minus zero

Just another day in the FIT Lab...

It's been brought to my attention that I don't post as often as I should.

I have but one retort, Mr Blackstock:

Oops. (from Boing Boing).

I just discovered a minor bug in pyBackPack (as it's now called):

• A user wants to backup her Firefox settings - so creates a backup set that just contains ~/.mozilla, and does a backup.
• Something screws up Firefox's settings, so the user restores her latest .mozilla backup to her home directory.
• The user then wonders where the hell the entire contents of her home directory have gone, and why only ~/.mozilla is left.

Note to self: When messing around inside the PC case, try not to get cables jammed in the CPU fan. If they do get caught up in the blades, it's generally a good idea to notice and rectify it.

Andy came out with the quote of the year today, a single sentence which pretty much perfectly describes Milliways:

welshbyte makes a bad pun, FireFury moans about something not working, stringfellow asks for help with something and gets wound up when told to rtfm, davea says something cool, Arthur offers some wise, yet accidentally condescending words, wedge corrects our grammar, pwb corrects our spelling, rollercow prods the exec to do things, sits turns up to ask rohan to lunch and disappears, rohan cracks an even better pun than welshbyte and all is stable in the world of mw.

Awesome, in a word.

After much grumbling and discussion about the subject for a while, the SUCS team (led by chckens) finally got around to setting up Planet SUCS. It should give members more of an idea of how much work we do for them (ahaha!). The new SUCS game server is also live, albeit it on a limited campus-only basis for the time being. We've got in contact with the LAN Society to help publicise it and hopefully we'll end up co-operating with them on events in the future. Setting up the server was a lot smoother than I'd anticipated, but I hope LIS see sense and let us open it up for off-campus members to use. It totally sucks that I spent ages setting the thing up and now can't actually use it.

In other news, I sorted out my choices for the 3^rd year project. I'm looking forward to it immensely as it'll be a good opportunity to do something creative. Doing set coursework is OK for so long, then they get boring and restrictive. The project counts towards 25% of next year's marks which is quite a hefty amount, I hope I snap out of my recent trend of leaving work until the day before (or even after) the deadline.

The choice of projects on offer was mind boggling, I narrowed it down to the maximum of 7 though (in order of preference):

• A web log system (AG-7): This was something I suggested to the ever helpful Gimbo and he seemed happy enough to take me on, w00t!
• A web log client (AG-6): Related to the above, but a prescribed project rather than something I'd thought of. Could be fun - the brief is to create a blog client that can talk XML-RPC to upload entries to a blog. Funnily enough, I'm posting this entry with a client that does just that.
• Rich music meta data system (MJ-2): The purpose of which is to find and exploit links between a user's listening habits in different situations/activities/locations. What's slightly odd is that I had an almost identical idea about a year ago, but never got around to implementing it in anywhere near the depth this project requires.
• Tamagotchi e-mail (MJ-4): This one could be seriously fun - create an e-mail client where each message is its own distinct entity with 'health' that changes depending on several factors, such as who it's from, when it needs to be replied to, etc. It's an exciting prospect, and I think if it was done properly, it could become a massive part of how we interact with each other using e-mail.
• Real time CSS Editor (NAH-6): Not so revolutionary as the above projects, but quite nifty nonetheless. My vision of this would be a two-paned window that updates the HTML display in one half while you create/tweak the CSS in the other. Would certainly speed up web design.
• Web Server Log Analyser (IR-11): This one involves working closely with a local company to generate statistics on their web traffic. Might not sound all that exciting, but there's a small part of me that's nutty about statistics - I often write logging code into things I create even if I then completely neglect the possibilities they present.
• Online Source Code Version Control (NAH-4): Basically a CVS/SVN type affair. I touched upon something like this with some code I wrote for the group project, so it would be fun to implement it more fully. Although after I'd handed the sheet in, it was pointed out to me that 'Web Services' probably meant .NET Web Services. Ugh.

Although I'd be happy doing any of the projects I've chosen (obviously), I'd rather do the ones towards the top of the list (obviously). Here's hoping I get good enough grades!

If you're wondering about the title of this post, I direct you towards Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Pure genius.

I recently had an epiphany of my geekiness, which was reinforced by a near identical incident today.

On Sunday, in the car on the way to Cardiff with Jen's mother Ruth, we had a conversation which went something like:

*rain hammers down outside the car*
Ruth: Dave, it's pouring with rain outside, do you have a Mac?
Dave: *after wondering how the two were related for a few moments* Erm, no , but I'd really like one. They're quite expensive though!
Ruth: Well you'll get soaked! Don't you have a coat at all?
Dave: Oh! You meant a mac as in a rain coat! I thought you mean an Apple Mac computer!
Ruth: You've got a one track mind!

Needless to say I was left feeling slightly bewildered and embarrassed, but it obviously didn't have enough of an effect on me to prevent the same thing happening today:

(in a Jabber conversation)
Jen: Do you have a mac?
Dave: No, but I'd love to have one. I'm actually using one on campus now, funny you should ask.
Jen: hahaha, mum told me about the conversation you had in the car the other day! You've got a one track mind!

So, yes. Evidently my obsession with all things Apple has taken ahold of me more than I had previously realised.