Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

DRM sudden outbreak of common sense

Monday, July 12th, 2010

An update to one of my previous posts from 5 years ago on the DRM vs Copyright issue. It seems that Brazil’s copyright reforms are planning to include parts that not only allow breaking DRM for fair use but also penalize people who put DRM on a work that restrict rights of users accorded to [...]

Missile Mayhem

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Or how to I set up my USB missile launcher to be controlled over the internet with Linux. Get missile launcher to work with pymissile. Run pymissile with the –network option. This will allow you to connect to it using UDP on port 20000 and send commands at it. To test this use the netcat [...]

Mock PHP 5 exam

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

I have been considering going for the Zend PHP 5 certification and bought myself some Zend PHP 5 Practice Exams to see what I need to study up on. Here is one of the questions I came across. Which of the following functions are part of PHP’s internal Iterator interface? Answers: (choose 5) rewind() valid() [...]

How do I unit test this?

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Came across a tricky bug a few weeks ago whilst working on some extremely fragile code. This was the code: settings.php $mail_settings = array( ‘server’ => ‘mail.example.com’, ‘port’ => 25 ); index.php function send_email($recipient, $message) { include_once(’settings.php’); $foo = new MailSender($mail_settings); $foo->send($message, $recipient); //this was line number in the error message }   send_email(’admin@example.com’, ‘Admin [...]

Tomb Raider: Underworld First Impressions

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

Yesterday I bought myself the latest instalment of the Tomb Raider series for the Wii. I spent a while playing it then I came across got stuck in the Level Puppet No Longer in the last room with the ceiling ring where I couldn’t progress in the game because the switch to open the door [...]

A double standard for adult content

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

This is my opinion on the topic of a bill outlawing the possession of “extreme pornography” which is set to become law next week. Here’s the BBC article Why does porn get a different set of standards? It’s perfectly legal to show non-pornographic films which contain “an act which threatens or appears to threaten a [...]

New PC

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

This week I decided to splash out a bit on a new PC for my parents. Their previous PC was a painfully slow decrepit Windows ’98 install which took about ten minutes to boot and often the mouse would freeze up (meaning that I would have to save whatever document they were editing using keyboard [...]

Guitar Hero III Expert Mode

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

I’ve found the secret to defeating songs in Guitar Hero III on expert mode… and it is more entertaining than watching someone else play i.e. if you’ve only got one guitar controller. You need three people, one for the strumming and whammy bar, one for the top three buttons (green, red, yellow) and one for [...]

He wasn’t my type

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

Guitar Hero III: May cause numb fingers

Tuesday, December 25th, 2007

Don’t try to IRC directly after playing “Through the Fire and the Flames” by DragonForce on Guitar Hero III The result comes out much like this: “I ahve been mostly playing Wii gmaes agianst my family and i ahve been playing guitra hero whcich has maed my fingres num” An MP3 of the track is [...]