Archive for June, 2006
Expansion of Google
There always seems to be something new from Google these days. They are just churning out the technology, but most of it is useful and I just hope they don’t suddenly start charging it. If they carry on like they are doing, it’s pretty good for all of us as we’re able to enjoy them, and they continue to make money from their adverts. So, it’s fine – as long as it doesn’t change too much from what they’re doing now, in my opinion. They’re still a capitalist corporation so I’m never really going to be singing their praises, but the software is good. Their AJAX skills are so 1337! I’ve started using Google Browser Sync tonight because of my problems with having a house for each parent, which should really make moving my settings around easier, and I might start using bookmarks again. I’m still on the Google Friends newsletter xD
Heather’s website is starting to fill with content now. I’m a little worried about the sheer amount she writes and that it may put people off, but I’m loath to edit it as it is all good stuff. I’m going for a strategy of an initial pass to get everything in, and then neatening it up later. A selection of nice images are being used to illustrate these articles as she has taken rather a lot, but I’m having trouble resizing them, so am generally leaving it as it is for now.
The school are really piling on the coursework now in the last few weeks of the year, and I’m having some funny problems. I havn’t had any qualms with deadlines (except maths, see below), but I’m finding that I really don’t know what to write a lot of the time. However, I know that I’ve been paranoid in the past about marks, however based on the Y10 results posted earlier I’m not 100% sure I’m going to do very well. I have no idea why.
Maths is a complete nightmare because my teacher has decided that the methods I was using are a waste of time and aske dme to start again. So I did, but then the new methods wern’t working out either. A method to give x number of people in a sample gave almost twice as much, for example. He’s taking it all as a bit of a joke but I only have until Friday to completely redo the coursework and I am losing another night now because he was too busy to see me today, leaving me in a total mess. I really don’t know where to turn.
Amusing article for deletion
This is up for deletion, and I think it’s pretty likely that it’ll go – it’s mildly amusing so I thought I might preserve an archive here to look back on and laugh and the things people get up to.
Introduction
Italian born Australian migrant Anthony has been a founder of the extreme badminton movment. De Ieso a prodigy in the sport sees himself as not only the sports founder but the sports promoter.
De Ieso invented the sport in his college days in the South Australian suburbs, where he played in the streets to fund his days as a drama student. De Ieso has propeeled the sport across the nation as ‘extreme badminton’ is now a common game in the slums of the countrys inner city.
Rules
Just like normal badminton except the game is played with modified tennis racquets also known as ‘nonnas’ and shuttlecocks known as ‘pasta’. The game is played anywhere where the surface will permit but usually on the busy streets of the inner city. The game involves moving traffic, which the players must evade as they use their ‘nonnas’ to ‘cook’ the ‘pasta’
What the future holds
The future doesn’t seem to bright for the sport of extreme badminton due to the fact that the fatality rate is at about 37%. Howver De Ieso still continues to persue his love for the sport as he continues to promote it in the inner cities of Australia.
IRC dropping off repeatedly
I currently have a shell account running FreeBSD at NullShells; thanks to dren/Mark there for giving it to me. On this shell I run my eggdrop bot WineSteward, who is a social bot for a variety of Wikimedia channels, and my IRC client irssi under the terminal multiplexer screen, which allows me to detach my session and leave everything open while I go to school or bed, or something else away from my computer. I connect to the session via SSH.
Unfortunately, the server has been rather unstable recently. My SysAdmin posted this about a week ago, trying to explain the problem, and why it keeps occuring:
Server Downtime: “Unknown” Problem Description
Sun, 18 Jun 2006 13:39:26 -0400
posted by Mark P.
The chipset was overheating because the cooling system wasn’t operational. The chipset fan has already been replaced, and the problem persists. Monitoring the chipset fan will be an ongoing process until the motherboard is replaced.
The other disadvantage to this service is that I have a very strict process limit and with my IRC client and the eggdrop bot running, I can’t do anything else. But, that’s the only way the shell is kept usuable by everyone, so I don’t have a huge problem with it. All in all, I’m happy with my IRC situation.
I’m really in a mess with all the tasks that I have to do online, as I’m failing miserably to solve a coding problem on the IBDoF that is disrupting the entire data editing team. It makes me want to resign as a priveledged user and just sit in the game threads all the time, but I’m not really sure. I’ll stick around for now and help where I can, but sometimes I question the worth of the project. The forums are very useful, but the database sometimes confuses me as to it’s eventual purpose, as the task is rather huge. We’ll have to see.
Switching e-mail client, keeping address
One of the main reasons why I choose to stick with my address of sean@silentflame.com is that I don’t like to be tied down to one e-mail service with the fact that everyone may know my address from the said service – I can freely set sean@silentflame.com as a forwarder and use a service that allows a different from address or failing that a reply-to. Even if SilentFlame is destroyed I will always have access to the domain as it only costs £5 per year on the special deal I have, and my registrar allows free forwarding for those using their nameservers or their single-page site creation system. So, I don’t have to worry about losing my address. However, as my address is all over the place and I rarely bother with some form of spambot-proof obfuscation on it so I get a heck of a lot of spam – that’s why I’m now using gmail as my primary e-mail client; indeed this was published from gmail. It now allows customised from addresses so I’ve just added a forwarder on the SF Mail server to make sure that everything comes in to the same place. This is excellent as I like the interface, but they’ve added some annoying features for chatting since I last used it. Although I’ve managed to turn some of them off, the chat logs sidebar item still hovers annoyingly at the edge of my vision. Hopefully they’ll add a feature to turn it off eventually.
This brings me to my next point – without all the spam flowing in (I notice that over night, not taking into account that old ones will probably have been deleted by this point, I had received ten, and that really isn’t very many compared to normal), I realise how few e-mails I actually get! Apart from mailing lists I very rarely receive any at all and it’s rather disheartening if you compare it to a year or so ago when I go plenty. True, I am slowly adding myself to ignore lists for annoying social networking sites, but I still get comparatively few notices on gmail notifier compared to before. However, it isn’t really a huge problem as I have enough to do already.
My book reading situation has got worse. The time for voting on the Sheffield Children’s Book Award is rolling closer, and I now have until the sixth of July to read three and a half books. This shouldn’t really be a problem, as long as I get into the habit of reading properly again. If my reading speed hadn’t decreased, I would be able to get through them way faster. I’m really annoyed that my novel speed has gone so low whereas reading other things such as that on the web is still at a reasonable level. My typing, while still fast but making many mistakes is improving as I follow the advice simply to slow down so that my brain has chance to get the right key hit. This school keyboard isn’t incredible though because some of the keys, especially the A, take a real whack and this is at the edge so I can’t have my strongest finger on it, which is of course slowing me down. I think it might be because I’m not pressing it very cleanly and am almost slanting it to one side.
I have so much more to write, but I think I better leave it because I don’t want to run out of things later. I really need to get a blog notebook organised, but no-one seems to be reading it right now so there probably isn’t a lot of point in putting that much effort in. Ah well, I suppose I better get back to reading The Merrybegot.