Making the grade.

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/newsbeat/newsid_7575000/7575406.stm

I found this video linked from somewhere on the BBC News website. 8 DJs took GCSE Maths and the video shows them getting their results. Only one of them passed and they got a C with a mark of 28%. At 1:53 in you can see the boundaries for C through to A*. The cut off point for an A grade is 51%. 51. For an A. If you are barely more than half competent in GCSE level Maths then you get an A. For A*, the mickey mouse grade supposedly designed to distinguish the high achievers, the cut off is mere 65%.

Maybe I'm demonstrating a gross lack of understanding of how exams work but I find these figures quite appalling. How can 51% merit an A?

Apart from anything else it means the grading system is heavily bias towards those with low marks and high marks get little reward. If you get 100% you've effectively wasted 35% of your effort because you'll be given the same grade as someone who only got 65%. If grades were done away with and people just got given their percentage score instead then the person with 100% comes out looking a lot better than someone with 65%. And rightly so.

Mike Willis : 22 Aug 2008 13:30 |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

13th time lucky for L driver

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7499804.stm

Teresa Clarke is celebrating passing her driving test after 27 years with L plates. The 62-year-old from Norfolk has spent £15,000 on 450 hours of lessons from 20 different instructors.

Every now and then a story like this makes the news and it always makes me wonder whether there should be a limit on the number of driving tests a person can take. I find it hard to see that someone who has to spend that long leaning how to drive could ever be considered a safe driver. Learning to drive a car is just not that hard. If someone can't pass the test after a low single digit number of attempts it seems to me that they are really not capable of mastering the necessary skills and that if they do eventually pass it may well be down to luck rather than inherent skill.

Mike Willis : 11 Jul 2008 13:16 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

BBC Computer 32K, Acorn DFS, BASIC

BeebEM + casual disregard for copyright of 25+ year old software = retro gaming joy.

Snapper, the version before Acornsoft had to change it to look slightly less like Pac-Man

Now if only I can work out how to make Arcadians playable. Using caps lock/ctrl for the left/right keys may  have made sense on the BBC Micro's keyboard but hammering the caps lock key repeatedly whenever you want to move left isn't really practical.

Mike Willis : 08 Jul 2008 12:54 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Who wants to be a quintillionaire?

Writing about web page http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi?Amount=1.00&From=GBP&To=ZWD

Yesterday I looked up how many Zimbabwe Dollars you get for a £1. It was a big number. This morning it's over 20 million higher.

At time of writing £1 will, at official exchange rates, buy you 30,110,863,437.47 Zimbabwe Dollars.

Insane really.

Mike Willis : 05 Jul 2008 10:14 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

By Your Command

Writing about web page http://www.sideshowtoy.com/?page_id=4489&sku=255

"If you're a really, really big fan of the recent reinterpretation of Battlestar Galactica and have $8000 not doing anything, you could invest in your very own 7ft-tall Cylon Centurion."*

If I had that kind of money to burn, I would be so very tempted.

* Text stolen from http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06/27/seven_foot_frakkin_cylon/

Mike Willis : 30 Jun 2008 12:33 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Firefox 3, GTK and a downside of Enterprise Linux distros.

N.B. On 6/8/09 Novell updated Firefox in SLED 10 to version 3.0.12. They packaged up newer versions of GTK etc and supplied them as packages with names like firefox3-gtk2. I guess they got tired of backporting security fixes in to Firefox 2, or it became too difficult or just impossible to do anymore.

So Firefox 3 is released today. This is a Good Thing but also highlights a downside of using an 'Enterprise' Linux distro. The Linux version of Firefox has a dependency on the GTK toolkit and Firefox 3 requires GTK 2.10 or higher. If you're using a Linux distro that has an older version of GTK then Firefox pops up a message about how it needs GTK 2.10+ then exits. Given that part of the point of Enterprise distros is that they don't change things like library versions for years at a time, (thus providing a stability lacking in distros that release a new version every 6 months or so), this leaves anyone using a version of an Enterprise distro that has GTK older than 2.10 with something of a problem if they want Firefox 3. I am one such person as my main work machine runs Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, which has GTK 2.8.

There is of course a solution. (Aside from hoping that someone will release Firefox 3 packages for the version of your distro you're using, which for an Enterprise distro seems unlikley.) Get a new version of GTK and point Firefox 3 at it. Except it may not be that simple since GTK depends on various other libraries, possibly newer versions of those libraries than a distro with a version of GTK older than 2.10 includes. Anyway, this is how I got Firefox 3 running on SLED 10. It should be useful as a guide for other distros though some adaption may be required.

Install some packages

You'll need the following packages installed: openssl-devel, libjpeg-devel, libtiff-devel, libpng-devel. The versions that are included with your distro should do. The names may be slightly different if you're not using SLED 10. Debian and Ubuntu tend to use -dev rather than -devel in package names for example. There's probably other -devel packages you'll need apart from those I've listed and which I already had installed, but you'll find out if that's the case when you try and build stuff.

Download source code for GTK and dependencies.

Glib - http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/glib/2.16/glib-2.16.3.tar.bz2
Cairo - http://www.cairographics.org/releases/cairo-1.2.6.tar.gz
Pango - http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/pango/1.20/pango-1.20.3.tar.bz2
ATK - http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/atk/1.22/atk-1.22.0.tar.bz2
GTK - http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gtk+/2.12/gtk+-2.12.10.tar.bz2

I used Cairo 1.2.6 because it's new enough that Pango 1.20.3 will use it and old enough that it didn't require me to also build pixman.

Set some environment variables

I found I had to set the following environment variables to get the build to work. Note that the paths reflect where I installed the libraries so change to where ever you decide to install stuff.

$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/local/opt/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/local/opt/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
$ export PATH=/local/opt/bin:$PATH
$ export CPPFLAGS="-I/local/opt/gtk/include"
$ export LDFLAGS="-L/local/opt/gtk/lib"

Build and install

In the order they're listed above, unpack the source code, build and install. The build command is the same for all:

$ ./configure --prefix=/local/opt && make && make install

I installed the packages in to /local/opt since obviously I want to keep it all separate to the libraries that come with SLED 10, that's somewhere non-root users can write to on my machine and not doing this as root eliminates the chance of a typo overwritting already installed libaries. You may of course find some libraries don't build because you don't have some package or other installed so you may find you have to install a -devel package and try again. Edit: If something fails to configure or build then read the errors. Look at what libraries are mentioned then see if you have the -devel packages for those libraries installed. If not install them then try again. If you get an error about cups-config not being present then install the cups-devel package. Also read the comments and see if someone else had the same problem and a solution is suggested.

Make a wrapper script to run Firefox

You'll need to run Firefox via a wrapper script. This is what I use. If you're not using SLED 10 remove or alter the MOZ_PLUGIN_DIR value as appropriate. Replace /path-to-firefox/ with where you unpacked Firefox 3 and /local/opt with where ever you installed stuff.

#!/bin/bash
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/local/opt/lib
export MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH=/path-to-firefox/plugins:/usr/lib/browser-plugins
/path-to-firefox/firefox

Edit: I've just realised the MOZ_PLUGIN_DIR doesn't have any effect. I could have sworn that it did. Will have to look in to that.

Edit: Sorted out how to make Firefox 3 uses plugins in /usr/lib/browser-plugins and updated wrapper script.

Mike Willis : 17 Jun 2008 13:31 |  Tags: Firefox Gtk Linux Sled |  Comments (45) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Hot beverage fakery.

Next time you see someone on TV holding one of those Starbucks-esque coffee cups watch how they treat it. Very often they'll be holding it an unwise angle and/or be generally twirling it around with a complete disregard for the fact that it's supposedly full of hot liquid. Perhaps there are health and safety rules against giving actors cups which actually contain hot liquid. Or the producers just don't think that anyone will notice that a cup supposedly full of freshly purchased coffee slammed down on a table makes a this-cup-is-clearly-empty sound.

Or maybe it's all in my mind.

Mike Willis : 15 Jun 2008 11:31 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Tom is not my friend. (Nor is in my extended network.)

Writing about web page https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6067

I just discovered there's a Firefox Extension Add-on that pops up a warning if you visit MySpace and offers to get you out of there. Damn good idea. Should you end up there accidentally it'll dampen the brutal assault on the aesthetic appreciation centres of the brain that comes with attempting to view every MySpace profile ever created. It also prevents that bloody music player starting up. ('Play music without being asked' would feature highly on my list of things a webpage should never, ever, do if I were to ever bother drawing up such a list.)

Mike Willis : 08 Jun 2008 23:15 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain

Writing about web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b00brnr1.shtml

Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain was on first shown around this time last year. If you didn't see it then it's well worth a watch. There's five episodes, the first of which is linked, covering how the country has changed since the end of the second world war.

The Greasemonkey inclined may find their iPlayer experience enhanced by this script which opens the current iPlayer page in a chromeless window just big enough to contain the actual player, as depicted in this here jpeg, which you can shove to one side of the screen and/or 'float on top' should your GUI of choice offer such a capability.

Mike Willis : 19 May 2008 19:33 |  Tags: Greasemonkey Iplayer |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Belt up.

There was a story on the radio just now about the high number of young drivers who don't wear seatbelts. When asked if they wore a seatbelt, one sense of reality challenged goon replied "Nah never, 'cos I just don fink it's wurf it". Given that wearing a seatbelt costs exactly nothing and it can make the difference between walking away from a car wreck and being dead, how the *&%$ can it be considered 'not worth it'? I hope the afore-quoted person is involved in a horrific but not quite fatal car crash involving no other parties from which they fully recover but only after many months of rehabilitation throughout which they are berated with constant reminders of how it could all have been avoided and the costs incurred both financial and otherwise whilst Girls Aloud's greatest hits is played to them over and over and over.

Mike Willis : 09 May 2008 18:10 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem