thispageonthe.net

What a load of bollocks yet again. Thankfully I missed the performances, but had to endure the results. The UK obviously still doing shit following the misguided “lets go to war” by a so called intelligent political figure! Anyway, after having obtained a copy of the Eurovision Album (not for me though, I’m not quite that sad!), I must say some aren’t that bad, however, how can a song that’s sung in a foreign language win the damn competition? It’s all just fucking retarded!

On the grounds that half of them cant sing, the rest you can’t understand, I move for the motion that you MUST sing in English and that if you share a border with another country, you cannot vote for them (water borders do not count), hence Britain couldn’t vote for Ireland, but could vote for any other country.

I believe that these new rules would make things a lot fairer and we would see a lot less shit on the telly! I suppose I can’t complain at paying for a TV licence when we have the great Terry Wogan to take the piss out of everyone along with the added bonus of “press the red button to sing along!”. I would love to know, how many retards push the red button to see what they’re singing? Sad bastards, vote for the singing and the tune, not the words! Isreal nearly had it all right, but I’m guessing their entry of “Push The Button“, all about nuclear weapons, didn’t get through because it was in English. It’s one good reason to sing in your own language I suppose

Surely Britains entry is just the sort of shit you’d expect to win, but instead, all thanks to Tony Blair for screwing the country over. Can you find anything wrong with this, the UK’s entry “Flying The Flag” by Scooch? (Exceptions being that they can’t sing, appeal to the wrong audience and didn’t do well anyway when the released singles in the 90’s!

Just for all the sad bastards that missed it, or if you have any need to gloat, here’s the full table of results. Please note: I’m keeping track of everyone who clicks this link, YOU SAD BASTARD!!!!

So at the weekend, I was bored, and through random trawling of the internet I came across these things called “flames”. Art created from maths, also known as fractals. Ok, so I already knew about fractals, Mandelbrot probably being one of the most famous, but these were different. Further digging revealed these things called “sheep”, another variant on the aforementioned names, but these were being generated using distributed computing techniques.

I grabbed the software needed to produce these things, Apophysis and flam3, and began to play. Then I went digging around in Electric Sheep to see what more I could find. Well, the final product can be seen below as very scaled down versions. My full renders are 4960×3508 pixels in size and took an hour to render on a Dual Xeon 3.2GHz Dell Poweredge server.

At present, as I write infact, the server is processing a 40 second movie of the 3rd “flame” with an approximate total render time of 16 hours.

Nothing really interesting happened today, apart from not getting home late due to teaching. The strange part is, I teach with two other people to a group of adult learners, where the group size last week was 2!

The images below are ones that I produced/edited, or whatever, to demonstrate the usage of the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) as an open source graphics tool. The main point of the course being that you can create certain things without the need to fork out for the expensive tools (e.g. Photoshop)

It has recently occurred to me how lazy people are! Now, I know I’m a complete lazy twat, if not the most laziest twat you could meet, but it really takes the piss when someone suggests to you (almost how to do your job), something that they would like doing.

It comes as no surprise that the request is from the IT (teaching) department, who, apart from some, seem to know absolutely jack shit about what they’re teaching! O.k., so there is some arrogance in my tone, mainly taken from the fact that, they know their way and couldn’t care less about any other way (which more often than not is a damn site better and more efficient!).

So what is it that has been requested? A coursework submissions system that will allow students to submit their work via email (which everyone knows can be spoofed!) to a “secure area” which is only accessible by the teaching staff. The suggestion has been made “based on an idea produced whilst working at a previous company” that also implemented it in a Lotus Notes environment. It was also said that “given a couple of months, we could create something similar“. Now, pardon me for saying but the “WE” doesn’t involve anyone who teaches IT, but rather myself and manager.

Something has obviously gone wrong somewhere for this job to have been pointed in my direction as this is technically a job for the “Integrated Learning Technologists“, but the buck stops there because we have BlackBoard!

Hands up if you would like to give me a job working for you. I will bring the munkeh if you like, he is however optional.

It was felt that there aren’t enough members of the team I work in so two new members have graced us with their presence. My assistant is gracefully perched upon my Cobalt RaQ 3 development servers.

Looking for a new job. I’m currently working at York College under the title of “Web, Messaging and Collaboration Support Assistant”. A mouthful, I of all people know and incidentally the longest title within the College.

The role involves assisting in the administration of the College email and database system with a Lotus Notes/Domino environment; covering such things as email account creation, creation of database systems, and the inevetable, resetting user passwords after the summer holidays.

Recently though, I’ve deviated somewhat (probably fairer to say quite alot), from my employed job role. I am one of three people employed at the College who know how to code systems using the PHP scripting language and where required attach these systems to a MySQL backend. I find myself developing more and more systems that I have as requests with PHP than in the Lotus environment.

As a result, I’m looking for a role where my talents will actually be exploited/skills put to good use. I had an interview with a company in York last week, at which I was a little unnerved as the role is working in .NET. I have done some simple stand-alone .NET coding (ask user to complete two form fields, then question WMI before dumping the results to an XML file and uploading them to a server for further processing), but never for the web. It’s something to look forward to getting my hands into if I get to second interview and further, otherwise, I think I’ll be sticking to LAMP.

If anyone needs a LAMP developer to join their team or to code a site or anything really, as long as you’re not looking for a designer, let me know. I’ll more than likely be interested.

How about a whinge and a moan then.

Well, I’m 18 months out of uni with my BSc in Internet Computing and I’m finding it hard to find time around my job to do something useful with the domains I own. Many moons ago, I started to build my own Content Management System, which currently runs at jacksonplanet.co.uk. Unfortunately, its a bit shit so far as to say, you can’t actually manage any content with it!

So, besides not doing anything remotely related to the job description I was employed under, I have begun, in parts, to write the CMS at work. Building requested systems using the code styles and blocks I have, in order to learn more and thus be able to code my system faster.

Anyway, I have a major problem where the internet and websites are concerned; my design skills are complete and utter SHITE! I can do basic stuff, or follow a tutorial, in photoshop (or GIMP, which is cool too; but not as cool as PS).  So, if anyone would like to put forward some design suggestions, id be greatful.

I think I should end this rant here, and a rant this is. I’m sure its not good that I can’t remember what I started writing about when I started this entry. Should I be bothered?

Well, here goes, my very first ever blog post

Now I’m already starting to run scared, but I suppose if there are plenty of other people out there who do it, how hard can it be?

Hmmm, back to the thinking board (or for more procrastination)