Wednesday 30th June 2004
Song: Blink 182 - Obvious
Did you hear that Victoria Beckham now holds the world record for shagging the most people?
In 120 minutes her shaven cunt fucked the whole country.
Heheh, oh, and I just found this one which I thought was brilliant:
Q: What do Barry Manilow and David Beckham have in common?
A: A: They are both fucking useless singers.
Sunday 27th June 2004
Song: Taking Back Sunday - One-Eighty By Summer
New TBS album... yay!
Since I've had no work for a week, and was getting very bored. I decided to sort out some curiosities I had. I've always wanted to understand fork() better (in C) ever since Matt got that silly t-shirt making a reference to The Matrix:
do
fork agent(smith);
repeat;
So I did... turns out it's very simple indeed. It is however, not as widely used as I once thought.
My thoughts then turned to wget. Everyone's favourite download manager. Well to be honest, my thoughts turned to download managers in general. How do they have one process (not two, which fork() makes) which has a opened socket that's downloading and counting data, but also manage to maintain a progress bar at the same time? I was baffled... It later came to me... Threads!
Threads were indeed the answer to my problem. I can make one thread slide off to the side doing the download, while another can update the progress bar. Another advantage of threads of fork(), is that they share the same memory space, so can communicate easily, unlike fork() where they have their own places in memory so have to communicate through pipes or signals. I'm still not too sure how the bit the gives you the current speed (kb/s) is done. I'm not entirely comfortable with sleeping/somehow pausing for a second, looking at the amount done, take from it the amount done a second before, and working out how much was done in that second. I need to talk to someone who's actually done it though. It seems pretty hard to find a simple enough example (wget is far too big).
Uhm, hm.
Thursday 24th June 2004
On a beautiful deserted island in the middle of nowhere, the following people are suddenly stranded by a shipwreck:
2 Italian men and 1 Italian woman
2 French men and 1 French woman
2 German men and 1 German woman
2 Greek men and 1 Greek woman
2 English men and 1 English woman
2 Bulgarian men and 1 Bulgarian woman
2 Japanese men and 1 Japanese woman
2 Chinese men and 1 Chinese woman
2 American men and 1 American woman
2 Irish men and 1 Irish woman
Now move on one month later on the same absolutely stunning deserted island in the middle of nowhere, this has occurred...
One Italian man killed the other Italian man for the Italian woman.
The two French men and the French woman are living happily together in a ménage-a-trois.
The two German men have a strict weekly schedule of alternating visits with the German woman.
The two Greek men are sleeping with each other and the Greek woman is cleaning and cooking for them.
The two Bulgarian men took one long look at the endless ocean, and another long look at the Bulgarian woman, and started swimming.
The two Japanese men have faxed Tokyo and are awaiting instructions.
The two Chinese men have set up a pharmacy, a liquor store, a Restaurant and a laundry, and have got the woman pregnant in order to supply employees for their stores.
The two American men are contemplating the virtues of therapy because the American woman keeps endlessly complaining about her body; the true nature of feminism; how she can do everything they can do; the necessity of fulfilment; the equal division of household chores; how sand and palm trees make her look fat; how her last boyfriend respected her opinion and treated her nicer than they do; but how her relationship with her mother is improving and how at least the taxes are low and it isn't raining.
The two English men are waiting for someone to introduce them to the English woman.
The two Irish men have divided the island into North and South and set up a distillery. They do not remember if sex is in the picture because it gets sort of foggy after the first few litres of coconut whisky. But they're satisfied because at least the English aren't getting laid either...
Friday 18th June 2004
Song: Straylight Run - Holding On
Things like this upset me... Poor dog.
Following the recent discovery of some SQL from Mac, from Simon, I've redesigned the blogarchive page. It looks and functions pretty much the same, but it's now about half the length in code, and a lot more efficient and potentially quicker.
Following a link I often follow from Mac's site, to Joel On Software earlier, I learnt a bit more about MS. Stuff I didn't know before. Stuff that's potentially in part to blame for Windows' weird and unpredictable behaviour. It's basically a result of them doing everything they can to keep backwards compatibility for developers. In Joel's words...
"I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it."
Although I appreciate Microsoft's efforts, I actually feel that they shouldn't have done this. In my opinion, the fault lies 100% in the hands of the SimCity developers. Who in their right mind would develop an application that uses memory right *after* freeing it? I totally accept that mistakes happen, and memory handling related bugs occur often. However, even *if* it was a legit bug... fix it. If the Windows developers were able to find this out from only the binary, it couldn't have taken the SimCity developers too long to have run it through a debugger under Windows... could it? I'm assuming though, that Microsoft did what they had to do because they need the customers and their money, which I can't really argue with. I just found it incredibly frustrating that MS had to do this.
The downside to this effort from MS though, is that the more odd bits of code that get put in place left, right and center, the more bloated the product (in this case, Windows) gets, and the harder the code gets to maintain. Many people in the past have blamed Windows' user interface for a lot of it's problems. I think there could be an ever so slight connection there. Although I would expect the two parts of Windows are developed completely independant of one another (except for a bunch of function prototypes of course). The wonderful open source world gets this right IMO, where everything is made by seperate people, in seperate locations, at seperate times. The downside of it is that you don't get one, shiney finished product that words brilliantly out of the box... but it does work better. Of course it does have the advantage of being entirely non profit. As I said... I don't blame Microsoft for their efforts, I applaud it. It just annoys me that there are people out there that would try and access memory after freeing it (personally I always set pointers to NULL after freeing memory anyway), and instead of fixing their problem, they rely on someone else to do it. What would be worse is if they realised the problem on DOS, but left it there on the basis of, "well it works...".
Heh, this reminds me of a program I made in one of my first C lessons at college... I had written a program that was a mere few lines of code (less than 10, at a guess) and it crashed Windows (98) when it ran.
#include <stdio.h>
void main() {
int age;
printf("Hello... please enter your age: ");
scanf("%d", age);
printf("You are: %d years old\n", age);
}
Those were the days... I actually struggled to write that, heh... I need to do more C.
Monday 14th June 2004
Song: Michelle Branch - Here With Me
Yet another thing's been made for the reason, "because I can". Yet another use for my existing blog database, if you will. Blog Statistics. I included the time it takes for the page to load mainly because it impressed me at how fast it was.
This is all for now.
Sunday 6th June 2004
Song: Alkaline Trio - Sadie
New Alkaline Trio split, yay! :D I was having an Alkaline Trio day yesterday, of old stuff. So imagine my delight when I'm told there's new stuff too! It may only be a split, but still... six new songs.
Oh, Andrea: What time of day on the 11th are you getting back to sunny Surrey? My guess was that we'd be going from Woking again, but haven't actually discussed it with you yet. Figured this was the best way of communicating with you :) Leave me a message, anyway. I think doors are at 6. This ticket confuses me, but it has "11-JUN-04 6-10PM", so my guess is we'll be home for an early night.
Last night was fun, it was Rob's 22nd birthday... and he was working. So naturaly (as if we wouldn't have anyway) we decided to go to the pub... Matt and I were the first to arrive, but shortly after, he had to leave to get his mum. Just as he's walking out the door, Dave arrives. Dave is an incredibly loud, eccentric person. He met my brother and/or Marc on a forum for Ford Escort owners... anyway. Him and his wife Dora (no, really) are now often sighted at Pirbright most weekends. So anyway, Dave, Dora, myself, Rob, and Jay were sat at the bar passing time. It wasn't long before Dave had starting talking about his apparent favourite topic of conversation: sex. He did have us all laughing, which was good. He then started talking about how he'd had something done to his penis (never did find out exactly what it was), but he went ahead with large amounts of unwanted details which made us all cringe. Unfortunately, he was talking about his penis for a very long time, but at least he was entertaining. Anyway, at some point, my brother turned up, and Matt returned.
This whole time I'd assumed, though not been told, that we'd be locked in and play some pool. For whatever reason, anytime we hang around waiting for everyone else to leave, there's always one other group of people that take forever to go. It was nearly midnight before these other people left. By this point we'd sent my brother and Dave out to get food, and had eaten it. So then, as expected, Rob locked the door, and we moved into the pool room. We got home about 1:30am, and I'd only lost one game of pool. I was pleased... Meant to be going back tonight for more pool, with less alcohol.
Two or three nights ago, I met some other guy called Rob. He seemed to be a fan of gadgets. He had a remote control starter for his car. He also had an car alarm that not only made an annoying noise like most, but sent a radio signal which is picked up by a little reciever that he has on him. This not only alerts him that the car's been hit or broken into. But it also says the part of the car that's been attacked. The most impressive part: He fitted and installed it all himself. It only has a range of 1km apparently, however he said you can get them that use GSM to alert you through SMS, which of course is global. Nifty... I later find out that he has an EPROM reader. Most people don't even know what EPROM is. Few of those who do actually have devices to read it. He was talking about how it's possible to circumvent something that requires a dongle, by taking the EPROM chip out of it, reading the ROM image from it, and then running the ROM through an emulator. He hadn't done it, but what he said did indeed make sense.
Saturday 12th June 2004
Song: Slipknot - Purity
Last night was good... Taking Back Sunday, at the London Astoria. There was an unfortunately long wait before the first band came on. Thankfully though, they were worth the wait. They were called "The Hurt Process", perhaps the name itself screams emo enough to put me off, but thankfully their performance kept me entertained throughout. It would have been a lot better if lyrics were learnt before going to see them, as most of it was just yelled and screamed, so it was hard to really know what was being said. But the music was still good.
Second support band were unfortunately not as good. Though not really all that bad either, to be fair. I've forgotten their name, and I'm too lazy to look it up now. Thankfully the wait for this band to come out could have been no more than 15 minutes. Much nicer than the 45 or 50 so minutes we'd waited for The Hurt Process. By this point my back was aching, and I was almost passing out from thirst. Nothing too memorable about this band, really.
Then it was time... Taking Back Sunday were due. Over a year later, and with only one third of the people I was originally meant to be going to see them with, but hey... not a lot could be done about that. They opened with "You Know How I Do", as I'd expected and hoped. "We... wont... stand... for... hay... zee... eyes anymore... we... wont... stand... fooooooooor". Yes yes, it was nice. Lots of people singing. We were perhaps too far back to be in the bulk of the singers, but that didn't really bother me. Only problem I had was that I felt like the only one singing John's bits. It was sad, as expected, to not have ol' JT there yelling along. As lovely as Straylight Run are, I'm still not happy with his departure from Taking Back Sunday. They left before their encore with Cute Without The 'E', which I found quite odd, wondering if maybe they had no encore. But then I remembered seeing a recent setlist showing them closing with No 'I' In Team, so I guessed they were doing that. It wasn't long before Adam was back on stage... what soon became apparent though, was that he was alone. He seemed to be wearing a guitar, and was trying to get it working. Soon enough, he was center stage, by himself, with this electric guitar. And so he started. He was playing it clean too, which I found interesting. I thought at one point that the rest of the band would jump in half way through or something, but no... He kept going. He was strumming faster and harder, and shouting louder and louder (I am still talking about the guitar playing here, for those who were wondering). He ended up repeating one line over and over again, then stepped away from the mic with the hope that we'd all been listening to this one line, so we could keep singing, and thankfully a lot of people did. So that was really good. Then as expected, they closed with No 'I' In Team. They did play a few too many new songs for my liking, but other than that, it was a good set indeed.
A few other things to be said about the evening. The Astoria, for whatever reason, have put up two screens, one on each side of the thing, which via the magic of SMS you can get your message put up there. Anyway... I understand that this is not a new concept. However, it did provide some entertainment between sets. There was about a billion different websites for local bands going past (most ending in .tk which amused me), and there was also a lot of references to 14 y/olds. As feared, there was a fair few under 16's in the place. They were no more or less annoying then usual, but there were two nearby that I found particularly annoying. They must have been less than 15... they both looked very young. One got out a packet of cigarettes, took one for herself, and offered her friend one. She then put the pack away, and got her lighter. At the same time her friend turned round to ask three people behind her for a lighter. Then when they all said no and she was facing her friend again, she took friend's lighter, and so she was all sorted. She then proceeded to take the smallest puffs imaginable on this newly lit cigarette. It really did make me wonder why she was bothering. Her friend at least appeared to have got the hang of it and was inhaling. While they were stood there looking cool, the particularly stupid, non smoker of the two turned round again and asked if any band had been on yet (there had not), and then asked this guy behind her who the next/first band was. The guy nicely answered with "I think it's The Hurt Process". It was her next question that made me really think that I didn't want her in the venue anymore. "Are they fit?". I sighed. Thankfully she soon dropped her cigarette that was still half untouched thanks to her stupidly small puffs, and they moved on to somewhere else. It's been known for people, myself included, to sometimes think that maybe some of the youngin's at gigs are infact sincerely there for the music, and that's a very fair point. However it's people like those two girls that remind me why all the kids at gigs get stereotyped.
Another minor bit of excitement after some mentioning of Charlie from Busted went by on these screens, to which someone replied with something like "charlie leave busted and stick with fightstar". Made me happy to think that there's at least one other person in the building that knew and apparently liked Fightstar.
Final moan, another old one revisted. People with huge bags in gigs. Needless to say there was some there, and they managed to find their way in front of us, and they were annoying. What was worse, and a first, was some girl who had this hand bag with her. It was pushed up to her upperarm, and shoulder, and basically kept hitting me. I was getting very pissed off with her.
So... that was evening. All backpacks and 14 y/old wannabe smokers aside, it was a good night indeed.
Rob and Jay leave tomorrow... It will be quite sad. It was nice of them to say that we can go to Australia and stay with them, but in reality I doubt I ever will. Partly through choice, partly through circumstances. Chances of ever seeing them again in my life seem slim, but eh... it happens.
Friday 11th June 2004
Song: Dido - Don't Leave Home
Bush will never fail to impress me. Clickety click
Saturday 5th June 2004
Song: The Beatles - Ticket To Ride
I've redesigned the backend of the site... Still keeping the lovely piece-by-piece (some may prefer the term "modularity", I guess) approach to it's construction though. I just feel it's a little bit more secure, and finally I get start using a robots.txt that actually works. Now there's an idea...
I think I've updated all the relevant links and such... but in the event you find a 404, 403, or complete visual catastrophe (two navigation bars or something) please do let me know. :)
Friday 4th June 2004
Song: The Darkness - Givin' Up
Well the exam was as stupid as I'd expected. My personal favorite:
TCP/IP is an example of:
a) Open source software
b) Shareware
c) Public domain software
d) Freeware
Last time I checked... TCP/IP is not software. It is in fact two completely seperate protocols, as pointed out by the links I put there.
There was another good one, something like "What is stored in memory?". It went something like this
a) Programs and Data
b) Just programs
c) Just data
d) neither
Last time I chcked, computer programs *are* data. All the computer knows, is 1, and 0, high and low, on or off. Those two states only. It's simply all data, the thing is... I think the answer they were looking for was actually a) Programs and Data.
There was also some question that gave a megabyte as 1 million bytes, which isn't true... it's actually 2^20, which is 1,048,576 bytes. Picky? Maybe... but for a degree course in computer science, I'd expect better really.
The most annoying thing is that they wouldn't let us keep the question paper, so I've had to write this from memory. There were a few other very stupid questions though. I'm not at all happy with the exam, but oh well... it's done now.
Can't be bothered to write anymore now... Got better things to do, like sitting and glancing out of the window.
Wednesday 2nd June 2004
Song: Boxcar Racer - All Systems Go
Jesus, it's 4:20am, and it's daylight! I sincerely wish there was someone here with me just so we could go and sit outside and chat. It just looks really nice out there.
Went ice skating some unknown length of time ago.. one day, two days, what day is it today? I was again the only person to have not fallen over, I was again very smug about this.
I'm kind'a regretting staying up this late, 'cause I said to Matt that I'd be up by 11 tomorrow. I know I wont be, and I expect he'll be annoyed.
This is very strange... I'm sitting here now, listening to the birds singing outside, as I quietly wait for a 30 year old Norweigan man to go and have a cigarette.
At some point tomorrow/later, I plan on doing some brief revision for Thursday's exam. Apparently we're being tested on entirely false things like Windows 98 being the first internet ready Windows OS, and that e-mail servers must be big mainframes. This is all too silly. If I fail, it'll only be because I actually know stuff. Stuff that isn't in this book, that they probably found in a fiction or humor section of a library.
Bored, tired... I want Charlotte here to go and sit outside with. Hmph. Ooh, I just saw an ambulance go past... how exciting!
I wish I were charming and funny...
Morning after:
Well I woke up around 9:30, which was interesting... am not tired at all. Well... no more than usual. I decided to turn this into a moany update. Following what I said last night about the ICT exam and it's lack of accuracy, here are some findings.
Under "Features added by Windows 98" they have "Internet/intranet browsing capabilities", they then go on to say that Windows Me was the first to provide home network support. Later, it says that Windows CE "is designed to work on machines with small screens and little, if any, storage". I'm wondering how you get software onto a device without any storage. It also says: "While Linux is more stable than Windows, applications are relatively scarce". Bullshit.
In the network section, it covers ISDN, dialup, DSL, and then cable. For cable, and only cable, it says "also there is no security for individual users or data – users must purchase a firewall program for security". How the hell is cable any less secure than DSL or dialup? They all offer the same thing, the only difference is the technical approach to how the offer it. None of them are any more or less secure than the other. Everyone still has their 65 thousand and whatever it is ports available, of which most Windows users have more than they need open. The myth that every computer user needs a firewall is crap anyway, IMHO. If Microsoft could manage to build even the tiniest element of security into their OS we wouldn't have this problem... There's no need for so many services running out of the box!
Apparently, "Java is a network-friendly programming language". I got very bored, and skim read most of it... but I'm still not too impressed by it. I am quite excited about the exam tomorrow, just to see how weird it'll be. Expect a moany update tomorrow with actual questions taking from the exam. I wish I'd read these revision notes before today (they've been up since the module started) 'cause I'm wondering it's perhaps an issue that should be brought up with the lecturer. Hrm.