The Megalomaniac Bore

Falklands Again

2012-02-08T12:13:00.002Z

I'm a utterly at a loss, how often and to how many people, must the British Foreign Office say "The Falkland Islands determine for themselves whether to be British or not" and they chose to be British.

The Argentines are getting right on my tits with this attitude they have "we'd rather see the heir to the throne in civilian attire" all any Argentinian politician need do, to gain influence and votes, is shout "viva las malvina's" and all the troggladites come crawling out the woodwork to agree.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-16939043

And to say sending the Dauntless down there is militarisation is a laugh and a half, we often send a ship down there on patrol in the south Atlantic, the Royal Navy do more good down there than the Argentine armed forces combined!

Server Server Server Everywhere

2012-01-31T09:16:00.000Z

The last 24 hours have been a pain in the bum, firstly because I've got man flu and keep coughing hunks of lung butter, but mainly because I've been in a quandary about servers. Specifically I've an idea to design and build a system, which uses a server to host a database on the back end to store the data, I've been playing with MySQL for this very purpose and am happy to proceed on technical ground.

But, and its a bit But... I'm not entirely sure what to do about a server in general, I have set up a virtual machine hosting the server on my laptop, so wherever I go I have the server on a local looping back address, great for development. I can copy this virtual machine to other physical hosts. I could even place the development virtual machine (after a security check) on the final host system showing the whole thing to the world at large.

My trouble comes when I think about that final host... Will it be a box in my front room attached to my anaemic cable modem? Will it be one of my physical Dell servers, which I buy hosted rack space for at a data centre? Will it be a hosted server I buy/rent from a data centre?

These questions have no easy answer. Especially as my project has £0 financing until at least in the late alpha stage, when I intend to tout it to a few known interested parties to see if they want to run with it as a concept and pay the bills at my end.

Certainly to host it myself on a box in the front room is free, I can even select to set up the linux server as "Free Software Only". To demonstrate the system on such a slow uplink however could be detrimental, so what about the hosted offerings?

To rent 2U space (this is two wrack slices in a data centre) was not too bad in London, with unlimited I/O with the server for customers, and a simple sign up process the two hosts I looked at were decent enough... but you could not bring the machine yourself, you had to ship it to them, and it had to pass safety checks and power checks and be of a certain age. Neither of my servers passed any of these checks online, let alone in person, they're slightly battered, old, Dell 2650's. Running a vulnerable (to hack) version of Ubuntu Server... Plus, to ship the machine to them for checking would cost almost as much as I paid for the machine in the first instance.

To rent a hosted solution seemed to be the way to go, a little more expensive per hour of operation then using my own machine, but with the advantage of their support and their network behind it. My only concern was to ask whether the data on the machine remained wholly and under my sole ownership. They said it did, but reading the small print of two different hosting solutions I noted phrased such as "access to your data, files and programs, maybe deemed necessary at any time and shall be left accessible to the root or administrative users by your assigned administrator". Essentially, saying they're going to look at the files at any time...

Is this a problem? For my purposes 99% of the time, no, I only planned to place compiled binaries and a database on the machine, none of my intellectual property (IP) would be at risk. Though, its not he IP we're worried about, its that pesky database.

Specifically the users database, these days you have to be very careful storing other peoples personal information, and in a secured database or not, if the machine is not physically on your premises you have you be very careful with your EULA wording to ensure that those signing up to your service know where the box is.

All very tedious, and means I need to go run around checking legal loops before committing to a hosting plan, for what should be a simple enough progression of a small, un-funded, project.

PC Specialist - Review

2012-01-26T13:01:00.002Z

My new laptop then, I ordered it from PC Specialist, and I have come to my blog to make a fair and even handed appraisal of what they're up to... because, they maybe a PC Specialist, but customer service specialist they are not.

First of all, when you order you're presented with an excellent price and a miriad of choices to configure your machine, I agonized over this and then went for a fairly powerful machine (Core i7-2670M Processor, 8GB of RAM and an nVidia GT-540M graphics card) and was happy to do so with the reassuring reviews and testimonials on the PC Specialist site.

However, I did have a pre-sales query, this was handled, and I placed my order. From there on, the customer service level dropped a little. Not drastically, just enough to get me worrying, and even to make my wife ask questions - never a good thing.

So, according to the rather complex diagram on the site:

My order should have gone through pre-production into building out to Awaiting Dispatched and then out the door. All good, I even bought "Silver Extra Care Delivery (Mon-Fri before Noon)" so on Monday this week I was happy to see (last thing) my machine move through building through quality control and into "Awaiting Dispatch". I assumed I'd missed Mondays courier, so expected to see the machine ship Tuesday and be in my sweaty eager hands Wednesday...

But no, the machine did not ship, Wednesday afternoon still with no sign of it shipping I sent them a message asking "Is there a problem?" No, no problem, came the reply, it'll dispatch and be with you Thursday.

Its Thursday right now, its after noon, clearly it didn't ship.

So I contact them, and I am assured it's shipping and gets moved up the queue (a head of who knows) and is supposedly shipped. Save for two problems, when I put the consignment number into the DPD tracking website it says "Your search did not find any matching tracking. Please refine your search criteria." And I have no faith that their customer service reps actually action what they've said they action.

Assuming it has shipped I'll have my hands on it tomorrow Friday, meaning of the entire length of my order it spent 4 whole days and one part day sat "Awaiting Dispatch". Combine this with it sitting in "pre-production" for three working days (and a weekend - so five days) and you can see that nothing quite matched their own vaunted processing and production diagram above.

I'm not going to knock the quality of the product, I have after all not received it yet, but I am going to say that their customer service is neither transparent, nor objective. You ask questions and you don't always get answers to the question posed, you get generic replies. And their dispatch process is clearly not working as it appears it should, with "< 1 day" shown, how long did it take my boxed up laptop to travel from the testers bench to the dispatch gate?... Four days by all accounts, that's pretty poor when it was build in less than half a day...

Fining Insurance Companies

2012-01-18T12:06:00.000Z

Am I the only one who finds it a little absurd to hear of Direct Line being fined for tampering with customer complaint files before submission to the regulatory body... How is fining them telling them off?.. All they'll do is pass on the cost of the fine to the already adversely affected customers in the form of higher premiums.

Surely to punish the insurer they should have enforced a drop in the amount of money they could charge for products for the next year... "24p per customer" or some such thing would be a fine, it would tell them off, and would enforce higher customer service standards as they would be scared of getting another fine.

Gah, the world whirls around and insurers charge what they like, and now the regulator enforces things in the most customer unfriendly way!

New Laptop Ordered

2012-01-12T15:19:00.000Z

So, I've decided on my laptop specification and I ordered it... I've gone for a completely custom machine, without any Operating System. Yes, after all my seeking I found a vendor able to produce me the machine I want without any Operating system. The saving I made not having the operating system was significant.

So, I've had an Intel Core i7 Quad Core mobile processor (infact its HT, so its got 4 real cores and can run 8 threads) with 8GB of 1333Mhz DDR3 RAM and a dedicated 2Gb nVidia 540 GT Graphics card... its a 15.6" form factor. All for under £550!

The only place I've skimped is on the hard drives, where I've gone for just a single 250GB 5400 RPM SATA drive, but this is mainly due to drive shortages following on from the flooding in south east Asia.

But this is a lot of processing power for the money, the same power from DELL costs over £1250 on the XPS 15 product line, and it seems impossible to get the Windows License refunded from anyone.

I will be going shopping for a new 15.6" carry case/shoulder bag.

And my chosen Operating System is going to be a Ubuntu derivative, I had toyed with Linux Mint being my chosen distro, but having used it for a few days on a virtual machine I'm not happy with it.

But my favourite distro is Ubuntu, the base from which Mint came, and also the inspiration of different offerings with the KDE shell, Gnome Shell (with and without Unity) and Xfce. So I think I'm now going to go with Ubuntu to use Gnome as and when I like, but with the Xubuntu-desktop package installed so I can use the Xfce interface whenever I like.

Where as...

2012-01-12T14:41:00.000Z

I knew this would come... India is complaining about the, rather disappointing India Special Top Gear shown over Christmas : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16526687

And of course the show is not very serious and full of toilet humour, unlike India which is very serious and devoid of toilets; unless you count shitting in the street of course.

Custom Laptop For Virtual Deeds

2012-01-04T11:08:00.000Z

Happy New Year folks. I'm having a real sort out of my computer equipment, I've just finished clearing up my desk, setting new power bars onto the wall, and clearing out a load of mess from under my work area.

Part of this effort is because it was getting to be a real mess under there, part of it is because I needed to clean the machines, as they've got a years worth of skin flake dust in them. But it is mainly because I'm going to be getting a new laptop, and this laptop is going to be a beast with an i7 processor capable of VT-d (direct device IO for virtual machines).

So, I needed to sort out my real machines which could become virtual boxes. I may come back with some pictures of the beast of a laptop I'm going to buy later, but its a race between a completely custom machine from PCSpecialist:

Or an off the shelf machine from Dell...

I would of course love it to be a sexy thing like the new Asus Zenbook

But as I'm a mortal man with a wife to support, I can't justify over a grand for the machine.

In fact its interesting the Dell Prices, I'm going to end up specifying a really low spec DELL and then buying the parts for it from other places, their XPS 15 machine, putting 8GB of ram into it costs over £200... buying an 8GB (2x4GB) Samsung brand SODIMMs from Amazon is only £35. So how do Dell justify the hike? They don't....

My major stumbling block is not the cost of the machine though, its trying to ensure all the parts I buy are going to work under the Linux environment I put on, I want to base the machine on Ubuntu or even vSphere and then host virtual machines on it to do my work (hence the need for VT-d).

But Dell don't supply, or easily make available, a way to get the refund on the Microsoft License, which I don't want. Microsoft say its up to the reseller of Windows to refund you, Dell say "not us".

Interestingly, Canonical (the maintainers and supporters of Ubuntu) taut Ubuntu Dell partnerships on their site. When you go ask DELL however, they say "not us".

Its Christmas

2011-12-24T01:39:00.001Z

Yeah, its christmas.. and this is what mankind has achieved... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16323666

That's right Obama... cancel the return to the moon... Nike have a new shoe out... for fuck sake.

Microsoft Notebook Noose

2011-12-22T15:21:00.001Z

So, I've been on a little bit of a crusade, I was given tentative permission the other day to look around for a new laptop. I had Toshiba and Dell laptops in the past, my current machine is a wheezing six years old, upgraded to the maximum and now simply not doing all the things I need to do with it (massive fan of virtualization that I am, I'm hobbled from coding on my chosen virtual machine in front of the tele, hence the need for a new laptop).

However, my first thoughts are, I want a stable host for my virtual machines, so I want to use a flavour of linux as the base for this laptop. Having consulted with the code of law as laid down in the Holy Rite of the EULA from Microsoft it seems I am able to obtail a refund for any Microsoft Windows License; which would automatically come with a new laptop, so long as I decline to accept the license on first boot.

This however poses a couple of problems, firstly, Microsoft say I must decline. If this machine has been booted, or cloned from a stock harddrive and the OEM/Manufacturer has in their turn accepted the EULA then I have to persue them for a refund. So, if I buy an Acer laptop from PC World, I have to talk to Acer, not PC World...

If however, the manufacturer has not accepted the license on my behalf, then I am left to accept or decline it. And if I decline it I can persue the reseller of the laptop, so PC World say, for the refund.

All sounds fair and, though complex, managable. WRONG, I've walked into and out of nearly every single reseller PC World, Staples, Comet, Currys, BestBuy; I've spoken to online resellers like Amazon, Aria and Overclockers; I've spoken direct to manufacturers and suppliers like Dell and Asus. All of them shrug their shoulders, scratch their heads and say "I have no idea what you're talking about"*.

It seems almost impossible to get what I want, or more rightly, escape the noose that is a Microsoft license. There's been all this bluster in the EU about Microsoft pushing browsers anti-competitively, well I want a different OS... but I have to jump through hoops with retailers unaware of their neccessity to supply the refunds...!!!

* Well, Staples didn't, their three lads seemed genuinely interested in my input and took my number to call me back and see where their "higher ups" stand on this topic.

Falklands Under Threat (AGAIN)

2011-12-21T10:11:00.002Z

Its interesting how history repeats itself, in 1981 the Royal Navy had just completed retiring its large fleet aircraft carriers, switching to the last light fleet carriers (HMS Hermes) and the new through deck cruisers (Jump jet/anti-submarine carriers) of the Invincible Class (HMS Ark Royal).

A considerable drop in our maritime exponent, recieved internationally as a percieved lowering of the white ensign, so much to that Argentina conducted an illegal, and ultimately misjudged, invasion of the British Oversears Territory of the Falkland isles.

In my opinion, spurred on by the idea that Britain would not come to the Falkland island government's aid and that the British Government were unable, through lack of these ships, to come to their aid.

But history less on over... Here we are in 2011, the government has just retired the Invincible class of carriers, leaving the Royal Navy with only the rotary wing air arm and HMS Ocean, two giant costly probably ill equipped super carriers on the slip ways being haggled over... and the South American Trade Bloc backing Argentina's claim to the islands once more!

I find it ridiculous, Argentina lost them to the French, Spanish and British in turn, the British people have a longer more thorough claim to the islands itself, but Argentina keep badgering for them, bullying for them. The reason is symbollic rather than required. I've heard Argentine Army Veterans who were landed on the islands during the war, one of them very poiniently said "We landed, and it was Britain, they drove on the left not the right, there were Red telephone boxes and no-one understood us, we suddenly were invaders, where I had expected a Spanish mix of people and us to be liberators I was suddenly very aware of being the invader".

That soldier (at the time of speaking) was living on the Islands, married to a native Falkland islander girl. And good on him, he'd seen how to co-exist, how friendly the Falklanders are, and how British they are.

Not to say they don't take on the Latin American flair somewhat, but they are basically good honest working folk, with strong British ties, on an island not unlike the Shetlands in both its weather and fauna.

Argentina better simply accept this, live with the people, instead of trying to always bully tactic them.

My bother with this is that, we really don't have a response, or an iron willed Prime Minister this time around, if Argentina or whomever, threatened the Falklands what response would we give... Moaning in the UN probably... but you never know, Gas and Oil have been found in and around the isles, the yanks might want in on the party just like they did with Kuwait.

Links: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16280613

Obligatory SWTOR Release Post

2011-12-19T15:02:00.000Z

So here it is, my obligatory post about Star Wars the Old Republic, I'm sure you can fill your boots with all the information you can find out there on the interwebs, it seems everything from the developer code to the artists car ahs been discussed endlessly as the game as come to fruition.

I'll be interested how many over time hours the staff have to put in at the game data centers, keeping it alive under the loads it'll get first week will be a challenge. It being Christmas will also mean, any serious players taking it up will be on there around the clock, so the servers if they go down will be a real sticking point.

In fact, its my past frustration with server down time at the launch of WoW, which is making me steer well clear of SWTOR. I suppose that's unfair of me, and its certainly putting a negative spin on an unknown entity; after all I've not really paid any attention to SWTOR, so how can I judge it.

But, I really don't see how they can change the formula of what an MMORPG is... Wow defines the genre, so its going to be WoW like... but not Wow... there are still going to be the elitist jerks, there are still going to be the RP maniacs, the gankers, the griefers, the scammers, the ninja's and the rest of us mindless automatons "Hey I got an epic"... "Gratz"... NEXT!

So, with that said, I really will be looking how the technology stands up, how do they cope with the influx of new players, have they load tested it alright? And my interest stems from my current personal development efforts.

Some of you may know, I did a degree in computing, Computer Studies with Software Engineering to be precise. My dissertation was on the topic of "Parallel and Cluster Computing in an Open Environment". Ironically, wenty years after the fact, you might know this exact idea as "the Cloud". Indeed Amazon offer a service very much like the concept I had put together in, the then fledgling, Java programming language. I was told all that time ago, it'd never work, go get a job. And I did, but I can't help I missed the boat.

I played games as a kid, lots and lots of computer games, I was one of that first generation who put down the boardgames to play their computers. And I had the idea of a server back end controlling multiple hundreds of parallel instances (not just sharing a mainframe as was popular) but descrete processes or worlds belonging to different players running a thin-client on their computer infront of them, connecting to the world over the internet... I missed the boat, but I love the technology.

So, lets see if Bioware and the rest, can stand up to the all conquering Blizzard and through my bitterness at having thought about this in the 90's and being ignored can they deliver a WoW Slayer?

Art Critque - Great Detail

2011-12-18T02:47:00.000Z

So, earlier in the month, on the 8th, I posted about some images released by the BBC. I complained that the artist was not actually very good that they had put "detail" in to make up for a basic lack of originality.

I just want to revisit this topic, firstly to say, I think I know where the artist vaunted by the BBC may have gone wrong. I think they were wrong to use what appeared like a digital photograph of a part of Manchester as their starting point.

And secondly, to show them how I'd appreciate their art being produced... No, I'm not going to get Pencil or Paper out... I'm not going to start up GIMP or go buy Photoshop... I'm simply going to send you to a link to watch a video... its 11 minutes of mesmerizing attention to detail.

Here is that link.

There's a reason....

2011-12-09T01:29:00.001Z

There is a reason the internet was invented, the history books try to tell us it was a method of communication created by DARPA to reduce the chances of the United States being unable to communicate in case of a nuclear strike... however, I disagree... the internet was invented so I could be up well beyond the time I should have gone to bed and I can find most excellent things like this:

http://www.break.com/index/enter-the-kazoo-man.html

In other news I'm actually up, because I'm wired, had a mad dash home from work earlier due to a medical emergency, and I'm utterly still wide awake from the worry and adrenaline.

Honourary mention to these tikes:

http://www.break.com/index/kids-playing-metallica-is-awesome-2177592

Art Critique... Apocalypse Manchester

2011-12-08T09:58:00.000Z

So, the BBC have done their usual and brought attention to something not very good... They're pictures created by an artist of Manchester in post apocalyptic style... personally I believe Manchester would be fully populated and a hub of any enterprises remaining after any apocalypse. The people might have an extra finger from radiation, or they might not be able to get full signal on their iPhones, but they'd be there...

So, looking at these images had me a bit skewed towards the, not very good opinion straight off. Looking at the detail in them though, I was impressed, the inner seven year old inside was like "whoa this is a great picture, look at all the detail"... then I realised all I was looking at was the detail, the amount of things the artist has flung shit at and scratched down walls...

Then I started to look with my thirty year old mind... and I came to the conclusion the art isn't very good... it looks like someone has snapped a picture on a decent high-res digital camera and then spent a good few days dirtying the pictures in Photoshop... the effect of decay is just taking walls and structures and scratching them away, best exemplified in the picture of the big wheel, if that structure had lost that segment, the weight of the upper standing arc would have pushed it down and collapsed it.

The railway viaducts, made of bricks, scratched away... bricks don't scratch away to leave brittle stagalmite like structures, they break off... well like bricks, and scatter... even in a nuclear blast. And they don't erode like portrayed, they round and the pointing fails and they fall out as oblong whittled blocks, not splinters.

This simple relation between what is portrayed and what real-life presents is very stark in the images, the images clearly are not trying to convey real situations of decay or desolation, but instead a stylised one. They are effectively abstract art, meeting modern art. But with the artist clearly not wielding an eye for reality is this art?

The Jackson Pollock brigade clear would say yes, I myself however am more dubious... its fine photoshop work, worthy of any game developer out there, but I don't think its art in the "hang on the wall sense" its less in the art category from that perspective than a Pollock, and I think they're pretty off the scale of art in themselves.

But above my critique, why has the BBC brought attention to it... I wonder if the poster at the Beeb has let their seven year old mind run away with them going "WOW" before their adult brain went "ah, not actually that good".

So, in summary, massive detail does not define good art, and if you're going to aim for detail, make it realistic, make it stun even after the second glance.

Functional Programming... Ner, don't bother....

2011-12-05T16:54:00.002Z

I've just had one of those moments, where I feel like the only programmer in the room who knows what they're on with... let me walk you through this one...

You have a complex piece of code, to sum the number of some values from a series of records where the record type is some given subtype... for example, you have a database of cars, you want to sum all the red cars registered in the last year... you want to sum the green cars... and then you want to sum the blue cars... Generically speaking, you can see where this is going, I'm sure:

function SumCars (Colour Col)

{

return ( SELECT * FROM Cars WHERE Colour = Col );

}

function SumRedCars ()

{

return SumCars ('Red');

}

function SumGreenCars ()

{

return SumCars ('Green');

}

and so on... this seems very simple yes... and you gain a single function, which is referenced by other sub-functions... now imagine that the "SumCars" function is very very complex (lets say, 350 lines of code) with different if-else and switch statements controlling different pathways through it.

Now, think about what the above style of code does for you, it makes a single copy of that huge function, and you just call that wherever you want... Great eh?... This is one of the tennants of good coding and functional programming. In my book its one of the best parts of programming.

This makes the code more maintainable, easier to read, and more approachable. I certainly don't do this kind of coding just to say "mine is better". If there is a better way to do this sort of thing please show me. No, what has gotten me utterly buffuddled today is the approach of a collegue of mine, whom has not grasped the situation above at all, and indeed has labelled my approach (what many of you I'm sure would consider the standard approach) to be obfuscating the purpose of the code at hand...

Now, I let them goad me, and I'm utterly lost, here's their solution...

function SumRedCars ()

{

REALLY

LONG COMPLEX CODE

WITH Red INSIDE

}

function SumRedCars ()

{

REALLY

LONG COMPLEX CODE

WITH Blue INSIDE

}

Yes, they want to copy and paste the really complex part and have a copy for every instance or parameter they want to pass in... and they see nothing wrong with this... they see this as being the correct way to work...

And it makes me want to chew my arm off just to have something to throw at them.

Slice a Penny Off Of Each Transaction Hack...

2011-12-04T01:18:00.000Z

So, I'm sat this evening just going through some old videos (VHS Tapes, you know those old things before digital storage)... and one of them I've pulled up is "Hackers" from 1995... an instant, if in accurate technically, classic for the hacking, freaking, social engineering and coding worlds.

I'd always had this information filed away in the back of my mind, but the hack involved is a worm, which takes fractions of a cent from each transaction at a huge firm... Sound Familiar?... It should, its the same sort of thing as Richard Prior was drafted in to do in Superman III... and that hack itself was used as the basis (directly) for the hack mentioned in "Office Space"...

Come to think of it, its a pretty weary, well worn hack... One which clearly saunters into the movie executive world in different guises every ten years or so...

My question is... who's going to use it next? iPhone is huge, Steve Jobs has gone to the great "fuck you all do it my way" shack in the sky... how long before someone puts eCredit, or Wireless banking, or whatever through the "skim 0.00001 cents each time" rigmarole?

BBC Micro - 30 day!

2011-12-01T10:42:00.002Z

With today being the 30th Birthday of the BBC Micro computer, a mainstay of very many British Schools like mine in the 1980's, I'm surprised the BBC haven't more stuff scheduled tonight about the machine.

http://www.reghardware.com/2011/11/30/bbc_micro_model_b_30th_anniversary/

They have recently had a fair few computing and maths related documentaries about Bletchley park and the code breakers. So with the anniversary and a lot of archive material and even some contemporary programmes about the Beeb in the system I'm just so surprised to not find anything listed.

I'd love to see this again: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92

Spoon feed me the spec...

2011-11-30T15:50:00.000Z

I'm narked off, as you all may know I work in Software, I have received various different job titles around the place where I work, from "Technical Interface" to plain old "Developer", today I am a Software Engineer.

I make that use of "Engineer" for two reasons, firstly, because my degree says on it "Software Engineering" making me an engineer of software, not a developer or hacker, and I say engineer because I do actually think about, write down and design the software I'm putting together before I start to type. Not doing so is not engineering, nor really is it developing or really hacking, its doing a hack job certainly, but its nothing useful at the end of the day.

So, what has me narked off you ask? Well, today we have a fault report, this report had floated in from a customer and gone all around the houses (to about 9 different people) before one of these people came over to ask "hey you, man in the department this fault comes from, have you seen this?"... "Why no, I'm not on the e-mail list so I've no idea what you're showing me, show me, and I might know".

A simple situation and easily resolved, I got a copy of the customer complaint. And took it at face value "I do A then B and it breaks"... fair enough... But looking at the system and the customer report, doing A then B did not make it break for us, doing B then A however made it go mental... "Oh" says I "that e-mail is a little off then, but we got it now, its B then A".

You're all still with me I hope... because here comes the part that made me angry... the person reporting the problem to me turned and said, in a really smart arsed voice "What do you want them to do, spoon feed you the information?"

Oh I was fuming, I said nothing, the guy knew he'd pissed me off, he left the area tout sweet. I turned to my co-worker and asked "Is this a customer, or a site trial?".... Its a site trial....

So, yes I very fucking much do want a site trial to spoon feed me information, that's the fucking point of a fucking site trial.

What has all this got to do with my job description? Well, you see, in order to get a software engineer to work on something they need to know there's a need for some work, they need to know of the problem, they need as much information as possible. You don't just let a road engineer turn up and say to them "Now make a road", they need to know things... they need to know the specification. This is a key tennant of working with an engineer.

But, it seems, when you're a Software Engineer, you should be some sort of mystic, able to descern from the most obscure conversation (never written information, always fucking conversation) just exactly what the customer wants. Its like they think from pointing, nodding and grunting, we can invent system software to know they want to iron their shirts whilst they take a shit.

And today just examplified fantastically this dicotomy, not least because the wanker who was bemoaning my wanting more information, programs himself... Well when I say programs, he works in VB... need I say more?

My Lord, I bow before thee...

2011-11-22T12:22:00.004Z

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/22/frank_fisher_creative_class/

Breakout...

2011-11-03T11:35:00.000Z

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/02/steve_jobs_most_influential_gamer/

Why is this? Is it because of "Breakout" or because he's dead?.. I don't think this is a deserved award at all.

Oooooommmmmm

2011-10-30T16:37:00.000Z

So, after the tirade of the last post, I've not done the shop for her, and text the old gits telling them the info, let them sort it now... I bet they can't... couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery me thinks.

Anyway, I have just been relaxing a little, I have a cup of tea and a pint of orange juice and I've just been playing some "Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance". I loaded up a game I was playing earlier in the week... and I noticed something... it ran very very slowly...

Earlier in the week, if I sent a fighter sweep out over the ocean, they flew they bombed about and came back to refuel... but after loading the game, it feels like everything is stuck in tar... like its slow mo... even whacking the "Game Speed" up to 10 made no difference.

I dunno what this is about, but I have 16GB of RAM and 8 CPU Cores running at 3 ghz... its gotta be quicker than it feels?

Dysfunction

2011-10-30T14:12:00.000Z

So, I'm busy today, very very busy arranging a wedding... no mean feat and nothing to be taken lightly, yet I keep getting blasts of bull shit from my mother and I've snapped, I'm so unimpressed I'm going to explain my frustration here.

My Mother is a right moaner, she'll moan about a topic basically until it either gets done, or until you snap and tell her to fuck off, I can't tell you how many months I've ignored my mother for to avoid this kind of confrontation, we had a flare up of this shit not three months ago, and I thought she might finally have learned her lesson, but no, today she's kicking off...

Now, what could she be kicking off over that is more important than my sorting out this wedding?... Okay... ready?....

Its making sure my daft old Nan gets her shopping in the 12pm-1pm time slot next week. My nan is useless she'll spend spend spend, but she'd harmless with it, she's too thick to be too vindictive and too self obsessed to truly get under your skin, so if she were to moan "I've not got my shopping", I'd just tell her to calm down... not my mother... oh no, my Nan moans to my mother... my mother starts to call me... as if I'm not up to my eyes in other tasks...

In the lasty 36 hours I have, worked a shift with work, taken delivery of a new washer, arranged and managed the fitting of both the bride and bridesmaids dresses. Arranged with the best man to get his suit sorted, done a full shop for ourselves, cleaned down stairs, cleaned the bathroom, hoovered the house and spend about three hours laying out the seating plan for the dinner following this wedding... so I'm pretty tired, pretty fucked off and have had no time to myself at all this weekend, to top it off my Mrs is at work so I've hardly seen her either.

Now, step into this my Mother niggling over this shop, now when we were kids my mother would moan at my Dad, she'd moan and cajoal and push him until he snapped and he'd come roaring in at us kids hit us, usually with a slipper, but sometimes with a fist, he'd smash something scream in cohearently and then later on we would have to go appologise to him... My mother easily leads my Dad into this....

So it was no surprise about twenty minutes ago when my phone rings and its my Dad's mobile... my Dad never makes calls... ever.... from the sound of his voice he's laying in bed, beery eyed, either he's not slept well, or he's been up all night (as usual). But I can tell my Mother has been moaning and moaning and moaning.... "Are you going to do Nan's shop?" he demands... no asks... not inquires like you should to someone doing you a favour... no demands in a strop.

And it all comes clear, Mother is moaning, she's bored today, she's laying in bed, her current favourite toy a trolly dolly for Quantas is stuck in Singapore cus of this industrial dispute, so my mother is sat at home brooding about what boat she can rock, and she's picked mine, whilst I'm under extreme stress.

So my Dad has been told to "Go away" and been hung up on.

I then decided to sort out five minutes to call my Nan, and I have and I asked her... "Nan, why when you can't get hold of me do you go and moan to my Mum?"... wrongly I've been thinking she's been moaning to start this off... "I've not called anyone since Friday" she says... honestly, I believe her, she's too thick to lie...

Sooooo my mother has gotten this bee in her bonnet about nothing... Has wound my Dad up, like the good old days, for nothing... and has pissed me off for nothing... and interrupted my getting on with these wedding arrangements for nothing....

So to all the mothers out there don't stress your kids....

To all the unthinking fathers who snap when their Mrs has been moaning at them all day... don't snap, think why is she moaning and then think... Hang on, she's talking about other people, who might be busy, I don't know why they're busy, but there must be a reason why they've not got on with something...

And what makes all this work, I've done this shop every weekend for about two years for my Nan, I know what she wants, I know when to call her, I know we'll get the delivery slot... and even if we don't my Nan does not have a hectic social calendar we'd work out a new slot... but my Mother can't accept that, and I'm right fucking fucked right fucking off with it... so here it is laid bare, if I pop around and strange my parents later, you'll all know why.

China again....

2011-10-27T16:46:00.002+01:00

They quash truth and freedom of speech, so why not rumour-mongering?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15476724

Idea for better grammar & spelling parsing...

2011-10-24T12:05:00.002+01:00

Any of you who have hung about on the internet will have seen Lol catz and other such meme's, one of them is the random pluralization of things... starting from "Internet" to "internets"... which technically is correct, damn it all to hell...

But, now you get stupid things being pluralised. I don't know where this came from, but I think I've just found out through recreating the piece of typing balls up which formed the crazy... I just bought a hard drive off of ebay (I know, how brave am I)... I sent a message with it to say "Lets make sure its well packaged"... but I has a typo, and I used 's' in stead of 'd'... "Lets make sure its well packages".

This annoys me, firstly because I ballsed up, but I do that all the time so who cares. But because when I read it back it looks like I'm not a native English speaker, it lowers my IQ by at least a southern US state quota... Dag nab it.

The foul up got be thinking though, the scentence does not scan correctly with an "es" instead of an "ed" we have spelling and grammer checkers built into our browsers now-a-days, why don't they check for this sort of foul up? Why don't we make one which fixes up the fuck ups? Or at the very least put a wiggly line under them Micro$oft style.

I don't get it...

2011-10-22T23:15:00.000+01:00

So, I've had my hands on an Apple Mac (for the first time since about 1989), the main reason for this was to see how it stood up in the coding department, they tout OS X as the most advanced operating system in the world... Really its not, its just a very pretty looking version of Unix... Sooo... where's the killer app?

You see, my impression of Mac software has always been that its fantastic looking, but doesn't do an awful lot... and you know what, right out of the box this Mac I'm putting my fangs into smacks of exactly the same thing.. Its dead pretty, its real elegant, but there's not a whole lot I can do with it...

All the programming side of things (XCode) is locked away behind a $99 license... I mean, this is Unix being shipped without a compiler... of any kind....

I've looked around, I can't get any GNU tools on there. I mean I can even get GNU GCC on the aborted alient faetus that is Vista... what the hell are Apple thinking stopping us programming on their kit... this is stuff that I can't believe is happening.

The other end of the stick is that, I always see academic use of Apple kit, I've just watched a presentation from Stamford Uni, where they were using OS X as the base operating system for all their programming examples... so they had all their students pay $99 to Apple... is this something about Apple being in California and Stamford being just around the corner??? I do not get this.

I'm going to keep plugging away at this puppy over the next few days, but for the cost of Apple kit, the cost of the XCode license and the hassle of it being only for their platform, I'd say get a real shitty PC/Lappy from ebay and stick Unbuntu on there for free...

Chinese Apathy... Maw Fong

2011-10-17T23:00:00.000+01:00

Well, having spotted this article on the BBC news I had to come to blog about it... its like why are reporters only suddenly bothered about this... take a look:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15331773

A two year old toddler is hit by a van, the driver makes off, she's hit again, people walk by and pretty much no-one gives a shit. This is pretty normal for South East and Eastern Asia in general, if you've ever spent any time watching any of the sickening postings and video's on "Toxic Junction" you'll soon see how people of such countries simply do not give a flying fuck about anyone in the road.

American McGee was on GFW Radio, back in the day, and he was talking about working in Honk Kong, he explained a Chinese (I think) concept of "Maw Fong". You'll have to excuse me if that's not the right spelling. But the phrase pretty much relates to the standard bullshit that goes on in China. The words actually mean "trouble you", so you could say "Maw Fong Mei", to mean "May I trouble you", but Maw Fong is just all the crazy fucked up shit that goes on in China.

A good example, apparently, is that in the Chinese driving test (or at least of Hong Kong) one of the questions is "Should you find yourself going down a street with cars parked, should you a) honk occasionally to let people know you are coming, b) honk often to let people know you are coming, or c) hold down your horn to let out a continual tone?"... And one of these is the right answer! That is Maw Fong.

The people walking past that poor little girl, that's Maw Fong. Its all fucked up, and shows just a little of the "don't give a shit attitude".

Why am I so bothered? Well, a couple of posts back I had a dig at Nottingham Police, and this was because I stood up to sort out a small local problem. The problem is quiet, but the situation carries on, the nasty bitch I had to deal with still goes out and talks to other people about me like I'm shit, that's Maw Fong. You try to be nice, you accidentally walk in the street and the planet will kick you in the knackers, run you over and watch you squirm.

I'm just amazed this story got reported, just go look at Toxic Junction, of how much of this crap goes on.

Strain your Resources, Ruin your Software.

2011-10-12T14:10:00.002+01:00

One of my daily frustrations around here is the amount of work which relies on such tenuous back history. A good example, which has I've been reminded of today, is the smart card (chip & pin) system used in one of the main products of my employer.

I wrote the current incarnation of this system, and to be frank, my employer needs to kiss my boots for doing so, because writing it was pretty much done in the worst circumstances, with no design, no idea what was even expected, from an in complete software development kit (SDK) purchased years before; for a member of staff no longer in their employ.

The fact that they have working chip & pin functionality is a miracle.

I mooted this scenario to a friend of mine, he expressed similar concerns at his employ, it seems the common story is that someone higher up decides a piece of kit or tech is needed, and they turn to a randomly picked, or the first available, technie type person and they set them a challenge to get things done.

The trouble with all this of course is that it leads to stress, the person doing is stressed, especially when there is no formal back, no training and no resource in which to carry out the task at hand. The person asking for results is stressed, as without that back ground the task takes longer than it is perceived to take. And then at the end of the day, one is stressed, the product is stressed, as testing it might reveal unknown results.

The moral of the story is, if you want to get good software, kit or tech, out the door let it mature. Get the resources, get trained, get research carried out, and get to know the end product required.

It seems the current economic slump has taken a bad situation and made it far worse, as before managers and higher expected tech results from the veneer thin surface of training or resource they'd give. But now it seems that tiny resource has been done away with.

Leaving people to produce substandard, strained, flaky software, and worse still they then point blame not at their own miss-management but at the developer working on the product.

Weird Google Search...

2011-10-07T21:22:00.000+01:00

I've just spotted something Google related, you know you can type a search query straight into the address bar in Chrome? And it'll start to prompt you for the page you might be looking for?

Well, I was just looking around, and don't ask me why this came up (I neither have a sister, nor caught her doing anything) but I typed in the phrase "Caught My Sister" and two of the prompted items surprised me, the latter on the list was Wikipedia's entry for Tony Blair, the direct link to his honours no less.

The other was the Wikipedia entry for Steven Fry... How strange that should be a suggested short cut from google for the phrase "Caught my Sister"....

Review My Review

2011-10-06T14:17:00.001+01:00

So, I have a thought... I've not tried this out yet, neither am I tempted to pander to the idiots I believe are doing this... but I'm going to express my opinion here... I am an Amazon Vine reviewer; in case you don't know us Vine Reviewers get a montly list of products offered to us to try to Amazon to drum up some reviews and interest in the items, we get the items free and are asked to read/listen to/use and post a review back about them. You become a Vine programmer member by invitation only. I'm not aware what Amazon's criteria are, one day I had an invitation e-mail arrive and I accepted, since then I have tried books, CD's, some head phones and a water jet dental flossing system.

Now, most of my reviews are really about my impression of the item, I like some items and I don't like others. A couple of the books I've had have been excellent and my reviews reflect that. But I've noted that some items are pretty rubbish whilst others are middle of the road. My Scores reflect that.

I feel that the removal of the pressure as to whether I bought the item, and the embarressment that I bought something and its crap, being removed has lead me to give more constructive and insightful reviews. Some of the items I've had I've not liked, they have negative reviews, and some of the items I've had have has positive reviews...

Yet the number of people who find my reviews helpful is destressingly bizarre. It seems when I get a product people like they roughtly 50/50 agree with me, pharoh nuff, but when I, and a gaggle of others detest an item; and say so clearly with defined parameters, examples and use cases; our feedback is given negative responses.

The dental flosser seems to be such an article, when I wrote my review for it, it had no other feedback, I was one of the first fice commentators, I posted my one star negative review and went to bed, I got up next morning and there were four more one star negative reviews and a couple of two stars... all seemed right and everyone of those reviews tallied somewhat with my own experience.

Then I noted the rating of my review was marked as a negative review, not useful, and there was a five star review in its place. This item had no reviews, hence no sales, just vine reviewers... a bunch of vine reviewers found the item bad, one found it good, but their review gets a positive feedback, whilst ours all get negative... "0 out of 1 people found this helpful" on mine... "1 out of 1 people found this helpful" on their strange "This is awesome" style review... I'm not disagreeing that that person found the item useful, and that their review has any less merit than mine or all the others...

But a detailed, insightful, presented review with use cases and my specific points of failure, along with the few redeeming features, is marked as not helpful? Why?

That's what I want to know, I want feedback on my feedback.

But I also want some transparency on who is giving ths "useful" ratings, should vine reviewers be able to (as it appears in this case) mark other vine reviews as not helpful? Should only people who have bought an item on Amazon be able to review that item... or if they're not a vine reviewer; or a reviewer whom has not had that item; be able to rate the feedback of others?

These are all questions I have, as a vine reviewer I now have page after page of reviews I've posted, of the feedback on those (24 points worth) only a measily 16 people have said my reviews were helpful. When I didn't bother with Vine and just reviewed things I got a hold of I had a much more positive number of helpful feedback points... (the points mean nothing by the way).

Might some reviewers be beign biased?

Might some be in collusion with the makers of items for review?

Might some manufacturers be getting staff to find down rating reviews not helpful to promote those with positive reviews...

In the field of PR the Amazon rating system must be a nightmare for some brands.

PHP - Exec, PassThru & System calls

2011-09-28T18:08:00.001+01:00

When you're working with PHP, hosted by Apache, if you are using the calls "exec", "passthru" or "system" to call into other applications you can miss changes in those apps, unless you change the PHP script before accessing the page again.

So, I have my browser pointed to my PHP page as "http://127.0.0.1/example.php" and in that PHP page script I have a call to "exec /usr/bin/myapplication" which is a program I've written in C++.

Now, if I change the application in C++ and recompile it, then refresh the browser I can fail to see any change, the Apache Server/PHP engine keeps the last version run cached. Great for speeding up your server, but a pain in the bum when you're trying to debug that C++ application through the web-browser interface.

The best solution to making sure your changes to the C++ show up appears to be to simple put an edit into the PHP file and save it again.

Note; Not even copying the PHP file into /var/www again makes a difference, the file itself has to change, if only by adding a space and then removing it again.

This edit then makes the Apache/PHP engine drop the cached version of the C++ Application and run it from scratch. This same problem must happen if you do anything to change any application you are calling with the above PHP commands.

Call Centres....

2011-09-27T10:46:00.000+01:00

No wonder I can't understand them when they're in India, if this is the kind of voice coaching they're getting:

"B-U-T is pronounced as 'but', however P-U-T is pronounced 'poot', [like foot] not 'putt'," explains teacher Stephen Rosario, as he coaches the class in how to enunciate English words.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15060641

But and Put... are the same changing the constonant from B to P does not change the inflection of the ut.... But, Put, Hut all sound the same, even Foot sounds like Fut to me (a very native British English Speaker)...

Poot, a pooter is a womans privates for heaven sake!

Ignore this "Stephen Rosario" he clearly can't speak English himself, his name sounds Italian. Gah.

Scrolling Technology

2011-09-26T22:44:00.000+01:00

So, taking a patient look back at all the graphics technology I have documented and on my reading list, I figured I needed to pick something worth reading that was going to further my actual work too. So, I picked up looking at scrolling and 2D effect games.

You know what? I am amazed at how much knowledge seems to have been lost, I was looking at old games from ID (the makers of Doom & Quake), I also looked at a bunch of 2D scrolling games on my old Atari ST, and started to put together some simple testing code to do the same soft of effects in Java & C#.

But, I'm after hard information about how to do certain tasks, how to achieve certain effects, but the knowledge is lost.

So, I cry out to all those old programmers out there, all you 2D scrolling nuts, blog about the technology! I'm going to be, but I have to reinvent your wheels first.

Hardcore programmer...

2011-09-22T16:29:00.000+01:00

How can you tell you've become a hardcore programmer? Well, for me its when we're looking at wall paper for the bedroom, and I've put this on the list

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Magic-Whiteboard-G450/dp/B001P5UAV8/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1316705114&sr=8-8

Code Development Quality

2011-09-20T12:56:00.001+01:00

I've stumbled into a habit of late, something I can't stop myself doing, which I've never really done before... I'm parallel processing... Since 1989 when I became more aware of the internal workings of my Atari St, and the way it did one thing at a time for me I've always worked the same way. I used to write softwatre that way, picking up a component, designing, writing, testing and documenting it in sequence.

But, I found that as my software projets have gotten bigger and bigger I needed to be able to put parts of things together, slide in other parts and then go back to sew things together. This started out small, but in a current personal project I'm working on its a sprawling documented seething group of about 110 classes (and counting).

Concurrently running through each module in turn, going back reading my notes and reviewing each, incrementing and incorporating innovation from one place through the body of the whole project.

Its turning into a bit of a quality kicker for me, my personal software projects are far more higher quality than the ones I'm writing for my employer, simply because my employer don't really seem to see the point of my spending four weeks to do a task which they think should take one.

I myself however am reaping the benefits. My current software project is, unfortunately, about four months behind schedule and had a bit hiatus between June and July as I re-wrote vast swathes. But things are quieter now, for example in one day (with the improved quality) I was able to replace a major components of the display systems and rendering threading in a day... it should have taken at least a week alone, just to get a coloured screen to display. Instead, because of the quality of the underlying code I was able to get this feat of engineering done in less than 8 hours and had it integrated on my three test boxes for soak testing after 10.

The question is, how do I sell this contept to my bosses?

Chineese Tesco..

2011-09-15T19:51:00.000+01:00

I love when I get really really shit attempts at phishing scams. Here's the one that just showed up... I love it, this Chineese accented Engrish really needs to be docrumented somewhere...

P.S. My mistakes are intentional...

EMF Head....

2011-09-13T18:42:00.000+01:00

So, I just read this article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14887428 and one could scoff at these people... but, I'm sure I'm one of them.

Not to the degree of moving house, but when mobile's first came out I could not stand to sleep in the same room with one, I used to get a headache every morning (if it were on). And I had a Motorola phone which was just as bad, if I had it beside my bed when I slept I'd wake with an almost hung over feeling.

I now have a Nokia phone and I intentionally put it way over to the side of me, over two meters away, or I leave it to charge over 4 meters away, over night.

So there maybe something in this...

I'm not bothered by wireless networks, I don't think... but mobiles certainly have this running recurrent experience to me... I might do a blind test, get a sock or something, and ask the wife to put it under the pillow her side of the bed with, or without, the mobile in it... and see if I marry up a bad head with the phone being present...

Policing - Nottinghamshire

2011-09-12T10:15:00.000+01:00

Over the last few months there has been plenty of coverage of the recent civil unrest and rioting here in England, plenty of pundits, speculators, commentators and nanny-say-do-weller's have been on their podiums spouting off.

Some have blamed the parents, some the lack of morals, some video games, some rap & hip-hop culture, some the simple bad economic situation and lack of jobs.

I myself could speculate plenty about the problems, I was born in St Anns and raised in Top Valley, two of the roughest, dirtiest, dangerous areas of Nottingham city. When people think of Nottingham they think of guns and shootings, so much so that the city has recieved the monica "Shottingham" in the tabloid press. What seens to be reported however is always the shock and outrage at the time, but little ever gets done to address the situations.

I have to say, I grew up in Top Valley in the 80's and by the 90's I was leaving further and further afield to University, but you could play on the streets in those days, you didn't (often) have kids snatched from the streets, or if you did it wasn't exposéd on the tabloid front pages. It was a different time, but the place was the same, the families were the same, the kind of kids and up bringings were the same.

So, why some three generations on is the place such a shit hole? And I have two view points as to why, firstly the lack of jobs. When I was a kid you could hear of peoples relatives going and getting casual work. In factories, in food processing, in road or building works. Work was, if not plentiful, certainly undersubscribed.

They went on about the unemployment figures in the 80's, but I strongly believe in our area a lot of the unemployment figures were from people simply not declaring they had a few hours here and there to make ends meet. They took their benefits and added extra's.

Now-a-days though, those self same people are simply taking the benefits, there is no way for them to even get those part time ad hoc jobs they once had, and certainly no hope of decent employment. So they're constantly struggling, the pressure builds and you get what we had here the other week.

That's all part of it, and being economics its all very convoluted and confused, so many inputs and so many expectactions that this is as far as I'm going to go with it and I'm going to move onto my other point.

Policing. The police. In the 80's and 90's you never saw them walking the beat on Top Valley, just as you never really see them today, but you never got the amount of violent disorder and crime you have today. The reason for this was two fold, firstly the police if they were called came down on whomever was causing the problems like a tonne of bricks. They took the work of two or more witnesses and acted, either telling the supposed-guilty party to shut up and buck up, or they gave them a night in the cells. It was an ever present threat which ever teenager in the area pretty much tried to avoid.

Yes there was still high spirits, yes some crime, and certainly crime from many passing through the area. But the actual people who made up that community did for the large part conform for a better standard of living all round.

Today however, you call the police and they come to mediate. You formally inform them of an infraction of the law, you spell out the actual laws someone has transgressed and you actually formally request that they take action... and they come to mediate... "oh that might inflame them, lets talk about this"...

What the fuck?

When I call the police, three times in a week, and have documented, diaried, recorded evidence of the situation at hand, when I am willing to testify, give statement and act to solve the problem, I want that active, reactive, policing approach from the 80's and 90's. I want the copper to listen to me, to understand I'm not a fool and to act.

Certainly not as my puppet, but to definately listen to my input and respond, hell I'd like to see them say "you're fucking moaning about nothing", then at least I would get off my high horse.

But oh no, modern policing... its mamby-pamby ball-less soul-less crack pop mediatory bollocks, and I'm saying this from experience.

Officers are either very confrontational to you the affronted party and very placating to the guilty party, or they simply do not engage with you. I've seen two different officers, both male, stand toe to toe staring down affronted parties (who were also male) and then being concilliatory and pacifying to guilty parties (who were female), its like the stab vests are holding in too much testosterone and they're trained to just pacify the women and to piss the men off.

And as such I'm not surprised that there were riots, I'm not surprised police stations were attacked. If I operated the prime civil law enforcement infrastructure and I witnessed my organization being so easy to trample at the bread and butter front line policing interface with the public, like the police here are, then I'd be very scared to be running that organization even ashamed.

None of this is meant to mean that we need draconian policing, but some balls at least, some common sense from practical living, rather than namby-pamby self reassurance course invested pseudo science clap trap approaches.

I'm geekily gobsmacked...

2011-09-09T12:14:00.002+01:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14843549

Writing your own Boot Loader

2011-09-04T20:12:00.000+01:00

This blog post is a following of the excellent tutorial at http://mikeos.berlios.de/write-your-own-os.html by Mike Saunders. My thanks to him for his permission to post this information and quote his original work.

Something I've been mooching over recently is writing my own assembly code, as part of my degree I did a tiny bit of 68000 assembly and before that I'd included assembly based interrupt driven Mouse controls into my Turbo C and Turbo Pascal programs but I had never actually sat down and understood Assembly on the x86 class processor.

So I have set about learning a little bit of assembly, using a text editor and nasm. After getting the basics I asked the question 'What will I make?'. Assembly is a really alien world, I'd seen listings of coding in it many times, all full of strange seemingly massively repetive commands like mov, add, dx, si and other scary looking nonsense; even as an experienced Software Engineer I had a certain amount of trepidation going through the topic at hand.

But, I soon realised I knew very little about how the BIOS in the machine picks itself up and starts the operating system. Sure I knew how to install GRUB, how to format a drive to make it bootable and add a new master boot record, but I'd never actually looked at how the software picks itself up, how it "bootstraps"... A PC is often said to try to pick itself up by its own boot straps when you turn it on.

The first bit of software run sits in some hardware chips (ROMS), this primevil code's job is to call launch an application loaded from the first sector of a disk (the first sector is the master boot record - or MBR). This application is the boot-strapper or boot-loader application, and you can write your own...

So I hit the inter-webs for some help and came across the MikeOS project, specifically the excellent introductory boot loader tutorial, and this is where I'm going to pick up the rest of my blog post, it struck me that as brilliant as that tutorial is it doesn't really hold ones hand through the process step by step. So I'm going to try and help you write your own MikeOS inspired boot-loader with Ubuntu (or Kubuntu or Edbuntu or Debian) you can do this on your Windows machine too.

So, lets get started, first of all you'll need to download a whole bunch of software from the internet, you'll need the following:

Development System

Ubuntu 32bit Desktop Edition - I used v10.04 LTS - so anything newer will do:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

If you want to run this tutorial as I have, get yourself a spare PC from somewhere, burn the Ubuntu ISO to a CD and install your system. If however you've not got a spare machine at hand, then you can read on anyway...

Next, you'll need VMWare Player. Many tutorials on writing your own boot-loader use qemu, but I'm going with VMware player because you can get it for windows and linux... so perversely if you want to follow this tutorial on a windows machine you can run VMWare player inside your Windows installation, and let it run the Ubuntu 32bit system you downloaded in the first step!... neat.

You can get WMware Player from http://www.vmware.com/products/player/overview.html (You will need to sign up to download the Player, but it is free).

So, go now and set yourself up, if you're really really stuck setting yourself up then drop me a line, we'll have a skype about what's going on. But I'm going to assume you're tooled up, you've install your machine (or host a new virtual machine with VMware Player under windows) with Ubuntu and you're sat looking at its desktop.

Configure Ubuntu Tools (good for Debian, Kubuntu, Lubuntu etc).

Once your Ubuntu Install is up and running set it up to look however you wish, and open a terminal window (with either the CTRL+ALT+T key stroke, or by pressing ALT+F2 and typing xterm). Inside your console window you will now need to install some software, namely the essential items to build software with and the assembler we'll be using; which is called nasm.

So, inside your Ubuntu terminal you will need to run the command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential nasm

This will install both the build essentials and the nasm assembler in one fell swoop.

We could now create some software but we'd have nowhere safe to run it...

VMware Player

This is where VMware player comes it, it'll let us create a virtual driev image (a floppy image) into which we'll put our boot laoder, without risking our real hard drives or wssting burning CD's all the time.

You will now need to install VMWare Player into your Ubuntu machine (if you are already hosting Ubuntu from Windows don't worry about this step, use the player from windows and copy the floppy image; mentioned in a moment; to windows to run the software we create).

To install the player simply open a terminal (or use the one you already have open) navigate to wherever you have downloaded the player bundle to and use the command:

sudo sh VMware-Player-3.1.4-855356-i386.bundle

(The last item there is the file name I've downloaded, by the time you come to read this tutorial you may have downloaded a different build of the product, so use whatever file name you have exactly in place of the one above: sudo sh <file name>).

Once this starts up to install you'll be back into the land of a GUI, so you can praise whatever god you believe in and use the mouse to set up the player software.

Once the player has installed on Ubuntu you'll be able to launch it from the terminal with the command "vmplayer" or you can launch it with a mouse click from the menu via "Applications->System Tools->VMware Player".

Go a head and start the player up, we need to use it before we can get coding.

Floppy Image

The first task we have is to find somewhere to put our boot-loader when we've built it. We don't want to use our hard drive because we still wan to boot our machine as it is... and we don't want to keep burning and wasting CD-R's... we don't want to use a USB stick to boot because they work slightly differently to normal drives... so the option left to us is a floppy.

Now, not many of us have a real floppy drive any more, infact I'm sure some of you reading this will have never held a floppy disk in your life, but don't worry, because we're going all virtual. We're going to get VMware Player to create us a blank floppy image.

With VMware Player open, click to create a new virtual machine, select to install the operating system later, and opt for a type of "Other" and select "MS-DOS" from the drop down... we're not going to actually let this virtual machine come into being, just advance through the screens until you get to the hardware selection screen, when you see the options to allow you to select "Customize Hardware" click that button and you'll be presented with the list of devices.

Inside the customization page you should see in the list of devices "Floppy", if you left click this item you will see several options, one of which is "Use a floppy image:". Check that option and you'll now be able to get at a button called "Create"... you guessed it, hit create and save yourself a floppy image (FLP) file somewhere (confusingly the option is "open" on the dialog, so 'open' the image to save it).

Once you have the image just cancel the creation of the virtual machine, we don't want it at this time.

So, I now have a "blankfloppy.flp" file, which I've saved out... that image can be very useful so take a copy of it somewhere as a back up...

Code

Now, I'm going to give you the code of a whole simple, well commented, boot loader (derived from the boot-loader in MikeOS). All this assembly does is specify the stack, define a constant string and output that string to the screen. It then sits in an infinite loop.

; This is the assembly code for our Bootloader

BITS 16 ; Instruct the system this is 16 bit code

jmp start ; Jump to the start routine, short being never to return

nop ; No operations from here

; This is the entry point put nothing else above this, not even

; include statements

start:

mov ax, 07C0h ; Setup 4k stack space after this bootloader

add ax, 288 ; (4096+515) / 16 bytes per paragraph

cli ; Disable Interrupts

mov ss, ax

mov sp, 4096

sti ; Enable Interrupts

mov ax, 07C0h ; Set data segment to the load point of

mov ds, ax ; our application

call PrintWelcome ; Call the print welcome message routine

jmp .loopHere ; Jump to the loop here label

.loopHere:

jmp .loopHere ; Jump to the loop here label

; this is now an infinite loop

; so all our system did was boot

; welcome us and sit spinning

; on this label

;------------------------------

; Constants

;------------------------------

c_WelcomeMessage db "HELLO AND Welcome to our OS", 0x0d, 0x0a, 0x00

;------------------------------

;----------------------------------------

; Routine to print the welcome message

; this is our only procedure in the

; application, so enjoy!

;----------------------------------------

PrintWelcome:

mov si, c_WelcomeMessage ; Move the string into si

call PrintString ; Call our routine to output til 0x00

ret ; Return to the call point

;----------------------------------------

; Print string Routine

; PrintString (SI)

;----------------------------------------

PrintString: ; Routine to output string in SI to the Screen

push ax ; Push the AX register to the stack

mov ah, 0Eh ; int 10h 'print char' function code

.repeat:

lodsb ; Get character from string

cmp al, 0x00 ; Compare the character with zero (0)

je .done ; if the character is zero then end of string

int 10h ; Otherwise call BIOS interupt 10 to print

jmp .repeat ; And now jump back up to the repeat label

.done:

pop ax ; Pop the copy of the AX register off the stack

ret ; Return the call stack back to the call point

;----------------------------------------

; Now we need to pad the remainder of the boot sector with 0s

times 510-($-$$) db 0 ; Times is a macro for nasm to repeat an action during

; compilation of the the application binary, in this

; case to add 510 lest the amount of data and code in

;the program to the output file

; Why 510, why not 512? A boot sector being 512 bytes?... well...

; to tell the BIOS this application, when written to the MBR, is

; a boot sector, we need to add two bytes to the end of the

; application, so we call define word with 0xaa and 0x55 now

dw 0xAA55 ; Standard PC boot Signature

You can download the complete code file from:

https://sites.google.com/site/xelsdoodles/bootloader

Read the code yourself to understand what its up to... that's the key to this tutorial, you have to apply yourself to understanding the assembly, everything else I hope you're having thought about, so you're free to look at that code in detail.

With this file in hand on disk open a terminal window once again and move to that folder, so for me its under my home directory in a folder called 'asm' in a file called '1.asm'. To get to it and to build it with nasm I'm going to perform these commands:

CTRL+ALT+T To open the terminal window

cd /home/jonb/asm To move to my home folder's asm folder

nasm -f bin -o OS.bin 1.asm

To build as binary into a file called 'OS.bin' the 1.asm source

Everything should be fine, and you should now be able to list the directory (ls) and see 'OS.bin'.

Copying Boot Sector to Virtual Floppy

So, we now need to move that OS.bin into the blank floppy image (or a copy of the blank floppy image)... so first things first, I copy my blankfloppy.flp into the /home/jonb/asm folder.

And I perform this command:

dd status=noxfer conv=notrunc if=OS.bin of=blankfloppy.flp

This does a none-truncating move of the OS.bin into 'blankfloppy.flp' (so it's not blank anymore, its now got a boot loader installed), but the flp file stays at a size of 1.44MB and the first 512 bytes of the file is overwritten with the bin file.

Running our Code

Now we want to run our boot-loader, so lets jump back to VMware Player; if we now create a virtual machine of type "MS-DOS" with a tiny disk (0.1gb), we can select the floppy (under customize hardware), ensure it is connected on power up and browse to and select the 'blankfloppy.flp' file.

Running the virtual machine now, we should see the VMWare BIOS post, it attempt to start over a network boot, fail and then it use our floppy disk image as the boot point.

And you should see out "Welcome" message from the assembler as the only thing that comes out... that is our bootloader... we have literally control at the earliest moment possible of that virtual machine.

(You could run the floppy image in qemu too if you want - see the MikeOS tutorial - link at bottom).

(If you are hosting a Ubuntu Virtual Machine, simply copy the floppy image out of Ubuntu onto the harddrive of yoru Windows machine, launch a second copy of VMware Player and create your MS-DOS type virtual machine to boot with the floppy there, you just introduce a copy back to Windows each time you change the floppy image with the 'dd' command).

Video

They say that a picture speaks a thousand words, so for you lucky people I've create a series of videos documenting the highlights of this process.

Its best if you expand the videos, and view them in HD full screen.

Credits

The boot loader code, with the exception of a little tidying up and extra commenting is copyright Mike Saunders: http://mikeos.berlios.de/write-your-own-os.html and as per his website I publish this code here completely open source (under a BSD-like license) with the caveat that any usage of this code, either directly, or as part of your own work should always carry a reference to this blog post within.

I now pronounce you GNU

2011-08-31T10:54:00.000+01:00

I'm struggling with a pronunciation... how to pronounce GNU? Their website tries to explain, but it has only left me more confused:

"The name “GNU” is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not Unix!”; it is pronounced g-noo, as one syllable with no vowel sound between the g and the n."

I've always (since about 1996) pronounced GNU as "GaNoo", the involuntary vowel after the 'G' being natural for me as a native English speaker. The involuntary vowel makes the strange contrast of the consonants there work in English.

I've hard some people pronounce it as "GæNew", "Ger~Noo" and heard them give up totally and call it "G.N.U". I have always known what they're talking about, and they've always known what I've been talking about. After all accents are so varied in Britain you never can be sure what accent, or language, you'll get out of someone so we accept a certain amount of variance to get the job done.

So it pains me to see from the site of GNU that I've been saying it wrong all these years... "one syllable"... I've definitely been using two... and no vowel sound between g and n.... gah, I can't do that, I simply can't... I'm not a linguist, and my English brain says "stick an 'a' sound in there it'll be fine".

There's a great British tradition of co-opting a phrase to suit our tongue, it drives other lingual structures to distraction... Ever been to France and tried to order a coffee in perfect French but with a rich Lancashire accent? I've seen someone try and get stared at like a they were trying to show a dog a card trick, that involuntary head twist from the French as you accidentally drop the feminine instead of the masculine for some object or other... I drive the French mad, I once had a woman scream at me (in French) about my pronunciation of "5".. not Five... Cinq... "Sank... Sanque... Sink... Five love, five" (hold up the digits of one hand.... much quicker).

So, with GNU I'm going to stick with GaNoo. Lets hope you still pronounce Hurd, Hurd...

Nox Knik High Technology Silent Fan

2011-08-28T01:10:00.000+01:00

So, a fair few months ago I upgraded my 120mm case fans in my Cosmos 1000 case to a set of four silent fans, here's my fitting and review information.

Don't worry about the dog bed, he wasn't in the room at the time, the moment he saw me getting the PC out he was off to the sofa downstairs.

My first step was to actually get my case out from under my desk, this is the best PC case I've ever had (and I've had a lot of them) I was an early adopter of the Cosmos 1000, when the case was around £220 and it was money well spent then, they're about £100 now a days. The case comes with four 120mm fans, one at the base drawing air in through two grill covered shafts, one pulling air horizontally out of the rear at CPU level and two in the top taking air directly up and out.

The fans which come with the unit are not overly loud themselves, so long as you have them connected to the motherboard and it regulates their power to ensure low RPM. Remember, the higher the RPM then the louder they get.

When the Cosmos housed my Intel Core 2 Quad based machine the fans hardly had to work at all, however, this year's upgrade was to an Intel Core i7 950. This alone instantly rose the case ambient temperature from 35 degrees idle to 42 degrees idle, adding the SLi array of graphics cards, adding the Corsair Triple channel RAM cooler only went one step towards adding more ambient heat. And soon the sock case fans could be heard.

Now, let me preface the rest of this information with this statement: I was looking at minimising the case fan noise as a first step towards silent running my system. The RAM Cooler and CPU coolers are not considered in my quieting process. However, at the start of this journey, the case fans (all four of them) far exceeded the noise level of the other cooling fans, even in idle.

Yes the black box to the upper right is my PS2... Yes, mine runs Linux, ain't that schweet.

So, here are the three fans I'm starting off with. I'm going from four case fans to three, this is because I have gotten hold of a couple of smoke tracer pens (they let of smoke for wind tunnel experiments) and I've decided that the two top fans actually don't cause a straight chimney effect, between the two is a near static vortex of hot air. With the Triple channel RAM and cooling fins being stationed right below this static vortex, meaning an overheat spot.

Removing one of the upper case fans resulted in the air flow over the RAM flowing out and into the pressure differential of the rear and one remaining upper fan. Always check whether you need a case fan like this... one less fan means less noise, and better performance.

So now we've gotten an idea of what we need in the case, lets just take a close up look at the new fans.

They look just like regular fans... they little baggy contains the rubber retaining clips... these rubber clips are better than using screws, they dampen vibration from the unit whilst in operation and alone make a decent reduction in case noise levels.

The power cord is around 500mm in length, but they do vary between the fans I received, being approximately able to wrap around the fan itself they are I presume meant to be four sides of 120mm (480mm) but they have a little tolerance.

The cable is nylon shielded and very manoeuvrable, making it look nice in a modded case situation, but also discrete. The nylon surround also helps reduce vibration sound, if the cable were to sit against a case wall and vibrate in the flow of air, the rattle would be deadened by the shielding.

Now, lets take a look at the rubber fittings, they seem very bendy and stretchable, they are meant to be pushed (by hand) through the case screw holes, then into the fan, where you then pull the long end to stretch the rubber thin, slipping the fan over, and release... voila the fan is held in place and is dampened.

However, with the sharp metal of the cosmos lining I did find that the rubber domes were susceptible to simply coming off in ones hand.

However, I soon had all the fans fitted, and was ready for a test run.

This is a shot from below of the one remaining top venting fan (notes the absent sister to the left) the small fan you can see in the lower left of the frame is the top most of the corsair RAM cooler fans, the static vortex of air sat to the left of the 120mm case fan and above the RAM cooler fan, a little negative heat spot right there against the case side.

Conclusion:

Oh my word, it worked, the machine on the whole is so much quieter, now on booting the fans come on full speed (a boot time precaution) but as the BIOS completes its POST the fans quieten down immensely, it really is like they go silent.

The case fans now contribute next to none of the sound from my machine. An excellent purchase.

And so far they have performed 6 months hard work with no interference, no hindrance and no problems.

If you have to sit and listen to the hum of your computer all day, and you know most of that noise is the case fan (or many Dell built computers do not have dedicated CPU cooling, they make do with case fans drawing external air past heat sinks & spreaders) you may do very well to invest the few pounds one of these babies cost.

There are more expensive, technological, coated bladed fans out there, but if you're looking for a fan which looks just like a fan should (black plastic and boring) then these are the babies for you.

One Embedd

2011-08-26T23:05:00.000+01:00

That's all I'm going to say today...

Gedling Colliery (14th June 1986)

2011-08-21T23:19:00.002+01:00

So, what were you doing on the 14th June 1986? Don't you know? Well I was eight years old and I was going to work with my Dad... and my Mum... and my little brother... wierd...No, not really it was an open day at the Colliery my Dad worked at. He was a Coal Prep plant Foreman.

I remember a few things about the day, I remember my Dad being quite excited to show us around his work place, somewhere that you'd not normally ever be allowed to go, and I also remember the sheer magnitude of the noise of the machinery giving me a really splitting headache and ending up in the infirmary... but I also remember in the infirmary there was one of the first proper database driven "Expert Systems", it was used to diagnose simple aliments in a series of questions to help the on staff first aiders sort out problems... Probably not the lesson my Dad wanted to teach me, but I was fascinated with information and technology even then...

But, that colliery is long since gone, lost to the destruction of the mining industry and the site itself if flattened, the shafts filled in, possibly even capped, and the area is slowly (very slowly) being regenerated and they are possibly building houses on the site soon. A sad loss, as my Dad did tell me once there were over 100 years worth of coal still down below that mine (and there are a lot of mines in Britain)... so why now I'm all grown up are we paying through the nose for electricity generated with (mostly) imported coal beggars belief.

Anyway, on that open day my brother and I received a booklet, with a little bit of history and some current information about the colliery, as well as a plan of the site. During my recent decorating I spotted them still tucked inside a book... from 1986 to now, they had been scribbled on a little, they had a sticker or two on them, they had been... moved from my parents home, to my university digs, to a flat I had in Warwickshire, to a house I rented in Long Eaton and finally to my new home here in Brinsley (another ex-mining village)... so with two copies I've been able to scan them in, clean up the childish scribbles, edit off some of the mess and sticky finger prints we left on them as kids and I've got them for you all to enjoy here.

Please click on the images to enlarge them, and be patient these are high resolution scans. Some of the pictures given on the pamphlet (all the pictures actually) are printed as grey dots (news paper style) so they scanned in as grey scale, if they look really grainy or granular then just zoom in/out the image (with most internet browsers you can do this with CTRL and + or CTRL and - respectively) to get the right "height" and you'll see the nice images.

The images are indeed nice, they show workings from far below Gedling, workings which will probably never be seen by a human again... least not until we've paid for all the foreign coal and some bright spark realises as all the lights go out, we can still power our power stations from the reserves below our feet. But until then, lets pay a pretty penny for my running this computer to show you these pictures.

If you right click you can open the image in a new browser, new tab or download it...

For posterity.

Film the Book

2011-08-18T11:16:00.002+01:00

When you buy an audio book you have choices... you either buy the abridged, or the unabridged version...

When you go to see a feature film you get to pick from the theatrical release... or wait for the director's cut...

When you buy a film on DVD you can choose different formats and from different cuts, like the director's cut, the editors cut etcetera.

How long before a company starts to make the unabridged version of films from their books?

A film which faithfully follows the books layout and plot... Peter Jackson and his editorial team, as well as his technical team at Weta, are quite good at this, but even they had to cut and chop and splice LOTR together...

So how long before a director/writer/editor team dare to use their budget to make a film as it was written?

How many times have you heard someone say "Oh the book was better"... there's a reason for this, the book (usually) contains a better narrative, more plot rounding (not jarring cuts) and we don't chop and change focus of the readers mind's eye... that is called "grip" in the filmmakers vocabulary... and many films really lose their grip.

All this comes to me because last night I watched Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows part 2... now having read the books, and watched the films, it's obvious they cut thousands of pages from the books out of the films. The films are, at times, nothing but mere shadowy approximations of the books and in some cases you could even call the official franchised film non-canon in comparison with the book it is trying to illustrate.

So, it got me thinking, firstly could anyone ever film a book to the letter? Probably not, time constraints and the limited appeal of such a mammoth length film would never allow it to reach the audience, let alone get past the ever budget mindful studio boss... But, would such a filming titan have an audience... in today's always connected digital fingertip world... I think it would very definitely have an audience... would it be a money maker, probably not with current filmography budgets and revenue streams. But alternative revenue streams for such an endeavour exist... with a large enough film franchise - like the Potter series you could almost rely on the promise of a faithful film edition to fund itself through advertising on the support material or pre-orders alone...

But, let's just assume it will get past all the people & cost red tape... could it be physically achieved? I think it could, in fact I think the precedence was set nearly 90 years ago. The film "Greed" of 1924 aimed to be over ten hours long, it was originally a faithful reproduction of the 1899 novel by Frank Norris... but ultimately this mammoth production was cut to just under two and a half hours... but the full ten were filmed!

Maybe before 2024 someone needs to take the same spirit from that production and film the lot, like for like, one for one... there are no limits to filming... digital costs so little... The question really is, what will be the first franchise to try this task then? Something old? Something new? Something clearly which has the gravitas... Maybe Harry Potter could have had that gravitas, certainly the later more mature films... But now Harry will forever be Mr Radcliff... and he's too old to play his childhood self once more...

SaveFileDialog bug under Mono .NET in KDE

2011-08-12T14:37:00.003+01:00

Found a bug... in Mono combined with KDE. So, today I released a little internal tool on Windows, some of our department run Linux, and the application is writtein in C#, so I figured I'd just cross check it on Mono and release it as a Mono flavour executable too.

All seemed fine until the very last step, where the generated output is saved. The application pops up a "SaveFileDialog" a very simple, standard System.Windows.Forms dialog, the code shows this and used the resulting Filename to save some data.

Under Windows on Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 it was fine, Under Mono within Gnome it was fine. However, under Mono on KDE I was getting a really strange result, it kept crashing in a routine (wholly unrelated to the actual issue I found) because the file name being returned under KDE was not lead with a directory separator character (as required in Linux).

So, the path under windows might come back as "C:\Data\File.txt" in Ubuntu it comes back as "/home/data/file.txt" but under KDE it was coming back as "home/data/file.txt". Meaning that the data files were being placed in the wrong location, they were going into a path relative to the applications runtime path.

Meaning the next time I ran the application, from a different root directory or as a different user, or from a folder which did not allow file creation, I could not find my data, I got undefined program behaviour and basically data-wise everything went pear shaped.

I solved this with a simple check:

private void SaveFile (string psFilename)
{
// Save the file
}

private void PathExample(string psThePath)
{
string lsPath = psThePath;
#ifndef WIN32
if ( !lsPath.StartsWith ("" + Path.DirectorySeparatorChar) )
{
lsPath = Path.DirectorySeparatorChar + lsPath;
}
#endif
SaveFile (lsPath);
}

public void SaveDataAs ()
{
SaveFileDialog lsfdDialog = new SaveFileDialog();
if ( lsfd.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK )
{
PathExample(lsfdDialog.Filename);
}
lsfdDialog.Dispose();
}

So, this is a problem with the current (as of writing) Mono on KDE, under Kubuntu 11.04, don't fall foul of it.

The Dying Art of E-mail

2011-08-05T21:17:00.000+01:00

I've been e-mailing people for very many years, and I always prefer it for arrangements, not least because you have a record of the conversation and information within, people can't stretch or move the goal posts and you have a record of what's going on.

But, in the last week I've seen a distinct shift in peoples usage and expectations of communication channels, leading to the ultimate "e-mails are shit, no-one reads them"... this is my misses opinion...

So I have to ask, is the art of the e-mail falling in prevalence? Is the smart phone, the facebook wall, the tweet, the SMS taking over from the e-mail?

Keyboard Woes and Obsessions

2011-07-27T23:26:00.000+01:00

So, in a prior post I extolled my employers to stop being cheap asses and to invest in decent equipment for my lightening fast keyboard fingers to work on. Well, my calls for a working keyboard were answered, however, my prayers for a decent keyboard were not really met... In fact I'm so befuddled with the outcome I'm not sure whether what I have now is an improvement.

Let me explain, I had a Dell, with horrible rubber dome keys. I had one of these at home up until we got a puppy earlier this year and it was a god send when he ate mine, so imagine my excitement when at work my left shift and control keys were getting a bit stiff and unreliable.

Now, I reckon I type at about 85-92 words per minute, I am a programmer, and I can touch type for most of the time. I generally work in bursts of typing, hitting the keys hard and repeatedly until a function or subroutine is complete and needs reviewing, or until my fingers physically tire; and tire they do on having to bottom out every key stroke. Now I type so much that I soon smooth the keys on the keyboard smooth. I've done this to around five keyboard at my current employer, I've had five keyboard in just short of 8 years (excluding new ones with new machines - then I've had 11 keyboards)... but five just wearing out and becoming unreliable.

I estimate the replacement keyboard I receive to cost the company around twelve pounds. Its not the cheapest piece of shit as I had envisaged in a prior post and looking it up on Amazon they go for £12.51. Its still rubber dome equipped, its stand feet are too short - meaning I have it propped up on some cardboard - and it is so lightly constructed as I type is bounces around (it has no rubber feet as other keyboards generally do, so it skitters around on the hard desk surface).

So, putting these tree facts together:

Professional level typing
Wears out keyboards in around 11 months
Replacements disturb the work area being hard to handle

You'd think I had a pretty interesting argument for better investment in better equipment. After all it is said that once you have your computer to work on the best thing to do is spend luxuriously to ensure you can use it correctly, and the keyboard is the primary interaction point for me; and so I strongly believe that I should be able to actively redress the situation with a vested interest in increasing my typing speed and hence work throughput.

Nope. I just get the £12.51 hunk of plastic. I point out that five of these things at that price is nearing £60, the price of once professional grade keyboard with mechanical switches.... I point out that the rich stay rich by buying one expensive piece of kit and it working for a long time, and the poor stay poor by buying a cheap piece of kit and having to continually buy more and more replacement pieces of cheap kit to replace them as they break down. But my philosophy is falling on deaf ears.

Maybe its the economic down turn... not so much that they're being cheap, but that they literally can't afford a decent keyboard for me... or anyone else... I doubt it, but its possible. More plausible however is that simply a decent keyboard is not seen as important.

On the personal side of my keyboard woes things are still not brilliant, I'm using a "Microsoft Wireless 1000". It it perhaps the second worst keyboard I've ever owned. Even after typing this little stretch of blog post (which, go look at it, ain't that much) is hurting my fingers, as I'm constantly in a strange stretching feeling between my third and index fingers - of both hands - also the function keys are a "secondary function" the function keys only being active when you have a "function" key toggle set down and they're small (only half the size of a regular key) which is a problem for a programmer trying to use the Function keys for debugging all the time.

I still miss the old Apple Aluminium keyboard I had, but I'm never going to buy another one because the build and materials quality is so poor for its price. I worked out it cost about £25 a year, for that I can have three complete sets of these Microsoft keyboards in that same time span...

Wait a moment.. I just struck myself with the obvious tactic being employed by my employer... yes you heard me, I can get three sets of cheap shit crap keyboards for the price of one better keyboard layout...

So, why would I want one decent keyboard? Because now I'm on the trail of mechanical keyboards.

Mechanicals live longer, they have (hopefully) better build quality than the Apple membrane keyboard, and they sound lovely compared to rubber dome keyboards.

Argh, I'm rambling... I'm just after a decent keyboard. I think one of the problems I have is that the mechanicals I'm looking at are expensive, they're never on show anywhere for you to try, and their price makes "risking" getting the wrong one too much of a risk.

Chrome Getting Flakey

2011-07-25T23:08:00.000+01:00

Is it just me, or is Chrome getting really flaky? I mean, I've had a fantastic experience with the browser until about the last fortnight, where upon all copies (on my main desktop, my laptop, my office PC and my two Linux boxes) have just gotten a bit temperamental.

Sometimes tabs refuse to browse to any site. Whereupon a cross check with Firefox shows the site instantly. Sometimes the chrome browser reports that plug-in (for example Flash player) is missing, but I've already got flash open in another tab.

And when I have multiple copies open, doing multiple downloads I'll suddenly have all downloads stop.

I'm wondering if this is personal revenge by Google as I read, and reviewed, Doug Edwards book "I'm feeling Lucky". hehe.

Stripping Victorian Plaster

2011-07-24T23:18:00.000+01:00

So, I've spent a very very un-technological weekend, actually the second in a row... We've been stripping the house out for a complete redecoration... this might sound dramatic, but we're going back to the bare brick... and this house was built when Queen Victoria still had 20 years left to live.

I've dug out the hearth, three layers deep, took off fake pine wooden beams someone added in a weird Union Flag motif, I've stripped layers of artex, modern plaster, plaster from the 1960's and then right back to lime plaster of the late 1800's.

Add to that door frames which were growing when America was only 100 years old... Soot & coal dust fragments its been a nightmare.

For some unknown reason the people who lived here over the ages have liked wall paper with vertical wood grain pattern, green velour wall paper, more vertical wood patterns, plain plaster, painted yellow, then painted green, finally the wood beams and betwixt these they stuck a ton of plaster into which they swirled their fingers... And they added fake points to all the doors... gah. Terrible.

Technology Employers Cheap on Technology

2011-07-22T00:20:00.000+01:00

I have a basic problem at work at the moment, my PC hardware I'm using as my main development box is starting to show its age. Compared to other machines in the company its a pretty swish bit of kit (Core 2 Duo 2.0ghz, 6GB RAM, nVidia 8400GS) but when you compare it with my actual own personal development machine (Core i7 950 3.0ghz, 16gb RAM, nVidia 4800 GTX) it looks a little measly.

And I thought back through time to late 1997 when I got my first technical job... we always had machines a step behind the technology curve. And it struck me as a utter false economy then, and it strikes me as it now.

I sit at work waiting for between 3 and 12 minutes for system wide builds to complete (I've been spending lots of time recently improving the optimization of my hard drives to speed up searches and file access) but he raw grunt of the machine is simply starting to flag. 3 minute build times for the stuff we do now 24 months ago (when the machine was bought for me) was excellent... but now, well I come home and can do much more complex builds in less and less time... 20 seconds for the same build... and I'm running like 4 virtual machines at the same time (on my 8 true cores).

At work, I'm struggling to run 1 virtual machine and a couple of copies of Visual Studio... I'd be far more productive with a much better machine. And it'd only cost a grand! You consider how much they pay me, increase my productivity by as little as 5% in a day and they're getting close to saving paying me to sit staring at a progress bar idle waiting for that same amount of time...

But the problem doesn't just stop where the hardware specification is, it continues... they insist, instead of implementing decent codes of practice and education of the less IT minded to prevent virus infections and people falling for cons they load the machines down with stupid (and unfit for purpose) virus scanners.

My employers use McAfee, and its an utter joke, we actually got slammed by a virus not too long ago (all my machines were clean I hasten to add) but the virus scanner we have in place; as ordered by the corporate overloads; didn't pick it up!

Then the IT department also get on with loading our machines down with yet more junkware... there's one they have running which reports all installed software to them, an audit trail of installed software as it were... this thing sits detecting every executable and DLL on the machine and reporting it back over the network to the IT department... Every time I perform a build it generates approximately 1,800 executable and DLL files... so I'm taking a hit on the hard drive to access the file, then the compiler is being scanned by the "On Access Scanner" then I'm getting hit as the compiler outputs the object file. Next the linker gets "On Access Scanned" and the output executable object file is then scanned, toe tied and tissue typed.... All when there should be one scan access, or preferably none!

Gah, shit shit shit.

Oh its all so touchy feely

2011-07-16T00:49:00.000+01:00

I've just gotten around to watching the BBC programme "Classroom Secrets", and oh my god, these are primary school pupils if the kids at my school (Eastglade Junior - 1984-1989) had acted like this there would have been hell to pay. Mr Allison, Mr Donnelly or Mr Dexter would have been down on you like a tonne of bricks sorting such bad behaviour.

Kids getting up to go for a drink... or sharpen a pencil... or go through draws... you could not do that in my day! In fact, I don't remember hydration being a major issue at school we didn't ever go thirsty, but we were not allowed to just up and go get a drink from our chair.

My memories are all of being told to stay where you were, unless you asked for permission to move... And I had some of the loveliest teachers at that time.

There was this regimented scheme, not to oppress you as an individual, but to make sure you covered the information you had to, to make sure that the teacher who was alone in the classroom had the confidence to know you were all safe.

But I'm looking at this programme, at these children and I can't believe what I'm seeing... teachers getting support workers left right and centre, all the staff (or nearly all) being female, its all so woolly, all so touchy feely...

And I just heard the head teacher calling a child by a nick name "You alright Betty Spaghetti"... my head teacher would never ever have called you by your nick name.

If this is the school system my children will be going into I'm seriously thinking about home schooling them.

Chrome Tabs Not Browsing

2011-07-08T00:41:00.000+01:00

So, I'm having a few recurrant problems with Chrome. After browsing for a while (and there seems to be no set pattern to this) suddenly I'll right click and "open in new tab" a link, but it'll come up as a blank new tab. No actual HTTP retrieval seems to go off.

I've had this before and resorted to removing Chrome from my machine and reinstalling it, however, it seems to be getting more and more frequent, and alarmingly so. Its happens on two different Vista machines, a Kubuntu virtual machine (running in VMWare Player) and on a Ubuntu machine.

All were running stock download and installs of Chrome from Google, there were no plug-ins - except maybe flash - but I was not using video at the time. And suddenly I can open no links in new tabs... we're not even talking a lot of tabs, just one or two and kaput no more browsing.

The weird thing is though that in any tab already open, showing a page/content, I can still left click to move into and out of hyper links to new pages, and they still load.

I've had this problem whilst typing into google.com, yahoo mail, msn, this very blogger site (which is a google site underneith) and also whilst using amazon, play and the BBC. There really is no pattern to when it goes, but once its gone I have to close all open instances of Chrome, all of them, even pages supposedly on other pages in other copies... and I have to open a whole new fresh copy of the browser.

The version of Chrome I've experienced this in is 1.2.0.742.112.

Ironically, I've just tried to report this bug through the Chromium project site... and not been able to.... so I'm going to file it with a fresh install of Firefox in a moment.

C++ based CGI with Apache on Win32 & Linux

2011-07-04T14:43:00.000+01:00

So, today I'm going to go through a really long winded explanation of how to set up C++ based CGI under Apache server on both Debian based Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows.

Before I go too far though let us just sort something out, CGI stands for "Common Gateway Interface" it is simply a set of definitions for data parsing and redirecting the standard input and standard output streams to your application. Your CGI application can be written in ANY language you want. It can be PHP, Perl, C, C++, Visual Basic, C#, Python... Literally any programming language which is able to create a console application can be used to make a CGI application. Many sources on the Internet (like this one http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/phpcgi.shtml) simply muddle up what CGI is, with it being a specific language. CGI is not a language it is actually an Application Programming Interface (API); it might even be thought of as a protocol rather than an API; to define how we use our cin and cout streams to render dynamic web page content.

So, moving on, we need a web server to host our applications, what we will do is code our applications in one location, build them and then copy them to the CGI folder of our web server. Then use a browser pointing to our server to make it run our application for us.

If you didn't spot it, I just mentioned the largest draw-back of CGI. Every time someone visits your CGI application page a new copy of the application is loaded from disk into the server and executed. If your CGI application is slow, or relies on a shared file, or some other item delays it, then you will noticeably slow your handling of web pages. There are ways around this, such as FastCGI, or with languages like Perl and PHP the scripts are not applications, instead they are interpreted (making them slower) but once they have been compiled (or precompiled once) those scripts can be kept in the server memory negating the need to load and reload each time someone accesses them. However, having lots of such scripts in server ram increases the server resource foot print (it needs more server memory to run effectively) quite dramatically.

Our target platform will be Apache2, on a very low power machine, single CPU, single core, 512mb of ram. Our operating systems will be Ubuntu Server, Kubuntu Desktop and Windows Vista 32bit Home Premium. (Any flavour of windows will work the exact same way - we're going to configure Apache, not Windows), and our goal is to run on as small a memory foot print as possible, with as few interpreters and sub-libraries working on our behalf.

Set up HTTP Apache Server under Windows

So, lets get on with setting up Apache... First lets get hold of the Apache HTTP server from http://httpd.apache.org/. We're going to concentrate on Apache 2.2.19, which is the current (at time of writing) stable release.

Under Windows you'll need to download httpd-2.2.19-win32-x86-no_ssl.msi from http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi#apache22, then install the server by double clicking the msi where ever you have saved it to.

You can set the server up however you wish, however, for this example I selected to install my server as "localhost:8080" only so that I had to manually run the server and could browse to "http://localhost:8080" to see the "It Works!" Screen. So go a head and install, start the server

If you want to throw your own HTML pages onto your server you now simply browse to the folder apache installed to (by default this is under C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2) and you can drop HTML or HTM files into the "htdocs" subfolder.

Note: You can copy files into the Windows Apache Subfolder and have them be served up without needing to restart the server.

Setup HTTP Apache Server under Linux

You should have your Linux machine installed with Ubuntu, server or desktop, or Kubuntu it makes no difference, you simply need to be able to open a command prompt (terminal window) and use the apt-get command.

So, first things first, lets install apache. In your prompt type:

sudo apt-get install apache2

Allow this comment to complete by providing your root password, and you should then be able to browse to your server IP, or the local host IP, and see the "It Works!" Page, just as we did under windows.

Again you can copy, or create, files in the folder /var/www to have them hosted by the server, so you could create /var/www/hello.html with a big "HELLO" text in the center of the page, however, just creating the file under Linux is not enough, you must perform a server restart each time you add a file (or after you have added a bunch of files).

To do this type:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Provide your root password and the server will restart and now you'll be able to browse to "http://127.0.0.1/hello.html" and see your big centered HELLO (swap 127.0.0.1 with your server/linux box IP if you're viewing from a different machine).

Adding CGI

By default both platforms have configuration to point to a cgi-bin directory, it is from this directory we will be running our example code (you can change the folder later), under windows you'll find the cgi-bin in the location of the apache executable you installed, so by default this is in "C:\program files\apache software foundation\apache2\cgi-bin". You can copy your CGI programs into there anytime you wish, once you have copied the file across, make sure you rename the extension "cgi", so you might build "cgidemo.exe", when you copy it rename it to "cgidemo.cgi".

On Linux this default location is /usr/lib/cgi-bin. So copy files into there you will need to use the root user comment to copy, for example, to copy a file called "cgidemo" from your home directory (where your username is ralph) to the cgi-bin you would have to use the command line:

sudo cp /home/ralph/cgidemo /usr/lib/cgi-bin/cgidemo.cgi

This copies the file, but also renames the file just as we would under windows.

Script Alias and Handlers

So, why do we rename our exe or file to .cgi? Well, this is to facilitate our adding a handler type to the Apache configuration. A handler basically tells the Apache software to associate a given file extension with an internal module. So we need to associate the .cgi extension with the cgi-script type.

Under windows you do this by using the start menu, seeking out where Apache installed in your programs list and using "Configure Apache" and the "Edit the Apache httpd.conf Configuration File" option. This will open notepad editing the sever configuration.

You need to look for the "ScriptAlias" for the /cgi-bin/ so use find to get to the line which starts "ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/" it will include another folder which is the actual folder on your hard drive where the cgi files will be stored. You can change that path later, but for now simply remove the # from the front, this will enable the Script Alias against that directory.

So mine reads:

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/cgi-bin/"

The next thing we need do is to find the actual configuration for this directory, the directory configuration tells the server what can and cannot be accessed or executed from this folder, so now find the Directory section for the alias given:

And you need to set some options and add a handler for cgi-scripts to the .cgi extension, this looks just like this:

<Directory "C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/ Apache2.2/cgi-bin/">
    AllowOverride None
    Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    AddHandler cgi-script cgi
</Directory>

So, I have enabled cgi to execute from this directory, and told the handler to use any file ending "cgi" as a cgi-script.

Under Linux this is a lot simpler, you simply need to use the command line to edit the same file, which is in a slightly different location. So from the command prompt you will need to run the command:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

This is the same configuration file as under Windows, it looks different, but it takes the same input, if you look now for the same <Directory specified as under windows, you should find the /usr/lib/cgi-bin folder thus:

Now set the directory to be the same:

<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
    AllowOverride None
    Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    AddHandler cgi-script cgi
</Directory>

However, unlike windows you need to add the script alias yourself, so I have added mine just like this:

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
    AllowOverride None
    Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    AddHandler cgi-script cgi
</Directory>

If you save this file and then restart the apache server any cgi files you have in cgi-bin can now be accessed.

Alias Explained

So, I hope its obvious now that the alias you set is used to map a local folder on your hard drive to a URL on your server, so if you have an alias of /cgi-bin/ pointing to a folder you access if from a browser as "http://YOUR IP/cgi-bin/"

If you added an alias of "/nothing/" then you could get to contents in that folder as "Http://YOURIP/nothing" in your browser.

Now to Code

So, our next task is to create some code which we can actually run as our CGI.  So, in Visual Studio I create a new C++ application which is an empty Console Application.  In Code Blocks on Linux I create an empty project.

To both I add a "main.cpp" file and I put the exact same code in both:

#include 
#include 

using namespace std;

const string c_ContentHeader = "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

int main (int argc, char* argv[])
{
 cout << c_ContentHeader;
 cout << "Hello From CGI" << endl;

 return 0;
}

Pretty simple application.  Both windows and linux (gcc) will build this without even blinking, so go a head and build it up, and copy the output executable to your cgi folder.... so my output is called "hellocgi.exe" on windows and just "hellocgi" on Linux.
I copy and rename it to our cgi folders "C:\apachepath\cgi-bin\hellocgi.cgi" on windows and "sudo cp /home/ralph/cgidemo/bin/Debug/hellocgi /usr/lib/cgi-bin/hellocgi.cgi"
On Linux I restart apache "sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart".
And now I browse to the server as "http://127.0.0.1:8080/cgi-bin/hellocgi.cgi" on windows, and I browse to "http://127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/hellocgi.cgi" on Linux.  And voila I see my "Hello From CGI".
Now, lets take this code apart, if you miss out sending the "Content-type" string first you will get a server side error in your browser, this error looks like this:
To then spot that we missed the content header, then we need to view the error.log within our apache logs folder and we can see the line:
[Mon Jul 04 11:32:16 2011] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] malformed header from script. Bad header=Hello From CGI: CGI.cgi

Oh, "bad header" and yes.. I had the code looking like this:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

const string c_ContentHeader = "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

int main (int argc, char* argv[])
{
 //cout << c_ContentHeader;  -- Commented out
 cout << "Hello From CGI" << endl;

 return 0;
}

So, what have we learned from all this?To point an Apache alias at a directory.
To configure this directory to allow CGI execution.
To add a handler for the cgi-script type to a defined file extension.
To copy our C++ compiled/built output to the cgi-bin folder we've aliased.
To restart the server.
To run the executable.
Rendering HTMLFrom our C++ application we can now render any HTML we want, we could load this from templates on disk, or simply stream it out from the code
 cout << c_ContentHeader;
 cout << "<html>";
 cout << "<body>";
 cout << "<lcenter>Hello World from the CGI app, but with HTML</center>";
 cout << "</body>";
 cout << "</html>";

This is using the C++ IOStream library, however we can use the old C style output of "printf".
printf ("%s", c_ContentHeader.c_str()); printf ("<html>");
 printf ("<body>");
 printf ("<center>Hello World from the CGI app, but with HTML</center>");
 printf ("</body>");
 printf ("</html>");

You could therefore load a template from disk, for example a file containing:
<html>
<body>
<center><%=String%></center>
</body>
</html>

And in our program we can replace &qupt;<%=String%>" with some other value... This kind of script usage might ring bells with ASP developers, as it is exactly the kind of syntax used to output a value from an ASP application... Maybe you could write your own dynamic content server...
We could simplify processing of templates loaded with the use of the C style calls, for example, this template:
<html>
<body>
<center>%s</center>
</body>
</html>

Loaded as a single string this could then be rendered with a value in place of %s with a single call to printf:
printf (template.c_str(), "HELLO WORLD");
Will result in the Hello world string being presented center of the page from the template.
You can get as complex as you wish here.
Receiving InputSo, if we now are happy with outputting HTML from our CGI application we will need to work out how to receive input.  For example, if we had our browser come to our CGI page from a form post, then that page might look like this:
<html>
<body>

<form name="TestForm" action="http://127.0.0.1:8080/cgi-bin/contentLength.cgi" method="POST">

 <input type=text name="TextField1" value="Hello World">

 <input type=submit name="submit" value="Click To Submit">

</form>

</body>
</html>

So, we see the form has an input field and a submit field, and it points to our CGI page... this is a new CGI page, the code for which looks like this:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;


const string c_ContentHeader = "Content-type: text/html\n\n";


    // ---- CONTENT LENGTH ----

    ///<Summary>
    /// The content length environment variable
    /// name
    ///</Summary>
    const string c_ContentLengthVariableName = "CONTENT_LENGTH";

    ///<Summary>
    /// Function to return the current requests
    /// content length
    ///</Summary>
    const int GetContentLength()
    {
        int l_result = 0;
        char* l_ContentLengthVariable = getenv(c_ContentLengthVariableName.c_str());
        if ( l_ContentLengthVariable != NULL )
        {
            l_result = atoi(l_ContentLengthVariable);
        }
        return l_result;

    }

    // ---- END CONTENT LENGTH ----


int main (int argc, char* argv[])
{
 cout <<c_ContentHeader;
 
 cout <<"The content Length is: " << GetContentLength() << endl;


 return 0;
}

This code shows you a new function to get the content length, this used the "getenv" call, get env returns a set of environment variables, for a CGI program like ours the environment variables are all items set up by the Apache server before it started our application.
So, if you build this code and copy it into place as "contentLength.cgi" save the HTML shown to your /htdocs or /var/www folder and restart your server.  Then you can browse your server to the HTML page, click submit and send that data to the CGI.
The "<input" items in the form are then sent to the CGI script, becoming its input.
You should see by default the number of bytes sent to your CGI script.  If you go back and change the text in the input field, you will see a different content length being shown by your CGI program.
So where does this input come from?  Well, it comes from the standard input stream, is you perform a cin, or read console, or Console.ReadLine or whatever you want, then you will receive your input.  We already know how many bytes to read, so lets see how to do this...
    // ---- GET CONTENT ----

    ///<Summary>
    /// Function to return the content
    ///</Summary>
    const list<string> GetContent()
    {
        list<string> l_result;

        // Now seek the content
        int l_ContentLength = GetContentLength();
        if ( l_ContentLength > 0 )
        {
            try
            {
                // Allocate a buffer for the information
                auto_ptr<char> l_Buffer (new char[l_ContentLength]);

                // Read the content sent into the buffer
                int l_bytesRead = fread (l_Buffer.get(), sizeof(char), l_ContentLength, stdin);

                // Check the data length
                if ( l_bytesRead == l_ContentLength )
                {                                        
                    // Convert the buffer to a string
                    stringstream l_stream (l_Buffer.get());

                    // Push the content as a string into the buffer
                    while ( !l_stream.eof() )
                    {
                        string l_item;
                        l_stream >>: l_item;

                        l_result.push_back(l_item);
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (bad_alloc l_badAllocationException)
            {
                // TODO handle bad alloc
            }
        }

        return l_result;
    }

    // ---- END GET CONTENT ----
 
So, what is this doing?  Well, its allocating a buffer of the content length we know we have, its then reading this buffer from the stdin stream.  I'm then choosing to squirt it into a string stream and pushing each line into the result list.
Putting it all together my whole code base now looks like this:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <list>
#include <sstream>
#include <memory>

using namespace std;


const string c_ContentHeader = "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

    // ---- CONTENT LENGTH ----

    ///<Summary>
    /// The content length environment variable
    /// name
    ///</Summary>
    const string c_ContentLengthVariableName = "CONTENT_LENGTH";

    ///<Summary>
    /// Function to return the current requests
    /// content length
    ///</Summary>
    const int GetContentLength()
    {
        int l_result = 0;
        char* l_ContentLengthVariable = getenv(c_ContentLengthVariableName.c_str());
        if ( l_ContentLengthVariable != NULL )
        {
            l_result = atoi(l_ContentLengthVariable);
        }
        return l_result;

    }

    // ---- END CONTENT LENGTH ----


    // ---- GET CONTENT ----

    ///<Summary>
    /// Function to return the content
    ///</Summary>
    const list<string> GetContent()
    {
        list<string> l_result;

        // Now seek the content
        int l_ContentLength = GetContentLength();
        if ( l_ContentLength > 0 )
        {
            try
            {
                // Allocate a buffer for the information
                auto_ptr<char> l_Buffer (new char[l_ContentLength]);

                // Read the content sent into the buffer
                int l_bytesRead = fread (l_Buffer.get(), sizeof(char), l_ContentLength, stdin);

                // Check the data length
                if ( l_bytesRead == l_ContentLength )
                {                                        
                    // Convert the buffer to a string
                    stringstream l_stream (l_Buffer.get());

                    // Push the content as a string into the buffer
                    while ( !l_stream.eof() )
                    {
                        string l_item;
                        l_stream >> l_item;

                        l_result.push_back(l_item);
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (bad_alloc l_badAllocationException)
            {
                // TODO handle bad alloc
            }
        }

        return l_result;
    }

    // ---- END GET CONTENT ----


int main (int argc, char* argv[])
{
 cout << c_ContentHeader;
 cout << "<html><body>" << endl;
 cout << "The content Length is: " << GetContentLength() << "<br>" << endl;

 cout << "The Content is: <br><pre>" << endl;

 list<string> theContent = GetContent();
 for (list<string>::const_iterator itr = theContent.begin();
  itr != theContent.end();
  itr++)
 {
  cout << (*itr) << endl;
 }

 cout << "</pre><hr></body></html>" << endl;

 return 0;
}

And I've built this and names it "contentExample.cgi" in my cgi-bin.
I've also edited the HTML form to submit to this new CGI application:
<html>
<body>

<form name="TestForm" action="http://127.0.0.1:8080/cgi-bin/contentExample.cgi" method="POST">

 <input type=text name="TextField1" value="Hello World">

 <input type=submit name="submit" value="Click To Submit">

</form>

</body>
</html>

Now when I perform the post we get an output from our CGI for the form being submitted.  And viola, there is our input.
ConclusionI'm not going to go into processing the input, nor am I going to point you in the direction of libraries to perform these item yourself.  It is a much better learning experience to process all the commands yourself, possibly write your own library, so you understand the underlying CGI protocol environment variables and pitfalls.
This becomes invaluable in understanding the API.
Here you will find a list of all the CGI environment variables you can ask for via "getenv": http://www.perlfect.com/articles/cgi_env.shtml
All the code given is completely interchangeable between windows and linux.
If you have any problems with this (very basic) introduction, drop me a line.

2011-06-28T13:05:00.000+01:00

I am starting to have real trouble with the BBC and their editorial staff, being British they are pretty much the de-facto source for news for vast swathes of the British public, indeed within my rather large extended family I have never known a national event to be watched on ITV. It is always the BBD one reached for in time of need. The death and funeral of Princess Dianna, the World Trade Centre Attack, the recent Royal Wedding, even the archives I've ever watched are of BBC source.

So, why is it that such a megalith, this pillar of our information community are publishing such utterly wrong statements, bad spelling, implausible grammar and just plain bad typographical mistakes is beyond me.

I'm just a blogger, I'm just a bloke in an office, but I sit and read these little short articles from the BBC and I'm amazed at how many mistakes, of all kinds, there are in them.

Here's one from today. An interesting historical piece, I believe written by jobbing historian Dan Snow. As the son of the man famous for his opinion poll swing arm during election nights you'd think Dan would have a grounding not only in history, but in even mindedness, but it seems he's slipped up... he states... and with the BBC logo above him this might become de-facto information used by other sources (who knows by someone's school report or a project) he speaks of the Spitfire fighter from World War II and states:

"Its [the Spitfire] design was so advanced that it became the only fighter aircraft in WWII that served on the front line from the first to the last day of the war."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13924720
What utter poppycock, other fighters faught throughout the war and had arguably the same basic design. The Messerschmitt 109 for example, fought as part of the Luftwaffe and their Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War right through to the fall of Germany and beyond with other nations. You might say "ah, but there were many different models of the 109... yes, yes there were... and just as many different models of the Spitfire, the MkI Spitfire of 1939 was certainly not the model being flown by Ronald Wolfe when it crashed in Ireland.

So, Mr Snow has mad a cock up there, big deal you may ask. And I do ask, who vets, or more importantly veto's these statements? It seems Auntie's favourite internal activity - censure and correctness - has been forced roughly into a back seat with the dawning of this our new digital information driven age.

And what's suffering? All the things the nay sayers and technofeebles of the past said would happen, peoples spelling and attention to detail is getting too fleeting, too transient. And I for one don't think that's a good thing.

Maybe its just me, as I'm on a personal drive to improve the standard of work I produce professionally, but if I can aim higher than usual surely people like Dan Snow with the BBC as their sounding post can aim that bit higher too. Check your facts, proof read make your statements concise and contiguous. And for goodness sake make sure what you've written is worth reading... I don't have to bother, I'm just a blogger... but maybe I should care...

Online Spelling....

2011-06-18T23:35:00.000+01:00

I'm aware of their being a very varied, and a very international, bunch of folks on the internet... but I'm worried about us, about all of us out here on the interwebs... our spelling. Sometimes the speaker/writer has been of a foreign (to myself a native English speaker) so I have forgiven them, as they should forgive our trespasses against them. Examples have been extracted from sources such as YouTube posts, Forum posts and e-mail archive lists. They have also all been used more than once, they are therefore judged not to be typing mistakes but are literal intentional uses of the given word. Please also bare, or indeed bear, in mind all the following examples are by people who are above 16 years of age, are of at least average intelligence and whom are all native English speakers.

Epersods... Episodes. (This one was pointed out to me by someone looking for an old TV show on YouTube).

Kayos... Chaos. (Gah, this comes up so often).

Obergene... Aubergine. (This guy was complaining about Tesco not having any in stock... I don't blame Tesco for this one).

Segway... Segue. (No he wasn't talking about this giro-stabilized scooter).

Inglond.... England. (He could have said UK, but then maybe that'd end up as US... but then, we are already the 53rd State).

Intergestion.... Indigestion. (He must not work for Gaviscon).

Farter... Father. (This chap clearly was trying to make a different point than he did with 'my farter used to make me breakfast every morning').

Amareican.... American. (This chap listed his world location as Chicago, and used the spelling no fewer than thirteen times in his forum post).

Disclaimer: No Dictionaries were hurt in the production of this post.

Natural Selection of Elitism Online

2011-06-17T16:54:00.000+01:00

Being a long time game player and now considered a veteran of the internet age (having been online in one form of another since 1994), not to mention being a programmer by profession. I've come to the conclusion that computer games, like World of Warcraft, World of Tanks and even Starcraft II are becoming a Darwinian style battleground naturally selecting for the most obnoxious, self-righteous, selfcentered, dictatorial, demanding elitist jerks.

Its been many moons since I was a competitive player in any online game, not because I can't dedicate the hours, not because I'm shite or have a crap PC. I'm in fact tooled up to fuck and have been a member not only of large successful WoW raiding guilds but also been a member of a Top 10 placed UK Clan playing the Day of Defeat FPS.

Years ago I played these games and the impact others had on me was minimised, either through the fact that games weren't very social, or that if push came to shove they were communities of people who knew one another.

But, with the vast numbers needed to sustain raiding, with the vast numbers needed to prop up the chosen few I believe people are turning the idea of an online community, which by tradition has always been free, into a money making idea. But acting snobbish, by being rude, by basically forcing their will on others. And these are the jerks, the ones who either think they are the community, or whom actually do pull the strings behind the green curtain.

And all these people, in my experience, are just as rude, annoying and selfish as I am describing, they have to be to keep order, they have to be to keep themselves in power. It's all becoming rather like the playground bully mentality, each day you log onto your game just to make sure there is a clan/guild channel into which you can say "hi".

So why are these people running their own little universes behind games? Well, some are clearly doing it because they want to be part of the game itself. Certainly that's how things were around most all half Life modder communities paying DoD and CS. But, now-a-days their seems to be other avenues... such as money making.

With the advent of gold buying/selling, with the advent of accepting paypal (for example) donations often clan leaders are pushing their members to make purchases (in such games that allow purchases - e.g. World of Tanks) through certain suppliers. They even sometimes barefacedly ask for money. Sometimes one can understand this, such as clans needing to run voice servers. But with the cost of servers and bandwidth out there being relatively low what is going on behind the scenes?

I have an example (which I am allowed to share with you, so long as I keep is annonimous) where a player of a game was a member of a large guild. They wanted a certain item from a certain boss, and had been with their guild for sometime trying to raid and receive the item. They had the points needed to claim it, and to their viewing they had put their time in, been a social member of the group and had earned the right to say "hey, i have the points, I'd like that item".

You know what the loot master said to them?... $50 and its yours. And you know what... my friend sent him the paypal transfer... and the guy never gave the chap the item.

He has sinced stopped playing that game, and like me is in MMO limbo.

That is just one example of how bad situations can get; and for a gamer that chaps story brings him out pretty low. At the end of the day he's stopped playing that game. Yes he did something stupid, he did something crazy. But he did it out of desparation, to turn the hours upon hour he'd sunk into doing nothing (aka playing this game) mean something to him. That time meant nothing to me. It clearly meant nothing to the guy in charge of the looting that night.

But it meant something to the player, and it means something to the game providers bottom line, because that chap has stopped subscribing to that game.

So, I wonder whether there is not room in the MMO space for a game which does away with the seeming law of the jungle that is the current social interaction channels.

An example of that need came up long ago (some what tongue in cheek) but during the fiasco which was Perpetual Entertainment going bust and the rights of Star Trek online being passed to market. There was an MMO live blog, reported at the time by the great Jeff Green. It was fun, and one chap was reported to ask whether him being who he was (i.e. a Star Trek officianado - aka nerd/geek/whatever) would equip him to survive better in that game? The answer upon release was a resounding "NO".

However, that person sounded slightly above average in intelligence, he sounded like he had a select group of people with whom he would end up playing Star Treck Online with... I wonder which way his group went? Elitist Jerks, or nice guys? Which way did their jungle drive their social interaction in that game?

Because that is the other selection pressure on these Elitists, it feels to me that the younger they are, the more then want, and the more they want the faster they want it... this is maybe a good explanation of the current generation of Teenagers out there... consequently though this speeds up the elitism. Because whenever something good arrives, say an item drop, they want it before anyone else can have it.

So, why do I bring this all up? Well, I've just been thrown out of a clan. Well, when I say thrown I mean, when I logged on last night I no longer had the clan tag after my name, and when I went to the Forum - the place to talk about the game - I was told not to ask... Pretty arrogant if you ask me... And the only reason they can get away with it is because I'm just a name, just a bit of text on a screen, I am nothing to their every climbing the ladder of achievement, I am a rung onto which they can stand.

And you know what, I don't like it. I'd prefer to stay at a low/mid level at something than to tread on someone else to climb higher. This is true both in games and in real life. Unfortunately I am in a minority... but hey ho, lets see what the next half of 2011 brings... might there be a new game out there with a more be and do, than achieve and go, mentality??

Step by step: setting up SVN Server on Ubuntu Server 11.04

2011-06-13T17:36:00.008+01:00

So, I've been playing about with setting up SVN quickly and semi secure on a Ubuntu server recently. SVN, because I don't mind it as a server technology, it has its benefits over nothing, and it of course has its own faults compared to other source and revision control software. Indeed, its major selling point for me was simply that I have been using it commercially at work for the best part of four years.

However, previously I've always set it up on Kubuntu, with KDE to help me out, what became apparent recently (on my Dell servers) was that I had no GUI, I needed to get back to the command line to install this software.

Also some of the examples out there on the Internet already make a real mess of using CHMOD and other tricks to move the folders around, and some of them reference htpasswd2, when you need to use htpasswd2 on Ubuntu Server 10.04 and above.

So, here are my set of commands, each with a little blurb about them, to help you use just the command line on Ubuntu Server to set up SVN via Apache2.

Prerequisites

1. Ubuntu Server ISO (on CD or DVD) to install onto your server or Virtual Machine.

2. Internet connection.

3. If you want to use SSH to lock your noisy server in a cupboard and administer it from a PC get Putty and follow step XX below.

Set the server up

Install your server. I chose Ubuntu 11.04 64bit for my machines and installed from a CD. I set it up as I wanted, the only thing I did was when prompted to choose to install LAMP or Apache etc etc, I chose nothing, I just started from the blank server.

Hmm looks like Visual Studio stuck a comment into my screen shot - ignore that,

make sure you have nothing picked in the DOS looking terminal style text.

Also, remember to set your password and username for root... and at this point... make sure the root password and username is NOT going to be one of the usernames which can access SVN [that's just a bit of basic security common sense].

So, my root for this demo has a username "mega" and my password is "maniac".

Once your server is up, and you are presented with the log in prompt come back to the sequence below.

Set up SSH

Log into your server, physically in front of it, so i type "mega" and then "maniac" and I get into the prompt, and the first thing I need to do is install the SSH server, so I can get to the machine over the LAN, or WAN.

Now, I don't want this service to automatically start, so we're just going to start is here once its installed. So, to install the open SSH server type:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

This will tell the system to act as the super user to use aptitude to install the package we want. Type that in and when is asked for the sudo password for your root type in your password, so I now type "maniac".

The system will remember your sudo password for a short while now, so for the next few commands you won't be asked for the sudo password, but after that duration you will start to be asked for the sudo/root password again. Don't worry, this is normal.

Once you've entered your password the system will go out onto the Internet and look for the open ssh server package, for me this tells me it needs to download just over 1megabyte of data, so I select yes and let it complete.

Once that is all complete, you need to start the server with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/ssh start

When it is complete you should see the message:

* Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server sshd [ OK ]

If not, then you'll need to go out onto the Internet and see who can help you. But if you're lucky enough to see the "OK" its time to exit from your shell in front of your noisy server, close the server room door and nip up to your quiet PC somewhere else. Before you go though you may want to use the command "ifconfig" to tell you the IP address your new server is on.

So, once you're back at your desk, you need to run an SSH capable terminal program, I prefer "PuTTy" from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html because you can scroll up and down in your prompt window, where as from the actual machine you'll find stuff disappearing off the top.

So, fire up the terminal program of your choice and connect to the server SSH server you set running.

Installing Apache & Subversion

Now we need to install the three packages which allow us to use and host SVN on the machine, these are SVN itself, Apache2 as our web server and the library to link apache to SVN. So type:

sudo apt-get install apache2 subversion libapache2-svn

This should be just shy of 18 megabytes in size, depending on your situation, so let it complete.

Now, fire up a web browser and just check the apache server is running, you should have seen "* Starting wen server apache2 [ OK ]" scroll past, so we'll just check.

Type into the browser address bar "http://" and the IP address of the server and hit Go. You should see the standard "It works!" message from apache2. If not, well something went wrong, again I'm not trying to trouble shoot for you just show you a way that works, and has worked, multiple times for Ubuntu Server.

Create your Repository

The next thing we need to do is set up the subversion repository. Lots of other tutorials and examples on the internet recommend putting the repository in strange exotic paths, which require CHMOD and alsorts of stuff being performed on the folders to give Apache access to them. We're not going to bother with that, we're just going to stop the folders being accessed from the browser by NOT creating our repository in the www folder. Don't ever do that!

So, now create the repository with:

sudo svnadmin create /svn

This will create our svn repository in /svn off of the root of the disk. Remember that path, we'll need it in a moment.

Set apache to host Subversion

Now we need to edit the apache2 module which points to SVN for us to point at this new repository. So we need to do some editing of text, other places use other tools, but I prefer nano as my text editor.

So, lets edit the first file, which is the config file:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dav_svn.conf

And it should come up looking just like this:

Now, the lines of text in this file can be "commented out" by adding a # at the front of them, as you see everything in this file is commented out... so we need to uncomment some lines by removing the # from the front.

So the lines to uncomment are:

< Location /svn >

DAV svn

SVNPath /var/lib/svn

And with this path line, change this to the path we created earlier. So I'm changing mine to read:

SVNPath /svn

The next items to uncomment are:

AuthType Basic

AuthName "Subversion Repository"

AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwrd

This path for the user file is important, it is the file to the list of users able to access your repository, so we'll be using that in a moment!

And the final things to uncomment are:

Require valid-user

and

< / Location >

(Ignore the spaces in the / Location stuff, they're only there as blogger thinks they're tags in the HTML)

You may see the Limit Except items around the require valid-user, I however am putting my SVN on the Internet, so I do not want to allow anonymous read, I therefore just want all users no-matter what they do, to have to enter their username and password.

So, with all that edited, you need to press "CTRL+O" to Write out the file in nano, you'll be presented with the filename you are writing, press enter if it is /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dav_svn.conf. And then press "CTRL+X" to exit.

Create SVN Users

Next we need to create at least one user who can access our repository. So back on the command line again we need to type:

sudo htpasswd -cm /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd < USERNAME >

Where the "< USERNAME >" is the username they want, it will then ask you to enter a password for this person twice. Remember, make this password something different to your root/sudo user. For my SVN this is "svnguy".

sudo htpasswd -cm /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd svnguy

The parameter -cm means to "Create" and to encrypt the file as "md5".

Later, if you just want to add a user do not specify the "c" flag, as you do not want to create the file again, you just want to encrypt the password file, so you do:

sudo htpasswd -m /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd < USERNAME >

Restart Apache

Lastly we need to restart Apache, so type:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Finally, check its working

Now, we need to check our repository is working you need to jump back to your browser and where you had "http://" you need to add /svn onto the end of the URL. You should be prompted for the secure logon, so enter one of the people you added with htpasswd and their paddword. And voila, you should see your working SVN server ready for you to checkout and add code to.

Phone Bombing....

2011-04-28T17:30:00.000+01:00

So, I recently used a really excellent company... like one of the best companies I've used for this little task ever... and I've been a recurring customer to them because their face to face service is so good...

But, whenever I've used their online services about 2 days later I get my phone ringing over and over with a withheld number... I don't answer unidentified numbers... so I leave it...

And it rings...

And Rings...

And RINGS....

Luckily I don't turn the answering service on... so in the end some bright spark their end decides to phone from a regular land line... it's the scottish part of this excellent company... and they totally ruin the great customer service given in person...

In person you're treated nicely, you get spoken to like a person... and then two days later these fuck wits from Scotland phone up, shouting at you in their deranged accents asking "Doooo Yoooo Haaaave Teyme Te Ansa E Foo Kestions Abuut Ye Service Yooo Received?".... And I say "No"...

"Auch c'mon It'll Onlee Take A Minute".

"I've already given my feedback online, and the customer service was excellent, the only thing ruining it is when you guys phone bomb me for a week afterwards. Stop this part of the feedback mechanism and everything would be superb."

"What, Canae Ask Ye A Kestion?"

"No, I've already left my feedback online"

"Right, Nae Pleeazin' Sum Peepol"

And she hangs up... yes, yes that's the shocker, this burly voiced kilted barn pot... who sounded for all the Earth like a character from the Simpons... was a woman!

Apple Aluminium Keyboard

2011-04-27T01:37:00.000+01:00

My Apple Keyboard is slowly dying the space key is working less and less than a British Leyland employee from the 1970's.

I'm disappointed, as I really like the action of the keys. They've always felt light and flowing, but I guess they can't stand up to just over 2 years of hard programming slog.

I'm in two minds whether to buy a new one.

I've had the keys off to see if there is anything obviously wrong, but nothing springs to attention.

If it were not nearly 2am, I would whack it on the wall to see if I can gee it up a bit.

Oh god help him...

2011-04-20T18:52:00.001+01:00

A chap whom I work with has an iPhone and he's been a bit loose with his hips (shall we put it that way?) but his wife, whom I also know, is rather techie... so when this little gem popped up on the wire this afternoon...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13145562

she innocently swapped his iPhone for hers at lunch.... and she's been doggedly trying to work out how to read this hidden data to work out where he's been... specifically if his penis been to a certain address in Chilwell...

But having read the Apple Terms and conditions, yes they can do this, but the things they're collecting... it makes the heading of the section a right laugh "Privacy Policy", which basically means 'You do everything we say'.

■ We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising.

Late, Tardy, Behind Schedule, Running Late

2011-04-17T17:23:00.000+01:00

I hate when people are late, I feel so embarrassed when I'm late for other people or meetings... I like punctuality... I'm a programmer, I hate running late on projects...

So right now, Sunday afternoon, one of my precious days off, and I'm sat idle waiting on other people...whom have neither text nor called to say they're running late.. and you know what, I bet money when they get here they'll not even apologise.

Experts Exchange

2011-04-16T01:41:00.001+01:00

I joined Experts Exchange in 2002... at a time when I was between contracts and bored... and I answered a few questions at the time... I thought nothing of it, recently though I've noticed google is showing Experts Exchange search results up in a lot of its indices.

So I went back into that site to see what the game was. And I got instantly pissed off... because you have to pay for answers. They used to be free. But you can earn free premium services by getting 5000 something points... I was already well over half way there... If I answered 8 more questions (ish) I'd get free access.

So I set about helping people in C#, Web and Linux areas...

And you know what... what fucking morons there are there... one guy I gave him not only an answer, but a program to do the job... you drag drop and then click this program... and his comment back "That's too technical for my boss to use"... WHAT? What is this boss doing? If he can't use my program he certainly can't use the application the guy was telling me he wanted moving about... jesus fucking christ how low can you go?

Another was a guy wanting to save all attributes from a class... I show him how, I give him a link and a code example to a library doing it... and he flat ignores it... it's just like everyone posting in the C# section has ADHD, with emphasis on AD.

Gah.

I'm going to quit that site, I hate it.