No more than meets the eye.

Writing about web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/markkermode/2009/06/transformers_190609.html

I watched the first (live action) Transformers film at the weekend. This occurred as a result of my being asked if I would like to go and see it's sequel at the cinema and replying that I hadn't seen the first one. The theory being to watch the fist one then I could decide whether I felt the second one would be worth attending a cinema for. I can sum up the first film in just two words: Utterly ridiculous. I've just discovered that Mark Kermode has reviewed the second film using no words at all.

Mike Willis : 24 Jun 2009 13:36 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

943,598?

Writing about web page http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/elections/euro/09/html/ukregion_999999.stm

943,598?!

Mike Willis : 08 Jun 2009 12:55 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Vote! (For someone other than the BNP)

About ten minutes ago I voted for the first time. It's somewhat shocking and somewhat shameful, that it's taken me this long. I'm not really sure why I haven't before. I almost voted in the last general election but then didn't. I've given excuses like not knowing who to vote for and that an ill educated vote is as bad, or worse than, not voting. Which doesn't sound terribly convincing. Or the old deeply cynical stand by of how they're all as bad as each other and it doesn't really matter who gets in because everyone will end up complaining about them in the end anyway and then vote them out in favour of whoever's so hot right now.

I'd actually forgotten about the election today, despite having literally driven past my polling station that I can see from my front door on the way home. Then I saw a Tweet from a friend that said "have to vote today to keep the racists out". This in turn reminded me of my housemate telling me recently that he's heard some news story about the percentage of people who claimed they were going to vote for the BNP in the upcoming (today's) Election. I forget the figure but it was high enough that if truly reflective of the population then there is something seriously wrong in this country. So I got off my ass, walked a few hundred meters and voted for someone other than the racists. I'm not aware of the specific policies of who I voted for, or indeed for anyone else on the ballot. (Labour did put a leaflet through my door specifically telling me not to vote for the Conservatives but presumably they have some sort of policy beyond that.) So it could be argued that I voted from a position of ignorance. But if someone in the same constituency as me was stupid enough to vote BNP I cancelled them out, and that's good enough for me.

The ballot paper being in alphabetical order, the BNP was at the top. Second on the list was something called  Christian Party and I now find myself wondering about that. I'd probably vote for them over the BNP, assuming they're not the sort of Christians featured on US news networks explaining why they won't vote for Obama because he's an Arab/A Terrorist/Wrong kind of Christian/Isn't an American, but Religion seems almost as bad a political platform in it's own way as not liking people who's skin isn't 'white' enough.

Mike Willis : 04 Jun 2009 20:25 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Whiff

Glade Plugin scents they should sell but don't: Toast.

Mike Willis : 29 May 2009 15:06 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

got cli?

Writing about web page http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes

Someone told me about this site the other day. Well worth checking out if you're *nix command line inclined. It also reminded me of something which isn't actually commandlinefu at all really, just delightfully pointless. Namely that you can watch Star Wars (Episode VI) in ASCII animation via telnet:

$ telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

I had quite a collection of ASCII asciimation around 15 years ago. Back in the days when websites were still something of a novelty. When telnet was still an acceptable method of connecting to remote hosts over the Internet as SSH hadn't been invented. Long before the invention of bittorrent and material of a binary nature could be obtained by downloading sticking together than decoding a bunch of uuencoded posts on a usenet group, provided you had the bandwidth and patience to do so. Before email was sullied by the introduction of HTML formatting, clients which allow you to tag the message as being 'urgent' and ~95% of it became spam. And all this was fields...

Mike Willis : 25 May 2009 11:59 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Another one bites the dust

Writing about web page http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/19/sarah_connor_chronicles/

Fox has announced that it's terminated The Sarah Connor Chronicles after two series, the Hollywood Reporter reports.

Another decent show cancelled by FOX without being given a chance to tie up it's story line. FOX seems to have very little respect for the shows it airs, or the people who watch them.

Mike Willis : 19 May 2009 13:06 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

As opposed to counterfeit.

I find myself wondering why was it felt necessary to state that the lemons used were real. As far as I'm aware something is either a lemon or it is not a lemon. There is no middle ground, nothing at which one could point and say 'this may at first appear to be a lemon, but upon closer examination it is in fact not a real lemon but an inferior product with a much lower production cost and correspondingly lower build and component quality'. Lemons aren't produced in Chinese factories where the owner sells the blueprints to someone who then sets up their own factory producing counterfeit lemons. Lemons aren't like iPods of Levi's jeans. They're not a manufactured product, they grow on trees. As such I fail to see how they can be anything other than real.

Mike Willis : 17 May 2009 12:29 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Jacqui Smith's secret plan to carry on snooping

Writing about web page http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6211101.ece

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said Smith’s announcement appeared to be a “smokescreen”.

“We opposed the big brother database because it gave the state direct access to everybody’s communications. But this network of black boxes achieves the same thing via the back door,” Chakrabarti said.

Jacqui, Jacqui, Jacqui. I could probably write quite a lot about what I think of you and your ideas. But it's late and I'm tired so I'll just say that everytime I see your name mentioned in the news it's attached to something which adds to my dislike of you and that I hope to see you removed from a position of power at the earliest available opportunity.

Mike Willis : 03 May 2009 23:38 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

These people aren't your friends, they're paid to kiss your feet.

Writing about web page http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article6149245.ece

I've always loathed X-Factor. Even before the heinous crime against music that was the ultimate result of the last series for which someone really should have been severally punished. So I can't help but be drawn to an article that describes how the X-Factor machine chews up it's contestants.

Ben Mills (third, 2006), whose fansite offers window wobblers and T-shirts bearing the slogan Fama Semper Vivat (may his fame last for ever), was also signed briefly to Syco. He describes recording several songs he “absolutely hated” and digs out a royalty statement. “Every time someone buys my album I get 0.2p."

One of Simon Cowell's cars is a Bugatti Veyron.

Mike Willis : 26 Apr 2009 10:51 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Adventures in Perl: Part 1.

I decided recently that I'd make some effort to learn Perl. I've long been aware of it but have never found the need or inclination to use it. When I've had cause to do server side stuff for web content I've used PHP. For general *nix scripting I've coped with Bash, GNU core utils, sed and the like. On a couple of occasions recently I've found myself trying to do something which seems clumsy or just pretty much impossible in Bash etc and thought, now is the time to look at Perl. I should probably work through some sort of 'learn perl' guide at some point, I acquired a couple of O'Reilly books recently, but I'm currently taking the brute force and ignorance approach of having something I want to do and trying to do it in Perl aided by many Google searches. Some thoughts thus far:

• There is no built in function for removing trailing and leading whitespace from a string. Sure it's easy enough to do it with regular expressions, but I'm surprised there's no pre-defined function like PHP's trim().
  
• Lack of boolean variables. Though I'm not sure that's the right way to say it. You can't say my $blah=true or my $blah=false like you can do in JavaScript and PHP. You can use 1 or 0 though which is just as good really I guess.
  
• I've struggled with arrays quite a bit. Things like trying to work out how to reference the required element and how to get the contents of an array rather than a reference to it. Nothing insurmountable though and I've made it difficult by wanting to use an associative array each element of which is another associative array some elements of which are list arrays.
• I really should find out what a scalar is. I keep encountering references to them but haven't bothered to actually find out what one is.

Mike Willis : 14 Apr 2009 19:18 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem