It seems that the IT department are still the most fun people at Bourne Grammar School. Shaking that Ass, Bourne Grammar Style was recorded on non-uniform day by the “ICT Crowd”. Look out for the teachers, including the entire IT department
I’m pleased to see that despite attempts of senior management to turn the place into a pompous public school, the BGS spirit still lives on!
eMusic UK has just lanched and I’ve been transferred from the US site to the UK one. This is bad because I now have to pay VAT on my subscription but good because I’m paying about £6.50/month for 40 songs and the new UK subscription price is £8.99 and… the new lineup of artists is awesome!
I just downloaded Arctic Monkeys and Bare Naked Ladies albums in high quality DRM-free mp3s, next month I think it’ll be White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, Badly Drawn Boy… the list goes on.
Ask me to send you a referral email and subscribe to eMusic – support a music store which supports independent artists and sells DRM-free music for 17 to 22p a song.
They’re not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but eMusic are some of the good guys.
This is half of the students who were on this year’s Shell STEP programme. Spot the geek. Yes, that’s right, the only guy not wearing a tie but proudly wearing his open source company’s logo.
This is my new bike, and before you all accuse me of being sad, I didn’t even choose it, the name is a pure coincidence.
wonchop.hippygeek.co.uk has a new home! Following his recent dazzling academic success, 
Wonchop has launced a new site, wonchop.net which has a back catalogue of all his old animations, forums and a cafepress shop. Me and djkoa are lucky to have been the inspiration for the characters “b3n and wez – the IT geeks”, two members of the wonchop family, and we’ve now even been made into t-shirts, mousemats and clocks! Go along to wonchop’s cafepress shop and buy some merchandise (like I just have) to support his work 🙂
Wonchop was the first project to start off life nestled in the bosom of hippygeek.co.uk, back in 2003, and has now well and truly flown the nest. In this spirit, I hope that hippygeek.co.uk will be the home of lots more new ideas. Over the coming weeks I am going to be moving my personal homepage to the new Drupal powered tola.me.uk (still in its very early stages) and hippygeek.co.uk will solely become a home for new ideas, mainly providing trac hosting for software projects. The hosting for hippygeek has been kindly provided by FFDesign, and then Moose Computer Services up until now, but it will probably now move to its own Debian box, leaving tola.me.uk in its place.
Watch this space.
This mundane, plain English blog post is dedicated to bouncykaz.
I’ve finished my summer placement and am back home in Bourne, though “home” may soon be moving. My summer placement was spent writing web based business software for things like accounting and project management.
I spent today filling out a boring tax form, paying a cheque into the bank (yay!), and fine tuning my new bike. Then I visited a couple of houses, one in Colsterworth and one in Pointon, and then got my car started to go and see lauperr for a serious chat.
Unfortunately my main PC didn’t survive the journey from Coventry and now has a dead hard disk, luckily it wasn’t the hard disk with my half backed up important data on.
I’ll be at home for about three weeks before heading back to uni. I need to sort out the Internet connection and visit samwwwblack before I go though, so a swift trip to Birmingham may be in order. I’m not looking forward to living in the new house as much as I was, having lived in lauperr‘s house for two months, it will just be like moving in all over again. Did I mention I’m doing a lot of moving around recently? Can’t seem to stay in one place for very long.
Apart from that, I’m just sat here at 2 in the morning drinking Guinness.
There’s an article about mine and Paul’s summer placements with Senokian in the Birmingham Post, it’s a good write up for Senokian and the dead tree newspaper version had a photo which made my head look really big.
My placement has officially ended but I’m stopping on for one more week next week. The new version of EGS is really starting to take shape and I have my final presentation on Tuesday (argh).
When I’ve finished in Coventry I’ll be home for three weeks until term starts, mainly packing my life into boxes again. Only this time it’s literally everything because not only am I moving into my new term time house in Birmingham but my parents are moving house about the same time. The house in Bourne has been sold (it was only on the market a few days) and if all goes to plan we’ll be renting a cottage in Little Bytham. Bearing in mind that I’ve lived in Bourne all my life and so has my dad, it’s really a big step (albeit only a 7 mile long step). I’m going to miss my custom built garage-conversion bedroom loads, but I really don’t spend much time there these days. I don’t spend much time in any one place these days.
An announcement (not a permalink) from PlusNet says that their Broadband connectivity, Webmail, CGI, MYSQL, Some mail Relays and wait for it…. “The Phone System” are currently suffering downtime due to a power outage in Telehouse!
After the recent email data loss fiasco where I lost two years worth of email archives I’m starting to get a bit irritated. If I can’t rely on telehouse for uptime, what can I rely on?
I finally managed to try out SecondLife last week (by transplanting all the best hardware I own into a single box so that I could run the thing!). Apart from slow rendering caused by the awful packet loss of my current Internet connection the experience has been a good one, it’s cool. I can fly. I can build awesome objects with 3D modelling and logic.
I’ve downloaded and installed Blender, “open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback.” It looks complicated, I really want to play with it but so far I’ve only had time to export a cube as X3D to see what the XML looks like. I know it’s capable of great things.
In December last year I blogged ” X3D + AJAX = …I wonder”. Today I found Ajax3D, which was announced at the beginning of the month. I think it was started by the same people who make Flux, the X3D browser plugin, which I also want to play with.
I’ve been reading about 3D standards like X3D, OpenGL, KML etc. recently as part of my research into the multimodal web. I’ve also been thinking more about a RESTful and semantic web, separation of concerns, software design patterns like MVC, content negotiation, device independence, XML transformation etc. etc. I’ve started to try and channel all this thinking towards one or more actual software projects to work on and have started wrting stuff up. So many ideas, so little time.
I think it’s interesting to compare the feedback from judges on my past two entries to Paper writing competitions…
2005 Entry:
The Judges felt that, although this entry was not of degree standard, it
contained a well developed argument with a clear purpose and a natural
flow, was interesting to read, with a good structure. On the whole the
Judges were impressed with this entry and the thorough research that had
gone into the essays production. The Judges noted that the topic was of
general and wide interest and, although the essay is not particularly
technical, it offers quite a grand vision and suggested that, with some
editing, the paper may be suitable for publication.
2006 Entry:
I seem to have tipped the balance too far in the other direction this year after last year’s feedback, next year I need to pitch it somewhere in the middle. Apparently this year’s winner of the IET Write Around the World competition has entered for the past three years. If I can combine “good technical material” with “interesting to read” next time perhaps it could be my turn 🙂
I have a question about RESTful URLs which is going to sound pretty trivial and boring unless you’re a RESTafarian… apparently they exist.
Say I have a resource with the URL http://widgets.com/widget/1 to which I can GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. If I want the user to have an overview of widget 1 they can GET this URL, similarly for DELETE. But if I want to point them to a form where they can edit the widget (which I don’t necessarily want to display by default), what would a RESTful URL be?
http://widget.com/widget/1/edit ?
http://widget.com/widget/1?action=edit ?
http://widget.com/widget/edit/1 ?
What if I have a page which lists all my widgets, should that be
http://widget.com/widgets
or
http://widget.com/widget ?
There’s an article on URI design by Timbl which contains lots of “don’t”s but not many “do”s.
I am furious with PlusNet for losing two years worth of emails I had stored on their IMAP server (along with everyone else’s). I had “backup email” on my to do list for about a year, shame I relied on an ISP to back up my data. There were a lot of important emails in that inbox. I’m going to start looking into running my own mail server so at least if I lose data I know it’s only my own fault. I’ve been meaning to play with Hula for ages but I’ve been waiting for their first stable release for over a year! They gave a talk at LugRadio Live and it sounds like the stable release is coming, but it’s still going to be a while (I can’t help but feel they’ve missed the boat a bit). I also have a book on Postfix which I might dig out.
Continuing in the theme of storing my own data, I’ve started on a new Drupal version of my now 5 year old homepage, which I plan to migrate my LiveJournal blog to if and when I figure out how to do it.
I found out that I didn’t win the IET Write Around the World Competition again this year, no suprises there really. The judges’ feedback boiled down to: well written, technically sound but boring as hell! I admit they have a point, I didn’t like it myself once it was finished.
