Sign the “Thank you, Poland!” letter

Merry Christmas everyone! I got back into Edinburgh tonight after a very nice time at home with my parents and sister. It mainly involved eating lots of very nice food and drinking lots of very nice champagne/wine/beer. Got a good haul of presents and seemed to come back with more stuff than I went with! We also managed to fit in some super-early sales shopping in Middlebrough. I got a really nice winter coat half price in Burtons and some new dressy shoes that I’ve been needing for a while in M&S.

I’ve got three days at work now as part of the “skeleton crew” just incase anything really hits the fan. Then its new year!

Had some enjoyable drinks after work last night in the Merlin. Good few people went and everyone was in a good mood. I’m off to finish packing and then catch the train home now (far too early!). Have a good Christmas everyone!

James from work/uni is getting married (at last) to Catriona. Of course, being a geek and fellow web nut he had to setup a wedding website complete with wordpress powered blog. Oh yeah and he stole my stylesheet: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” 🙂

I still have a heap of gmail invites and three brand new o2 sim cards. If anyone want anything, just leave me a comment. Merry Xmas!

Half-life 2 seems to have swept the board at Edge magazines awards this year. Winning ‘Best Game’, ‘Most Innovative’ and ‘Best Visual Design’. Strange, as I always think of Edge as very console biassed. From Guardian Gamesblog.

Chris Justus has dissected the Google Suggest Javascript code that I blogged about earlier. It’s very cool stuff, it uses an embedded http-xml component to communicate with google’s servers as you type. The results are then displayed dynamically with some clever javascript key handlers to help navigation. I first read about Google Suggest over on the Google Blog, where it started as one guys personal project. At google they’re allowed to spend 20% of their time at work on any project they choose. That is so cool.

Dumped a load of (kinda) recent images onto UrbanArt. Also made the front page a bit more responsive and useable. Check it out.

An Interesting chat with SCEE’s Executive Vice President of Development Phil Harrison about the origins and growth of the Playstation:
Guardian Unlimited Gamesblog

I finally finished reading this fantastic book the other night: The Second World War by John Keegan. It’s taken me quite a while, mainly as I stopped reading for a bit whilst I was “flat limbo”. It was a fantastic, if very long read. I’ve always been interested in war in general and so especially in WW2. But, I hadn’t really read a book that covered the whole thing. Keegan very clevery manages to break down the different styles of warfare and the different regions that the conflict took place in. He covers the massive tank battles at Kursk, the ‘island hopping’ marines in the Pacific and much, much more. I’d recommend it to anyone wanting to read a history of the war.

I’ve finally cobbled together some kind of ‘About’ section, you can get to it over on the right there. In it you’ll also find the “design archive” (pretentious enough?) of past cyber-junky layouts. My amazon wishlist if also now linked from the sidebar, as is a paypal link and a brand new section of Projects. At the moment urbanart is the only one but I hope to get a few more up soon, including:

• A demo of my ‘Collaborative Online Document Management Framework’ dissertation project
• More amazon xml api searching fun
• My latest toy, an online task list manager
• Fun with php image generation
• and much, much more…

Very Cool

Last Saturday Kerry and I went to see the Beastie Boys live at the SECC in Glasgow. First time I’d seen them and the first time I’d been the SECC. The gig was amazing, we had a good spot quite near the front and managed to avoid the drunken beer-throwing and crushing that went on in the middle. They started with a huge screen showing what was happening back-stage. Some roadies were wheeling a big case up to the stage, smiling and slapping and pointing at it. They brought it up the stage, opened it and Mixmaster Mike jumped out and lept up to the DJ booth. He then did some amazing turntablist trickery for a bit including the “5-4-3-2-1” countdown from Thunderbirds (genius) and then the Beasties came jumping on to the stage in matching adidas tracksuits. It was a great show starting with them doing their “3 MCs and 1 DJ” style stuff. Then they went off the stage leaving Mike in the DJ booth. Then the booth disappeared backwards and a huge stage/float thing was wheeled around from the back with a whole band on it, plus the Beasties all in really bad suits. They then did a few of their more instrumental tracks before the stage did some more trickey and reverted back to DJ booth/dancing space. Amazing night in all, even though it took us 3 hours to get home.

Review here from the Independent.

And another from the Guardian.

And a last one from the Times.

Anyone looking for a cheap old skool car in amazingly pristine condition? My flatmate Ben is selling his Vauxhall Chevette.

It was the the Playstations 10th birthday yesterday. 10 years, wow. I can still remember the first time I saw one in use, it was pretty damn impressive for the time. It had loads of fast moving 3d stuff, amazing cd sound and the actual console looked good. Speaking of which, I like the new Playstation3 logo a lot:

Sony’s graphic design is always very nice.

• bittorrent changing lanes
• father ted bittorrent christmassy
• kerazy bittorrent
• shag tag edinburgh
• p0wned

Netscape? Whoah, everyone thought you were dead! But damn! The new you is u-g-l-y: http://gemal.dk/misc/nsb05.png

“The new Netscape is based on Firefox, but with a twist – it includes support for switching to Microsoft’s IE engine.”

Oh dear god…

Last Friday I went to my first Thanksgiving dinner kindly hosted by Jed (aka Neil) at his and Ian’s place. There were a few initial delays but we had plenty of wine to keep us occupied and when we got to the food it was delicous. He’d cooked a huge turkey (that had apprently taken an age to defrost) and to go with it we had sweet potatoes, stir-fried sprouts with almonds (very nice), stuffing, gravy and a carroty type salad which was curiously nice. We polished all that off with strawberry cheesecake and chocolate roulade, and some belt slackening…

A couple of gallery updates to feast your eyes on. The first is from Jed’s birthday party about a month ago which was rather hilariously fancy dress. See if you can work out who everyone was supposed to be (sorry about the lack of focus).

Jed’s Birthday Gallery

The second is from when my parents were up visiting about three weeks ago. We took them along to the Falkirk wheel which is pretty impressive and looks good in photos (see then new header image).

Falkirk Wheel Gallery

Wow. Just….wow. I was up untill 3:30am last night playing possibly one of the finest action games of all time. It’s just mind blowingly polished in everything it does, you just know that Valve have tweaked, tested and optimised every possible facet of the experience. It really is getting close to the convergence product of an “interactive movie” that we keep hearing about. There are no cut scenes, a interface that is minimalist to the extreme and a world that is so full of possibilities that it is a joy to play. The story is just brilliant, it picks up from the end of Half-Life 1 and drops you into this Easterm European soviet-chic police state (1984 style) with no explantation of why you are there, how you got there or what you have to do next. It is left to the player to use their imagination to explore and interact with the surroundings and maybe guess at what is going on.

The physics are just plain fun. Barrels, boxes, tables, chairs, radiators, phones; everything can be moved around, smashed, burnt, blown up, thrown, stacked, floated, catapulted…It’s just sublimely fun. And the graphics! Oh man! I thought my PC would struggle (1.4 Athlon, 512 RAM, Gf4) but it’s coping surprisingly well at 1024×768 and rendering the Half-Life 2 world beautifully. Birds fly from rooftops, smoke and mist hangs around creepily and custard yellow paint peels from apartment block walls. Water effects are brilliant and don’t turn my pc to treacle. Reflections, frosted glass, sun streaming in through windows, and sheets of glass breaking gradually all look amazing. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the following screenshots taken whilst playing. I’ll try and get better ones up later but most of the time I’m too engrossed to bother pressing the screenshot key.

GameSoc had it’s AGM last week and the new committee is now in full effect. No one else wanted to be the WebMaster so I volunteered to stand again and was duly elected. This year I’m gonna try and put my stamp on the site by stripping out a lot of junk we never use. We never use the forum, the front page needs a re-design and the colour scheme is looking a little dated. On major task would be to make the whole site standards compliant. Not as easy as it sounds, as most of the pages are generated by the back end so it means lots of hacking around in php files. I should really write some kind of numpties guide to the backend aswell as I’m not going to be doing this forever.

Oh baby, how I have missed you! Sweet, sweet internet is back! BT finally activated our ADSL connection today and ben ninja-ed ISA server into action on our server PC. Oh man, its good to back on the bit torrent wagon, running the IM clients, constantly polling everyone’s RSS feed. I don’t know how I survived without it really, I’m sure Kerry saw I lot more of me though.

We have a phone line at last and luckily we same to be on the ADSL register immediately. I’ll be signing us up to force9 1MB tonight I think.

Firefox have at last released verion one of their fantastic browser. They also raised the funds to have a full page, full colour ad in the New York Times basically telling people that IE is rubbish and that they should switch. I like their style. Go! Download it now!

Fred Dibnah has died 🙁

I loved his programs on TV mainly becuase of his endless enthusiasm towards any kind of mechanical system. Fred, you’ll be missed.

Thanks to everyone who came along on Friday night, it was really good fun and more people than I expected turned up! I’ve got some pics on my camera somewhere that I’ll dig out later.

Froogle have recently launched in the UK and at work we’ve hopped on the bandwagon with me developing a froogle feed backend. You can view all of our products here or one of my favourite products here. Now….its party time.

Lloyds have re-designed their web presence and finally moved away from the very clunky table fest that is was before. It’s totally css and not a table in site now, nice. Not sure if I like the actual layout though, there is an awful lot of white space at the top and it never seems to quite fit on the “first scroll” of my browser.

John Peel has died from a heart attack while on holiday in Peru.

I got a mobile bill for £103 yesterday.
Apparently I was “on an old tariff” and was getting charged more than double the data rate than normal. Numpties…

I went to get my eyes tested on Saturday for the first time in at least four years. I was amazed to find that my eye-sight was not drastically failing. One eye had got slightly worse but only by 0.25 which is the smallest unit they measure in (apparently). I need some new frames anyway so I went ahead and got some nice neat ones and a free pair of sunglasses aswell. Thank goodness for credit cards, blimey glasses are not cheap!

Ben and I are at last having our super-cool flat warming this Friday from 8pm onwards. We’ll provide the snacks and mixers if you provide some alcohol 🙂 Drop me a line if you need directions or don’t know where the new flat is.

Well, I got the access logs from my parent hosting company (who were vey helpful) and it seems the first accesses all came from IP addresses assigned to Romanian ISPs. Pesky Romanians…. I’ve googled around a bit for this ‘zloboz’ name and came up with one of their scam emails here. It’s based off a different site but it looks like the same kind of scam, they must have hacked quite a few sites to base their pages at. It also looks like they didn’t have everything configured properly as there are lots of errors in the logs about php scripts being unable to write to local files. The numpties didn’t setup the file permissions properly! So, any information they did harvest from the silly people who filled in their details is lost in the void 🙂

Many, many thanks to James and his excellent Ripped Tickets service for letting me know that Beastie Boys tickets for Glasgow were going to be released. I didn’t even know there was a Glasgow gig! I quickly checked the Beasties site and saw there was a ‘fans only’ link through to ticketweb where you could buy them online. Two days before they went on general sale! I snatched two tickets up sharp-ish as the London tickets sold out in less than 24 hours. Kerry and I have been wanting to see them live for a while, it’s gonna roXor 🙂

This new programme on BBC2 look very interesting in our increasingly different world.

Our new flat has a phone line but it has never been activated. This means we have to get BT to ‘install’ a line before we can get it even activated. Ben called them up and they can’t send an engineer until the 5th of November. BT really do suck. So, no phone line for at least three weeks, then we’ll have to wait for it to appear on the ADSL register, and then we have the wait to get ADSL installed and then activated from force9. For the moment I’m surviving with brief doses of GPRS ‘net via my phone and bluetooth to my PC. Wonderful thing technology.

Urge to kill rising…….

Some little toe-rag had hacked into my site and was hosting some kinda ebay-credit-card scamming pages! Godamn! I was browsing my access logs (as you do) and noticed some strange hits to a directory called ‘zloboz’. Strange, don’t remember uploading anything called that. Uh-oh… I immediately deleted the files, which was really stupid thinking back as I could have seen what he was up to with the data. Anyway, I’ve since changed my passwords and checked the email accounts, aliases, databases, cron, redirects, everything. Just in case he’d left some sneaky stuff anywhere else.

Anyway, I’ve got the site backup from yesterday downloaded and I’m going to extract his naughty files and have a look at what he was upto. I’ll report my findings.

I finally got through to Lothian Buses lost property yesterday and amazingly they actually had my phone! I belted along on my lunch break today and got the pesky thing back. It was amazing how much I rely on it but don’t realise. All of yesterday I was saying “oh I’ll just text so-and-so”, “I’ll just give my parents a call” then going “oh, wait…”. I was also using the GPRS via Bluetooth to get on the net with my PC, no internet in the new flat yet. All I can say is thank you to who ever handed it in to the bus driver and thank you to Lothian for having an organised lost property service.

I managed to lose my mobile somewhere on the way to work yesterday. I suspect I left it on the first bus I got in the morning. I’ve been trying Lothian buses lost property all day but they seem rather tricksy to get hold of :(. So it’s email only contact for the mean time. Not having a landline or internet in the new flat is also complicating things.

Well, the move went reasonable well. Apart from the van rental company screwing us over on the morning… We went along to pick up the van and apparently they had ‘cancelled the reservation’, without telling us…. Very helpful! Jed and I then had to waste about two hours frantically calling around town to find another van. We eventually got one at Condor which was actually cheaper than the intial place. It took three trips to get all of my stuff over and we managed to fit in a very long (and expensive) trip to Ikea aswell. Many, many thanks to Jed for driving the van and generally being a top geeza.

I should really fix this content div so that it has a min-height. When I get slack on the blogging front things start to get a bit messy. As you can see…

Ben and I finally picked up the keys to our new place on Monday :). I’ve managed to get tomorrow off Work to move all my junk over. I’ve hired a van and the ever helpful Jed has volunteered to drive as I still haven’t got my license yet. Everything is pretty much still in boxes so it should only take a couple of trips in the van. Hopefully we’ll have time left to pop to Ikea for a ‘few things’.

Got to get ADSL sorted in the place aswell. Force9 2MB is looking very tempting…

Woo-woo. Looks like Ben and I have secured the flat we wanted. We’re going along to the agency on Monday to sign things and pick up the keys 🙂 :). Now, I’ve just got to move all my junk in…

Hands up who’d rather have a whole load of wind turbines over a nuclear reactor. Sign here: embrace the revolution.

A while ago at work my colleague Alex discovered something in css that none of us knew.

When assigning a class to a div like so:

<div class="blah">...</div>

You can choose more than one class:

<div class="blah anotherclass andanotherclass">...</div>

This is incredibly helpful at times. I even used it in the re-design of the site here. The rollover images down at the bottom use this technique. There is a generic class that does the rollover background image changes and then more specific classes so that the image to use can be specified. Neato stuff.

Looks like Ben and I may have finally found a flat. Now we’ve just got the get the 8 billion (4) required references together before someone else snaps it up…

Kerry and I went to see Hellboy last night and damn it was good. I read the graphic novels a few months back and was pretty impressed. The stories have everything you’d want: nazis, the occult, general mythology, demons, secret government projects, more nazis, crazy nazis, clockwork nazis and some more bonkers nazis. I was pretty hooked and ploughed through all of the trade paperbacks quickly. Anyhoo, the film certainly lives up the novels and they didn’t tone it down a bit. Thankfully the crazy nazi characters are still there and have not been turned into comedy villains (a la Indiana Jones). Ron Perlman was made for this role, its just like they painted him red and he became hellboy. Great fun, although I’m amazed it’s only rated 12, in places it’s pretty nasty.

Just remembered, there was a trailer for Blade 3 (trinity) on aswell. It actually looks pretty good. I really didn’t think the blade franchise would last long but I was impressed by the freshness of the Blade 2. Maybe they’ll pull it off again.

Some more very tasty Battlefield 2 screenshots revealed on ea games here.

Had a day off work today and decided to help out at the GameSoc Freshers LAN. There was an ok turnout but surprisingly most people were playing Wario-Ware on the Game Cube instead of playing Quake 3! It’s usually the other way around.

Pirate toilet roll! “Keeps Your Booty High And Dry” genius….

From the Pirate Bath Collection.