510102A - FT BSC COMPUTER SCIENCEFIRST CLASS HONOURS
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SECOND CLASS HONOURS (UPPER DIVISION)
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That’s me, fourth from the top.
Popularity: 19% [?]
Cans of compressed air are surprisingly helpful in getting at those difficult to reach balls of dust behind radiators.
Just thought I’d share that with you.
Popularity: 19% [?]
<a href=”http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/get_involved/4466770.stm”>http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/get_involved/4466770.stm</a>
Is anyone else mildly perturbed by this?
I have a mental image of gangs of kids running around with identical Wayne Roooooooney masks on, menacing old ladies and stealing hubcaps.
Then again, it might be quite fun to cycle to work with one on. And perhaps menace rollerbladers.
Popularity: 20% [?]
<a href=”http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/12/ringtone_adults_cannot_hear/”>http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/12/ringtone_adults_cannot_hear/</a>
At last, a viable excuse not to answer the phone - I’m too old.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Groovy stuff. I got me a photo page. Check out my snaps of Ireland and Spain. More coming soon.
Popularity: 25% [?]
For the upcoming rewrite of Coffee & Feeds (aka The Great Refactoring) I’ve been farming out all the visible effects wizardry to the excellent Script.aculo.us, which is a JavaScript effects library based on the likewise wonderful Prototype.
Prototype itself adds a whole bunch of useful stuff to the JavaScript language turning it into a more agile beast at the cost of a few little niggles.
One of those niggles is it’s method of implementing inheritance which is teh_uglier. Enter Base which also implements inheritance but with much cleaner syntax. Justin Palmer’s blog, who is writing a book on Prototype ‘fesses up to using Base and Prototype together. Then the author of Prototype steps in and gives us the tantalising titbit that Base will eventually make it’s way into version 2 of Prototype.
This is great, but none of this solves the immediate problems of someone trying to write a robust, readable JavaScript application with inheritance right now. So you try to Google on Base and Prototype to get an idea of the problems you will face in combining them, however they are such generic terms that it proves difficult.
For the uninitiated, base is a common term used in OO related discussions, generally referring to an ancestor class higher up the inheritance chain and in terms of JavaScript, a prototype is a property of an object that is used to add custom properties to all objects of that type. So if you are looking for discussions about Base and Prototype, you are likely to come up with discussions about base and prototype. Kapish?
No matter how hard it is to remember the URL (where do the dots go?), at least script.aculo.us is not likely to get confused for something else. Even though I thought it said scriptalicious for ages.
Ugh.
Okay, yes, JSThing is also a stupid name, but I couldn’t think of anything better at the time, okay?
Popularity: 19% [?]
One of these is Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ and the other is the Beatles ‘A Hard Days Night’ (with the drum track removed). Can you guess which one is which?
And who says pop music is overly simplistic? Oh.
Popularity: 27% [?]
I’ve just had a look at a photo stream on Flickr of the new MacBooks.
I think this Slashdot comment says it all:
I mean, it’s really not that great value for the black ones. It’s quite an expensive price bump for the black finish and an extra few gigs of hard dr….OH GOD I WANT A BLACK MACBOOK!
I am weak.
Popularity: 13% [?]
I just went to a seminar about Power Point where the trainer said (to an audience of career PAs), “creativity cannot be taught, it is a gift, if you don’t have creativity may be someone else in the office should be making your presentation.” At which point I thought, a) why are you bothering with this seminar at all? and b) where is the creativity in using Power Point?
Be prepared, I am now equipped to unleash spinning exploding text on the world.
Ugh.
Oh, and Alex, can I ask two questions in a blog? Although the questions are rhetorical, so I expect it doesn’t count…
Popularity: 20% [?]
Alex’s corollary: If you ask two questions in an email, only one will be answered.
Popularity: 18% [?]
More old news, but just what you need to distract you from data mining revision:
Boxing day will never be the same again…
Popularity: 18% [?]
I hate exams.
You are sitting at a desk staring at a question on a paper that is broken in to sub questions, one worth disproportionately more than the others. You recognise it as one you didn’t drop a mark on in your coursework submission. You have worked through a couple of pages worth of calculations to find that the answer you have arrived at is wrong. You’ve approached the question from the right direction, and all of your working is there, you’ve just made a tiny error somewhere that’s thrown the whole thing out of balance.
You don’t have time to re-write the question, and even if you did, you can’t see where you’ve gone wrong.
What do you do?
Popularity: 22% [?]
Yikes. Alpe d’Huez have closed their glacier to summer skiing for the foreseeable future, due it melting*.
How scary is that?
* = excessive meltage?
Popularity: 13% [?]
In the spirit of posting old news, I just found this while researching stuff for my dissertation:
http://www2.info.ucl.ac.be/people/PVR/decon.html
It is from the early nineties but (and?) quite amusing…
Popularity: 12% [?]
The date today is 2/5/6. Which the nerd in me finds amusing.
Popularity: 14% [?]
I’d just like to chime in with the Monty Python reference.
Honestly, this and Mac Book Pro, where did all the good product names go this year?
Update
I’d just like to add Core Duo 2 Extreme to the list of this year’s silly product names. Which will probably be followed by Core Duo 2000 Extreme Hyper Ultra Edition For Gamers and Core Duo 2 Grey and Inoffensive for the budget desktop version. I mean, really…
Popularity: 12% [?]
I just thought I’d share this:
OldVersion.com - Because newer is not necessarily better.
Too bloody right.
(I’m writing a bit on Winamp and Geiss in particular for my dissertation, and am harking back to the halcyon days of WinAmp 2. Ah, yes… You can also get the Geiss screensaver from here. I’d long thought it unavailable. It’s good to be wrong).
Popularity: 16% [?]
I’ve just posted JSThing on the stuff page. It’s a bit of JavaScript in the form of a favelet that allows you to edit the window object of a given web page and interact with your changes. It works well with Firefox but is a bit too long for IE.
JavaScript is a wonderful little language. When you load a page with some JavaScript in it, the objects and functions that are created exist for the duration of the page in your browser. Some of the data may have been used, some may not. JSThing allows you to examine and change that data.
Here’s a little example. If you add JSThing to your links bar (get it from the link above), then head over to http://www.google.co.uk and activate JSThing, you’ll see that the fourth item in the window object is a function called qs(). It looks like this:
function qs(el) {
if (window.RegExp && window.encodeURIComponent) {
var ue = el.href;
var qe = encodeURIComponent(document.f.q.value);
if (ue.indexOf("q=") != -1) {
el.href = ue.replace(new RegExp("q=[^&$]*"), "q=" + qe);
} else {
el.href = ue + "&q=" + qe;
}
}
return 1;
}
Examining the source of Google’s home page reveals that this function gets called when you click the Images, Groups, etc links above the search box. In JSThing, hit the little red hat next to the the name and type of the item (qs function) and it will appear in the boxes at the top. Change the function to read:
function qs(el) {
window.opener.alert(el);
return false;
}
and hit ‘Go’. Some text should appear saying ‘Value changed, hit refresh’. Click the ‘Refresh tree’ link above where the text appears and the list of properties should update to reflect your changes.
Now go back to the Google window and click one of the Item, Groups, etc links. An alert box should appear with a URL in it.
This sort of behaviour should be possible on pretty much any page. AJAX applications in particular should be quite fun to play with.
Also, inspecting code to debug your own programs should be much easier with this - for example, ensuring proper namespacing (as proper as you can get with a language where everything is global by default) is a doddle.
Try it out and let me know how you get on.
Update - It now treats arrays slightly differently from other objects in order to parse them properly.
Update - Slightly better error handling when trying to access properties it shouldn’t.
Update - Human readable source now available.
Popularity: 12% [?]