PeoplePerHour.com (and 1s of my head) were on the six o’clock news last night:
Unfortunately, the traffic spike generated from the mention on TV and the associated BBC web page brought our server down – so I’m feeling pretty bad about my abilities as a web developer at the moment 🙁 Hopefully, I’ll be ready for it next time around…
PeoplePerHour on the BBC news website
I’m doing a walk next month with some friends – we want to go up and down the 3 highest mountains in the UK within 24 hours – a serious challenge for someone who’s primary exercise for the last 5 years has been computer programming!
We’re trying to raise £1000 for cancer research in the memory of anyone who’s lost someone to cancer – we’d really appreciate a donation. The link is: http://www.justgiving.com/tri_copaon
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I’ve been trying to do some training for the last 3 weeks. I’ve joined the biggest cheapest swimming pool in London – This morning a dead fish floated past me! |
I wanted to watch freeview on my PC so I bought a brand new Hauppauge Nova-TD-500 card. Unfortunately I found the picture quality to be exceptionally low – There were significant image artefacts and glitches where everything is fine if I plug the same cable into a normal TV. I tried a whole load of things but the solution was to buy an attenuator. Without the attenuator the card was useless.
For reference, this was my “why isn’t my nova-t 500 card working” checklist:
/lib/firmware/dvb-usb-dib0700-1.20.fw). I experimented with the “force_lna_activation” and “buggy_sfn_workaround” module options -> No luck.
Additional actions you can take to get this fiddly Nova-TD-500 card working (relevant to UK Freeview television using a roof mounted aerial and coaxial cables).
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We get attacked by ants every year but this year we have an extra problem because ants seem to like cat food. Kix put the cat bowl into another bowl and half filled the outer bowl with a moat of water so ants can’t get to it. Anyone know a better solution? |
 A jackalope? |
I highly recommend the new Ubuntu 9.04 release (Jaunty Jackalope), it has A+ compatibility on a Sony VGN-AR51E. I also recommend upgrading from previous Ubuntu versions. Apart from the pretty new style system notifications the other thing well worth upgrading for is the promise of better boot performance. |
Boot speed: Obviously, when I turn on my laptop I would like it to be ready ASAP but in the last few years each release has seemed to take longer to boot than the last. In order to minimise boot time I installed the 64bit version and partitioned with the new ext4 filesystem. After installing, doing an update and rebooting, I installed bootchart (sudo apt-get install bootchart) and rebooted again. The chart generated in /var/log/bootchart says boot time was 23 seconds. Pretty good.
Jaunty Goods:
Jaunty Bads:
It only takes a few lines of Javascript to make a HTML table start rotating it’s rows. Example:
| field 1a | field 1b |
| field 2a | field 2b |
| field 3a | field 3b |
| field 4a | field 4b |
| field 5a | field 5b |
| field 6a | field 6b |
| field 7a | field 7b |
| field 8a | field 8b |
Using javascript, you need to remove the last row of the table and then insert it in front of the first table row and then repeat continuously.
Sci-Fi, 8/10 – April 2009
[asa tomButton]0450002314[/asa] |
The story follows the revolution of a Lunar penal colony against earth for political freedom. The people of the moon don’t have any conventional weapons but it is “uphill” of earth (in terms of gravity) which means it can throw rocks down apon earth with a near-nuclear impact. The second secret-weapon of the moon is a recently sentient super-computer called Mike which has the brains to target the rocks and attend to intricate politics as well.
This book was written in the 60’s but holds up flawlessly. I particularly enjoyed the Luna-speak, a shorthand pidgin English that the people on the moon speak. It’ll drive English teachers nuts. |
My latest project at PeoplePerHour was to implement a redesign of the website homepage. The new page is a lot less busy and less work for the webserver:
I’m loving jquery at the moment.
The best April Fools jokes are the subtle ones right?
We have pretended to add a dating service to our website. Check it out at peopleperhour.com. We’ve added cheesy dating profiles and fake FAQs such as the following:
Will the dating site affect my rating on PPH?
No you will have a separate score on the Dating site however both scores will be visible in the dating site: a high professional score is most often a source of attraction and as such will be displayed.
🙂
Kix gave me a myth for my birthday (a Myth Box without the box). More specifically she gave me a motherboard, a ASUS P5N7A-VM which is special because it has a HDMI port for nice connectivity to a TV.
Full Motherboard details: ASUS P5N7A-VM micro ATX GF 9300 / nForce 730i LGA775 Socket UDMA133, Serial ATA-300 (RAID), eSATA Gigabit Ethernet video High Definition Audio (8-channel).
Check out Feverous Tea:
XBox360,RTS,4/10 – February 2009
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It has been proved, RTS on a console just isn’t possible. You can put as much effort and talent into making it as possible but a mouse is a fundamental requirement of a RTS. |
Playing this demo made me doubt whether releasing a demo is always financially advantageous for the game companies? In this case, I would have certainly bought the game if I hadn’t been able to play the demo. I did have to buy a subscription to XBox live gold to download the demo so it wasn’t a total loss for Microsoft.
Fiction, 6/10 – February 2009
1000 pages set in 12th century Britain based largely around the building of cathedrals – sound interesting? No, but it comes highly recommended (33rd in the BBC’s 2003 big read) and in an effort to broaden my horizons I gave it a go. It is based on real historical events such as the Battle of Lincoln and the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury and it had me happily living in the middle ages with monks and builders and downfalls and triumphs for a few weeks. I found it a little slow and it laid things out a bit too clearly but a worthwhile read nevertheless.
I looked around for quite a while to try to buy something non-Microsoft branded because I didn’t want to “feed the hand that bites us” but at the end of the day one has to be a bit pragmatic?
I highly recommend this keyboard – Everyone should upgrade from a standard keyboard because it’s not all that expensive and risking RSI is stupid (especially as a software developer I’m attached to my keyboard for more than 10 hours a day).
| This is my list in order of importance when it comes to a happy computing experience (I could go on extensively about each point but won’t): |
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Source: Weightwatchers “Cook!” (p180), Takes: 20 mins to prepare and 45 mins to cook, Rating: 9/10
Looks like a cake but doesn’t have the texture of a cake – it’s really smooth and melt-in-the-mouth. Usually recipes don’t look like the picture right? Well, this is an exception:
 Mousse cake |
 Not mouse cake |
