The ramblings of a complete geek

Friends-locked posts

2008-11-13T00:57:24Z

I just signed in to LJ today, and my RSS reader was suddenly full of posts that I didn't recognise, dating back for ages.

Essentially, if you have made a friends-locked post since about May 2007 (possibly earlier), and are wondering why I have acted insensitively (ie as if I'd not read it) then there's a good chance this is because I *hadn't* read it.

There's also a chance that I had read it, but most likely at least a month after you wrote it. I expect this situation to continue, so if there's a post you think I should be reading, either prod me on MSN, or point it out to me via facebook/gmail.

Also, if anyone else has migrated to wordpress or whatever, please prod me, so I can update my feeds again.

David.

Clarification

2007-11-11T20:21:37Z

This journal has been discontinued. I have also disabled commenting as anon, to avoid spam.

Go to http://alsuren.blogspot.com or http://alsuren.wordpress.com for all new posts. I've not decided which site to go with yet, so add me on facebook (David Laban, Cambridge), and read my imported notes. I will make sure that I import all posts from whichever site I pick in the end.

clarification

2007-05-06T19:14:38Z

With the arrival of a credit card advert, my faith in livejournal has finally departed.

I was expecting it to happen a lot sooner after the take-over, but maybe I just didn't notice how it was going downhill, because I never really used LJ in internet explorer until recently.

A few items of book-keeping need to be done before I really migrate which I need some help with.

1) Could someone with a paid account, please get http://alsuren.blogspot.com/atom.xml added as a livejournal feed, and tell me about it so that I tell people about it. That way, people can still get updates on their friends list when I post.

2) If anyone knows anything about blogspot, could they please tell me what they use as a friends-page equivalent? I will still check my LJ friends page, but getting all my friends in one list would certainly be nice.

Live[journal] on hold

2007-05-06T18:57:00Z

While I avoid turning my computer on, I will be stuck without a decent web browser(see previous post). As a result, I need a blog with post-via-email functionality. This presents itself in the form of http://alsuren.blogspot.com

For those of you who use aKregator to read my LJ, please update your feeds list to include http://alsuren.blogspot.com/atom.xml

The post which caused this mess will be re-posted to blogspot in due time.

That is all.

David.

FUUUUUUUCK!

2007-05-06T15:58:00Z

So guess who just lost 5 hours of typing thanks to internet explorer mobile.

There is a reason why I decided to avoid internet explorer mobile like the fucking plague: It's SHIT! It crashed my entire phone first time I went on LJ to post, and when I managed to get a post mostly finished, it fucked up and I couldn't even cut-paste out of IE in order to save. The only place I could save was splitting into chunks, and saving in the titles of favourites, wich were then sorted by title rather than date, so it would take me longer to unscramble them than to type the whole lot out again.

What's worst is that it took me longer than normal to type the thing out ad dit it than normal, because the up/down arrows are broken in IE, and the phone keyboard is about a third of the speed of a normal keyboard.

It makes me want to hurt things!

Is there an email-or-whatever-based lj-posting method that anyone knows about that would work on my phone?

Lindy Hop primer

2007-04-22T12:12:11Z

I posted something on Jared's blog about what you need to start lindy hop (he said he has a problem with coordination, which stops him doing certain things). Unfortunately, it turned into a bit of an essay, so I'll post it on here. This version has been heavily modified so that it applies to people in england rather than america. It remains guy-centric though.

The level of co-ordination you need to go to a beginner class is pretty basic*. Look for a class with a social dance afterwards, and go along to that. Things to google for are:
"lindy hop" (best dance in the world),
"jitterbug" (another name for lindy hop. Seems to be used by people who like to dress up in period costume for it)
"balboa" (for lindy hoppers that want to get intimate :P )
"swing dancing" (a general term for the family of dances. People are sometimes careful about using the word "swing", for obvious reasons)
www.yehoodi.com (has a forum where you can probably find a class with a good social dance after)
Ask me (or any lindy hopper) about "Judy's list". You can't google it, but you can get someone to forward it to you.

* Many dances have a simple "basic step" (set of steps less than 5 seconds long), and your feet do that same thing (or simple variations on it) for a whole song. Eventually, it stops being about coordination, because you don't have to think about your feet. If you're not very co-ordinated, it's not a problem: it just means that you'll need a bit more time learning the basic step.

* Triple-steps are sometimes quite tricky to do at first, but most good teachers will wait until their whole class can do them before moving on (or leave them out entirely in some beginner (East Coast Swing) classes). Triple steps are useful because a follow can use a single triple step to move a good metre or get most of the way around a turn (basically, they're good for flash-gits).

* If you can hop four times without having to put your other foot down, you're balanced enough to learn the charleston basic. You can't really avoid the charleston in england (certainly not Cambridge) because it's what everyone knows. The charleston is marginally harder than the triple step based 6-count basic, but it's easy to improvise with. It's possible to dance a whole dance with simple variations on the charleston basic without worrying about your partner getting bored.

Notes on social dancing:
Most places have more girls than guys, so you don't have to keep a boring conversation going for too long before some girl will ask *you* for a dance. As long as you say "sorry, I've forgotten your name..." before every dance, and "thank you" afterwards, you'll have a great time and meet lots of really nice people. "hey: can you remember how to do that thing they taught the other week?" is a good way to start a conversation with anyone (guy or girl).

Don't get too worried if you think someone's flirting with you: They're not. It's just a dance. Guys/girls who *repeatedly* try to get off with other lindy hoppers at regular events quickly get a reputation, so generally they don't (or if they do, they don't do it *on* the dance floor, and especially not at regular weekly events).

For people who know another form of dance: Note also that Lindy Hop is different to things like ballroom in that lessons are always very closely associated with the social scene, and there is almost always a social dance immediately after lessons. This leads to some quite interesting differences between social dancefloors of the two styles. For example, there are certain phrases that are acceptable on a ballroom dance floor that are less popular in lindy socials.
For example:
"Sorry, I can't dance the [type of dance]"
becomes "*sweats and catches breath* tell you what: give me a dance to cool down, and I promise I'll dance with you next time"
or "*bounces for a few seconds to get the beat* Bloody hell. It's a bit fast/slow isn't it? What are they [the DJs] trying to do to us? [I reckon we could dance half time/double time/( or tango/samba/waltz if you really don't like the DJ) to this? Let's do it!]"

"No: I think you're doing that wrong"
becomes "*changes to a different basic*"(for guys)
or "that's an interesting variation *attempts to follow*"(for girls)
or "*confused look* You'll have to teach me that step later"(for both)

"*following/back-leading something that wasn't led*"
becomes "*hesitation*...*improvised break/jazz step*"
or "*waits until the lead actually leads her somewhere*". This means that you can dance with beginners/intermediate follows from another part of the country, and it tends to go by with only a few surprises.

"*Taking a girl and doing loads of moves that she doesn't know, expecting her to follow*" sometimes happens, but that can't be helped sometimes. If you mess up and lead something that can't be followed, most people either do a break, or default back into charleston basic (which almost everyone can follow and is always fun).

Bottled water

2007-04-19T22:19:42Z

Why is Volvic so disgusting?

More to the point: why did I buy a litre and a half of it?

London Lindy Exchange

2007-04-17T22:05:54Z

Okay, so I promised Liz that I'd post about LLX, and I keep getting distracted by Alex's fucking VB problems, and other stuff

From the thursday to the sunday, I totalled a decent amount of dancing:

thursday was 8:00-11:30 (swing thing: a weekly event at the Thames Boat Club)
friday was 9:00-1:00 (LLX welcome party)
saturday was 3-5 then 9-12 (theoretically 3:00, but I couldn't be arsed with the night bus after Friday's not getting in until 4 or 5 in the morning),
sunday was pub from 2 then dancing 7-9 (Could have been 11, but I had a headache, and I got tired of Lotte's friends appearing out of nowhere to dance with me in an obviously conscripted manner)

That's well over 12 hours of dancing in 4 days, which I say is pretty good going.

I initially attributed my headache to the annoying disco lights (which should be banned from all Swing events, as they are evil and tacky), but I am coming to suspect that it may have been the obligatory LLX plague that you get from dancing with people from all over the world, with their various interesting diseases.

Friday was the best dance night I've ever had. I arrived quite early, so I got to dance with loads of random people on a spacious floor, even before the cambridge guys arrived. Water was £1/bottle, but apples/oranges were free, so they provided the bulk of my refreshment. I narrowly avoided blisters, but my feet hurt the following morning, after walking home from chingford mount's night bus stop. Honourable mentions include: Jen[ny, but only with a british accent], Mandy, Natalie (with a T), tall-bald-guy-who-sat-next-to-me-on-the-coach-whose-name-escapes-me.

Saturday afternoon was good and chilled, but the floor was all sticky and yuk, which was less good. Jen and Natalie revealed themselves (and a canadian guy, whose name escapes me) to be sex-obsessed, of the explicit, american school. Honourable mentions include: "girl with duck taped shoes", Poppy, Monica (textile designer). Caption for the event was "Don't move, I'm getting my bag [from between your legs]"

Sunday was a live band, and it was a great display of dancing if you wanted to get people interested in Lindy Hop, because there was plenty of space at the beginning, so there were lots of swing-outs and variations thereof. There was also a jam session towards the end of the band's set, which was great to watch. I was still tired from friday night

Sunday afternoon was good, if a little overpriced (£4/magners or £3/lemonade). I heard lots of cool stories, and saw lots of funny dancing on the mini dance area set aside in the pub.

Sunday evening had lots of interesting girls-leading-guys, which was fun to watch, but I wasn't in much of a dancing mood, and they had disco lights (!), which didn't agree with me.

There is much else that happened, but my mind is not capable of noting it all down in one go. Can I go now?

Improvements in Facebook and Skype

2007-04-11T12:11:12Z

Couple of things I've noticed recently, regarding changes to facebook

1) The adverts have gone (though I suspect not for long)
2) Pokes work under konqueror
3) RSS feeds have been added to notes etc.
4) They're open-sourcing some of their technology

If they keep going this way, it'll end up being less evil than LiveJournal, and I won't be able to hate it.

That's not good!

In other news, I now have skype on my phone, and it works better than MSN. If skype publish a telepathy based client (which they look like they're going to) I might start expanding my skype contact list beyond the current total of 5.

Simplified D-Bus interface

2007-04-03T23:58:02Z

I hacked together a little bit of python to help anyone who wants to control dbus from a command line, or from python. If anyone wants to submit patches, they're more than welcome. Check my userinfo for contact details, or just post a comment to this entry (it will automatically get forwarded to my email address)

http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/dl325/media/code/thebus.py

Hope you enjoy it. It's supposed to be the D-Bus equivalent of the command line dcop program for KDE3's DCOP, but (it being python) it also doubles as a module that you can use in your code.

shutdown /r

2007-03-30T20:35:05Z

Okay, so that was *too* priceless. Windows vista's shutdown command can be run as any user (with hilarious consequences).

lots of nothing

2007-03-30T13:51:36Z

Not posted in a while. I've been messing about with telepathy, Windows vista and kde4 (details can be found on my wiki at http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~dl325/moin/moin.cgi/RecentChanges ), and not dancing and not doing any work. I feel that dancing and doing work may be linked. I always feel productive when I've been dancing and gotten a good night's sleep.

I've also been going to see my nan in hospital. She had a brain tumour removed a while ago, and her mood swings somehow remind me of my mum's laptop, when it halts and catches fire every so often.

I was also thinking of something that Gavin said at past midnight sometime during term. I think it was something about not having any philosophical objection to certain hypotheses relating to the set of real numbers being impossible to prove or disprove, because the set of real numbers contains numbers that are impossible to define (if you remember the proof for the fact that the set of real numbers is uncountably infinite).

This got me to thinking whether you could produce a set of numbers that could do most of the things you normally want to do with the set of real (or complex) numbers, but is countably infinite. Let's call my set Cc (the countable set of complex numbers)

So what do I want my set of numbers to do?

1) be countable.
2) contain the rational numbers
3) satisfy f(x,y) in Cc for all x,y in Cc (for functions involving powers, like f(x,y)=x^y )
4) (for bonus marks) contain pi, and other "interesting values" like e

Is it possible to create such a set, or is there some proof that says "this is impossible"?

My first idea was to create a set of the "rational powers of rational numbers" (letting you write numbers of the form x=(i/j)^(k/l), which would be countably infinite). This doesn't even satisfy 3) though, because 2^(2^(1/2)) is an "irrational power of a rational number". My instinct says it might not even be guaranteed to satisfy 3) for functions like f(x,y)=x*y. This is Not Good.

Any mathmos fancy coming to my rescue?

blogger

2007-03-11T15:44:02Z

It seems that blogger is crappy. While it seems to be what most people pick for writing technical blogs, I think I prefer livejournal's simpler posting interface. Mainly because it *actually works* in konqueror

In other news (Dance related) I don't think I was dancing very well yesterday. I was kinda idling boringly, while planning overly complicated moves that I couldn't lead properly. I should also remember to always shave before dancing, as I don't think I was looking too respectable last night.

I was reading a couple of posts on http://www.yehoodi.com/phpBB2/ this morning, and apparently (as in general consensus among follows worldwide), it's more fun to follow if the lead does mostly the simple basic moves and does them with variations in style that fit the music, listening for what the follow is doing all the time. That way, the follow can add her own flare as well. I should really do that more. There was also the comment that it's nice when a lead dances moves that have recently been taught in classes, but that seemed to be only a minority request.

I will have to go in search of London based swing communities for when I go home, I think.

Also: Linux day in the JCR on 16th. All welcome. Dunno what will happen, but we may have a gigabit switch and super-twin-aerials wifi router courtesy of my dad (he's sending them up here so I can test them out, because he knows I will only be staying here for a few more days after the end of term

In other news:

2007-03-04T22:00:50Z

00:01 British Summer Time on 21 July 2007. (HP7 for the win)

Vista as a multiple-user system?

2007-03-04T03:12:39Z

My friend has recently become the proud new owner of a Windows Vista "Ultimate" box. Naturally, I have been getting him to let me try a lot of different things to see whether it's good enough for me to make the switch.

There are some interesting ideas floating about in vista, but it's still not even *close* to being a secure, multi-user operating system. (note that it may be possible to make vista into a secure, or multi-user system, but I doubt you can do both at the same time)

The statements below are my justification for reaching the above conclusion:

1) It's only a single-user-at-a-time system.
-- It has "remote desktop", but by default, it only lets one user on at a time. There are hacks available which let more than one user log in at the same time, but I expect they're illegal. He set up one of those hacks for me, so that I could play about with his computer and find more things that are crap about it.
-- On most unices, "ssh" lets you optionally specify a user limit, but it defaults to letting infinite users connect concurrently.

2) It is very difficult to do things as a non-administrator user.
-- I was trying to install python in my user's home directory, and it seems that the .msi installers will run up to a point, and then a dialogue box comes up asking for an administrator password in order to run untrusted programs(or something). While this is probably good for large companies, in that it reduces the number of random games that can get installed, it makes no sense that the authorisation message was not displayed as soon as the installer started. It also seems to mean that all untrusted programs end up being run as an administrator (thereby making the system less, rather than more secure).
-- On unix systems, any file can be made executable by changing its permissions to include "execute". It is possible on unix systems to stop users creating executable files (The way you do this varies from system to system, but in the worst case, removing/changing any programs that change permissions will work). In most cases, it is good enough to know that anything your user's program does can only affect his own files (which brings me on to my next point).

3) The file permissions and layout is shit by default
-- I was (I think) able to create a folder called C:\python25\ (the computer went down before I got round to checking it). If this is the case, then this is a Bad Thing. Imagine if everyone on the system decided to add folders to C:\. You could fill it up to such an extent that the administrator would have to wade through hundreds of irrelevant junk folders in order to find anything. Also, "Program Files" is a really shit name for a place to put things. Not only does it have a space in the name(which makes the automated creation of links in msn a complete pain in the ass), it's also suitably ambiguous that it invites itself to become a dumping ground of all the rubbish that any developer wants to install. In fairness, at least Alex's Dell has C:\Users\David\Documents rather than C:\Documents and Settings\David\My Documents. Seems they've taken a leaf out of Apple's book on that count.
-- There exist unix specifications including a recommended set of locations for files and folders. They also tend to specify that users by default only have write permissions to their home directory and /tmp (which can be safely deleted each time the computer restarts). This means that all executable files are placed somewhere sensible (one of 4 locations for commonly used applications, so users can always find the application they're looking for). It also means that a user of the system can't be malicious to anyone but himself (see point 2 about executable programs).

4) You are encouraged to be administrator to develop programs.
-- Even the MS official development environment won't work as a normal user! One in three items on the "known bugs list" translates to "Sorry: you can't do that as a normal user" (see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa972193.aspx for details). This basically destroys any attempts to make Vista into a multi-user operating system, because program developers will always have to make their programs as an administrator. Yes, it's possible to *test* programs as non-administrator, but that's extra effort for the developer. It also means that you can't have multiple developers on the same system, because if one person does something dramatically stupid: it is done as an administrator, and therefore has the potential to create chaos for all other users of the system.
-- On Unix systems, many developers who have root access to their own machines create new users for any large project they work on. This is the suggested development model for the KDE project (see http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE3To4 for details) as all unrelated projects can then be completely isolated from one another, on what looks like an untouched system. It is therefore very difficult to completely destroy a system by accident. It also makes it easy to track what software needs to be installed as a dependency for each project. Obviously, there are still some projects which need to access hardware directly (like Xorg, and the Linux kernel), and these do sometimes end up with computers needing a reboot, but these are the exception rather than the rule. Also, these are the kinds of projects which simply don't exist as "enthusiast's projects" for commercial systems, because the OS/hardware vendor is responsible for ensuring that such things work.

I think this is all I have to say. I'm sure that people will post work-arounds for each point, and eventually, it may be possible to generate a single executable shell script which will turn a stock vista system into a usable multi-user operating system, but until then, I think we're stuck with either one-user-per-machine, and spending the necessary sums of money on hardware, software and power for each distinct machine, or sticking to unix-based machines like linux.pwf and pip.srcf, which are secure, multi-user systems by default.

Dancing ( :D ) and other things, with names removed to foil google

2007-02-25T16:33:17Z

Okay, so it would appear that I have spent about the same amount of time dancing since wed as I have working. The only work I've done is the entirety of thursday in the library (lectures don't count as work), but I've been dancing thrice in that time, each time for in excess of 2 hours. This is a statement that used to be true of playing pool, and was completely normal, but dancing is *actually* physical, so this is a new thing for me :P

There are a few consequences of this:
1) I have dancing people in my head. When I'm idle, I keep getting images of [the birthday girls] dancing with [that guy with the tassled trousers]. He was really good: Dancing with [some other people he'd never met before], and looking both flashy and in sync at the same time, as if it were already choreographed. Might also help that the ladies present were also amazing. I spent most of the time watching, and wanting to be that good.

2) I need to get to work on my lab report now, because I have done a total of nothing, and it's in for tomorrow. Rubbish!

3) I have provisionally accepted a sponsorship form for the hopathon the day after my birthday, but I don't trust my ability to keep dancing for entire songs straight, without stopping to experiment with different moves that I didn't quite understand during classes. I think what I really need to work on is my ability to pick random breaks to do when things go wrong, so that I can feel better about doing things I'm not too sure about without having to stop and look stupid when it all goes to pot.

4) I have concluded that the good dancers are, as a rule, both: exceedingly hot, and at least half a decade older than me. What's with me and older women? :P

In other news:
1) I've decided against going to MIT, because I'm really more one for small amounts of optional difficult work than large amounts of compulsory work that reaches the same standard in smaller increments.

2) I have yet to email anyone about holiday work: either UROPs or working for external companies. This needs to happen at some point.

3) My phone will not be getting its deserved dose of linux until during the holidays when I will have two O2 phones with free calls to each other for testing.

4) Our rooms are really not very clean. Both [my favourite mathmo housemate] and I have been getting sticky eyes in the mornings, and [our esteemed ex-sex editor] has reported the same symptoms. I'm tempted to put all of my sheets and towels in a boil wash, but
a) I don't expect it'll do much good, given that it seems to be almost parkside-wide
b) This would need to include my quilt and mattress protector, and they would take a lot of money to dry in driers, and I don't have any spares, so I can't just chuck them on the line overnight.

5) There is enough exciting stuff happening around my birthday (see dance.3) that I don't think I'll be doing anything centred on myself this year.

6) [someone I slept with at last saturday's party] is proving to be incompatible: After making some effort at talking to her, I am realising that all we have in common is the unnerving ability to nod off to sleep no matter what's going on around us. She does give the most amazing hugs (both relaxing and exciting, and something that I may never understand), but while a trip to the cinema would be a good date, I can't think of many others. As a result, I would really prefer it if [a certain physicist] would get a partner of his own, before acting as official commentator on the passed up romantic opportunities of others.

7) I have a packet of mayonnaise from hall that has been in my pocket for a while. It seems to have some kind of gas trapped inside it. Assuming this is because it is rotting, I'm wondering how long it'll take to expand enough to explode. Sweepstakes, anyone?

8) I have received complaints from [everyone's favourite interfering boatie] about my posting of a text-dumped jabber session to my pwf space, which included my entire contact list in a slightly obfuscated form, and was then indexed by google. As a result, you will notice a lot of square brackets. It should be noted that this is a purely ironic gesture, to point out quite how ridiculous the complaint was, and will not be repeated. To those in the know, it should be a trivial exercise to assign names to each set of brackets, and to those not in the know, a name will mean nothing anyway.

alsuren @ 2007-02-20T01:26:00

2007-02-20T01:33:02Z

http://www.css3.info/khtml-356-is-the-most-css3-compliant-of-all/
Yeah? Fuck you [Crowston, theorb]!

Drunken proles

2007-02-18T01:46:45Z

Okay, so after walking Helen home ( :D ) from Tom's most excellent partay (when did the rest of the yobs leave, I wonder?), I was riding home on my bike, when I saw a woman's shoe flying across the road at me, from a little scuffle involving 2 (I hesitate to call them ladies, but could hardly call them girls) and a bloke. I promptly dumped my bike and went over to make sure nobody was going to get injured etc. I wasn't going to do anything on my own, so I beckoned to some onlookers who were watching from about 10 yards away (not exactly useful if anything *does* start to happen). Took a few blank looks, but eventually, some guys came over to "break it up". Nobody needed to be touched, because it was a jealous (recently made ex-) girlfriend, and when she realised that she was being quite so undignified, she started to calm down a little.

I then got back on my bike and was waiting at the traffic lights when some random guy came up to me and said "You're cool: I like you". It was only then that I realised that I had just almost gotten involved in a street scuffle, while wearing black tie, with a shiny red waistcoat and pocket watch.

PWF linux and printing

2007-02-16T15:26:14Z

Seems that the Public Workstation Facility Windows machines aren't letting people log on, but linux works fine, so I've had to teach people how to restart the machines to linux and use firefox etc.

I now need to test whether printing works by trying to print something to the computer room. For this purpose, I think I may just print this page.

If someone picks this up from a printer, would they be so kind as to post a comment on http://alsuren.livejournal.com/, telling me where it came out?

ho-hum

*posts, prints, and runs off to find scraps of paper*

Applegeeks

2007-02-16T00:28:55Z

To put it in context, the green bubbles are supposed to be electronic voice: Eve is a robot.

Enjoy:

http://www.applegeeks.com/comic_archive/viewcomic.php?issue=343

T3h Sw1ng

2007-02-15T01:14:55Z

Yeah, so swing dancing is t3h w00t. I think I was getting withdrawal symptoms today and yesterday: Just letting time disappear without doing anything at all. I'm currently transferring all my swing moosic onto the phone so that I can get in the swing more often. Amarok seems to be a bit shit at giving nice error messages...... oh look: it's crashed again :D *twitch*

*has the shimsham stuck in his head*

*finally manages to get his playlist transferred, but doubts amarok is going to be able to "synchronise" it. *wonders whether 1.4.5 will be any better than 1.4.4*

*heads to bed wih music on his phone*

Room points

2007-02-09T17:45:36Z

The Rooms Committee has awarded you 26 points.

I think we need to get a group of people together, and decide where we're going to live, so I don't have to decide for myself.

College marriages.

2007-02-05T22:58:38Z

We have incest!

(Lucie and Peter are getting married)

80% literal, 20% metaphor

2007-02-04T11:05:43Z

Okay, so it seems that 1) there is support for phoning people from linux on my phone, but it requires a little 'wizardry'. This is encouraging. Maybe I can re-hash my old awayd.py script for use on a phone. Teaching windows that I want it to be AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE when I'm not doing anything and SHUTTING THE FUCK UP when I'm in lectures seems to be beyond the scope of a graphical user interface.

Translation: don't expect to be able to call me at any point next weekend, as my phone will be 80% broken.

If I were being sensible, I would probably have worked out how to back up the contacts etc. on my phone by now, but evidently not.

You know how I said I wasn't going to do this to my phone? Well I'm too pissed off with not being able to get internet explorer working to care right now.

Oh, and I think I might try to get some good games for the JCR again... DAMNIT! I should have put the gamecube down on my room ballot form!

Oh, and the iPhone looks quite sexy, but I reckon my phone is capable of being just as good, as long as you don't mind having a real keyboard instead of a pretend one :P

If anyone is interested in multiple mouse X. I got it working, and it seems that KDE4 works considerably better with it than kde3, but konqueror is still not playing nice. I am very tempted to write a proper howto/install script for it, and then get the kde developers interested, but I think it might be better to wait until multiple keyboards become stable. I'm also quite tempted to try writing an X server that doesn't need to be run-as-root, but that requires trawling through mountains of C code, and C is ugly shit. I think making a graphical representation of how X works together with Qt (UML: discuss) would be worth doing, because at present, it's a bit ick and confusing. From there, it would be possible to plan what needs to be done to get MPX/Qt working.

In physical news: Curried cheesy bacon-and-beans is quite a nice conglomeration, but tesco baked beans aren't good for the bowels... Why are the orientals so damned hot?

Right. That's enough of that. Time for some thermo and materials, then maybe some mechanics so I have time to go to the MIT lecture on thursday. (*hates R. Oliver for making him do mamterials*)

If you got this far, you deserve a prize. Well done. *runs off*

Multi-Pointer X11

2007-01-25T09:50:07Z

Okay, so this is *very* cool.

http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/?q=screenshots

Just *think* what you could do if you had a computer desktop with a mouse cursor on it for each of your friends. Still need to test it out for myself, but it seems like it's going to be very interesting.