Initiative. I think I'll work towards implementing at least the first level of accessability for SSQ. Should be fun.

Going swimming with Davina and the kids tomorrow, should be fun. There's a big slide.

Olympics, etc.

Here's a very interesting article from BMEZine about being a modified Jew. I liked it.

``The restrictions on food and drink are intended to ensure that only items made by official sponsors such as McDonald's and two Greek dairy firms are consumed at Olympic venues.''
So no vegans allowed to the Olympics then?
Here's an article about the rediculus tactics used by the Olymics people to infringe on people's rights... oh I'm sorry, I mean the tactics used to stop advertising terrorism. Seems the connection between wearing a Nike T-shirt and terrorism is about as tedious as the connection between copying music and piracy. Yarr!

I read an article the other day about the athletes, support people, etc not being allowed to publish anything they write relating to the Olympics in print or online on pain of disqualification. It really is rediculus the lengths people will go for a little extra money. I read yet another article about NBC having excusive rights to Olympics coverage in America and they're not even showing it all! (I posted that link the other day).

UCAS, Odeon

Here's a short article. Something about virus protection, but the interesting part starts half-way down, which starts ``Garza and company might have drawn another conclusion, namely that open source folks have more fun.'' and goes on to list a few names of open source intrusion detection systems. Oinkmaster's my favourite name.

Oh yeah, I added my second nipple ring to the same hole as I put the first one (the bottom hole). It looks good. I tried putting it in the top but I gave up after a while. Mmm, it looks so sexy.

Look what I found, a post about Odeon's website. *reads*.

Their email address is info@odeonuk.com. I hadn't found it previously so I tried Googling "@odeon.co.uk", nothing. Then "info@odeon.co.uk". Success! It was hardly surprising when my email to webmaster@odeon.co.uk bounced considering the Odeon have NO respect for anything that even looks like a standard.
So I sent the sample email I found on the blog to the address. If you ever want to the Odeon site to be accessible (and comply with the Disability Discrimination Act), email them.
And I found a Perl script which apparently allows you to access the Odeon's site. And voila, it seems to work. Don't forget you need to put it in a CGI directory and set the executable bit (in Apache at least). Wow, it's cool. It's only 8K, so download it and have some fun with it.

Oh, it looks like I got a bounce from UCAS. I just sent an email concisting entirely of flame to webmaster@ucas.ac.uk and it bounced telling me I sent them stuff that they deemed offensive. Fucking morons. They deserved it though, the clearing site doesn't work again. I never found any information about if there were places left for the course I wanted.

On my clearing form it asks for an academic referee. I already gave them that but they still have the data and I don't. I have no idea what I put the first time round. It was probably Mrs Ekong at school but I wouldn't expect her to be in now as it's the holidays. I'll have to get Davina to call the school and see if there's anyone there. And no, I can't do it actually. They also want my GCSE results again. Fucking morons, that took me ages to do last time. There's a code name and code number I have to fill out for my institution. And I don't know where the code name is. I lost the prospectus and the website doesn't tell me. I hate UCAS so much. I doubt I've written as much as I'll have to write for these GCSE results on one day for weeks. Writing isn't my strong point.

And no, I didn't go to uni either today or yesterday for the clearing open days. Come on, it was never going to happen.

Esperanto and gender-inspecific language

Yep, still learning Esperanto.
I found this page on Riism in Esperanto. It's all about making Esperanto non-gender-specific by using ri for li (he) and sxi (she) (Gender-neutal pronouns) and not using -in- or -icx- in words like onklo/onklino (uncle/aunt) unless you want to stress or make specific the person's gender. You can also use the ge- prefix so people who don't know Riism(o) don't get confused.

Here's the Esperanto HOWTO I'm currently reading.

It's a really good language. I'm learning all those words for words I was never taught at school like pronoun and prepositions. It's typical of many artifical languages in that it's well thought-out. Much better than those natural languages with their stupid special cases. I'd say I'm almost as good at Esperanto now as I was at German in my GCSE exams (after three years of forced studying of the language). I've only been learning it since yeterday. (What did you do to celebrate your results? I learnt Esperanto). I'm not sure if that says more about the relative easiness of the languages or about the styles of teaching used (being forced to drudge through a language versesenjoying it). I guess it'll be a mix of the two.

Oh, and for anybody who read the last paragraph of the last post, it works... but not that well, and it doesn't seem to reliably work well either.

When I watched Meet the Parents (`my father in law is a monster' or something in French - we were in France when it was showing) I was entirely bemused that Robert DeNiro would refer to the guy as a `male nurse'. I just thought `well he's not a fucking female nurse is he'. Anyway, here's the relevant Vikiopedio linkage: Gender-specific job title, which reminded me of the film.

TV, Unicode and piercings.

I was watching The Gadget Show last night. They were giving away what they described as a modded computer. Except it wasn't modded at all, it was just made to look modded. It was from Alienware. Morons.

I managed to find a text editor that supports unicode - ed running in xterm (with the -U option). I'd have thought I'd find an option in Vim or Emacs for unicode supports but I haven't yet. Maybe they don't support it. Emacs doesn't even support Latin-1 (not that I've searched that hard)

So anyway, today I shall be looking into Plan 9. Not only does it support unicode throughout but, unlike Unix, EVERYTHING is a file. And I mean EVERYTHING. There's no ftp utility - just ftpfs, which mounts an ftp resource to a point in your local filesystem. And don't forget that sockets are files too. You can have unicode in filenames and usernames and everything.

Ahahaha. Legalise Stupudity, Smoke Linux.

If you're a prude, or you just don't want to hear about my genetalia, you might want to skip the rest of this post.

How clever am I, I just put a ring in my cock to join the bar that was already there. The bar's an apadravya and the ring's in the lower hole, I guess that makes the ring a prince albert. It was one of the rings I had in my nipples before I stretched them and got bars. I had a little trouble getting the bead on the ring but I managed. It looks so fucking sexy. Mmm, metal. Maybe I'll put the other spare ring I have in the top hole some other time... if it'll fit. I chose to do the bottom hole first as it's only a thin layer of skin that would stretch easily, the top hole's made of membrane which is harder and more painful to stretch. Ha, one of Summer's friends got a PA and took it out the same day because it was hurting him and I put mine in in a day with almost no pain (the most annoying thing was getting the ball on).
Okay, so I have some bottle-nosed pliars. I put the ends in the ring and I put the ends of the handle between this tapered object and I push the handles down the tapered object until the ring's open enough for me to get the bead on the ring. I took the ball off my ring once, when they were on my nipples and I never got it back on. I left some blutac on until I got them stretched. I'm so clever. See, my D in Physics is paying off already (^_^).
Yes, I know people will complain about me disgussing my gentials as they usually do. But I included the warning so it's okay.
I wonder if I'm going to still be able to piss standing up now... only one way to find out... model it using the latest open source fluid-dynamics modeling software. Failing that I'll just go and have a piss (when I'm in the shower, just in case ;).

See you next post, my avid fans.

So, today I decided to learn yet another artificial language. The twist is that it's a spoken language. I decided I wanted to learn another spoken language. At the moment I only know two - English and BSL (don't even think about asking - STFW!). It's the international language of love... Esperanto.

I guess it's good to have a not-computer project every once in a while. Like reading sci-fi...

Sexuality and foo

My lovely friend Will asked me if I knew the term for a species with seperate male and females as opposed to asexual reporoduction. Turns out the term was Dioecious. Anyway, while having fun searching for it I found a very interesting entry about Asexuality (as in sexual orientation, rather than asexual reproduction). I also found an interesting article about Heteronormativity. Anyway, I remember one of my friends telling me she was asexual ages ago and I was kind of heteronormative about it (even though I was okay with homosexuality and bisexuality). I felt kind of guilty about it so I wanted to talk to her again and appologise and stuff. In fact I only re-met her recently after not talking to her for ages. It wasn't for any particular reason, we just sort of drifted apart over the period of a year or so. But I haven't seen her online for a while. She was a member of Oddworld Forums back when it was good and Syndey admined. I went on a mission the other week to find her after all that time and she came online and Buncey added me in a convo with her. So I didn't need to do any searching at all, it was easy. Anyway, we must have been out of contact longer than I'd thought because she said she'd been vegan for about a year. Last time I heard she was preaching meat-eating on the basis that we've evolved to eat meat. Teehee.

Oh yes, this interview with John Gilmore was on Slashdot yesterday. I thought it was very good. I didn't have a clue who he was before I read it but here's what the post on /. said: ``Gilmore starts: 'I'm a civil libertarian millionaire eccentric.' Enjoy!''

Last night, I fed the fish, procrastinated a little, then turned off the lights and ran upstairs. Then I came up with a little philohumour... What? You have a better name for it? Here comes the philohumour. Hehe, it could be a kind of pastry depending on how you pronounce it. I digress, onto the strip-less comic strip:

Do we run because we're scared or are we scared because we run?
I believe there is a third factor you have neglected. This third factor causes both responses. The third factor happens to be the horde of zombies chasing us.
Makes sense...

What have I done to deserve this? I am a good wedsite!

THORAX CORP

Google entered the Nasdaq or something today (yesterday) at $85 per share. They're called GOOG. As somebody on Slashdot said, they'd only buy shares if they changed their name to GOO. I think they're right, GOO is better than GOOG.

I read an article about some stupid and not stupid things MSFT have done to piss people off in terms of cultural differences. Such as including an offensive chant in Arabic in their game.

Ah yes, I have a very short rant prepared about flood-plains, etc.:
Why do people insist on building- and living-on flood plains? I have no sympathy for morons who conciously decide to live below the water-table. Why live on a flood-plain and try and fortify your home against inevitable flooding rather than living somewhere less flood-able. Don't bother fighting nature. It's stronger than you.

There's an interesting story on Wired about the Olympics and how USians only get to see what some company lets the see (NBC?). It's really weird as the BBC seems to show absolutely everything. It also had a comment or two from some techie people about how locking people out of content based on their region was impossible with the internet. They mentioned a bit about setting up a reverse proxy to the BBC in the UK and accessing it from somewhere else. I saw an ad for `root on your own Linux server' or something so it's very feasable that you could do that, set it up as a proxy and watch the Olympics from America or whereever.

And yes, I do get most of my links from /..

I'm hungry. Maybe I'll have some food. I'd change the time so it's 0016 in the morning but that would involve changing all those other things like date and am/pm.
And the American bastards at Blogger.com have it set up in such a stupid way. hh:mm am/pm month(as a string, not a number), day of month, year. So silly!
It should be as follows:
YYYY-MM-DD (ISO-8601) HHmm (in 24-hour format, of course). And they're all input type=text, no bloody selects. That would make a lot more sense. It would also be pretty much region-agnostic too. No Brits complaining the date's in American format and no Americans complaining either.

I just tried to view a page on Nintendo.com. I decided to stop that persuit when I found myself getting pissed off at them. Instead of displaying the page I want to view, they show me a page telling me I need Flash. Fucking morons. There was a link to let me go to the homepage without Flash. I went there and it told me again. So I figure it's a cookie thing and enable cookies for nintendo.com. Keeps happenening. I decide they're fucking morons and ask Erik to copy/paste the review he recommended. Ha, as irony would have it, I go to it in w3m-el (not Firefox, which I was using before - I assumed there may be interesting pictures of whatever game it was) and it gives me a 404. So yes, a strongly-worded email is in order...
There, I only used moron twice and fucking about thrice.

Anyway, that's the end of that post. It's been an eventful post. Yup... see you tomorrow.

UCAS Morons

I just emailed the webmaster at UCAS with a detailed bug-report as the CGI keeps reporting errors. I asked them if there were mirrors or static dumps of the database. It's strange how lots of people use mirrors for software and people at Slashdot often mirror articles that are likely to get Slashdotted. But big corporate sites can be easily Slashdotted. That's obviously what's happened on the Clearing server. They should really learn about distributing their content. If they put a few copies on ultra-high bandwidth mirrors like mirror.ac.uk. But no mention of mirrors on the UCAS site. Surely they could put a mention in a user-friendly error page about static dumps on other mirrors. I've said it before and I'll say it again, UCAS are morons.

Oh yeah, I found a nice page with interesting pictures relating to Vim, the visual editor.

Results, woo

In AS:
I got a C in maths last year. No resits.
I... hold on, let me just run bc and check what I got last year in physics. Oh yes. I re-sat one unit of physics and I got a B, which is what I got last year.
I got an E in psychology last year. I re-sat all the papers (couldn't be bothered with the coursework) and I got a D in it.
I took sociology this year and got a U, teehee. But I got a D in the research methods (^_^) - I'm happy about that.

In A:
I got a D overall in physics. And an E overall in psychology. I thought I'd do better in physics. Like a C or something.

Physics A: 325/600 = 25 more than an E and 35 less than a C
Psychology A: 295/600 = Fuck. Five marks below a D.
Sociology AS: 87/300 = 33 marks off an E. Pathetic. I'm proud of the D in research methods.

If anybody's wondering why I didn't do ICT it's partly because it didn't occur to me at the time. But it's good I didn't take it because if it's anything like GCSE ICT then it's all about using Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Publisher. You know, rubish like that.

Now I shall work out my overall UCAS points...

According the the JavaScript Tarrif Calculator on UCAS.co.uk, I got 140 points. It seems kind of low. I think I only put the ASes that I didn't take to A-level in the JavaScript thing. Let me just RTF... prospectus.
I need 240 for the course. Hmm. And 160/180 points for the foundation year. How annoying. I hope I get into the proper course, not the foundation year. It looks very boring.
In the prospectus, on the foundation year, here are the module titles:
``Maths for media'' - I'm fine with maths although it could be an okay module.
``Use of Computers'' - I'm not a fucking baby.
``Basic IT Skills'' - ``basic understanding of operating systems and enable you to perform simple data analysis'' - again, not a fucking baby.
``Introduction to program design and applications'' - I started programming in C when I was 14 for hell's sake. I know Python, XHTML, CSS, XML, Perl, C++, damn it! I don't need no introduction.

There's no good reason why the entry for this course should be based on grades. I have TWO relevant qualifications - C programming level 2 City & Guilds and a C in GCSE ICT. There were no relevant qualifications available to me at my Sixth Form (unless you count ICT, ha!). So they have no way of knowing how good I am at ANYTHING from my results. I absolutely adore psychology and I'm quite good at it and I got an E overall - no correlation! I'd have completely failed it if it wasn't for Jane teaching me all about essay-writing. She's such a fantastic teacher. She made loads of vegan food for the barbecue she had for all her student. It was good. And she tought me to speak confidently and loudly so people could hear me. I stopped trying to follow her advice after I decided talking loudly too much hurt.
They do mention that they like people to have ICT, maths or science at A. That's good. I have Physics.

Morons. I'd better get on the real course. Or I'll be very bored. Let's hope I can find something nice to do if I'm forced onto the foundation course, like contributing to an open source program. Or starting my own. That would be fun. I'd be in about £16 thousand debt if I do the course for four years (with industry placement) and £20 thousand if I do the foundation year too. And that's just to the Student Loans Company. I think I'd rather be in £16 than £20. Maybe I'll skip the year in industry if I'm forced onto the crap year.

Anyway, I'd better post this now before I die of hunger.

Foo

Soon I shall have to give up the free FTP space given to me by NTL World as I shall soon not be using NTL World. When I move to uni I'll probably get broadband (I think they said we get cheap broadband access via the uni). If we don't, I'll find somewhere with broadband. The Bradford Foyer where Summer and Ste live in has network access from the uni rooms, it probably involves Internet access.

Can't wait. If the service provides a static IP address I wouldn't need FTP, I could host anything on my PC. I think the uni provides free webspace for the users. I hope I can choose my own username. I also hope they have good scripting facilities. i.e. Perl, Python, PHP, etc.. I checked, the server machine is `Unix' and it runs Apache. Clever people.

I just uploaded two pictures of what my `MSN' client looks like for Erik. It's Irssi and it's an IRC client. It's rather good. You can write Perl scripts for it. I have Eliza the chatbot appearing when I'm away in private messages. Anyway, I connect to MSN through the Bitlbee server (im.bitlbee.org:6667). It's mega-useful. I used to use imcom, a Jabber client, and connect via an MSN transport. But Bitlbee is better. It tells you when people try to send you images and it can tell you when people are typing. Amazing. It's also nice to be using IRC again. I remember back in t'day when everybody would chat on OddChat. Ah, nostalgia.

I added a new page to SSQ, the page of the picture framer.
I should really add something in send.sh to make it send newly-created images along with all the XHTML and CSS...

The Development of the RTS Engine

I started the afternoon by programming. I made a very simple wanna-be RTS engine. So far you click a person (Link from my `Zelda' `game') and they move to where you click next. I'll probably add path-finding later. It just zwoops over immediately. I figure rather than writing a complicated thing to make it walk in a straight line I'll write a complicated thing later to make it walk around things. Next on the list is turning the units into objects. So we can have more of them (as many as I need). Should be good. So tomorrow I'm learning about OO in Python, and then I might implement the unit as an object if I get time. The grand plan is to make a module spcifically for RTS games. The ultimate in seperating mechanism from policy. Of course I'll create a simple RTS game to go with the module.

I got FreeCiv working. I never really paid too much attention to it before. I thought I needed a server but I didn't realise there was civserver. Anyway, I just spent several centuaries playing on my own as I set aifill in the server to 1. I thought that would give me one AI opponent but it means 1 players total, one of which will be AI if there isn't a human. So I'll set that to 2 next time. Or maybe 3.

I saw Nathelie... tonight. Very very good film. French, too.

Poor `Chris Ward'. I said I'd do his page on SSQ. I sort of procrastinated. Tomorrow... probably. I'm driving too. On a dual carriage-way :(.

The long journey

Me and Davina went to Bathley to see my cousins. It was good. Tori got a tramampoline for her birthday so that was fun. And we played on Age of Mythology. It made me think about the lack of RTSs available for Linux. So I thought I'd make one using Pygame. I made a list of things to do. I goes like this:
1. Click to select unit.
2. Click again to move unit.
3. Multiple units: units as objects, movement as method.
4. Drag to select.

And that will leave us with the very basics of an RTS game. I'll be sure to GPL it and show you all if it goes any further than that.

So yeah, that's my latest project. And I also have to add a page for the picture framer at South Square Centre.

And my uncle leant me some Asimov books - Second Foundation, Foundation's Edge and The Naked Sun.

Tcl

Yesterday I learnt the most basic syntax of Tcl. It's just a shell scripting language as far as I can tell. But I shall continue, probably with the `Tcl for Web Nerds' tutorial. But I'll have to get my server working first as I downloaded it and the pages are suffixed `apd' and w3m-el just opens them in a standard Emacs buffer for editing. So I'll symlink to them on my server and it'll get the Content-type header so it'll interpret them as HTML. But My server's a bit buggered at the moment. For some reason accessing a file in a symlinked dir yeilds 403s and listing normal dirs yeilds a 403 but I can read files. Hmm. I thought it might be a problem with the directories' permissions... but it wasn't.

PySol's a nice game. I'll be sure to install it for Davina (mother) when Windows 95 finally gives up and dies. Hex a Klon is a good game. But Bits n Bytes is just confusing. Maybe it's a case where the documentation hasn't kept up with the game.

Davina's Win95 nearly died once. But as soon as I set up the BIOS to boot from CD-ROM first (to demo Knopix) it started working again. And then a few weeks later the `OS' suddently decided it didn't like the CD-ROM booting first. Very strange. But then it is but a poor kludge of an `OS'.

So anyway. Today I'm going to South Square Cafe. So I'll probably go and see the person at the shop today as it's only open on Saturdays during the holidays. I'll take some pictures probably and see what they want on their page (if they want one) and maybe they have their own website. We'll see if Amanda's in (SSQ Cafe's manager/owner sort of person) and talk to her about the cafe page.

Oh yeah, I finished The Art of Unix Programming yesterday. It's a really good book. I recommend it to anybody interested in the culture and programming practices of Unix (which is defined in the book as including the original UNIX, derrivatives and clones - GNU, Linux, *BSD, System V, etc).
I also recommend The Unix Koans of Master Foo (aka Rootless Root) to everybody. Read it, it's funny and it only takes a few minutes.

Next post: you can expect lots of action when Holizz jumps in her Eva and blogs more about Tcl/Tk and maybe a bit of Pygame. And of course, expect more fan-service ;). Tune in next post for `The Value of a Blog is...'

Yay, PHB!

My PHB came round today to talk about the website. He told me to change the links to black (nooooo!), centre it (argh!) and make it all `Ariel' (I made it sans-serif ;). I must admit the links on the left look better this way. Anyway, I did it all in about ten seconds. I must admit I had to resort to using a table on the gallery page to get those two images to sit on their own without the text creeping up the middle.
He was very bemused by the whole idea of CSS.
When I went to his house a while ago to get the source of the site (including new images, etc) he was trying to do something and at some point he said `I hate Windows'. I just thought how stupid somebody must be to hate something but keep using it when there are alternatives. Pfft.

I made a little game in Pygame today. Well, `game' is a bit of an overstatement. I made a little PNG Link (`Link' is also an overstatement) using SNG. In the `game' you move `Link' with they hjkl keys and he stops when you get to a wall. But it's a start. More than I ever did in Flash.

Zelda-0.1.tar.gz
Zelda-0.1.tar.gz.md5
Teehee. You will, of course, need Pygame installed (with PNG support).

Well, that was my day (and my fantastic software ;) - oh yeah... if you WANT to modify it, it's GPL'd.

Death and the Magic Axe

I had magic powers. I also had a magic axe. Various things happened, including levitation. Anyway, somehow I pissed somebody off. He had lots of weapons (nothing Freudian there...) and he was using one at a time and attacking me and somebody else, who was a friend of mine. He used various things such as swords and weird dart-like things (at one point he was using a very long, very thin, golden katana with various engravings - very pretty). Then as people were walking away (got bored of him, I suppose) he was firing darts at their legs and stuff. I commented that he was like a little kid. He got annoyed at this comment it seems and grabbed me from behind and held what I thought was a knife to my throat. I looked down and it was a dart of his. It was very sharp at my end, needle-like in fact. Then he thrust it through my throat. It hurt not in the `ouch' sense but in the `there's a needle in my throat sense'. Then I woke up. I didn't die. I just thought `Death and the Magic Axe' was a good title.

Got Ghost in the Shell this morning. This time Amazon were thoughtful enough to include the DVD. So I shall be watching that today.

Oh yeah. I was talking to Erik (yes, the Swedish guy) the other day and he mentioned a Jetpack clone called `N' (proprietary, unfortunately) and I looked for a Free clone. But I didn't find one. With all the power of Google I couldn't find one. Yesterday I learnt a bit of the pygame library. For the tech-people out there: it's a Python library to make (graphical) game programming simple, it's written in C and uses SDL. Well, I decided it would be a good idea to make a FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) clone. But then I started thinking of all the great games I haven't played in ages which only run on DOS and are proprietary such as God of Thunder and Jane of the Jungle (I bought a lot of Shareware games when I was little - they were great). So, if there's anybody out there with any programming experience (as my friends go, that narrows it down to about three) who would like to resurect a classic game, please get in touch. Either by commenting or emailing me (addy on the user info page, which is here somewhere). I don't actually have any experience with programming a big project like this would be, but then I'll never get any if I don't do big projects.

Vote FLOSS.

Python, driving and curry. A little drudgery too

My friend now has a blog on Blogger.

I started out the day with a bit of Python in the form of pygame. I found an excellent introduction to the module via the pygame site. It's a fantastic module.

Next. Driving. Starting at about 3:30, a one hour lesson. We went up Church Street and right towards town. We did some driving around narrow streets. He's a great instructor. I believe it's called Flying Colours Driving something. I can't actually find his card. He teaches Michael Hughes too. That's how Davina found out about him. If it was up to me I wouldn't be driving at all. It all started when my dad got me driving lessons for my birthday. If I leave it after 10 lessons and 6 on the simulator at BSM (which ran on Windows 95 or something laughable like that... idiots) then I'd have wasted a lot of money. May as well get it all over and done with now. I'm thinking of buying a bike when I go to uni. A nice and healthy form of transportation.

Then we went to Fiona's (one of my mum's oldest friends) at about six, after Hannah (one of the kids Davina looks after) went. We had a curry and me and Beth (Fiona's daughter) watched The Simpsons - Too Hot For TV. We went to ASDA for boredom and drugery... and bread. I decided I should sell my Xbox and get a Nintendo DS. And I'll get Pokemon for the DS too. I've always wanted Pokemon... But before that I have to find the Debian packages for DVD-playing. I haven't found them yet, they're probably in non-US/main. But we'll see. And then I came home. I currently have my screen session in an xterm in IceWM. I know, scary. But I needed to post in my blog and whatnot which involve cookies and I decided to stick in X for today (I'd been in X earlier for playing around with pygame and ion3 didn't seem to like it).

And now..? Now I go to bed. I went to bed like an hour or two after Davina last night and I woke her up when I was brushing my teeth. I have nothing to wake up for so I may as well go to bed when she does.

Night night. And of course there'll be more fan service next post ;)

See teen sluts fucking Ciscos!

Router humping!

I was checking Netcraft to find out what I could about `the website' and there was a link to something, so I tabbed over to it and pressed enter. Lo and behold was UNIXsex. Here's the Netcraft stats on SSQ.
I'm glad it's running Linux... but what the hell is Zeus? Why can't they use a real httpd like Apache? Morons.

As you'll know if you've read the ChangeLog for the SSQ site (which you haven't), I use a home-made Perl script called xmagic (XML Magic) to piece the site together. Well, at the moment it only searches for tags and replaces stuff. What I'm thining of doing is doing a re-write in Python and actually using a real XML parsing module instead of just looking for tags. Anyway, I'll do that and at the same time make it a bit more scalable. At the moment the script specifically looks for three values: toroot, title, and body. Maybe I'll make it find the values in the (X)HTML template and then look for those values in the XML documents.

It's all very magical. I just type `make' and the site gets built. I type `make install' to build and upload it. Very simple :). If anybody's interested I'd certainly upload the scripts so you can see and understand them.

Well, I'd better get back to UNIXsex... See you later (if there's anybody reading this, that is).

Python, wonderful Python

It's official, after one day of coding I now love Python. It's such a fantastic language.

I implemented a very simple web application to add an email address to a file. It checks the address submitted against a very simple regexp ('holizz-@foo...com' would be valid). If it's valid it sticks it in the file. If not it politely informs the user that the email is invalid. I was thinking along the lines of making it for South Square Centre. But that is, of course, a pipe-dream. It runs some obscure www-server called Zeus which probably doesn't even support Python. If it did they'd charge us for it. It's just a nice example.

Oh, and I'm now on Part IV of The Art of Unix Programming. Just about to start on Documentation. I probably won't finish it tomorrow as I'm driving at 3:30 (they're one hour lessons, which is nice :-) and then I'm going for dinner at Fiona's with Davina.

I found out what all these .pyra files are on Blogger.com. Pyra owned Blogger... before Google 0wned Pyra, so it does still own it. Actually, I'm no closer to the truth. .py is the Python extension. Maybe .pyra is an extra magic thing. It may not even be a real Python thing. Maybe it's not Python at all... But it probably is.

So, I switched from imcom (Jabber) to irssi (IRC) as my main communications magicness recently. On Jabber I used the msn transport msn.jabbernet.dk and now I use the MSN/AIM/YM/etc transport im.bitlbee.org (port 6667, of course). In an attempt at being as annoying as possible, I use eliza.pl (Irssi script). It sets up a conversation between Chatbot::Eliza and anybody who talks to me when I'm away. Great fun.

Teehee, notice how all these posts are either early in the morning like mid-day or something or late at night, like 1am.

Woo, that's me protected against the latest buffer-overflow in libpng. I love APT :-).

Dates for your diaries:
Subday (2004-08-15) I'm going to David's (mum's brother) to see him and Mandy (his wife) and their kids - my cousins. Just for the day.
Monday (2004-08-16) is Debian's birthday. Eighth or something.
A week on Thursday (2004-08-19) is results day for me and other A-levelers.
2004-09-03 is a `talking art walk' with Mik Artistik talking you round his exhibition at South Square Gallery. Oh yeah, it's also the gallery preview. Resvere your tables at South Square Cafe ;).
2004-09-15 is Debian Sarge's stable release! Woo!

Um yeah. So bye bye. Until tomorrow... (shut up, pedants!)

Mmm, Pyfoodbot

See, told you I'd post today.

Today I am planning on learning more Python. I stopped learning it last time because I thought it was too quirky. But from reading ESR rant about Python in The Art of Unix Programming so much I decided it was probably worth another go. I got mod_python working on Apache now and I added a cgi-bin to my personal folder. So that's useful. I'll go and boast to Toby at some point that my HTTP server supports Python (he knows Python - his only language apart from HTML, I believe). I'm not sure what server he has but it isn't Apache.

Tomorrow I'm driving. Should be fun. Damn chair, keeps falling apart. Also, these `shortcut keys' on Blogger are getting in the way of me using the Emacs-style editing commands as C-b (or ctrl-b) adds a bold span. Pfft, idiots. At least the `publish' command isn't linked to a standard editor command. In a sort of unrelated issue. The DOCTYPE declaration at the top of this page states that it is XHTML 1.0 Strict... but it isn't, I put it through the W3C validator. Lying scum.

So, university. I'm planning on going to `The University of Bradford' to do Computing. There are three courses I may do. Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Internet Computing. They all share the same first year so the tutors at the open day said we can choose one after we have an idea about what we do in the courses. It looks fantastic. The computers dual-boot Windows and Red Hat (not the best distro in the world - that's Debian - but it's Linux). There's one problem with the course. According to the prospectus, Java is the language used. I'm sure it's a great language but it's proprietary. Sure I can use GCJ and Kaffe to emulate the Java compiler and run-time environment, respectively but although those implementations are free, they'll always be playing catch-up to Sun's proprietary Java. Pfft, how annoying. Java has no place in a free system like mine. Maybe I'll learn Java in class to keep them happy but program all my assignments in Python or whatever I'm using at the time. Learning to hack on a proprietary system is like learning to dance while wearing a full-body cast (as ESR once wrote in his Hacking HOWTO). We'll see.

I wonder whether it would be better to do Software Eng. or 'Net Computing. I expect one will focus on developing apps to be operated locally and the other will focus on web applications. I don't know which is more exciting. Maybe I could do my year in industry at Google... *day-dreams* I think Google said it would Open-source one of its things at some point. I hope they do it soon after their IPO `silent period' is over. Mmm, I want shares in Google.

And if that previous paragraph doesn't get me free Gmail invites, nothing will ;)

Anyway, I'm going to go do something useful now like learn Python or make food... or program a robot in Python to make me food? Mmm, Pyfoodbot :D

No, Pyfoodbot, I told I was vegan! Put the goldfish back in the aquarium!

Tomorrow/today!

As it's about half past midnight and I'm tired I shall probably start posting properly tomorrow. So yeah, look forward to it.

At the moment I'm installing libapache-mod-python so I can pretend to be Google/Blogger and have lots of cool Python scripts on my machine. I don't really know Python too well. I'm trying to become better aquainted with it as it looks like it could be quite nice if I just spend the effort to learn it.

So yeah... I think I should try to read my friends' (well, Jenni) blogs more often as I don't really read personal blogs. I tend to read /. and Newsforge often.

Well, this sort of turned into a post in the end. So that's okay.

I've meant to get a blog for a while. But the other day I was talking to Buncey and he mentioned that I might get Gmail invites if I join Blogger. I figure I may as well kill two birds with one stone - become popular via the gift of Gmail invites and by the gift of personal information via a blog.

I believe I still have the pots to put away when I've finished writing this. Pfft.

Blimey, I just tried to enter a tab into this textarea by pressing ^I and it inserted an italic span. I never thought those keyboard shortcuts would work with Mozilla. Learn something new every day...

As a new blogger I feel it my duty to link you. So here's one: Odeon.co.uk - the worst website for usability I've ever found. If you can penetrate the mile-thick JScript and find a contact address please send me it because I would like to give them the bollocking they missed out on when webmaster (of all addresses) bounced. How crazy! Webmaster@... bouncing! Idiots!

That reminds me, I have to find out what happens to webmaster@southsquarecentre.co.uk (the website I am currently volunteering to maintain). I replaced the crappy image rollovers on the left with good CSS rollovers. It is all, of course, XHTML 1.1 compliant (now that the no-banner-ad extra has been paid for). Send me any bug reports and comments please. So anyway, I just thought - why not email webmaster@southsquarecentre.co.uk. I was going to ask but it's better this way. My mum who has various secretarial duties including checking the emails can tell me if it appears along with info@southsquarecentre.co.uk.

Yay, libapache-mod-python is installed. Woo. That should be some fun for tomorrow.

If you get a chance, read The Foundation Series. Fantastic books. I've read Foundation and Foundation and Empire so far. Really amazing. Oh, and don't forget The Art of Unix Programming, which I am still reading.

Well. I'll stop boring you for tonight.

Consider this line of shell script...

Wow, this is like my new blog... or something. On Blogger of all places. I got bored of my blog back on deadjournal. I wonder if this will be any more fun.