OK, so its 20 past midnight, so this post might be a bit unreasoned, but I’ve just had a revelation:

Wine is killing Linux.

I’ve started using Spotify recently (which I might add is pretty awesome, though the adverts you get with the free account are a tad irritating) though because I run linux, proudly and happily I might add, I had to download the Windows client and run that through Wine as there was no Linux client available.  The user interface is a bit buggy, but the core functionality works beautifully so it didn’t bother me.

I’ve been thinking about getting organised and getting into Evernote, so I perused their website for mention of a Linux client and there wasn’t one.  Again Linux is unsupported, but it works in Wine apparently.

Then it hit me.  Think about it – if Linux users are willing to use wine to run programs, if they are willing to grit their teeth through the glitches, then the publishers of programs are never going to feel pushed to release native programs and Linux will never be considered as a mainstream operating system.

Don’t get me wrong, Wine is a fantastic tool and I would much rather have access to Spotify than not, but is it right that we are considered only as an afterthought when developers write software?

There is the other side of the argument, that it just isn’t cost effective to write programs for Linux, and I suppose at the moment I’d have to agree, because there is a much greater proportion of the population using Windows, not Linux.  Hopefully the open source movement that is shaking the internet and causing more people to question their acceptance of Microsoft will change this in the coming years.

Of course, considering the trend, spearheaded by Google, of moving everything “into the cloud” as the cliche puts it, this whole conversation will soon be moot, and the whole principle of downloading and running software will be rendered obsolete.

Well, maybe not soon, but eventually.

I don’t know if you know, but there is a lovely computer worm terrorising the web called conficker.  It’s damn hard to detect, and has the lovely ability to shut down antivirus software and dig nice and deep into your Windows computer.

The simplest way is actually to visit this website:

Conficker Eye Chart

Hopefully you’ll be clean, but if not have a look here:

Protect Your Computer

I thought it might be worth mentioning because it is spreading so quickly

Though I run linux, so it doesn’t actually bother me!

Dominic is using his laptop, trawling the web for something vaguely interesting.

Dominic is going to the toilet.

Dominic is back again, idling around the internet.

Interesting?  Not really.

I don’t get Twitter.  Supposedly people are interested in the minor ins-and-outs of my life.  But I don’t find me interesting.  I can’t see how anyone else would.

OK, so maybe if I was off in the wild, exploring the unknown and discovering all sorts of crazy new places, maybe then I’d have something worth mentioning.  But unless ‘the wild’ was the Lancashire countryside, where I might just about have enough signal to be able to post using my archaic mobile phone’s GPRS web connection and WAP browser, I’d have no way of accessing this web service to tell you all about it.

I can’t understand the hype around it.  I can’t understand how it’s exploding in popularity.  I guess it must just be one of those things that work for other people, but would never work for me, like every other social network I’ve tried or been asked to try, like every instant messenger that I’ve used for a bit but got bored of.

It’s not for me.

Ben wants me to join in with his WriMo (which I think he should call RaWriMo, or Random Writing Month, as opposed to the NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing month, he entered last November, but that’s another story). He wants to do a 40K word novel in February, and he wants me to do the same.  It’ll be fun, apparently.

I don’t really have the sadomasochistic desire to subject myself to that ammount of work.  I can’t handle that much work.  I mean I don’t do half the stuff I want to do, I’m that lazy.  Plus I don’t really have the desire to write a novel.

However, I would like to set myself a challenge.  I think it would get me off my backside and doing something, rather than mindlessly surfing the web for hours on end (though it is good fun).  Also for a long time I have wanted to write a computer game.  I know I don’t have the staying power to write a big one, but I might just be able to crank out a simple prototype of something or other if I set myself a tight time limit.  And by tight time limit, I mean one week.

So, call me crazy, but here’s the plan:  I want to do an unofficial PyWeek challenge.  An unofficial one for two reasons – I don’t know how long I’d have to wait for the next one (I’m thinking I’ll do it in the February half term,  probably 16th – 22nd Feb, inclusive),  and I don’t think I’ll actually create something of competition standard anyway.

“And what does this PyWeek entail?” I imagine you’re saying right about now.  If you haven’t guessed already, you build a game in a week, using Python and Pygame.  I’d be doing all the game logic and graphics and music and testing (and hopefully documentation as well, so I can let you all know how it’s going).  Well, actually, that’s not true – I’d have to get the music from the internet, though it would have to be legal (probably under some Creative Commons licence).  As much as possible I’ll be following the official rules, though if you look you’ll see that many of them are irrelevant to me.

Now I don’t really know what I want this game to be about, so I’d like your help.  Each PyWeek has it’s own theme, and I could pick one of them (for example, the latest one was “The length of a piece of string“),but I’d like to hear some new idaes as well.  Please post more suggestions in the comments, preferably in the open-ended style of the above example.

You already know I’m crazy.  This whole idea supports that.  But I tell you that there have been a lot of good, innovative games, award-winning games even, that were originally prototyped in a game-in-a-week challenge such as this.   In fact there is a whole website about these protoypes (I can’t guarentee that that link works, or even links to the page I think it does; at the time of writing, the site is down).  Both Crayon Physics Deluxe and World of Goo (speaking of which, the soundtrack for the latter is available for free download, and is thoroughly fantastic) started off in this way then won prizes at the Independent Gamers Festival last year.  And they are both fantastic games.

One thing this goes to show really is that the best games dont come from the multi-million pound companies – they come from the new guys, the ones willing to take risks, that publish their games from a messy room while they still live with thier parents.  I don’t expect to reach their level of popularity, but I know that the experience I get from this will be fantastic all the same.

So, what theme should I do?

That’s a lame title.

But I don’t care.

This doesn’t get read often anyway, apart from by poor misguided souls who collapse here after chasing some obscure web keywords.  Yep, this is a big shout out to all you poor misguided souls who have collapsed here mistakenly.

Apparently a month and a half has gone by without me posting here.  IT has been a busy month, and I still continue to blog without obligation.  So I’ve been procrastinating again, it’s true.I have been busy with university mumbo-jumbo, ended up getting a place at Oxford uni with an offer that basically said get that A in Physics and you’re in.  Which is pretty good.

I’ve finally got round to applying for a year in industry, which is a relief since I was way too apathetic and left it really late; I’m still worried that I might have missed my chance, but at least it’s sent off now.

And I’m in the middle of my January exams.  And I really can’t be bothered to revise for them.  Even physics, which is the only one that matters now.

In tech news, my phone is dying.  Big wow.  Thats some big news.  Well it is, if you consider it’s almost pushing me to buy a new one, and my current one is two and a half years old now.  I’m trying to hold out just a bit longer till I can afford to pick up an awesome smartphone – I really like the open source Google Android, and I’d love to have something with that on (especially because its the only phone that would ever let me write python on the go).

Though my affection towards Google, with it as my search engine of choice, with it providing my e-mail account, with it possibly running my mobile phone, and with it eventually in a browser I use (once Chrome gets released on Linux), I am rather putting all of my eggs in the one basket.  If they were to belly-up because of the reccession or break the company vow of ‘Don’t be evil’, I’d be royally scuppered.  Hmm…  rather them than Microsoft (speaking of which, check out this).

And speaking of web comics, my I wholeheartedly recommend a certain Dr Mcninja – another feast of wit and humor, presented in a clinical black-and-white package.  Where else would you find the phrase “Ninjas can’t catch me if I’m on fire!”.

Reverting once again to the topic of phones, my network is being a pain.  Let me explain.  I’m on a network called blyk, which is a small network for 16-24 year olds and gives us all a large sum of free minutes and texts. Or at least it did.  I used to get 217 free texts and 43 free minutes for totally free as long as I agreed to receive a small amount of adverts to my phone.  And yet in the past few days they have revised their system to give us £15 of credit, claiming they were making the service better by making it more flexible.  Now lets do some math:  £15.00 / 8p (the price of a text) = 187 which is LESS than what I had before, and I get no free minutes.  I don’t call that an improvement.  OK, you actually get a few extra minutes if you waste them all on calls, but I don’t and I don’t think many other people do as well.  Now if we were to get the same ammount of minutes and texts as we did before, we’d need 217*8p + 43*24p = 27.68, which is almost twice as much as what we actully get.  So I’m rather annoyed.  Now ok, maybe it’s getting expensive for them, but I’d be a lot more happy if they didn’t try to pass of cutting things down as improvements.

Now if  you have been moved by this misconduct towards the poor students of the UK, please sign this petition

And finally, as I made an massive mistake when choosing the topic for my A2 Computing Coursework and ended up doing something inconceiveably over-ambitious, I now have a minor presence on Stack Overflow.  If you happen to be a 1337 wxPython haxxor please answer my question.  And of course there are other questions for you non-wxPython 1337 haxxors out there if you want to take the time to help some random off the interweb.

Right I’m off,

Stay classy San Diego!

I like blog dust.  I think I might become a collector.  Of course, this is more a reference to the fact that I never post here than the fact that I have a dust plant growing in the corner somewhere.

Now having won the award for the most uses of the word ‘dust’ (and derivatives thereof) in the first 50 words of a post, I’ll get on with things, starting with getting the excuses out of the way.  I’ve been busy.  Why else would I not post for over a month.  Now if you know me, you’ll now that by “I’ve been busy”, I mean “I’ve been lazy”, and it is true that, despite my blogging without obligation previous post, there are things I could have said to at least achieve a semblance of blog life.  And as a matter of fact, that’s roughly what I’m doing now, just to keep the critics (i.e. Ben and Hannah) happy.

So “what have I been doing?”, I pretend to hear you ask, in a figure of speech indicating that I’m about to explain what I’ve been doing.  The inevitable answer, is as such.  Not much.  College work mostly.  Or really, pretending to do college work.  I’m now dreadfully behind.  My own fault.

I am, thankfully, not quite sad enough to spend every waking hour doing work.  The lion’s share of the spare time I don’t blow idly surfing the web is taken up fixing my laptop.  Or at least it was.  In an epic series of unmentioned misadventures, my laptop and I spent a good amount of quality time together as I delved into it’s depths to sort out it’s various quirks, culminating in me accidentally killing the graphical user interface completely and getting some very disappointed looks from my slightly my slightly-more-computer-competent friends.  But in an odd turn of events, after a day of four operating system reinstalls, somehow everything is working – the WIFI, the graphics card, the sound, everything and what’s most surprising is that it is managing it simultaneously.

I also learnt the best way to mess up building a binary keyboard, which is a story in itself (and will if I can be bothered, become one in post form to grace this blog).  What I haven’t done, which is mounting in urgency, is build my robot and done the “learnt a lot from it” that I mentioned on my personal statement.

I also happened to turn 18, with the only effects being that I’ve been able to sign my own medical form and that I’ve had Hannah complaining that my About Me page is out of date.

Ultimately I haven’t been doing a lot with my time.  Compared to my cousin, who completed the nanowrimo competition and churned out 50K words resembling a novel in November *cough*geek*cough*, I’m hugely unproductive.  You know what I say to that: procrastination is an artform that is to be perfected, and I think I’m getting good at it.

EDITED 3/12/08, to remove an unexplained repetition of most of the post

FYI, I’ve updated my about me page, to keep up with current events.  Not that you care of course.

I’ll admit, my enthusiasm for this blog is waning.  I’m not going to kill it, but I’m not going to whip dead horses and try and squeze life from my instantly unpopular freeware flash and what’s in my feeds folder series.  Instead, I’m taking up the stance that says I’m only ever going to write if I have something to say.  That is the true spirit of blogging after all – it’s meant to be fun, not a chore.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not abandoning this train wreck altogether.  I do plan to come back and add things occasionally.  I mean, before I had a blog there was many a time when I wished I could tell the world what I thought, but I didn’t really have a way to say it.  And now I do have a voice in this oh-so-massive internet, and so if I desire to be heard at any time in the future, I can be.

Acting upon this, and having read a relevant random blog post earlier, I have decided to join the ranks of the Bloggers Without Obligation.  It just seems appropriate given my current feelings on the subject.

So till next time, whenever that may be, I bid ye farewell.

So, my blog is still alive.  2 weeks have gone, and I’ve managed a healthy average of about 1 post/page every two days.

As far as visits go, I’m neither flying high nor crashing and burning.  I’ve had a grand total of 90 visits, a vast improvement from the total for the middle of day 2, from various people,  many of whom I know, though a surprising few whom I have no idea who they are.

I managed to work out who many of the people who visited my blog were by realising that the two major spikes in page views closely followed the two occasions when I mentioned this blog on the news letter I’m in charge of.

However, looking at the limited other information that wordpress.com gives me about my blog’s stats, I have had to conclude that I’ve had quite a few visitors who weren’t actually intending to come.

I’ll explain:  Last weekend, I made this post about a comic strip I read on a regular basis.  It didn’t prove too popular.   About Friday things, oddly enough, started to pick up on that specific post, even though I’d posted another one.  After puzzling over my stats, and for a long time not making much sense of them,  I eventually got to the bottom of the mystery.  The thing is, I’d checked all the recorded search terms in Google, to see if I was in any of the top soil to no avail, but they still seemed to be the source of all my traffic.  Finally it twigged – have a look at the second item on this page.  Does it look familiar (I hope it is still 2nd place, or else I’ll look a tad silly – data correct at time of posting)?  For some reason unbeknown to me, I’d managed to hit the top line of the image results for 3 or 4 search terms including the word “best”.   It’s not even my picture – I hotlinked (I assume I have permission, since he gives a link to do so on the page) it from XKCD!  Now I’m not complaining, but I do feel somewhat guilty claiming some credit from Randal Munroe’s work.  So I’m repaying him with gratituous backlinks!

So all in all, due to some kindliness on the half of Google’s pagerank algorithm, I got a lot of hits.  Eat that, SEOers!  To be honest  I don’t think they stayed for very long – it’s actually impossible to tell what they did once they got here, but it’s nice to know I exist outside of my social circles.

On an almost totally unrelated note, it’s rather intriguing how the whole process of managing a popular blog works.  My perusing of the blogging world, has told me that there are a few topics that are bound to make you the talk of the town – anything to do with religion or politics, especially Sarah Palin as of late, will give you a busy afternoon replying to comments (and probably offensive ones if you argue for religion).  I wouldn’t be surprised if that sentence along attracted a few inquisitive/argumentative/academic people.  What also piqued my interest was that there were blog posts out there that used (or abused really) all sorts of super popular tags to describe themselves, even though they had nothing to do with the topic.  Of course, the search engine pros at Google penalise acts like that, but I do wonder if the programmers who manage the internal search here at WordPress.com have learnt the same lesson.

I’ve also noticed that people are a lot more liberal with their links in their posts, again I assume to improve traffic through their blog.  So I’ve followed suit, if you haven’t already guessed.  Though here I am again with  pagerank, yadayadayada, but I think link abuse might also get punished by Google, so I’m loathe to do it too much.  And it would be a shame to spoil what is turning out to be such a good relationship.

So it’s been an interesting two weeks, in a geeky sort of way.  And I’m well up for continuing, if I can think of something decent to write rather than those ghastly, dreary, series I’ve got running.  Maybe I need to be more topical.  Its a bit old, but something about the Large Hadron Collider perhaps?

Some dutch guy wearing a rather sweet looking jet pack just flew across the English Channel, or La Manche if you’re French, in less than 10 minutes.  Check out the video in the link above.

I think this has just been added to the list of things I want to do but will never get around to before I die.

Though I do wish there was a slightly easier way of starting off and finishing.  It’s hardly convenient to have to board a plane if you wanted to fly across town to meet your friends, and in comparison to a jet pack, landing by parachute is decidedly lame.

But still. how awesome is that.