Archive for July, 2006

DnD cancelled

Disorganisation of others often throws events despite planning well in advance by those with the organisational capacity to do so, I’ve found. I have been trying to plan our summer DnD session since May, and every week or so since then I’ve been asking everyone for their holiday dates – but they don’t seem to have any. I can find out mine from my parents by February at the latest, and this seems totally normal to me but I don’t know if this is the same for everyone, of course. Everyone else is unable to tell me what they are doing until just a few weeks before, which makes it extremely difficult to plan anything if I’m only being told so close to the event. Because of this we have had to call DnD totally off for this summer because there was a severe lack of interest that stopped us from completing what we wanted to do. Several people couldn’t be contacted at all, Matt is in Japan, Alex will be on holiday and Rosie doesn’t think she is good enough at roleplaying (she is, and she needs to get over this imaginary barrier!). So, it would just be me, Liam and Peter DMing which isn’t really enough for cracking adventure that Peter has put together. Additionally, I could have gone to Castleton today to meet Hannah as apparently she wants to go down some caves but now I can’t even do that because I’ve got a dentists appointment quickly followed by a doctor’s one. I’m not doing very well, as you can see.

Otherwise, the holiday is going reasonably well and I will get round to typing up the rest of my work experience journal extracts. At the end of my placement they were kind enough to give me a £50 (!) book token to spend so I’m going to have to take a trip to the bookshops. I might save it for a few months because my reading pile is still ridiculusly big. I’m trying to read more again, and am going to bed at ten to read for half an hour every night which should help somewhat.

I got SilentFlame registered with freenode in order to allow us to have hostname cloaks pertaining to the project on the IRC network. This has the advantage of hopefully raising awareness of the project as many clients display the hostname of a nick joining to a channel and at the top of /msg windows, which is good. I havn’t got many questions yet but I might be able to encourage people to join the channel with server staff and clients getting cloaks of the same level; my /who response looks like this:

08:51:22 [freenode] -!- #SilentFla xyr H+ 0 i=spw@SilentFlame/Xyrael [Sean Whitton (Xyrael) ]

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Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments » | Permalink | July 28th, 2006

Python, progress and politics

Work experience is going well. Today we had a teleconference with another developer who lives somewhere in the Peak District, and the project manager decided to introduce me as the lead developer who was out-coding the others, which made everyone laugh. It lasted about ninety minutes and a lot was talked about; I tried to understand as much as possible. I will be posting my work experience journals up on here at some point so you will be able to read them, but I have limited space available in which to write so they aren’t of very good quality. I can’t wait for ringing tomorrow.

I’ve decided to learn python for my programming – stay tuned…

As I have seen for a while I have a choice of law or computing ahead of me for a career, and right now, thus far through my placement I’m leaning towards law slightly. At the beginning when I was watching and learning about the technical stuff I was edging around the middle but now I have seen the way the company works a little more and have discussed these things with Matt, I’m really not so sure – I’m not certain that I would want to be part of that system as there are some morally-uncertain aspects. This is something that I will have to think in great detail about.

I’ve now got a news ticker on my desktop, which is great for grabbing stuff to blog about, so moer political stuff will hopefully come.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off | Permalink | July 19th, 2006

Dual-monitors are so incredible

After a week of gloating over the nice screens of the coders at my work experience, I’ve had a go at hooking up my father’s laptop with the main computer’s CRT. Although this means that I don’t have my usually installed stuff available, with my flash drive this isn’t a huge problem. I’ve hooked up an alternative keyboard and rearranged the desk as best I can to get things so they actually fit, and am really enjoying the benefits. In the screenshot, the laptop’s LCD is on the left, and the CRT is on the right. Being a diehard CRT person, I’m running my active stuff on the right and my general always-on stuff on the left. And since stuff spawns on the left, hopefully any IM chats will appears over there, although I havn’t had any yet this evening so I can’t really tell. On there at the top is my IRC client, provided by the ever-generous Mark of NullShells (which is really stable now that the hardware as been partially replaced – I don’t really understand the specifics). Below is a constantly changing feed of changes to Wikipedia, purely for the 1337-ness of it, not because I’m actively checking it most of the time.
It’s sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo quality to have all this data flowing down the screen all the time :D

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Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments » | Permalink | July 14th, 2006

2nd day

Completed week’s work in two days! Also wrote some JavaScript. Met with project manager to discuss what to do next; downloaded some IDEs.

I had a good discussion with the others today about Microsoft vs open source; I’m sure you can guess which side I was fighting for. With Tribal being a ‘Microsoft Gold Partner’, they warned that they may have to bring in the thugs to reeducate me ;) We argued about web standards, money, trickery and expansion. Looking at Windows Live, they’re now offering e-mail using your own domain, as from yesterday I’m doing through Google! This is awful. They’re copying everything. Sickening. I got some new Firefox extensions this morning and have done away with Google Browser Sync, as my tabs are now saved automatically, as are other aspects of my session. We also violently debated whether or not Firefox/IE were proper browsers. I’m really enjoying my work experience now that I have done all the SQL queries in such a short time (I’ve printed them off and pinned them up in pride), and it’d be nice if I had a camera to take pictures of my working area before I leave, but I doubt this is going to be possible. I’ll be interested to look back on these posts though.

I’m slipping back into shorter posts, and this is not good. Help.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off | Permalink | July 12th, 2006

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