Share. Check. Rapid. Not so much…
Does anyone else think Rapidshare should be called very-slow-unless-your-premium-user-who-forks-over-lots-of-money.com ?
Facebook: The place to name and shame your friends
One of the features that the facebook people have added really bothers me. It is the feature that if you type a name of one of your friends into you status, facebook will put a link to that persons profile in your status, thereby advertising you to the world (or at least all of the friends of this one person).
That bothered me enough, but today I think I have seen the worst case of name-linkin on facebook.
Naming and shaming! That’s right, if it wasn’t bad enough to air your dirty laundry on facebook, you can now provide a direct link to the object of your disapproval. Have a look at this example below and then think about where it will go next…
I think it should give links for every word to fan pages or anything remotley realted. For example ‘Kristian Brimble thinks sporks are cool’ and then this would link you to the spork fan page. Good idea? Didn’t think so.
Quite scary isn’t it?
As I have mentioned in my last few posts I have some more time on my hands these days. Yesterday I was browsing Wikipedia, and in the news section I came across this.
I must be honest, I knew this was possible and all those crazy Hollywood films like Eagle Eye make it look like the government is spying on us with insane amounts of technology that the average citizen can’t even comprehend. It may be possible that the government are doing this, I wouldn’t be surprised if I am honest. On the other hand, neither would I be bothered, I can’t say I have a lot to hide…
I just never would have thought that something on such an international scale could exist and not have been found out by now. It just makes me wonder a few things like how do they do it? and am I being monitored right now?
The answers are probably not as interesting as the questions but it does seem like one step closer to something from 1984 or V for Vendetta.
Burn baby burn
Hey y’all.
Once again, over the weekend (yes I know this will be posted on the weekend again but I’m talking about the weekend that just passed) I was playing Ultimate Frisbee at a tournament.
This time I was at Bristol for Disco’s Disco Inferno tourney. Here is a quick summary of the weekend on both the Frisbee and non-Frisbee fronts:
- Left on Saturday morning, on the way popped into McDonald’s for some breakfast and for some reason the guy there gave me an extra cappuccino.
- Arrived in Bristol, as usual, just in time to play our first game. (Warming up is for pussies right?)
- Lost 2 and drew 1 on the first day, played some hard teams like our heroes Danger! High Voltage.
- Went to the ‘Sexy Disco’ party. To be honest, not very impressed. Not very sexy, not very disco and not very cheap.
- Day 2, won all of our games and we all generally played well. Came 3rd out of 3 in the scavenger hunt as we were the only non local team to enter and non of us thought that bringing Pogz was a good idea (even though my new and huge bag could have fitted the whole game in). We came away with the bowl (17th) which made us happy as we all played really well and beat some good teams on day two.
- I was chosen as MVP for the weekend and won a cool little photo of the team. I was trying not to be too happy about it but I think most people could tell that it did mean a lot to me.
So yeah, that was Bristol. I know what you’re thinking, why post about that so late in the week, what the hell have you been doing since then? And, why haven’t you blogged this much earlier?
Here is the answer I know you are so desperate for. On Monday I was too tired from Bristol and was putting off doing my graphics coursework and both of those things took over the whole day (apart from Monday training which I obviously went to because Frisbee is awesome!). Tuesday was the hard-core graphics programming day, with slow gamma correction done, there was only convolution left to do. With a few pointers from some friends and an un-relenting need to finish it before midnight, I cracked on and actually did a decent job. Wednesday was another training day, but with a twist. We were on the beach.
That’s right, you heard me. February and beach. Surprisingly, it was fairly warm and enjoyable. Some dude even took photos of us while we played (Not sure why, but hey). Here is a tip for all the beach Frisbee players out there though: when the sand is still kinda wet and all compacted together, its like running barefoot on concrete until it all gets churned up. My feet were on fire for the next 6 hours!
Thursday, doing some more coursework, mainly Compilers. Got lots done. The deadline for assignment 2 is on Friday and I’ve done up to assignment 5 so huzzah for me!
Friday. Friday, Friday, Friday. Of course I had Uni in the day, but then somehow going out for a £3.50 meal at the Bryn-Y-Mor turned out to be a Frankie and Bennie’s with some Revolution cocktails thrown in. You thought that was odd? Leanne nearly got ploughed into the road/a tree whilst in a trolley that Fran had let go of as she had fallen over. And to top it all off, me and Matt had some chocolate eclairs.Yum.
Saturday: I decided to come back to good old Newport to see the good old family. Completely smashed Josh of FIFA 09 (6-0 incase you were wondering.). The sad thing is, I have spent most of my time home not talking to my family and catching up, but learning how to you Trac on top of Subversion for my Software Labs Group Project.
You are probably waiting for me to say something witty or clever, but all I will say is “Are you happy now Andy!?”
Just getting things done
I must admit, as much as I love them computers can sometimes be very annoying. For instance, yesterday my laptop (which I am currently writing this from) decided that the touchpad shouldn’t work while I’m using Linux and that it shouldn’t boot at all should I choose Windows. Quite annoying as you can imagine.
As annoying and frustrating as all of that was, it is kind of nice when something goes wrong just for the challenge of fixing it. Yes, this isn’t the best use of my time and I have a whole stack (notice the Comp Sci term there, eh?) of coursework that I could/should be doing right now on this less than snowy Saturday. Ah well, so far in the lest 24 hours I have:
- Installed a wireless card into my desktop
- Updated the desktop with everything it was needing
- Fixed my touchpad on my laptop by disabling the touchpad service in openSuSE startup
- Re-installed the sound card drivers on my desktop as they just disappeared
- Somehow disabled and then re-enabled my wireless on my laptop
- (In progress) Getting Windows to boot
See, good fun isn’t it? I wonder who it was who said that computers will make us all that much more productive/intelligent/better because it seems the only thing that I’m getting productive at is fixing my computer…
Never mind, it beats doing my laundry.
Virgins of the internet
Long time no see guys! Well, it hasn’t been that long, but still, I have missed you.
The reason for this hiatus is simply my lack of internet connection. I have moved into my shared student house in Swansea and I’m enjoying it a lot. Even though we had no internet for just over 2 weeks it has been a good laugh and I can see I have made the right choice in house mates.
Strangely, the lack of internet was a good thing. Male bonding (not bondage) and all that.
The lack of internet is a great segway onto why I am posting.
Basically, we chose Virgin Media as our ISP with the nice fiber optic 20Mb/s connection (which is rumoured to be going up to 50Mb/s soon). We signed up, paid the installation and everything was installed fine. Hunky-dory then? Almost.
With the Virgin internet package we get a free wireless router, a nice Netgear one not unlike the one I have back in Newport. Sounds good eh? It is. Sort of.
See, Virgin have installed their own firmware on the router for some reason (I can’t see the point of this) which is locked in and is un-upgradable.
We had a browse to see if we could unlock it but no dice. Seems odd to me that an Internet Service Provider wants to stop their users from benefiting from security updates that they don’t provide and therefore don’t really have to support but can be of great advantage to more advanced users.
Moral of the story: you get what you pay for.
Diamonds are forever
It is here!
If you visit quite regularly (you have too much time on your hands), you will notice that I usually post every 2-3 days. Yet, I have had something that has kept me busy for the last few days. You guessed it, my new phone.
Batman and BlueJ
I can see why there is a huge hype behind Batman: The Dark Knight, the Sequel to Batman Begins. The first was good, this one looks even darker and I don’t really want to delve too much into Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker as many more-respected reviewers can probably do him better justice than I can (especially since I am yet to see the film). But, as always when I write here, I feel something is being over-looked. (more…)
SUCS is twenty
Being a Computer Science student at Swansea University, I couldn’t help but joining the Swansea University Computer Society (I love funny acronyms). I thought it would be a great way to further my knowledge, meet new people and its the only place that you can play most online games. A fiver for the year? Thank you very much.
As boasted on the SUCS homepage, the society is one of the largest and oldest societys and Swansea Uni. This year is very special for SUCS though, as they are twenty this summer (making them a few months older than me)!
If you’re interested have a look at the section on the twenty years of SUCS, and to SUCS I wish you a happy birthday and hope that there are many more to come!
EDIT: also forgot to mention, thank you to SUCS for my hosting too!