So, I finally got round to upgrading the gallery on this website. Click on the side reference to gallery for pictures of my baptism etc. I’ve managed to use the wpg2 stuff to embed it in this blog. Also put up my baptism testimony.
Category Archives: Computers
Computer related articles
Cooooool – play Risk with Google Maps…
Wow – the only proper use of Google maps: a Risk game. It’s still a bit flaky but could turn out to be really cool. Imagine multi-player and some better representation of people. This again shows some of the features of “AJAX”; although why this has suddenly caught on is a mystery to me as the technology has been around in decent browsers for years.
In other news, I spent yesterday at lectures and doing work etc. Had a nice meet-up with Cheng-shi – he’s going travelling around England this next week apparently. I went to CU (well the Bible study part anyway) and saw Crells again – not seen him in a while. Toby came round to spend the night on my floor. Just a usual day with not much happening…
Computers and parties
Had a nice day today. On Monday I’d booked another appointment for Wednesday on the instructions of the nurse. The conversation went something like “I’ve been told to get another appointment for the nurse on Wednesday” “Ok, is 9am ok?” “Yes” “OK, 9am Wednesday”. I therefore got up at 7:30 (the earliest yet this week) especially for this. I went to the surgery and after several minutes of them searching their systems to try to find a trace of my appointment, they discovered that it had been booked for Thursday… Oh well. This meant that I got a reasonably early start to work as I had walked home by 9:10.
I spent the rest of the day working on our home cluster succeeding in upgrading virtually everything on it in an attempt to get samba working with windows 2000. I finally succeeded and then set up a test network with several domains and so on, to prove that we could use different networks for the office and home. It’s always nice when something you’ve been working on for a while works properly, although I’m sure we’ll have more problems in further days as this is the nature of computers…
In the evening, I went to Rachel Coward’s with lots of our ex youth-group and some other nice people. We had a top-rate evening with a candle-lit supper cooked by the remaining two Coward girls and then chocolate fondu. Following Rachel’s visit to a funeral director’s today there was about an hour-long talk about death and funerals which according to the “how to act in England” book in China, was one of the things you must not talk about over dinner. It didn’t feel strange anyway, especially as we were all Christians and I really cannot understand why anyone would want all these special coffins and fancy arrangements… it’s not like anyone’s going to see it anyway!
The genius of googlebombing…
Just read this article up at the bbc about how people have manipulated google so that a search for ‘failure’ or ‘miserable failure’ leads to the biography of Bush…
Today
Spent a day doing some research. I’ve created a research page here so if you click on the research button on the side and then click on “Psalms of Solomon” you’ll be able to find links to various notes and other things which I’m working on at the moment, if you’re interested in that stuff. I’ll put the dissertation itself up there as well as it evolves.
I went to the doctor’s earlier today to get my arm dressing changed, which was quite a faff. To start off, I had to fill in several forms stating that I was temporally resident at home. Apparently they can’t work it so that I am resident in two places at once… Anyway after quite a bit of form filling (although not as much as in China, I’m sure) I finally went through to see the nurse. The wound seems to be healing quite well so she put some more antiseptic on and then put a plaster on. However, apparently today my arms are just not sticky. We tried holding the plaster down for about 5 minutes while blowing on it and so on (apparently heat makes it stick?!). Finally we gave up on that plaster and she got out what looked like a sheet of selotape and she said this was the stickiest plaster in the world or something, and that fell off. Finally she got another type of plaster and tried sticking it on. It didn’t stick but she just quickly put the tube-grip back on my arm and pushed me out of the door before it could fall off a third time. I wonder how I can get sticky arms…
Wendy and Darrel came this evening, we had dinner with them (after my mother forgot they were coming and had to cook a dinner at 5 minutes notice!) and then told them about China.
Heard that Lillian and Lindsey (from our China team) are coming over from the states during November! Yay – it will be good to see those guys again 🙂 Also got an invitation to my cousin Jonathan’s wedding in December – should be fun.
I’ve been very impressed with unison a tool which synchronises two trees of files – it seems to handle deletes and changes on both ends very well; I’ve been using in for the past few weeks to keep my laptop and home computer in sync and it really works – I was fearing I’d have to start running a SVN like subversion or CVS to keep my stuff in order.
Also started re-learning French, German and Greek grammer. I learnt the French verb conjugations in 7 tenses for the 3 standard types of verb because we were never really taught it properly in school; it was much easier than I remember it being. Also started reading Mark in Greek as it turns out I didn’t do well enough to be able to do the fun advanced Greek course next year so I have to do Mark’s gospel instead… Oh well.
Back home again
Had a wonderful night last night at Jesus college grad formal. The food seemed much nicer than normal formal and to cap it all we had a cheese course as well as pudding. The main course was salmon which apparently Patrick has been eating for the past week due to the “Buy 1 get 1 free” at Sainsburys. We lived the past few days on such offers which was one of the reasons I got through 15 chocolate-chip cookies yesterday… The other reason was that they were delicious.
Anyway, I’ve just got home and written a little bit of code to change the picture at the top of this page. There are now 5 different pictures that you could get, so keep hitting refresh until you’ve cycled through them all 🙂 I’ve also changed the layout of this website and put a few new pages up detailing some of my research and perhaps putting up some of my lecture notes etc..
Also, isn’t the internet amazing? My supervisor recommended a PhD thesis to me last night about the Psalms of Solomon, just giving me a title and an author. Using this I worked out it was written in Durham and checked the library up there to see if they had the book; which they did. They can’t lend it to the UL in Cambridge so I managed to find out that the author is now working in Hawaii. I went to that website, found his email address and he’s now sent me a copy of his 250 page PhD thesis over email… Amazing.
Reading, hacking, sleeping
Again a rather boring few days although I’ve been doing some interesting stuff. Read “Chasing the Dragon” which is a really awesome book about a Christian working with druggies in Hong Kong – a really recommended read. I’ve also just started re-reading “The fifth elephant” by Pratchett as I’ve not read anything by him in a while and I just love his books.
I also started writing a program to keep a list of friends I really ought to write a letter or email to – it stores a list of them and the last time I sent them something and the last time I received something from them and tells me who I should write to. Development with KDE is really easy and because of kabc I can integrate it with the photos and so on stored in the address book so the infomation retrieval is very simple… I’m actually starting to like C++ which is a very scary thought.
I spent yesterday fixing problems with the cluster at home. I built this last year and it worked reasonably throughout the year but broke recently. I’ve got dhcp with failover and dynamic dns updating running, and also failover samba, ldap syncing across the network and fixed a problem with zope that I couldn’t figure out last summer. Also been trying to fix some problems with drbd clustered disks. I found a really great tool for syncing my laptop to my computer called unison which seems to work very well. I’m always impressed by how easy it is to do such powerful things for free with linux. Now to start work on the office cluster I suppose.
mmmm Welsh leeks
Came across a really clever idea – a leak detector for IE. It’s amazing how some of these simplist ideas (both to come up with and to implament) are some of the best. Havn’t used IE in many years but still its very cool and should be straightforward to do in moz/konq or whatever other c++ browser people use. Really ought to get back onto this ‘AJAX’ programming circuit – was fascinated by it about 5 years ago but things have moved on rather a lot since then.
Last night was really cool – saw Sam, Lydia, Serena and Emma for a few minutes because they were doing some mad jazz revision thing/party. Then went to the Barn where there was an Irish evening. Never realized the Irish had such weird phrases – out of the four that they said, the only two that I could vaguely understand were “top o’th’man’n tu ya” and “wh’z th’craic?”. Had a good look at Acts 3:11-23 with Yumi, Rena and Felix.
Spent this morning trying to learn to remember historical facts so as to write essays for my Church History exam next week, and also been revising some of the Matthew’s gospel paper… I find that very difficult as well. For some reason all the gospels seem to blur into one in my head – it wasn’t really meant to be like that, otherwise the early church would have accepted one of the “condensed” versions (there were several floating around by about 200ad).
Found an article about removing Bible’s from hospitals for fear that they would a) offend people of other faiths and b) spread the superbug. I think the second option has been disproved and as for the first one – how does just having the offer of being able to read a Bible offend someone? As far as I understand, hospitals stock all sorts of different “holy books” so if you’re a Muslim in hospital it’s no difficulty to ask for a copy of the Qur’an. I’m sure that if Muslims wanted to start up a Gideons type organisation to put copies of the Qur’an by every hospital bed, people really wouldn’t have a problem with it. (However, Muslims might well have a problem with it because they have a much higher respect for the physical copy of the Qur’an than Christians do with the Bible; for example it’s considered very bad to put the Qur’an on the floor). It really is Political Correctness gone mad.
Sunday and Monday
Sunday was good fun. Got about 2 or 3 hours sleep on Saturday night for no apparent reason – I’d allowed myself about 7 hours to sleep but my body just didn’t want to. Went to church on Sunday morning and met up with Jim from Oxford which was good – hadn’t seen him in ages, and won’t see him all summer due to China. We then went to Jesus Green where the 30 or so Eden people were joined by the Holy Trinity student lunch, a few random StAG guys and the CLC posse were over the other side of the park. Thanks to Widge we had a BBQ though which was the highlight. There was a (i think 3-way) football match, some “French” cricket, frisby, rounders and then some ultimate frisby at the end (Jesus college vs). Then went home to have a shower and back to church for the evening service which was Marvin speaking on Jude 17-25.
Monday was very lazy – listened to some more NTW lectures and read through some essays I wrote. Started learning a bit of Haskell due to boredom and then started doing a mock test. I’d just got 1/4 of the way through when Ellie phoned me asking if I wanted to go to a jog; the former being worse than anything i accepted. Was really nice and sunny and we ran along the river to Fen Ditton. Took about an hour and 10 min but we did walk quite a bit. I really ought to do more jogging – a healthy body leads to a healthy mind and all that.
Found some cool links:
An ‘Open source’ Cola recipe… looks somewhat dangerous though, and cola is pretty minging.
A really sick piece of modern art which is a dead frog in formaldehyde spliced open with a web server and electrodes which lets you trigger its legs to jump, ovr the internet…
A DIY laser which is basically a spark-gap in the air which uses the nitrogen to generate the laser beam. Might give this one a try sometime.