Pink Blog

Fine, so I went and bought one from Amazon. They even sent it in time for the release on friday. :+)

When I get it home, I’ll look at it properly, see if it plays all my FF games, and then do another post

I read this today on BBC news. I’m sufficiently irritated by it that I will not be buying a PS3 on its initial release.

I do enjoy Skins. It’s not about to win awards for drama (or comedy), either in writing or acting, and everything it has to say (at least, so far) has been said before. I like it because of the nakedness

What can I say, I’m a simple man :+)

As my last blog of the afternoon, it occurs to me that I seem to be making this blog into a TechBlog. This is all well and good, and rather in keeping with my existence, but it does somewhat limit the scope of my readership.

I suppose the main problem here is that Tech is all I am And in typing that smiley, I discover a new keyboard shortcut on the mac (shirt-F11) that made a nice effect. Anyway, if I’m not programming (at work or at home) then I’m on a pc or console at home playing games. Not much of a life, I hear you (and many others) scream. So? I don’t ask anyone else to live it, and I certainly don’t judge anyone else’s existence, so why should anyone judge mine? “You need to get out more” - erm, why exactly? What’s out there that’s so interesting? I’m quite happy pootling around and just once in a while venturing outside (perhaps to the car and back).

Of course, once should consider the line from ‘Alfie’ by Lily Allen: “Now how the hell do you ever expect that you’ll get laid, when all you do is stay in playing your computer games”. Haven’t cracked that one yet…

XML is definitely a freaky thingy. I know this because I’ve just finished writing a parser for (some of) it.

I’m unconvinced of its superiority over any other standard, really. Took me 2 days to write the parser, and now that it’s done I STILL have to write more to handle the node tree it’s produced.

Can anyone explain to me what’s so good about XML?

Reading something on BBC news prompted me to look at VDSL today. Where I live is not the best placed area for any kind of decent-speed broadband. My current ISP is Zen, who are ok - they offer the usual “up to 8mb”, and I get the usual 2MB if I’m on at like 4am or something. Quite often it’s slower. When my bro and I moved in last May, we considered all options, finding that cable doesn’t exist around there (huge surprise there then), and any other place was a) overpriced, b) insisted on 12 months contract and c) just shit really.

So, a little stuck with our broadband, especially the bandwidth. Before I moved down south, I was with bulldog who were really really REALLY bad at customer service. It took them about 6 months to realise I hadn’t actually paid them anything at all, which caused me some humour. However, they did give me unlimited bandwidth, and I made the most of it

I hope VDSL gets here soon, quicker than the 24 months quoted by BBC. I can’t wait 2 fecking years, it’s ridiculous. Give me 50mb of speed NOW! Upload of 16mb would be extremely funky too - can you say home server network?

I’ve been contemplating the arrival of the Playstation 3 for quite some time. When I was involved with my distributed chess AI project for uni (2 years ago or so), I looked at the architecture of the Cell processor, and marvelled at the idea of it: that many Sony Cell-based items (PS3, DVD, TV, whatever) could potentially all link together to provide a big (well, medium-sized) net of cpu’s working in parallel - it’s astounding.

Of late, my enthusiasm has waned somewhat. I have to say I don’t know if Cells are being used in other devices - it doesn’t seem too likely. The PS3 itself is insanely overpriced. £425 for the 60gb model, which doesn’t even vaguely compare with the Xbox360 - which we got for free with a mobile phone: mad or wot?

At any rate, I was inspired to have a look-see at the current deal on PS3, approx 1 month prior to release. A brief google search later and i found
this.

Feel free to look yourself. I clicked on 1 of the links. It was a video that lasted around 2 mins. It talked about the wireless bluetooth controller. The woman said something like “Imagine a controller that moves as you do, with every flick of the wrist or turn of the shoulder” - my immediate thought was “You mean the Wiimote?” Sony do seem to be in a trap of being behind everyone else lately.

I continued to watch the trailer-film. And had to sit through 2 minutes of blokes riding bikes. Nothing at ALL to do with the actual PS3. I couldn’t see a single computer-generated image, or hardware shot at all. Oh, until the final 10 seconds, where I was treated to a brief (and I do mean BRIEF) shot of some dragon-flying game showing the controller moving around. Well, whoop-de-do. I went onto the site to discover something about the PS3, and I learned more about fecking bikes than anything else! WTF???

Is my blog stationary? Or is it stationery? I find myself wondering, after a cupboard at work containing paper and such like bears the legend “stationary” (which is quite true), how many people know the difference.

My mind wanders further - if a word is used in a context (specifically, an invalid one) does it take on that meaning? Flammable and inflammable mean the same in general usage. So many people use “their” and “there” interchangably, that one wonders what is the point in arguing?

Is text speak more than a set of mindless contraction and replacement algorithms (I suspect I am over-intelligising it there): and is that word I just used - intelligising - actually a word, and does it REALLY matter if it isn’t since the context completely identifies my meaning.

Argh, my head hurts.

Final point: if (human) language is communication, are the rules that important?

(ps: this is my first blogging from a Mac. innit fun?)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6213012.stm

What happened to parents disciplining their children? Rather than going begging to some other authority to do it for them.

I changed my blog software. I was using Nucleus, which was a bit painful. So, I’ve changed to WordPress, which I use for my chess blog. It’s rather nicer. Still doesn’t mean I know how to use the fecking thing, of course

Anyroad, I have copies of my previous bloggetry, so I may well be adding the old posts to here. Depends how arsed I can be :+)

Oh, and I recently became guest author at the blog site of a friend. Its in the links, but its: Everything Hurts