I’ve deliberately stopped myself from commenting on this series of Who until the end.  And now that we’re here I’m struggling to find the right words to say about it.

Poor.  Lacklustre.  Uninspired.

Hmmm,  I’m in the right direction but it still isn’t right.  Nevermind, I’m sure the right word will pop in my head later on…

But this series HAS been poor.  It started badly and to it’s credit picked up later towards the end but for that last episode, the heavily laden sacharine moments, and the Flash Gordon & Star Wars bits at the end, the less said the better.

Right now I’m thinking that this is the single worst episode in the history of the show.

I’m hoping my opinion will improve.

BigAl 

Back on May 8th I began my LugRadio listening marathon. Well - 49 days and 80 shows later, and I’m finished (apart from the to-be-released-on-Monday Season 4 Episode 22). It’s been an interesting experience, cramming it all in in such a short space of time, but I’ve enjoyed (almost) every minute of it.

Roll on LugRadio Live (10 days and counting)

mrBen

Sometimes you come across a cool new thing, and you wonder whether or not everybody else already knows about them, but never bothered to say. Well - I’m going to say, but if you know about it already, keep quiet

I’ve been playing with ‘PuTTY Tray’ for the past couple of days. Almost every geek worth their salt know about PuTTY - the definitive SSH client for Windows (yes, I know it’s on other systems, and supports other protocols, but I reckon 99% of people use it for SSH on Windows). PuTTY Tray is basically PuTTY, with a few extra features. 2 of these are really (_really_) useful - it does proper URL highlighting, so you can click on a URL rather than copy and paster, and it does session reconnection after standby.

Anyway - give it a try - it imports all your existing PuTTY settings, so there’s no overhead to trying it out. Get it from http://www.xs4all.nl/~whaa/putty/

mrBen

A while ago, I used to play Enemy Territory a lot. It’s a great game, and I miss it at times. Me and some of the guys on the #lugradio IRC even setup a server to run every Sunday and Wednesday night for us to play on.

Well - Heather is going away this weekend to get some R&R at her parents, along with the beautiful Mira, and to sooth the pain of absence, I thought it might be nice if some of the old crew (and any new crew, of course) could get together for a good old shootout.

Server details at http://clan.lugradio.org (if you didn’t know already). The server kicks in at 7.30pm. Let me know if you’re coming!

mrBen

Well - having posted only 48 hours ago about my QuickURL, and thanks to lots of prompting and suggestions from the guys on the #lugradio IRC channel, I now have LinkPot.net, for all your URL shrinking needs!

Finding a good, available, domain name was hard, but hopefully linkpot.net is simple enough to remember. I’ve made some changes, and I’ve a load more to make, but I welcome any comments or suggestions for improvements to the site. There is a proper design in the works too.

Oh, and big thanks to kNo`, who helped me sort out a Django upgrade and fixing a problem with the NSFW tagging.

mrBen

I recently picked up Myst: The Collection for Ruthy and being a bit bored of Guild Wars the other night, I decided to indulge in some classic point-and-click.

Sure, the graphics are dated and the gameplay is as straight-forward as it comes, but to re-immersed in the Myst universe from the beginning again is a feeling that I can’t really describe.

I’ll put this in a personal perspective for a moment. When I first saw Myst, I was transfixed. The graphics were, for the time, breathtaking. The audio effects, both background sounds and the soundtrack, had an incredible attention to detail. All in all, it was one of the most beautiful gaming experiences I ever had.

I still remember thinking that this was a bright future for the adventure gaming genre.

Of course, having been a fan of the entire series (Riven, Myst III: Exile, Myst IV: Revelation, Myst V: End Of Ages, the ill-fated Uru: Ages Beyond Myst and the brand new Myst Online: Uru Live) it’s a real blessing to go back to the start and remember why the series has meant so much.

I feel like going to start rambling here, so I’ll quickly sum up…

If you have Myst go back and play it.

If you don’t have Myst, go and find a copy and play it.

And when you play it, play it with an innocence you no longer have.

And when it takes your breath away with it’s simplicity and beauty come back and tell me you’re looking to play Riven…

BigAl

TinyURL is great. It’s a wonderful service that replaces a really, really long URL, with an itty-bitty URL. For those of us who live online in IM, IRC and forums, it makes life a lot easier.

But. (There’s always a but)

It’s a bit crap for people who talk on the phone, or who present podcasts. So I present my latest technology demo, QuickURL, which creates tiny URLs with real words. (It’s currently limited to the 24,143 words in the dictionary between 4 and 7 characters long, but this is just a demo ). Admittedly, the rest of the url is a bit of a pain, but I reckon that quickurl.com/codfish/ (should I buy the domain) is better in conversation than tinyurl.com/?ahd73h

mrBen

A good proportion of you will be reading this site via a webpage that is powered by the Planet Planet aggregation software. Now, I’m told that Planet Venus is a better aggregator, but I have no real plans to change.

However, I do have vague plans to change the way it works. As part of my LugRadio marathon (status) I got to an episode where they complain, legitimately, that many planets are simply overrun with posts that are not particularly relevant for the topic. However, as the conversation continues (and the subsequent conversation on hashlugradio) it becomes obvious that there is a great deal of subjectivity of what people want to read on a planet site.

So - here’s the plan for “Galaxy Galaxy” (bigger and better than Planet Planet ) - we create a (thoroughly web 2.0) set of tools that allows for a very customisable planet-type system. This has a number of elements and features:

• Key to this will be plugins for blogging software that provide feeds of the categories/tags that are used on that site
• Likewise the blogging software will need to provide feeds for each of the categories - Wordpress already does this
• The “GG” site will be set up to subscribe to particular sites (as they are now) but also which categories are subscribed by default
• Individual readers will be able to select/deselect which categories they actually do want to have feeds from, via a whizzy Ajax-style interface
• Choices will remain persistent (probably through cookies - we don’t really want logins…)

OK - so this may not be a new idea. In fact, it may not even be a good idea. But I would like to hear from anyone who’s interested in developing it

mrBen

OK - if you’re not into Django (the Python webframework), or you don’t know know anyone who does, look away now. Otherwise, I really need your help. Hell - even if you know nothing about Django, but know some database stuff, you might have some insight. Either way, it’s important

I’m trying to create a Rota system - you know, like the bit of paper that you stuck on the fridge when you were student, identifying who was supposed to do what each week? So I will have a table of users, let’s call them Rob, Bob, Mark, Mary, Lisa, and Rupert (for arguments sake). And a table of jobs (washing up, toilet cleaning, hoovering sitting room, etc). These 2 tables need to be linked in some way to indicate who can do which jobs. (Mary gets bad hay-fever, so likes to avoid the dusty hoovering; Rupert is allergic to fairy liquid; etc) Now - this can either be a list of names associate with the Job, or a list of Jobs associated with the User. I’m not overly fussy either way.

Each week there needs to be a rota - the rota should be dated, and contain each of the jobs, and which person is doing the job. But (and this is the big but) when selecting the user for a particular job, you should only have to choose from the users that can do this job.

So - 2 questions:

1. What is the best table structure to do this?
2. What is the best way to represent this in Django? I am beginning to wonder if I will actually need to do a custom admin page for this model, in order to achieve the desired result.

Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

mrBen

AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!

BigAl

I suspect that I am a good few years later than most people in arriving at this point, but I hope that I’m not the only one who has struggled to make the decision: admin or dev? Do I turn my geekery talents to being a system administrator (or a variant, like network admins) or do I try and progress as a developer.

So - Dear Lazyweb…… what helped you make your decision?

Admin?
I’ve always enjoyed working with computers, and, like most geeks, find myself doing, and enjoying, a bit of both. I love working, in particular, in a *nix environment, and I’ve done some support work. I continue to do some of the maintenance on the church office systems. However, there are 2 major drawbacks. Firstly, getting a *nix job is hard, and I’m much more likely to find myself working in a Windows environment. Secondly, I am aware of the vast amount of knowledge I don’t have, and I worry that I wouldn’t be able to handle all the new stuff.

Dev?
I began programming with my Dad’s Amstrad CPC464 22 years ago. I’ve continued the passion through the years, and I continue to write, and contribute to, bits of software, particularly in Python. I’ve got my name in the credits of one bit of software (Jokosher, although I feel a bit of a fraud, given the amount of code I actually contributed) and I’ve got a new piece of software due out in a couple of months. Part of my actual job involves developing in various languages. However, the majority of dev jobs are in Java, which I don’t really want to learn if I don’t have to, and I am worried that I wouldn’t be able to cope with projects other than basic scripting. (And basic scripting skills tend to lend themselves nicely to admin jobs, rather than dev jobs…..)

Pearls of wisdom gratefully received.

mrBen

LugRadio Live 2007: be there!

Following on from their first video, Freedom March, the LugRadio team have released this second promotional, “viral” video, which is a bit less serious Enjoy.

mrBen

A rare gaming geek post here…

Can anyone tell me what the fundamental difference is between Dreamblade and the Dungeons and Dragons miniatures game?  Or are Wizards of the Coast, the makers of both games, conning the kids by producing two seperate but similar fantasy miniatures games?

They produce the D&D minis game which, as the name suggests, is the minis equivilent of AD&D and another fantasy based minis property called Dreamblade which is based on something else (obviously).

But what’s the difference in the actual games?

Anyone help me out with this one?

BigAl

I pissed myself laughing when I saw this headline on an article in The Register this morning.

Finally we’ve been found out.

The BBC News site has more about it here. They use the same headline. Excellent!

BigAl

In what is, frankly, a surprisingly sober and thought provoking video, “Freedom March”, the 4 large gents of LugRadio have announced that the registrations for LugRadio Live are open here.

You should be coming, really. (Ya Rly)

mrBen

This is kind of urgent.

I inadvertently watched some Lorraine Kelly on GMTV this morning and I seem to have reacted by plunging a knife into my eye.

Could anyone come round here as soon as possible as I’m losing a lot of blood…

Cheers,

BigAl 

Then go out and buy a Dell, with Ubuntu preinstalled. (OK - I realise that this is not particularly new news, but there you go.)

Currently they haven’t released these in the UK - part of me hopes they do, but I would then feel duty bound to buy one, which I can’t afford.

Dell responded to a flood of requests on their IdeaStorm website to sell machines with Linux preinstalled, but I am seriously worried that much of the fervour would not be backed up by actual hard cash over the counter, and this would be a tragedy. So, if you’re in the US, and you’ve got at least $599 to spare, then why not give it a go? (And, lets be honest, $599 is not bad for a laptop, albeit slightly underspecced). It’s not about whether Dell are any good, but rather about seeing Linux available preinstalled on machines from mainstream vendors. And that is good for _all_ of us, whether we use Linux or not.

mrBen