Archived News for July 2008
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Better Explained
betterexplained.com is really well written. It's worth a read even if you think you know your way around imaginary numbers, or e, if only because the way they explain things might help you explain them.
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Wrong Number
Thursday night, the phone rang. I went to answer it, but it stopped before I got there. Then started ringing again. I answered "Hello, Dominic speaking" – my usual greeting only because I'm usually mistaken for somebody else (with startling frequency).
The caller was a man who sounded as if he were in his late forties. He quickly gave his name, which I sha'n't repeat, and explained that he didn't want me to be worried by his call. He was trying to phone a woman, he said, who may have put a "block" on his calls. He seemed to think that the block may have made his calls transfer to other people.
He stressed that I needn't be worried about the reasons for the block. In fact, he stressed it a little too much, to the point where I started to be worried. I guess his intentions were quite reasonable; he figured he'd be calling a number of times, and that I'd be alarmed if I received that number of wrong-number calls.
He called again a couple of days later. Once I answered, I pretty quickly recognized his voice, and the call ended politely. But just tonight he called again, and this time when I answered he immediately hung up. That presents a number of questions:
Is he dialing the same number each time? If so, is it my number? And does he expect to be connected to a different line? — is that why he keeps trying? And why hang up when I answer if he's explained himself already?
The thing is, I think I understand that he might be so desperate as to continue calling whatever number he has, even after the woman he's seeking has decided to get a block placed on his calls. I don't identify with that, or think it's OK - but I'm happy to reserve judgement on that front. However if he's calling my home phone number every time and expecting to somehow reach her, that's just crazy. The phone exchange isn't a lottery.
Next time he calls I think I'll ask. And if it turns out to be my number, I'll ask him to stop. More news, as it happens, although the whole thing reminds me of Dimitri.
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Barcamp Auckland 2
Don't know if I'll be able to resist live-blogging this. All the cool kids are doing it (via Twitter, I guess)
I went to:
- Mike Cochrane's talk on distributed microblogging.
- Pretty interesting. I think I'll start microblogging only once I can build a standard implementation of it into my own sites (like I did with OpenID and this site).
- Steven Ellis' talk on trac.
- I've never really liked trac, but do I really like the idea of pulling active, assigned tickets into Eclipse with Mylin.
- I've never really liked trac, but do I really like the idea of pulling active, assigned tickets into Eclipse with Mylin.
- Mike's talk on OpenID and the Open Social Graph.
- Quickly turned into cost-benefit analysis of OpenID itself. Kinda got out of hand.
- Quickly turned into cost-benefit analysis of OpenID itself. Kinda got out of hand.
- Richard Vowles on Groovy and Grails.
- Interesting because I got to see Java guys' reactions to things that are fairly commonplace in the languages most people use to do web development.
prepared statements -> not susceptible to SQL injection. But that doesn't mean:not using prepared statements -> susceptible to SQL injection.
- Interesting because I got to see Java guys' reactions to things that are fairly commonplace in the languages most people use to do web development.
- Show and tell
- Dontcom
- Widgets
- etc.
- Mike's talk on mobile/cellphone tech.
Oh, and look. It's 0.017 seconds of me!
- Mike Cochrane's talk on distributed microblogging.
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Word of the day
imbricate:
- As an adjective: regularly arranged so as to overlap.
- As a verb: to arrange as such.
The other elements such as the form tag and the submit button will need to be added by the developer. This might not look obvious at first, but we will see later how useful and easy it is to imbricate forms. — Symfony 1.1 Forms Documentation
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Games!
I'm pretty slack, I haven't done much on my projects. My bro has been staying, so the last week or so has been pretty busy.
I have been really enjoying some video games. The Playstation 3 has just introduced this concept of 'Trophies', which I'm really excited about. The only game I have that supports it is Super Stardust HD, so I'm trying to get all of the trophies in that, but unfortunately I need a lot more practice! -
Vincent Moon and La Blogothèque
Really fantastic music videos of every song on Beirut's Flying Club Cup album. My favourite from the Brooklyn lot is Forks and Knives (below), although some of the ones shot in Paris are pretty neat too. Cherbourg was shot in a parking lot full of ice cream trucks!
Here's one by Arcade Fire, also with Vincent Moon.
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How's this for microblogging
At Ben's place. Watching QI.
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Fixed!
When Dominic updated our server to Symfony 1.1 earlier in the week, the project details page stopped working. It was a really minor error on my part, but I finally got around to fixing it. I had to upgrade my development environment, and get it all working before I could track down the problem. Everything is good now though. I hope my whole weekend is as productive as it's started out! -
RSS!
I've just implemented an RSS feed of my blog! I've never used an RSS feed before, so I'm not sure if my implementation is particularly useful. Dominic was asking me for one so he could syndicate my blog over at Something Emporium. If you want to check out this awesome feed, it's over here. -
Power Supply!
I've finally finished building the power supply I've been working on for a while. It's good to finally 100% finish a project. And it's a prerequisite to finishing my balancing project. I've started a project page for it, and writing it up. I took some photos before I screwed the box up, so I'll be able to put those up too, as well as some photos of the finished product. Awesome! -
downforeveryoneorjustme.com
A natural extension of sites like istwitterdown.com, downforeveryoneorjustme.com provides the general case. With a pretty attractive interface, and a good sense of humour*, I think I'll be using it quite often.
* — they've thought of everything!