Thursday 31st March 2005
I would like to apologise to Mr Dijkstra. Also, in line for an apology are Sun Microsystems.
The problem was not so much that Dijkstra's shortest path next algorithm was terribly inefficient, nor that Java is terribly slow. But simply that my implementation of Dijkstra's shortest path next algorithm was... terrible.
To be fair, that's a bit of a stretch of the truth, but it seemed appropriate to use the word terrible there. I basically decided tonight to try and speed up my crappy route finder thing, after Tor's turned out to be so speedy. I soon realised I'd done some things quite badly, and so tidied them up, removed a few loops, generally improved it's structure. Suddenly it was running a hell of a lot faster. However... it was broken. The weirdest thing, was how it would get me from Woking to Weybridge. But it wouldn't get me from Weybridge to Woking.
Thankfully, Tor saved the day, fixed the problem, and then tidied up a bit more to improve speed further. Now it's super speedy and generally takes less than 0.2 of a second to find most routes that are thrown at it. Hurrah.
Anyway, it's now 4:30am, and I'd like to get some sleep and forget all about route finding algorithms! :)
Hopefully this will be the last you hear about this.
Wednesday 30th March 2005
In many ways starting up the Charlie Simpson arguments all over again almost seems insane... but I just found this, and thought it was interesting:
We were surprised to find Charlie from Busted was a fan of ours. We didn't think much of it, then we played a gig in New York last summer and he was there. He was standing outside the venue smoking a cigarette and we got chatting. He came backstage and hung out with us. Then he came to the show the next night and hung out again. He really is a nice guy and I grew to like him quickly. He was a genuine bloke even though he was in Busted, which he kept referring to as his crazy day job. Even then, we got the feeling that the Busted thing was something he was just doing without any great passion. It was no surprise to Charlie when I told him that I didn't like Busted's music. Busted were together for a while for a band of that ilk. You don't get that many bands around for that long. I think he is doing the right thing pushing Fightstar.
That was apparently James from Biffy Clyro, on Busted. It's strange though... I thought it was a Biffy show that Charlie was spotted at and asked by the band to leave. But I guess that could have been another band, or just a rumour. Either way, I thought it was a nice little story.
Monday 28th March 2005
Song: Korn - Freak On A Leash
Christ. on Thursday night, my uni's wonderful Blackboard thing went offline. I assumed for some scheduled maintenance. It's still not back.
Blackboard annoys me a great deal. Not having access to Blackboard angers me more.
I happen to know of a "development" Blackboard server that is run. I believe it's supposed to mirror the main public one, but it's not meant to be known about by students, so I'm thinking I probably shouldn't use it. I just think that four days downtime is awful, for this sort of service. Also with no indication of why it's down, nor anything about when it might be back.
Went out driving again today with my mum. Growing less keen on this arrangement. She's not calm enough, most of the time. I realise that at times it might be quite scary sometimes, but it only makes it harder for me. She can also get quite patronising. "It's okay... you can do it... look there's no other cars here! This should be easy". I know she's only trying to help, but eh.
This was a pretty pointless update. I'm getting tired and bored. Got my nice route planner thing now to ask where you want to go to and from. Couldn't ever be bothered to do this before now. I've been thinking of a cool-ish thing to do involving image maps and mouseover events, but my JavaScript knowledge sucks, and web pages bore me. So... I'm not sure what to do next. I'm very tempted to try and make one in C++ and/or PHP, to compare speeds. Either way, Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm seems pretty crap.
I'm still very undecided on whether or not to buy a Mac mini. It basically comes down to this:
Pro Mac:
The GUI rocks my socks. I could not ever imagine wanting to use anything else. It makes me realise how awkward and difficult to use Windows is. Also makes me question some things on many linux Window Managers.
The "it just works" factor. Very appealing after I spent several hours (literally) on both a web cam, and a USB memory stick thing. These sorts of things shouldn't really need several hours of work, just to get working.
It's quick to do things. I think this is greatly tied in with the point of the UI, but I find it very quick to move around. It's nice having all my applications in a single folder. Thanks to the .app folder idea, there are no problems with libraries etc. From the user's perspective, it's simple.
Let us not forget finally, it's UNIX based... with bash, ssh, and an X server ready and waiting to be used. Who can complain?
The main thing in favour of linux though, and the sole reason I don't want to ditch it: Simple things are hard to do, and it takes several hours to get a USB memory stick thing to work. It may sound crazy, but yes. It's the geek in me. I've learnt so much about computers, and how things work from using linux. The UI isn't fantastic, at least not without a load of bloat, but that's okay as I prefer the CLI. That reminds me of something else though, with linux it's nice having very little bloat.
Oh it's all so tricky. I can't really justify keeping my linux machine here though in addition to the little 6 incher. Help me decide!
And above all else, remember: Mac for Productivity, Unix for Development, and Windows for Solitaire
Saturday 26th March 2005
Song: McFly - Room On The Third Floor
Well well, big news! My brother has apparently got engaged. It seems so strange... I know it's been said before, but when *did* we all grow up?
Somehow, this first week of my holiday hasn't been too bad at all. I can only pray that the next two go the same. I don't even really know what I've done for most of it.
I thought I was in an updatey mood, but apparently I'm not.
Thursday 24th March 2005
Jonathan Davis (Korn's singer) has had a new son: Pirate Howsmon Davis.
As if having your dad as Jon Davis as your dad, and your mum's an ex-lesbian porn star wasn't bad enough... you're called Pirate. And as a middle name, you were generously given a misspelling of your father's already rubbish middle name (Houseman).
Poor guy, I can tell he's gonna have a rough life.
I wonder when he'll get his first set of bagpipes.
Thursday 24th March 2005
Song: Evanescence - Imaginary
hehe, this quite amuses me. Sadly accurate depiction of my life, heh.
That's all for now.
Monday 21st March 2005
Song: The Smiths - How Soon Is Now?
ugh, I feel like death.
I appear to have this nasty thing that they call the common cold. The really crap thing though, is that I last had it about two weeks ago.
I cancelled my driving lesson this morning, because I could only just walk in a straight line. I decided being in control of a vehicle wasn't wise. Plus I was feeling delicate and knew I'd screw everything up and be told off, and have no patience for it. I don't think my mum was too pleased though. Because I cancelled it so late, we've gotta pay for it anyway. She's been very cold to me today, I really don't know why. I can't think that the driving lesson incident could have annoyed her *that* much. This is of course coming off of a painfully usual weekend at home. I don't think I should get into this here though.
I was up from about 3 - 5 this morning, and after stumbling around the house for a while, I decided to go see if I'd woken up my mum yet. I knew there's nothing she could really do for me, but still. She was awake anyway, and so then we had a chat for a while, about all things from my cold, to... Busted. It was quite nice, as it always is when I get on with her. But then this morning, she was back to Subzero Mother (Ally reference, apologies). It's just so odd, but it's been so annoying as I really don't want that on top of feeling pants anyway.
*sigh*
Who wants to hug me? I'll try not to cough too much in your hair and ear. Girls preferred.
I need to get off here really, I'm sure this screen isn't helping me much. Nothing to do though. TV fails to entertain me.
Perhaps I could have a night in with The Corrs.
If anyone knows anything about tomorrow night, get in touch. I'll be glad to get out of the house.
Friday 18th March 2005
Song: Tegan And Sara - Our Trees
heh, so Microsoft abuse their market position. Taking a fine of £345m from the EU for it, and are told to fix the problem, Microsoft failed to comply. The EU refused to accept this, and are now threatening $5m per day fine, if they can't propse a deal that is acceptable. This could get interesting. :)
Today, when home alone, the doorbell rang. It was two old men. So I opened the door, and it turns out they're some Christians from a church about two roads away. They say they're going around, not trying to force their religion down people's throats, but just having a nice chat. So I went "mmmm" raising it up at the end, to make it sound almost questioning. I didn't even intend on doing it. I just didn't know what to say. So this guy (who had bizarre teeth) went "mmmm?" to take the piss out of me, then looked down at my t-shirt:
"The Used... who's that, a group?"
And from then on... a pretty normal, and pleasant conversation ensued. He asked how I found out about the band, since they're not very popular. It was mostly all about me. Partly because I wasn't asking him any questions, and he was probably keen to find out if I was going to Hell or not. Anyway, he asked if I played any intruments (going on from The Used and my music tastes) so we talked about that for a while. He apparently used to play guitar a bit, so understood that it's not all that easy and stuff. It was a bit odd, but I figured they were just trying to be nice, at least. And they weren't asking about religion. They left in the end anyway, after about five minutes or so. They gave me this little leaflet to read, about their church. But aside from that, they really did just have a quick chat.
All in all, it wasn't too bad. :)
Wednesday 16th March 2005
Song: Flashlight Brown - Ready To Roll
I am so fed up with internet explorer.
On Saturday, I went to finally meet Charlotte's brother. The last member of her immediate family that I'd never met. The reason though... his computer was fucked. My understanding of it was that I was just gonna format, reinstalled Windows, and be done. I said I wouldn't be able to give them a copy of Windows, and was told that was okay...
So Charlotte and her sister come and pick me up (about 40 minutes late) and we head off to Leatherhead. On route, I get given a pile of CDs, except Windows isn't there. Turns out their Dad didn't have a copy of XP he could give them either, as his is legal, and activated. So my new mission plan is to fix the problem. I wasn't keen as I thought it'd take longer, but didn't have much choice by that point.
Basically, the first thing I did was install adaware, which found x cases of spyware. So I cleared them out, scanned again, found x more, scanned again, found x more, and so on.
I then went for the manual approach, checked the process list for dodgey looking things. Then checked HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run or wherever it is, as well as HKCU, and didn't find much, but removed one or two things. These were back there a matter of minutes later. Getting very pissed off by this point.
I found one dll file which I guessed was spyware, stuck it in google and got no results. Went to Yahoo. A big advert popped up, so I closed it. But wait.. Yahoo had gone. Re-opened explorer, went to Yahoo, another advert popped up, closed it, Yahoo was gone. Opened it again... only this time it occured to me that Yahoo wasn't actually loading, and that the popup wasn't a popup, it was the window that should have had Yahoo in it. Arrgh!
In the end I installed SP2 (it's soooo much quicker to install with a CD) and AVG. Oh I'd also like to mention that I was using MIcrosoft's new antispyware program too. It's fucking useless. It's not so much that it was unable to fix the problem... it was that it didn't even realise there was a problem. Seems another case of Microsoft buying a small, young product from a small company, putting their name on it, not bothering to improve it at all and preaching to the world about how great it is.
So anyway, I had to leave in the end and just give up. There was no way to win with these browser hijacks. I was quite tempted to put Firefox on there but I'm often weary with people I don't know to well, and trying to convert them. This aside though, there was a problem with spyware being all over the place anyway. We needed to cure that first.
So I had to leave them, and apologised for not being able to fix it. I was so pissed off though, and I felt bad for letting them down.
And then...
Yesterday morning, my mum got a phone call from a friend of hers/friend of the family. Her daughter had been overloaded with spyware, and in panic bought some spyware remover online, and had the registration key e-mailed to her. Except like I had with Yahoo... she found herself unable to get to hotmail. It's so fucking stupid. Who on Earth would actually make a browser that allows that sort of thing to be done. Amen, Windows API.
I apologise for people who thought those were boring stories, but explorer pisses me off so much. Aside from the fact that using it pretty much gives your computer away to the world from a security standpoint, it also makes your computer a fucking nightmare to use.
So the moral of the story is as follows: If you use Explorer and have a computer problem. Don't bother asking me to help.
*deep breath*
Sunday 13th March 2005
Song: Blink 182 - Obvious
Heheh, this looks like a pretty neat idea.
Today has brought much excitement. I've finally managed to write an implementation of Dijkstra's routing algorithm in Java. Much blood, sweat and tears went into this. Most of that was just caused by the Java language on the whole, or tomcat specifically. The rest of the problems were that I didn't really know how to do this, and have no experience with programming anything this big before.
But program I did, and after starting from scratch three times, I've now done it.
*excited*
Saturday 12th March 2005
Song: Sum 41 - There's No Solution
Wow... Brian 'Head' Welch (ex Korn guitarist mentioned a few days ago) has totally lost the plot.
He said he plans to release more music without the band. "My songs are God saying things to me, him talking to people. He's going to use me to heal people and people are going to be drawn to it, just watch, they will be," he said.
He's apparently now got "Jesus" tattooed across his knuckles and "Matthew 11:28" tattooed on his neck. And looks like this.
It seems too crazy to be true!
Thursday 10th March 2005
Just been watching the video for McFly's comic relief single, "You've Got A Friend". I didn't think a lot of it for the most part. Didn't seem too bad on the whole (I don't think I know the original, which shouldn't surprise anyone, heh), but suddenly, something caught my attention. The bassist guy, I don't know his name... was wearing a light blue t-shirt, and on the back it read: "The Used"... *gasp*!
A few clips later, I see him from the front and it has what looked roughly like Bert's face. I found it so strange. To be honest, I don't really have anything against McFly. I just really hadn't expected that.
So I had a quick play with Google, and found out that their drummer is infact a The Used fan. Also likes The Starting Line, Dashboard Confessional, and New Found Glory. It is quite unexpected, actually. Until now I think they'd kept that quite quiet. Charlie on the other hand made it no secret that he liked Funeral For A Friend, Biffy Clyro etc. I don't really think that McFly will end up with the same problems with one member wanting to be in a "proper" band, to be honest. But, eh.
Thursday 10th March 2005
So apparently Tim Armstrong helped write Pink's "Try This" album... quite interesting, I thought. I really hadn't expected that, based on the sound of the songs. Linda Perry was still on hand too, but apparently Tim Armstrong wrote the majority.
I heard Garbage's new single the other day too... quite looking forward to their new album.
That's all for now. I've gotta go to sleep, else I'll be sleeping in my lecture in the morning.
Monday 7th March 2005
David Beckham and his wife victoria both feel sorry for Jackson. David phones Jacko and says, "once your trial has ended, me and victoria would like to invite you to our yacht to spend some time with us". Michael jackson is really happy by this and says, "I would love to come on your cruz"
Monday 7th March 2005
I think I'm going to die. My throat is really painful. I can barely talk. My mum just said I sound like Barry White, as my voice has gone really deep. I also cough every now and again. Not like big roaring coughs, but enough to make my throat hurt more than it does already. I've not got the sneezes and snots yet though, which is nice. It's quite hard in some ways to think which is worse. At least when your nose wont stop running you're still able to complain about it. But I can't moan and complain, as not much noise wants to come out of my mouth.
Didn't really help that I had to spend four hours straight tonight talking to people. Hopefully I will get away with not talking so much for the rest of the week.
*grumble*
Sunday 6th March 2005
What has the STL ever done for us?
"Well, yes, vectors, I mean obviously the vectors are good ..."
"Don't forget queues Reg, I mean, where would we be without properly organized queues and iterators for any data type?" General murmurs of agreement
"Yes, alright, apart from vectors and queues ..."
"Sorts Reg - I hated having to code up a new sort routine for every class." Here, here, etc.
"Right. So apart from vectors, queues and associated containers classes, iterators, various useful algorithms and functions, what has the STL ever done for us?"
"Memory allocators Reg. We can allocate container memory using any scheme we like, and change it without rewriting all the code. It keeps things in order" Reg loses his temper
"Order? Order? Oh shut up!"
Heh, I think it's quite sad that I found this funny... (Yoinked from http://www.yrl.co.uk/phil/stl/stl.htmlx)
Sunday 6th March 2005
Song: Korn - Twist
I don't think I've got any metal fans who read this, but I was interested enough to want to comment anyway.
Purely because I was pretty bored here and had iPod in hand, I decided to listen to old Korn songs. As I had just finished (given up trying) what I was doing, I thought I'd head over to www.kornweb.com and read the lyrics as I listened. I can still remember nearly all of their first four albums, but still... However, I then saw what I didn't actually believe at first.
"Head Leaves Korn"
Could it be?! After having been together about 12 years, that finally, Korn have lost a member. What's worse though is what followed:
"Korn has parted ways with guitarist Brian "Head" Welch who has chosen the Lord Jesus Christ as his savior, and will be dedicating his musical pursuits to that end. Korn respects Brian's wishes and hopes he finds the happiness he is searching for"
"Now they're just joking", I thought... but apparently not.
Anyway, I've not really had much of an interest in Korn in a while, which is a shame. But it's not my fault... they just got crap. I get so bored, trying to listen to their newer albums. Still though, as I am now, I enjoy their older stuff. They did kind'a go off track a bit though. Here's what Kerrang said last October:
"In 1994 five freaks from California revolutionised metal... In 2004 they have no record deal, and a frontman more interested in making porn films than making music"
Sad but true... Jon Davis always was a bit perverted, but shy and quiet. Now he's going out (are they married yet?) with an ex-lesbian porn star. I expect he's a bit more comfortable with things now, heh. He's still on the antidepressants, last I heard, but seems to be doing better.
It's a shame in many ways, that their albums got worse, but I guess at least the people're happier. Though Fieldy never will be black, despite his wishes.
I still think it's quite impressive how they formed... one guitarist had cut off the end of his finger as a kid, and played guitar as a way to rehab it. The other guitarist and the bassist were in a band before, and wanted to form a new band. So they got in touch with this guy with the cut off finger on the basis he had long hair. Then they advertised for a drummer and got David who was about 14 at the time and had to get his mum to drop him off at band practice. Then they found Jonathan singing in a club with his old band SexArt, and they all were impressed by his voice, so eh.
I want the '90s Korn back. :(
"I scream without a sound
How could you take away
Everything that I was
Made me your fucking slave
Your face that I despise
Your heart inside that's grey
I came today to say
You're fucked in every way..."
Friday 4th March 2005
Be warned kids... they're now cracking down on filesharing people in the UK.
Click here for more info.
Thursday 3rd March 2005
Song: No Use For A Name - Coming Too Close
I'm tired. Yesterday saw a trip to London with Mary to see Tegan And Sara. I was quite looking forward to this, having never seen T&S before. I was not dissapointed. Quite impressed by how many lyrics I'd picked up off the new album too. But eh, aside from a few stupid fans, "I LOVE YOU SARA!", it was all good. :)
Then got home late, went to bed late, got up far too early. Was at uni by 9, didn't actually do anything at all. I did though, have a few questions answered, so I should at least now be able to do the work over the weekend (as it's due Monday) by myself.
Then homeward bound for a trip to the dentist. I'm sure everyone knows by now, that dentists frighten me. He seems like a really nice guy and all... but his choice of career was awful. So I went in, scared as always, and soon went in to see him. He scratched and poked around like they do, and everything seemed to be going well. But then... at the point where he usually says that everything's okay and he'll see me in six months, he said he wants to take a few X rays... I wanted to die. :(
He didn't tell me what they were for, so naturally I assumed the worst, but went with him anyway. Now, I've had many X rays of my mouth done before... but this time it was different. Before I've had my head put in the middle of this big machine which rotates around me, taking a picture of each side of my jaw. All the while, I'm biting on a bit of plastic to keep me in place. I assume you've all had this too, so anyway... I have no complaints with X rays on the whole, as they don't hurt. It's about the only thing that's medically related that I have no fear of at all (aside from a small dose of radiation each time, heh). So anyway, I'm happily expecting him to take me to one of these machines, but no... He starts trying to put this thing in my mouth. I assume some/most of you loyal readers will know what I'm on about, but it was basically this little thing on a stick that was shaped so that the thing could be inserted into my mouth, while the handle stuck out the side. So he's sticking it in, and it feels reeeally uncomfortable, and I found it hard to breathe (very much like having an impression made of my teeth. I *really* hated those). He then just about gets it in, pushes a little bit further, then I gagged, coughed a bit from not breathing properly, and luckily he pulled it out. I felt so useless. :\
So what he did then (as I said, he is a nice guy...) was he gave it to me, and asked me to put it in myself. It was still a bit uncomfortable as I think it was a bit too big for my mouth (dug into my jaw while I was biting on it) but I did get it in. This was though after I'd asked a few questions as to where it's meant to go, etc. So I felt pretty stupid by this point, but it seemed a lot easier when I was doing it, so he took this X ray, then gave me another one to do the otherside with, which wasn't too hard either. He then told me to wait in the waiting room for five minutes, which I did. And panicked a lot...
I was planning on asking him quite what he was looking for when I went back in five minutes (I at least like to know what's happening if I'm gonna have painful things done to me). So I'm waiting and it feels like forever, as my oral fate is being decided. In the end, one of the nurse people (do they even do anything at doctor's surgery's, aside from giving stickers to kids?) came out and said I was okay to go, and to come back in six months. So first thought... relief. But then I really wanted to know what he was looking for. I suspect it was those back teeth that I've forgotten the name of, but I'll never know...
So anyway, all in all, there was nothing wrong as usual (Lord help me the day there is). So back home to waste a few hours, and then I was off back to London with Mary. This time to see Straylight Run. I felt like they'd been shunned a bit as so much attention and pre-gig excitementd had been given to T&S, but I've known their songs longer, so eh. It was all good though. I was very tired still from late night and early morning, but it was definately worth it. The support were quite good, if not a little too emo at times. But most importantly, Straylight Run were brilliant. It was much better than last year when they were Brand New's support, as they didn't seem very well received there. I think they're definately the sort of band who really shine when you see them live though.
Anyway, I'm completely knackered now, and just need to get to bed, but I lost the bathroom to my dad while writing this. Poo.