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Super Yacht Cup: the overview

... in 60 seconds

Boring boring boring…

I mostly hate these industry events that we sponsor. Far too muhc money goes into them for very little return, they’re pretentious affairs pandering to a group of people who for the most part shouldn’t be given the acclaim they’re given, and well… they’re VERY boring.

The only good thing out of them is the experience.

You never quite understand the amount of work that goes into provisioning most of these events.

In most cases it’s relatively simple. Show up on the day, setup some banners, put the kettle on, sit round ...

Posted by Richard on Sat June 14th 2008 at 10:11 a.m. | comment |

Geek funnies...

... ipv6...

You’ve probably seen it, but still I found it funny.

Friend of mine has been playing with IPv6, and was complaining that the first p0rn site he visited on ipv6 (god, he’s so cliché), had no porn.

So I did a quick lookup:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.ipv6porn.com.       86053   IN      AAAA    2001:4978::b00:b1e5

The appropriate bit was highlighted.

Trouble is, only the geeks will ever see this humour.

Posted by Richard on Sun April 6th 2008 at 1:36 a.m. | comment |

Stephen Fry » Blog Archive » Deliver us from Microsoft

Stephen Fry introduces the open source platform that will see off Windows.

Posted by Richard on Tue April 1st 2008 at 9:01 p.m. | comment (0) |

Geeks

... spanish ones no-less!

Ok, so moof is over for some of his visits and invited me out with a group of local geeks.

An interesting evening. Not least punctuated by work related panic alerts being fired at me from the monitoring system… Not fun, but it all worked itself out.

Hopefully though, I have found some guys who I can bounce some of my ideas off…

Posted by Richard on Sun March 16th 2008 at 5:17 p.m. | comment |

Gamasutra - Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine?

Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine?

Posted by Richard on Thu March 6th 2008 at 6:41 p.m. | comment (0) |

OpenID broken...

... well... sortof...

My openid implementation is a wee bit broken at the mo people.

You can signin/register, as long as your openid provider supports the sreg extension. Specifically, it needs to respond with a `nick` and an `email` element.

Sorry folks…

Posted by Richard on Sun March 2nd 2008 at 5:08 p.m. | comment |

There has to be a better way...

I’ve come up against a submerged rock.

I’ve recently switched from Google feed reader to Liferea. I’ve gotten to critical mass on feeds. Not so much information overload, more like it’s taking too long to skim/read the feeds.

I can’t really stop, because else I’d be clueless as to what’s happening in the world, which is somewhat embarrassing when you make an inappropriate comment to someone and have to explain “I don’t live in the real world”. I don’t watch TV, mostly because it’s bad for my productivity and ...

Posted by Richard on Sun March 2nd 2008 at 3:45 p.m. | comment |

Quantum Random Bit Generator Service

Quantum Random Bit Generator Service… With Python API… For the TRUELY random… Also has the best Captcha method EVER.

Posted by Richard on Tue February 26th 2008 at 3:30 p.m. | comment (0) |

Beancounters...

... should be seen and occasionally heard...

… not managing engineering teams.

Especially if you understand little about the processes and technology involved.

This is the one part of my job that I really hate. Our beancounter has recently developed a habit of “meddling” in my process, to the point where I’m being micromanaged.

Proposals I’ve been asked to investigate by bossman get blocked, contracts that need signing at the request of the bossman get held and invoices that need to be paid, don’t get paid until the last possible moment.

It’s been my experience that beancounters, while essential for the correct functioning of ...

Posted by Richard on Tue February 26th 2008 at 11:24 a.m. | comment |

OpenProj | Projity

OpenProj is a free, open source project management solution. OpenProj is a complete replacement of Microsoft Project and other commercial project solutions. The OpenProj solution has been download more than 250,000 times in the few weeks since launch and

Posted by Richard on Tue February 26th 2008 at 9:51 a.m. | comment (0) |

Openness and interoperability?

...a good thing?...

With the press-release from MS about the various things they’ve done, are doing and are going to do, I thought I’d take a barny over at Port25 (The Microsoft Open Source side of things).

It was an eye-opening experience.

MS have really taken up the baton recently with regards to open source. There’s all sorts of Apache 2.2 briefings and implementation notes regarding various aspects of integrating it with Microsoft Technologies like Active Directory and Server 2008. And that’s just in the quick squizz I gave the site. Some interesting reads…

Though all this interoperability ...

Posted by Richard on Thu February 21st 2008 at 9:05 p.m. | comment |

CouchDb Quick Overview - CouchDb

What CouchDB is
* A document database server, accessible via a RESTful JSON API.
* Ad-hoc and schema-free with a flat address space.
* Distributed, featuring robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and management.
*

Posted by Richard on Thu February 21st 2008 at 12:30 p.m. | comment (0) |

Ideas For Dozens: What s Wrong with Google Reader

And Google Reader is covered in sharp bits. Here s my running list:
# OPML import doesn t respect folder structure. This meant that when I imported my existing 700-ish subscriptions, they were just thrown in chock-a-block. After a week I still don t have…

Posted by Richard on Thu February 21st 2008 at 12:27 p.m. | comment (0) |

God I was a pretentious fuck...

A belated apology to all that know me

I’ve been cleaning up the rest of the database this evening. I know, I’m a sad little fuckstain.

Anyway, I have been reading over some of the old old old old blog records that are in the archive, and I can only guess that I must have been unbearable as a person. God the pretentiousness is some of those posts is staggering. Like I was god’s gift to the development world.

Jesus christ all fucking mighty.

Therefore, to those that know me, I can only offer my sincere apologies for the utter fuckwittery that you must have ...

Posted by Richard on Thu February 21st 2008 at 2:49 a.m. | comment |

Joss Whedon's Firefly Season 2

The Firefly Season 2 Project: Captain Mal and the crew of Serenity need your help to stay flying. We are looking to push the envelope of episodic television by offering Season Two of Firefly in a groundbreaking new format. Each episode (or the entire seas

Posted by Richard on Thu February 21st 2008 at 2:32 a.m. | comment (0) |

PostgreSQL, I love you...

... if only it could have my children...

I love postgresql. It’s the most wonderful thing since sliced bread.

Specifically, the tsearch2 that comes with it in the contrib directory. Makes my life so much easier.

I’m so glad that theo inflicted postgres on me all those years ago. It’s such a relief to just be able to use real SQL, instead of the cut-down pseudo SQL that MySQL implements.

And before you go harping on about version 5, please note: PostgreSQL has supported SQL 99 syntax for a metric fucktonne longer than your toy RDBMS. I’d prefer to stick with something that’s ...

Posted by Richard on Wed February 20th 2008 at 9:39 p.m. | comment |

Overview — Python Documentation

Mmmmm Pretty new Python 2.6 documentation. While the old stuff was functional, it wasn’t very easy to read.

Posted by Richard on Wed February 20th 2008 at 2:48 p.m. | comment (0) |

BBC NEWS | Technology | Brain control headset for gamers

The beginning of neural interfaces for computing? Woo… I might finally be able to get my thoughts into some form of legible notes before I forget them.

Posted by Richard on Wed February 20th 2008 at 1:51 p.m. | comment (0) |

Ooops

... Sorry guys...

I broke the feeds last night.

Should be working now though.

Posted by Richard on Wed February 20th 2008 at 1:44 p.m. | comment |

It's alive... again...

Mwhahahaha

I got bored and finished off the code behind this site.

It’s more of a feed aggregator now than ever before, only it’s only aggregating my feeds. Meh, it’s a cheap way of getting a site that updates all the time.

Of course there’s spammy posts, like my music feed, but that can easily be silenced. I’ve polished here, and there, added little nuggets of usefulness including sitemap.xml main feed… so yeah… should be good now.

Posted by Richard on Wed February 20th 2008 at 3:20 a.m. | comment |

Damn, damn, damn

... and double damn...

Having written this lovely bit of code, I an unable to deploy it.

Why? Because I needed python 2.5 for some of it. That requires upgrading python on my gentoo box which is still Python 2.4!

There are circular references all over the place. Crap.

Posted by Richard on Wed February 20th 2008 at 1:12 a.m. | comment |

Something wicked this way comes!

Fun and games in lalaland of Python and Django

Finally!

I’ve managed after a few weeks working on this, here and there, to finally get the ideas and bug fixes I had while putting together my previous blog and put them in code.

You’re now looking at the all new wonderfully shiny new gotworms.co.uk.

What? It looks the same? Yeah, sadly it does… But it’s an all new engine under the hood… and this beast has an internet connection.

Yes my friends, foes and casual browsers my website has an internet connection!

You’re probably wondering what manner of narcotics I’ve been taking ...

Posted by Richard on Fri February 15th 2008 at 1:55 a.m. | comment |

Are you a Python Developer?

Messy or not-messy?

Something that really fucks me off about some developers is their code. Some people just don’t know how to write readable code, and it’s these fuckwits that I’m bitching about today.

Yes, you know who you are… You’re the kind of fuckwit that does things like this:

self.name,self.namespace,self.attrs,self.data,self.kids,self.parent = node.name,node.namespace,{},[],[],node.parent

and

if something: return self.method(arg1, arg2, arg3).method(arg4, arg5, arg6)[:self.method(arg1, arg2, arg3).anotherMethod(X, Y, Z)]

(I kid you not on that)

I mean really ...

Posted by Richard on Fri February 8th 2008 at 1:48 p.m. | comment |

Give me my time back

KPLXTHNX

Well last week was pretty much a waste of time.

Bossman had enrolled the gang here in the office in a CCNA course, since it’s pretty much a pre-requisite of any progression in Ciscoland.

The sad thing was, I spent the majority of the week working on other things from my lappy instead of from my desk.

sigh

Posted by Richard on Tue December 11th 2007 at 8:55 p.m. |

Pro tips

for those plotting to go into managerial roles

When a developer, who has proven his worth god knows how many times, tells you something, do NOT under any circumstances utter the words “But 20 years ago it would have taken me 10 minutes in $language, I’m sure there’s been signifigant progress made since then…”

Doing so will likely result in your name, and several expletives being mentioned in the same sentence.

Doing so repeatedly will result in one of two courses of action:

  • You being challeneged to write said code in 10 minutes using $language
    * A resignation being thrown over their shoulder as they walk out ...
Posted by Richard on Wed October 31st 2007 at 4:42 p.m. |