World’s first flying penguins

A very cool April fools joke, documenting a unique breed of penguins that don't huddle up for winter, instead they fly a few thousand miles south to a tropical island to enjoy the tropical sun. Have a look while the video is still available.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/01/npenguin101.xml

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-04-02 9:17:45

Public debate on climate change

Lesley Riddoch

A public debate on climate change will give people the chance to quiz experts on what can be done to help prevent global warming.

"Challenges of Climate Change", led by broadcaster Lesley Riddoch, will be held at the National Museum of Scotland Lecture Theatre on Thursday 10 April at 6pm.

The event will feature a panel of specialists from the University's School of GeoSciences and politicians from various parties.

The event, organised by the University, National Museums Scotland and the Royal Society of Edinburgh will end at approximately 8pm.

Should be fun.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-03-27 16:30:50

Movies

While Heather has been away I have been watching all the movies in the cinema that she does not particularly like, namely horror movies, anything with Jack Black, and a couple of others just because.

Last week I went to see Jumper expecting to see quite a rubbish film, as I had been told by some of my friends, however I was pleasantly surprised, the movie was actually good well worth seeing while it is still in the cinema. I also went to see the untraceable, The concept of this movie interested me due to my interest in web design, and I was curious as to why the us government could not shut down a website, in the end it did make some level of sense, though not to ruin the plot there are ways of stopping this. It did have a few clever things within, some graphic violence, and very sick scenes in the same style as saw except without the logical puzzle to escape the trap.

A few days later I went to see Be Kind Rewind which was a typical Jack Black movie, a silly movie with a feel good chewy centre, and a good ending. Finally I went to see Rambo, I was interested to see how Sylvester Stallone would handle this film. I could see how a lot of the criticism of this film could have come about, in fact it was reaching the end of the movie and for a few moments I was wondering was that it, expecting something more to happen, then remembered the most interesting use for a claymore mine which was genuinely cool.

Other than this, I have not been up to much, went out for Hugo's leaving do at work, Hugo was our graphic designer in the web team, a stand up guy and it is a shame he left but the new guy Stephen seems to be fitting in well and Hugo's new job was paying him considerably more with less limitations which the university is infamous for.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-03-12 1:54:51

Woo hoo!

MSPs vote to scrap endowment fee

Students will no longer have to pay the graduate endowment fee when they finish university, after MSPs voted to abolish the charge.

Holyrood voted by 67 to 61 in favour of scrapping the one-off charge of £2,289.

The vote means current students and those who graduated last year will not have to pay the fee.

Brilliant News I am very happy, so is my bank account.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7268101.stm

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-02-29 12:51:47

Such a geek

I was working today on fixing a bug in the paging system of one of the pages, which just turned out to be a miss-count in the maximum number of pages. However while debugging this I was also looking at the php.net website and noticed that a bug in the dl function had been fixed so as curiosity does I went and had a look to see what it did. To my delight it was a function I had been looking for, for a while, it loads a PHP extension at runtime rather than compiling it before which I do not have access to do on most of the servers. I like it when I find useful little functions like this.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-02-14 9:44:30

Cloverfield

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn . . . ah hem sorry about that had something caught in my throat. Went to see Cloverfield on Saturday and was thoroughly impressed, it is a homage to HP Lovecraft set in a Blair Witch low budget handy cam style which intensified the experience. What I liked was that it was mostly atmospheric unlike other horror movies which either go for the thing lurking in the dark or outright gore this is in the style of Aliens where the style is more towards action or atmosphere, yes people die but it is not as huge an issue as traditional horror movies. Found the page below when looking for images for Cloverfield very funny in a geeky way.

http://hijinksensue.com/.../project-cloverfield-top-secret-bath-gel/

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-02-12 10:33:13

Time goes by

About 2 weeks ago I attended a very useful course on coldfusion run by a company called Tidalfire which was very good. Since then I have been playing a little with the language and can really appreciate how easy the language is and have recommended to our graphic designer that if he wanted to get more involved with programming try this language. It does have a few interesting features which I take particular note because I know how difficult and how much code it would take to replicate that feature in PHP. An example of this would be SQL transactions and locks which can be done with an open and close tag as HTML is.

Whereas in PHP, you would have to check if a lock already exists if not create one, if one already exists loop round until the lock is released, send an error message to the browser, once the transaction is complete remove all the locks. It is so much easier in coldfusion. On the other hand Coldfusion's handling of arrays and defining of variables could use a bit of work.

Last weekend I went around to little Stu's place for a 24 hour gaming session with a group mates, unfortunately I was the only one who managed to stay awake for the full 24 hours everyone else sort of disappeared to various corners from 5am onwards. Saying this though it was very good while everyone was awake.

Finally most recent news, on Monday and Tuesday this week I attended a course on project management which has enlightened me as to things I have been doing wrong in the various projects I have been involved in. Especially why the project is going on, which was one of the questions I was asked and I could only come up with "to get a grant for next year" which was depressing after all the time I have spent on that application. Since then I have thought of several other reasons but these reasons are only my suspicions based on the background I have for the project.

Though one thing I think will come in immediate use will be change logs, as the potential for project creep is ever present, before I started writing down what we agree on for the project at the start, we did not really have any recourse if a client came to us and asked us to tell them that the changes they have just suggested are not in the initial concept for the project, as there was only a vague mental structure of a project. Though saying this, the projects usually end up as what the client desires with a few features thrown in which they did not ask for when they proposed the original application, thus happy customers.

The idea of a change log and an original definition of the project may have come in use because the really niggling changes that we got may have been avoided by saying that all changes must be entered filled into a form and submitted for final review, as if the change was not important most people would not make it if they have to fill in a form, and only major changes would be requested. Though this may mean it is not as full and flashy as it possibly could be, it also means that the project reduces the risks of being over on time, budget and will be focused on the features the client really needs.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-02-08 16:10:20

I got the cake

I got a copy of portal the Half life 2 spin off last Thursday and played it from about 7pm till midnight completing the game after a few deaths. It is a very good game with some very nice puzzles and dark humour from a psychotic computer especially when it tries to kill you and then tries to convince you that it was a test, a joke, or some other thing, the sentry guns which tell you that they won't hurt you, ask you to put them down if you lift them, and wail if you break them. The constant comments of "The cake is a lie" and the ever classic "get comfortable, while I warm up the neurotoxin emitters."

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-01-28 10:21:29