Sticking again with the theme of parts of a website, established in July due to my lack of time on the internet (and, indeed, lack of time spent watching TV or doing anything particularly leisurely), the website of the month for September 2010 is Irishpolyglot.com for this exceedingly good video about a trip up Teide:

Sticking with last month's theme of focusing on a part of a website, the website of the month for August 2010 is this rather cool video of a guy walking across America. And, so you don't even have to click the link, here's the video:

It seems that the comment submission system on this blog has been cracked by bots (or, by the looks of it, one bot). Consequently I'm going to turn off the comment submission system for a bit and I hope to look through the blog's code and make some improvements soon (issues with the statistics systems have developed too). Neither problem is simple, so don't expect quick solutions - in fact, I'm not sure of the cause of either problem (in both cases there's significant potential that the problem is with something on which the blog is built), so expect various diagnostics to go on and possibly temporarily show themselves on the blog.

As always, I hope to have things fixed as soon as possible, but I am quite busy at the moment and the priority of blog problems, especially these non-critical ones, falls far below most other things. However, you will certainly see the spam comments being cleaned up in the near future.

Once again delaying my tour of a particular stretch of the coast of Tenerife due to a lack of aerial imagery that I can use, Video Podcast 3 is similar to Video Podcast 2 in that it involves an early version of an Android port on a Windows Mobile device. Video Podcast 2 featured touchphone from 2008 (the HTC Touch Diamond), whereas Video Podcast 3 features a touchphone from 2009, the Snapdragon-powered HTC HD2. If the Touch Diamond could be considered a sibling of devices such as the Hero, the HD2 is a sibling of the EVO 4G, Nexus One, Incredible and Desire.

Anyway, that's enough preamble. This video podcast, like the last one, is more rushed than my first one, and I make use of music I didn't write in this one - Hiding in a Shadow, White Evening and Born Already are by remaxim of ccMixter.org though, of course, the Emptosoft Background music and Emptosoft Logo from previous video podcasts are my own.

The video podcast is titled "Android on a HTC HD2" and is 10 minutes and 51 seconds long (I have a reasonable play with Android). The Android ROM I use is Android 2.1 with HTC Sense, and can be downloaded here, and requires the automatic backlight adjustment in Windows Mobile to be turned off as well as a T-Mobile US-based HD2 ROM to work properly/at all. If you want to keep an eye on progress with Android or Linux in general on the HD2, point your browser here. Download links:
- Windows Media Video - Small (9.61MB)
- Windows Media Video - Large (42.9MB)
- MP4 - Small (11.0MB)

If you don't want to download the video podcast, you can watch it here:

The website of the month for July 2010 is this article on rubber ducking on the Nokia Qt Developer Network's website, suggested by bencord0. Rubber duck debugging, also known by various other descriptions such as having a cardboard programmer, helps programmers with basic debugging by involving them explaining their code to an inanimate object - the concept originally comes from programmers explaining their problematic code to another programmer and, while doing so, spotting mistakes themselves with no input necessary from the programmer the code is being explained to (it therefore makes sense, to avoid wasting the time of others, to replace the programmer having the code explained to him/her with an inanimate object).

The website of the month for June 2010 is the well-known and respected XDA Developers. The website is famous for its forums which feature, along with tips and information, cool applications and ROMs for phones that improve upon or change what can be found in the official ROMs for phones. XDA Developers really should have been the website of the month many years ago, but I was waiting for an appropriate moment - now that their main website has been improved, they're partnering with PDAdb.net and, most importantly, they're moving onto a new era with the departure of Flar, who has been the admin for over 4 years. XDA Developers is an enormous website which deals with both Windows Mobile and Android devices, with a bias towards HTC's devices and is one of the largest (if not the largest) and oldest online mobile device communities, though there are reasonable alternatives around if you somehow get bored of XDA...

Ross Anderson is a very clever guy and a good lecturer - he was one of the authors of the "Chip and PIN is Broken" paper. Indeed, when demonstrating my group project (no, that's not me presenting it but yes, that is my HD2) earlier this year he seemed quite interested in the details of the project and I enjoyed explaining it to him and justifying our various design decisions while reflecting on the difficulties we encountered. Here Stephen Fry interviews him about the Y2K bug. Enjoy!

Yes, you heard me. If you are based in the UK, get out there and vote for the Liberal Democrats. I shall elaborate later today (just hoping to catch early voters at the moment).

Update: 22:10 (Voting is over now):
Clearly the current Labour government needs to be retired so that it can be refreshed (I do feel that Gordon Brown is unable to take the country in the direction he wants because he has been a senior figure for so long and perhaps supported Tony Blair more than he should have), and the Conservatives will be the government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. Therefore, the only party that can realistically bring change for the better is the Liberal Democrats. Before the election campaign, most people didn't even know who Nick Clegg was, whereas the television debates have helped to show off both Nick and the policies of the Lib Dems (as they are often called) to the British public - consequently the Liberal Democrats have risen from the perennial third party in British politics to a serious contended for this election (indeed, they were even the most popular party at one point recently, according to several polls). Newspapers and even celebrities have switched their loyalties to the Lib Dems, including people involved in comedy such as Tim Minchin (who I did a post about recently) and possibly, by implication, Graham Linehan (creator of shows such as Father Ted and The IT Crowd) (I offer you this information not because I think you should use celebrities as inspiration for your vote but, rather, because their comedy exposes their views and the way in which their mind works, whether or not you feel your views align with theirs will tell you to an extent, whether or not you are likely to want to vote for the same party). Even the internet in general seems to support Nick - I highlighted abuse of David Cameron several months ago, but here is just a taste of the Lib Dem support.

I could go on for ages about various issues, but nobody likes reading through a huge amount of text on a blog, so comment if you want me to talk about more stuff.

The new series of Doctor Who has been running for a few episodes, and some of the music from it has found its way online. My favourite part of the soundtrack is below, (specifically the bits at 0:36 and 1:51). The volume seems a bit erratic in this recording - presumably this will be fixed when the soundtrack is properly released. Click through to the version on YouTube for better quality sound...

The Eleventh Hour (The Eleventh Doctor's Action Theme)

The website of the month for May 2010 is Grooveshark, a website where you can listen to virtually any music for free. There is a Windows Mobile Grooveshark client that costs money, but the free GrooveMobile (formerly known as Groovefish) has everything I need.

I hereby apologise both for the lack of posts recently and, in advance, for the lack of posts to come - preparation for exams, as well as other stuff such as trying to find something constructive to do this summer, is keeping me very busy. Both physical and digital files are beginning to live in odd places and everything is in dire need of a good cleanup, defrag and virus scan.

However, I do have one more blog post that shall appear soon...

The website of the month for April 2010 is The Matrix 101 - a website that explains all of the meaning and symbolism behind the Matrix trilogy, and answers any questions you may have about the films. Again, I apologise for the lateness of this post - it has been a busy few days with things like the Boat Race (), Holy Week and other stuff happening (indeed, this whole month seems to have been very busy, and it doesn't look like I'm going to get any less busy soon as I have exams coming up).

In other news, I was made aware this month of the musician/comedian Tim Minchin. He is rather funny - you can follow him on Twitter but, before you do that, check out these videos of him in action:

If I Didn't Have You


Some People Have It Worse

"It never rains but it pours". Yes, despite yesterday's late website of the month post, I'm already posting again. This is the first post in the "film" category - not because I've suddenly decided to start reviewing all of the films I see, but because there is really no other category this post could go in, and it really is worth posting about.

Born of Hope is a prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Unlike the trilogy, it had a budget of only £25,000, and can be seen for free on the internet (as a fan film, there aren't many other distribution methods available). Personally, I am not a fan of The Lord of the Rings though the trilogy is in my DVD collection. Born of Hope is, in my opinion, well worth seeing - especially considering the price (free), ease (online) and length (just over an hour - nowhere near as long as the trilogy). The budget barely seems to harm the film in any way - a good story, locations, props, costumes and acting combine to make the film enjoyable to an extent that I never thought was possible. The soundtrack is very nice too, although they're still working on getting that into a releasable format. They say that pictures say a thousand words and, at 25 frames per second, this trailer should be able to say far more than I ever can:


The website is here - it has some extra stuff such as video podcasts about how this project happened (it took six years). Feel free to donate too, if you enjoy it.

The website of the month for March 2010 is GraphJam, a collection of funny and (sometimes) true graphs and charts.

In other news, Apple is once again being silly and I apologise for the lateness of this post - I had a group project code completion deadline at noon yesterday and ended up doing a 23-hour final stint.

What is it with HTC and doing triple announcements on Tuesdays? Anyway, today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona they announced three new devices: Desire, Legend and HD mini. The Desire is the "Nexus One with Sense" or "HD2 with Android" that everyone has been waiting for (unsurirpsingly, apparently "all key networks in all key countries" want to sell it). The Legend is an upgrade to the Hero, with an aluminium unibody (unlike the Touch Diamond2, announced at MWC last year, the Legend is more stylish than its predecessor). The HD mini is, as the name implies, a small HD2 - it's the only one of the three to run Windows Mobile (6.5.3, I believe), although I must point out that I have an issue with them still calling it HD (it implies that their "HD" line is more of a design style than anything to do with the screen quality). Anyway, videos of the new devices (and of the HTC Smart) were uploaded today - check them out:

HTC Desire


HTC Legend


HTC HD mini


HTC Smart


In other news, Windows Phone 7 Series (Windows Mobile 7, to those familiar with Windows Mobile) was announced yesterday. It's definitely the change that Microsoft needed (a complete rewrite of the OS and big changes to key concepts), but I'm not sure that I'm a fan - I do want my phone to be a PC to an extent. What do you think?

An interesting series of videos from YouTube is below - they demonstrate various parts of the designing and manufacturing process for the Nexus One (including a rare peek inside HTC's manufacturing facility). Presumably the process is fairly similar for many of HTC's phones.

The website of the month for February 2010 is Airbrushed for change - MyDavidCameron.com - a rather funny website.

As you will probably have noticed, there are rather a lot of strange statements, beginning "Notice:" on this blog at the moment (other than the title of this post). This is due to the fact that the server this blog is on is now running a new version of PHP. Nothing seems to be broken, so fixing the problem is not high priority on my todo list - however, I shall get rid of them at some point within the next few days.

It's time to share some of the music I've been listening to recently (I mostly listen to soundtracks):


The music above is from the soundtrack of The Mummy Returns.


This music is from the soundtrack of Avatar.

I just did a brief bit of digging to see if I could find any technical details about some of HTC's more interesting rumored/leaked upcoming devices on HTCMMS.com.tw, and I did.

- HTC Bravo
- HTC Dragon
- HTC/Google Nexus One

I also found the Leo 1.5, which is presumably the American version of the HD2. Strangely, the Nexus One claims to have a physical phone keypad and a landscape screen by default. Also, the Dragon claims to have a HVGA screen whereas the Bravo and Nexus One have WVGA screens. Anyway, have a look at the data yourself.

(If you don't understand the title of this post, click here).

Good morning and welcome to the second decade of the second millennium AD (or CE, if you prefer that), if nobody else has bothered to welcome you. I know I haven't been posting much here lately (although I was tempted to do a personal post, like some of Rory's posts, once or twice), and I don't expect that to change - but something is better than nothing isn't it? I thought I'd share a preview of the 2010 series of Doctor Who:

Sorry for the late post again - the website of the month for January 2010 is downforeveryoneorjustme.com. That website is quite useful and was one I considered for last month - as I haven't seen any good websites over the last month, I'm making it website of the month for this month.

The website of the month for December 2009 is boklm's webpage - specifically, the part with an introduction to prolog which, while perhaps not extensive enough to teach Prolog, is a pretty good extended cheat sheet. Interestingly, some of that website uses Blosxom, which powered this blog for a while until I effectively rewrote and augmented Blosxom in PHP.

Apparently, some sheep in Northern Ireland have been rather nicely decorated (follow the link for a video). Unfortunately, their owner does not appreciate the decoration and wants to remain anonymous - I would buy one (or more) of those sheep!

In other Ireland-related news, it's nice to know that the latest weapons are being used there. Combined with the Irish Air Corps' 7 aircraft capable of attack (the 8th crashed recently, killing both of its pilots), Ireland shall surely be capable of resisting any invasion attempt.

A bit later than usual (it shows that I'm working, I suppose), the website of the month for November 2009 is pocketnow.com, for some good articles recently, a good recent visual redesign, lots of help for new visitors and, of course, Brandon Miniman's famous video tours and reviews.

This afternoon I finally got around to watching last weekend's F1, and consequentlly decided to find two entertaining extracts on YouTube so I could share them here:
Jenson, Master of the Universe


Brawn's Story


In other news, the HTC HD2 is still only in the hands of a select few (including Stephen Fry, who apparently likes it despite being an Apple-lover) and it doesn't look like any network will be getting it significantly before it is available unlocked (week beginning 2nd Nov is the latest O2/T-Mobile rumor, vs 11th Nov for the unlocked version). Coupled with the fact that demand is very high and the Touch Pro2 and Hero are already stretching HTC's manufacturing output to its limit, it would be advisable to pre-order a HD2. It's available for pre-order on a number of websites, but Amazon is arguably the most reliable and effortless way to ensure you'll get a HD2 sooner rather than later:

It's official here, here and here. More will follow soon...

[Edit: 15:24 WEST, 07/10/2009]
I said more will follow soon, so here is more:

The specs are equal to the best non-stupid rumors - things like the digital compass, multi-touch and micro-USB are all there. In fact, there was even one nice surprise that wasn't predicted by the rumors - it will have 448MB of RAM rather than the 320MB seen on pre-production models. There has been no mention of a Windows Mobile 7 upgrade yet, but I wouldn't expect there to be so soon after the launch of Windows Mobile 6.5. Also, I'd like to point out that HTC has not ditched TouchFLO 3D as some websites are saying - TouchFLO 3D is a part of HTC Sense, which the HD2 does come with. Also, the battery (1230mAh) was slightly worrying (I know that Snapdragon is more power efficient than older Qualcomm stuff, but it was hard to tell how much more efficient - the TG01 was the only device available, with Snapdragon), but apparently it has quite a decent life - it's certainly officially significantly better than the Touch Diamond (I should point out that batteries get worse as they age and these days my Touch Diamond will only last for a day).

I have yet more exclusive news on the HTC HD2: the HTC HD2 will be coming to O2 UK, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

Proof
O2: I have two copies of the O2 brochure featuring the HTC HD2 that is all over the internet now - you can pick your own copy up from an O2 store if you're still unconvinced.
T-Mobile: I've found a T-Mobile version of the information about the HTC HD2 on HTCMMS.com.tw: http://www.htcmms.com.tw/tmo/HTC_HD2-1.0.xml
Vodafone: I've found a Vodafone version of the information about the HTC HD2 on HTCMMS.com.tw: http://www.htcmms.com.tw/voda/HTC_HD2-1.0.xml

For more explanation about HTCMMS.com.tw, see my previous post about the HTC HD2. If you're wondering why the O2 version isn't on HTCMMS.com, it may well be there - I just haven't yet guessed its URL. Also, for the same reason, I don't know whether or not it will be available on Orange - hopefully it will, as they had its predecessor, the Touch HD.

Interesting note
Check out the modification dates of the data for the T-Mobile and Vodafone versions of the HD2 - the Vodafone version was last modified all the way back on the 2nd of September, whereas the T-Mobile version was modified on the 24th of September. The data for the unlocked version was last modified on the 21st of August and the initial data on the hardware (when it was known as the HTC Leo) was last modified on the 18th of June. The earlier dates aren't interesting, but it is interesting that the T-Mobile version has apparently only come about recently - perhaps because, having finally stopped O2's rebranding of their devices, HTC refused to let T-Mobile sell the HD2 if they were going to rebrand it and T-Mobile finally gave in because they need the HD2 to compete with the other networks.

Finally, this is personal speculation, but the sheer amount of information about the HD2 on the internet now and the rapidly approaching release date (which has, most likely, been delayed by a few weeks) makes me suspect that the HD2 will be announced this week - certainly within the next two weeks (as I said somewhere at some point, HTC won't/can't spoil the launch of WM6.5 by announcing a potentially WM7-compatible device).

I really should do a Halloween-related website of the month for October - I haven't so far though, and I won't this year, so perhaps next year...

The website of the month for October 2009 is HTCPedia.com, which is a great website for HTC-related exclusive content, contests, news and discussion. Their competitions are definitely worth taking a look at - I've already won stuff in a competition, and their latest one has produced some very entertaining results, such as this:

In a few days I will be returning to Cambridge and software development and posting here will once again slow to a snail's pace. I thought I'd share two interesting Cambridge-related audio slideshows published by the BBC today:
- Stephen Hawking
- Blake's 'Informal Panorama'
Both have entertaining endings.

Also, this deserves just a quick mention - it's related to my last post.

As you may have noticed now, I'm very precise with my device names, rarely shortening things like HTC Touch Diamond to HTC Diamond or just Diamond - if I were to shorten that, it would be to Touch Diamond. So, the fact that the title of this post is HTC HD2 is significant.

...OK, I'll stop teasing you and let you see what I've found. Anyone familiar with looking for stuff about HTC's devices before they're launched should be familiar with htcmms.com.tw, which appears to be a place that HTC shares some of the specs of its devices (especially things that look like MIME types), presumably for something to do with MMS (most likely just stating what sort of content the device can handle). Devices appear on htcmms.com.tw not too long before they are announced, but the URLs of their information are often hard to guess. Lately, HTC (I have checked the ownership of the website) appears to upload some data under the codename of devices and, presumably after the hardware and software is finalised (or close to being finalised), they upload the data again under the final name of the device.

So, what's my point? As you know, I have been following the Firestone/Star/SuperStar/Leo rumors since the start of the year. The data for the Leo was finally uploaded and spread around the internet via various blogs and websites a few months ago. After a bit of searching around for information, I've guessed the URL for the second set of data for the Leo: http://www.htcmms.com.tw/gen/HTC_HD2_T8585-1.0.xml. The data seems to be pretty much the same as the older data but the name of the device is quite clearly "HTC HD2" (with the model number being T8585). Other recent, similar devices clearly have "HTC Touch whatever" in their URLs and in the data, whereas the HD2 does not. Coupled with recent whispers about "HTC HD2" being the default bluetooth name of one of the Leos apparently mysteriously making their way around the world, I think it can be concluded that the HTC Leo will be known as the HTC HD2, and apparently HTC is dropping "Touch" from its device names - presumably for simplicity and because they've realised that their Touch family is the way forwards.

Oh yeah, and sorry for the abrupt cessation of activity here recently - I had to go to a funeral in Scariff.

If you've been keeping an eye on the source code, you'll have noticed that v1.1c of Emptosoft Chat appeared a few days ago. I never like putting letters in version numbers, but it seems appropriate in this case - v1.1c is exactly the same as v1.1, but it will use a command-line interface rather than a graphical user interface if you run it with the argument "-c".

Therefore, I hereby announce the availability of v1.1c (and through that, version 1.1) of Emptosoft Chat. Version 1.1 fixes the "Participants" list problems in v1.0, adds a diagnostic mode (enter "Diagnostic Mode" as your name when the program starts) and improves on the speed of v1.0. Also, clients now check if they are compatible with servers before attempting to connect to them. I'm not sure how to best make the public aware of which versions are compatible with each other, but for the moment the compatibility is simple enough: version 1.1 (if you compiled that from the source code) and 1.1c (the version available for download here - source code also available) are compatible with each other, but they are not compatible with version 1.0.

It's worth noting that it's difficult to keep track of conversations when running in the diagnostic mode due to the amount of diagnostic information added to the message log. It's difficult to send messages too, when running in diagnostic mode and using the command-line interface - the command-line interface was (clearly) added as a last-minute hack for my personal needs (loose coupling made it quick and easy), so it's not as polished as the graphical user interface, nor does it have as many features (and it's stuck in server mode). To be fair, the type of people who would use the command-line interface mode should be capable of modifying the source code to suit their needs - the changes needed are not difficult.

Anyway, I'd like to thank Rory for making this version Mac-compatible and, without further ado, here is the download link, the readme link and some screenshots:

Download Emptosoft Chat v1.1c

Readme
(Contains the licence this software is released under, which is the same as the licence Emptosoft Chat v1.0 was released under).




I don't know when the next release will be - there are still a few minor improvements that I want to make before any major changes, but my return to Cambridge is aproaching rapidly and I don't want to waste time (especially during term) doing work from the previous year.

By the way, if anyone wants a version of Emptosoft Chat in a different language, I can give you a list of stuff to translate and I can compile version 1.1c in that language fairly easily (if I do get translations, obviously I'll make some way of choosing the language within Emptosoft Chat in the next version).

Enjoy.

As you can see from the title, I have returned to this blog after my break and I'm now posting again. I have a few bits of news but I'll group them all into this post rather than do separate posts for each of them:

Beerware source code
The source code for all of my recent software is available here - I've finally made a system for sharing the code. I will be adding the source code of my less recent software in due course. If you find the code difficult to understand or compile ("Real programmers don't comment their code - if it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand"), you can ask me about it, but I don't really care - I don't have the time to offer customer support and free open-source software, on top of doing a degree and having a life. I might add some readme files alongside the source code though, which will give you some information that you may not be able to work out yourself (e.g. what you can use to compile the code).

Emptosoft Chat v1.1
If you followed the link in the above section, you may have noticed that there's source code for Emptosoft Chat v1.1 sitting there, despite no release announcement. That's because I have finished Emptosoft Chat v1.1 (I might start work on v1.2 tomorrow - I'll see if I can get that handy popup that comes up while the software is starting to come up in more places) but I haven't yet announced and released it yet - before I release it, I want to get it compiled on a Mac (so it's compatible with OS X, Linux and Windows), screenshot some of the new features, and write a decent release post. Of course, if you want to try it now (it's much improved - you shouldn't encounter bugs unless you're immensely unlucky), please feel free to download the source code, compile it yourself and buy me a beer (I've barely had any alcoholic beverages for months). BTW, if you think any of the source code for Emptosoft Chat or any of my other software is bad, it probably is - I am learning as I make the applications.

g400.co.uk
I'll be changing the images that appear on the front page of g400.co.uk at some point over the next few days - some more epic and interesting photos are on their way. By the way, I do not randomly change the image there when I feel like it - there are 10 images that rotate. (I've been asked a few times about that).

Music
That's right. I'm going to leave you with some nice music. As always, it's worth putting high quality mode on (I don't know of any way of turning on that mode by default via the code on this blog) and listening to the music through some decent headphones or speakers. Enjoy.

How depressing that it's September already! Winter is approaching fast, but there is another academic year to look forward to. The website of the month is Keep Tube, which lets you download videos from various video-hosting websites. It probably enables you to violate the terms of service of most of those websites, but if you're using it on your phone it does help you keep the search for free wifi to a minimum and/or keeps your mobile internet costs down (if mobile internet costs you anything). To be fair it's not as if, for example, HTC's YouTube application has adverts...

I'll be posting again in a few minutes...

The website of the month for August 2009 is openBVE. I've been meaning to make that website of the month for ages, but more interesting websites have been cropping up for quite a few months now, meaning that I missed making it website of the month around the release of version 1.0. Anyway, openBVE is a good open-source train simulator, started due to the lack of development of the original (Japanese) BVE train simulator. Now that he/she has competition, apparently the developer of BVE is developing a new version of BVE, but I'm sticking with openBVE.

The link above for openBVE may break at some point - the website has moved a few times since I started using openBVE (a long time before version 1.0) - I don't know how permanent the current solution is. Anyway, don't expect any posts from me for a while. I might ask some of the other admins to post, if I have time...

It's been a while since I did a post in the "general" category, but I have a few different bits to share, so it seems to be an appropriate category to post in...

OK, firstly, the previous two posts contained all of the things I've been working on recently. There will eventually be updates, but I have no idea of when they will come. I might look into making my own image merger for the Emptosoft Render Farm Manager too. If I still have time, I intend to look into making applications for Android and Windows Mobile, but I doubt I'll have that much time.

Secondly, the video below is interesting - The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra seem to perform a lot of arrangements/orchestrations of famous/popular music, and they're pretty decent. The thing that annoys me though is that, in my opinion, they do some parts of every piece of music better than the original, and some parts worse - no individual piece of music I've heard so far is clearly better or worse than the original. The recording and mixing quality of what I can find on the internet is also not as good as the originals.


Thirdly, here's an image which has single-handedly brought me to the verge of liking cats:


Fourthly, I won't be posting too much over the next month or so, as I become busy with (fun, I hope) summery things.

And finally, there have been quite a few "leaks" about future HTC devices over the last few days (incidentally, the same days over which the HTC Hero launched). Initially, some clues were apparently found in the depths of the previously leaked TouchFLO 3D 2.5 about a device called the HTC Leo - a device with both a WVGA main screen, and a QVGA external screen, perhaps implying a clamshell-type design like the long-rumored HTC Omni. A few days later though, a blog claimed to have the specifications of the HTC Leo, saying it will have a 4.3-inch WVGA display with capcitive touch-sensitivity, a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU and a 1230mAh battery. While those specs sound great, they make no sense to me - 4.3 inches is halfway between the Touch HD and the Advantage, but 1230mAh is less than both. It is claimed to have a Touch-HD-like form factor but, with those specs, I wouldn't be surprised if it was completely different - it would have to have some pretty major stuff inside to force the battery to be shrunk to 1230mAh. On the same day, independent reports suggested that the device would have a compass. Also, wmpoweruser.com seems to have started the rumor that the Leo is the previously-leaked Firestone. And, rather conveniently, a high-quality render, matching the initial leak appeared the next day, along with a few more details about the Firestone. So...my opinion? The initial leak has been frighteningly accurate so far, so I weight that quite heavily - at that point the Firestone did look just like the latest leaked image. The HTC Leo has not been previously leaked, which would mean that it's something that's only now in the early stages of development, an enlarged Firestone, a shrunken Thoth or just a confused fusion of the Thoth and Firestone. I'm inclined to think the latter, and that those specs do not correspond to a single device - I can't see any reason for HTC to create a device of that size. I expect the Firestone and Thoth to be released pretty much as initially leaked. The Leo may actually be the SuperStar, which had a few tantalizing details leaked in March - that was clearly intended to be a big device, and as nobody had heard anything about that before, the specs may still have been fairly fluid. Of course, these are all rumors - anything could happen over the coming months! Also, I should point out that all of the names used here are (as far as I know) codenames - the devices are likely (although not certainly, as demonstrated by the Hero and Touch Diamond) to be released under different names...

It is with great joy that I hereby announce availability of Emptosoft Chat - a simple (under 30KB) chat server/client for all desktop operating systems (again, for Mac OS X compatibility, I need someone to compile Emptosoft Chat on OS X - ask me for the source code if you can help the available version is now Mac-compatible). Rather than explain the software here, I'm going to leave you with two screenshots and let you fiddle with the software yourself. It should be noted that I've fixed a few bugs even since making these screenshots. For example, the "Your IP" bit towards the top-left of the server mode screenshot was omitted when the software was in client mode - the version available for download does not have that bug.



The software is released under my "beerware" licence:
Emptosoft Chat, (henceforth known as 'the software'), is provided 'as-is', without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, without limitation, fitness for a particular purpose. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the software is with you.
The software was created by Mark Hogan. As long as you retain this notice you can do whatever you want with it and its source code and files (if supplied). If we meet some day, and you think the software is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return.

Of course, I don't expect to meet most visitors of this website so, if you want to buy me a beer, there is a donation system on this blog for doing so. Also, I should point out that it's fair that I'm not obliged to take any responsibility for consequences of using the software, or provide any support, when you consider the fact that it's free. At the moment, the source code is available on request (either via email or blog comment) until I can think of a hassle-free but neat way of making it available.

Click here to download Emptosoft Chat.

By the way, this is v0.9 in my opinion, in terms of development - there are still quite a few bugs that I know of and will fix. However, calling it version 1.0 makes me feel less pressured to fix the bugs.

I shall undoubtedly be augmenting the features in subsequent versions - this is only the beginning...

It is with great pleasure that I hereby announce availability of the Emptosoft Alarm, version 1.0. The Emptosoft Alarm is a very basic program that I wrote a few months ago and tweaked a bit this afternoon - it gives your computer alarm-clock functionality. The program is very, very small - only about 2KB without the built-in alarm sound. Oh, and while the built-in alarm sound is fairly nice, if you put a file called "sound.wav" in the same directory as the program, it will play that as the alarm sound instead.

The software is released under my "beerware" licence:
The Emptosoft Alarm, (henceforth known as 'the software'), is provided 'as-is', without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, without limitation, fitness for a particular purpose. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the software is with you.
The software was created by Mark Hogan. As long as you retain this notice you can do whatever you want with it and its source code and files (if supplied). If we meet some day, and you think the software is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return.

Of course, I don't expect to meet most visitors of this website so, if you want to buy me a beer, there is a donation system on this blog for doing so. Also, I should point out that it's fair that I'm not obliged to take any responsibility for consequences of using the software, or provide any support, when you consider the fact that it's free. At the moment, the source code is available on request (either via email or blog comment) until I can think of a hassle-free but neat way of making it available.

Click here to download the Emptosoft Alarm.

The Emptosoft Alarm should work on any desktop OS (I don't think the UI will work on mobile operating systems and, besides, mobile operating systems come with alarms), although I have found in the past that Mac OS X has an older version of Java which will only run software compiled with old versions of Java - if you are running OS X, ask for the source code and compile the software yourself (I'd appreciate it if you could send me the result of the compilation - that way I can distribute a version of the Emptosoft alarm which is guaranteed to run on all operating systems).

I have more software nearing completion, so keep checking this blog regularly...

Edit (23:40 WEST, 19 Jul 2009): With a bit of help, the Emptosoft Alarm is now compatible with Mac OS X - download the new version from the link above, now! (The version number hasn't changed because there have been no changes to the code).

This is just embarassing - you can see at least one thing in pretty much everything if you look hard enough...

This evening I've been searching for new music to add to my collection as, during the last year, I have been listening to Hans Zimmer's recent stuff too much. The preview feature on Amazon has proved immensely helpful, because it's hard to know which soundtracks are going to be full of good music and which are going to have the theme and a load of random bits of music (soundtrack CDs never have all of the music that you hear in the corresponding TV show or film). Anyway, I thought I'd share the highlight of this search here - it's the end credits from the Robin Hood series on the BBC which was, rather unfortunately, recently cancelled after three series. Yes, I know it's not historically accurate and the script isn't great, but it's meant to be easy-to-watch family entertainment - such complaints about Robin Hood are equivalent to complaints that the science of Doctor Who is incorrect, and the writers have to conform to virtually no rules as they can just make random stuff up. That, coupled with the BBC ignoring HTC's sponsorship of a cycling team (the team's name is Team Columbia-HTC, not Team Columbia), has made me pretty annoyed the BBC at the moment. Thankfully, I'm not actually paying for them to annoy me. Anyway, here is the video:

Time is flying - I can't believe it's July already. I've been rembering and forgetting to do this post all day. The last month has been simply amazing, for me. However, this is not a personal post - the website of the month for July 2009 is Free Map Tools, which has loads of handy map-related tools for Google Maps.

I'm sitting here, waiting for my results to become available, so I thought I'd post an update about the stuff I'm developing at the moment. My major new project (which I struggle to think of as major, as it was inspired by a piece of supervision work) is progressing erratically - a few hours ago, I switched from Notepad to Eclipse, in order to speed up development (the large amount of code was getting unmanageable in Notepad). Anyway, hopefully it will be finished soon, and hopefully some people will find it useful. The software should work on all operating systems, although I may need to get Rory to compile it on a Mac to make sure (Apple has even managed to make a mess of its JVM).

If become unhappy with the rate of progress, I might release the original software I wrote, which is more of a proof-of-concept thing than a finished piece of software. But, of course, I will aim to avoid that situation.

HTC has just announced the HTC Hero. My opinion, based on what I've seen so far, is that it is perfect, apart from the fact that the screen only has a HVGA resolution (like the iPhones and other Android phones) and that there is no flash for the camera. But, ignoring those minor flaws, it's a perfect device - it may not have the mouth-watering amazing specification of, for example, the HTC Touch HD, but with its cheaper but no less functional feature set and lots of customisability, the HTC Hero looks like it may be the iPhone killer that everyone has been waiting for for years - it doesn't try to copy or be better (copies fail and better devices hit different parts of the target market), but it does offer everything that Apple doesn't (as well as everything that it does) at what I would guess will be similarish price.


Anyway, below are some links, so you can see the device yourself and form your own opinions. Apparently the device will be released through Orange and T-Mobile from Julyish - hopefully there will be an unlocked version too, but HTC hasn't given away too many details yet.
- Facebook
- Press release
- The Hero's "Website"
- YouTube

HTC Sense, the new user interface, which clearly takes a lot of stuff from TouchFLO 3D (including Footprints and prople-centric communication), is highly customisable and is the thing that really makes this device stand out. Anyway, the good news I've heard is that it's cross-platform, and therefore should hopefully show up on future Windows Mobile devices by HTC. I'm not sure where that information has come from - I don't think it has officially been confirmed, and it could be little more than speculation based on the trouble to which HTC has gone in making HTC Sense, but I do hope that it is cross-platform. Oh yeah, and the HTC Hero has Adobe Flash.

Finally, yesterday, a supposed rendering of the HTC Firestone leaked onto the internet. I've had my eye on that since it was initially leaked at the start of the year, and it looks like my next device will either he a Hero or Firestone - I'll make my final decision once the exact features of the Firestone and the availability of both devices become clear.

As you may have gathered from the title of this post, my exams are now over. Once I've finished celebrating that fact by attending things like garden parties and balls, expect to see some software and blog updates appearing more regularly than they have been appearing for years...

The website of the month for June 2009 is RateMyLecturer.com. Not the best website at the moment, but relevant at this time of year.

Again, another short post. This is just to inform you of (and hopefully increase the popularity of) BookSync. Unlike other Facebook-Outlook synchronisation applications such as Fonebook and OutSync, BookSync runs on Windows Mobile, which means that you can synchronise contact pictures while on the move, and it also synchronises much higher-resolution pictures, which look much better on TouchFLO 3D than the low-resolution pictures that the other Facebook-Outlook synchronisation applications syhcnronise.

Again, this post is going to be quite short due to exams and work. I just thought I'd share the video below really. While everyone loves Dustin (the turkey vulture), he wasn't really suited for Eurovision - Ireland's entry this year is much better, in my opinion.

I would love to do a long post about this - it's something I can say a lot about, that you probably don't already know, seeing as I've met Adam Carroll, but unfortunately I don't have the time. Perhaps I'll say more in the summer - apparently Adam has been approached by two F1 teams in negotiation for a driver's seat in 2010. But it would probably be better for him to stay in A1 rather than to join one of the poor teams in F1 - perhaps he'd make a nice replacement for Barrichello at Brawn?

Anyway, the main point of the post is below - watch Ireland stylishly win the final two races of the season, which ensured that they became A1GP champions and therefore won the World Cup of Motorsport:

A1GP Brands Hatch 2008/09: Qualifying Highlights


A1GP Brands Hatch 2008/09: Sprint Race Highlights


A1GP Brands Hatch 2008/09: Feature Race Highlights

The website of the month for May 2009 is Planetside, which has finally been updated. Also, Terragen 2 has finally been properly released.

In other news, I won't be posting here much at all over the next two months (you'll be lucky if June's the website of the month appears anywhere near the start of the month), but fear not - a new generation of Emptosoft software is in the works. There are some very handy new programs already virtually finished, and I'm planning to rewrite at least some (most, or all, if I have time) of my existing software in Java, which means that they will work on Windows, OS X and Linux. I also might release mobile versions of a few pieces of software (at the moment, I'm just thinking of the Emptosoft Render Farm Manager monitor, as that's the only program that might be useful on a phone). Anyway, in conclusion, make a note in your calendar to come back here in July, and keep an eye on HTC, as they should be releasing at least one Touch HD-like device before the end of the year.

Yahoo has stopped accepting new GeoCities accounts and will be closing the website later this year. It's a great shame, because my first proper website was on GeoCities.

Anyway, I need to get on with secretly making innovative and/or cool new software, and preparing for exams. Does anyone have an opinion on the website's favicon? I've been meaning to make one for a long time but, for the moment, I've borrowed the icon from the Emptosoft Network Simulator - I think it looks good...

Last night I rewarded my hard work over the last...erm...few years (I really need a holiday soon) by listening to music. I concentrated mostly on the non-Pirate film music that Hans Zimmer was involved with, but also listened to/watched some other very interesting stuff. Anyway, here are some interesting videos that I found:

The Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions (Don Davis)

(Interesting to find out how they make some of those odd sounds).

The Lion King (Hans Zimmer)


(The start of the second video is a bit boring - listen to the last two minutes).

Madagascar 1/2 (Hans Zimmer and will.i.am (2 only))



(The second video is a bit similar to the first, but has lyrics - the third video has hints of Pirates in it).

Gladiator (Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard)


The Dark Knight (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard)


The Simpsons Movie (Hans Zimmer)


(The first video features an interesting arrangement of the main theme (which, of course, is by Danny Elfman - another famous film score composer (very similar in many ways to Hans Zimmer)), while the second demonstrates some completely new stuff by Hans Zimmer).

Mission: Impossible II (Hans Zimmer)

(Again, the main theme is by Danny Elfman, but you can hear ideas that ended up in Pirates and Batman).

And, finally, here's a completely random but good a cappella version of the Ghostbusters theme:

"The difference is not so evident."
In fact, this video is evidence that Steve Jobs generally talks rubbish when comparing Apple products to the competition. It's also worth pointing out that the Touch Diamond generally presents a browsable page faster than the iPhone 3G, and that it actually has double the number of pixels that the iPhone 3G has, despite the smaller screen (so there's more detail).

(Notice the way I haven't even bothered criticising Safari because of the random crash or zoom-out failure near the end).

Anyway, if you follow this blog you will notice that I haven't been posting much lately - I intend to do a post at some point soon with a few bits about stuff I've been up to.

Apparently Microsoft has purchased Apple. Big changes have already been announced - Microsoft plans to put the stripped-down version of OS X, iPhone OS, on netbooks (eventually giving netbook users the choice between the fancy looks of iPhone OS or the actual functionality offered by Windows 7), and it will release iPhone and iPod Touch versions of Windows Mobile 6.5 and Windows Mobile 7.0. However, it does plan to phase out iPhone OS on these devices, as Windows Mobile offers not only better functionality (iPhone OS doesn't support sending files over bluetooth, for example) but many good UIs, such as TouchFLO 3D, the Toshiba TG01's stripes and Samsung's Touch Wiz UI.

Naturally, there have been mixed reactions to the news - Microsoft certainly will reduce the obscene cost of Apple's products, which is good in the current economic climate, but members of the Apple cult (aka Apple fanboys and fangirls) are understandably furious (as you can see in the WM6.5 article above - I've never heard of a WM device failing in any way during a phone call, at least WM can run several applications at the same time, and most iPhone apps are rubbish - like that thing that calculates how much you should pay when spreading the cost of a meal (use a calculator!)).

Anyway, I'm sure many more details and consequences of the takeover will come to light over the next few days - it's really late now, and I need sleep.

The website of the month for April 2009 is The Aargh Page, for providing an interesting analysis of the spelling of the word "aargh" on the internet.

So, I've finally got around to doing my second video podcast, about two years and one month since I did my first one. My plans for one on Tenerife are currently on hold until I can get some good, copyright-free aerial images of relevant areas. Anyway, this video podcast shows Android running on my Touch Diamond. Here's a short preview:


The full version of the video podcast is 5 minutes and 23 seconds long, and there are three versions available for download:
- Windows Media Video - Small (7.51MB)
- Windows Media Video - Large (22.22MB)
- MP4 - In case you have some objection to Windows Media Video (7.18MB)

For those of you who want the technical details and/or want to try it out yourself:
- HTC Touch Diamond ROM version: 2.03.405.2 WWE (version 2.03.405.3 was released on the 27th of February, which shows you how long I've been working on this video podcast for).
- Android source: the alternative version, here.

The website of the month for March 2009 is FAIL Blog, for providing good entertainment in small chunks.

This has been a good week so far - yesterday the HTC Touch Diamond2 and HTC Touch Pro2, and today the HTC Magic (which runs Android and is basically the G1 without the keyboard). Anyway, I've put all of the launch and product tour videos below. Enjoy!

(BTW, the SE Idou and Samsung Omnia HD have pretty cool cameras, but are otherwise very similar to the Touch HD).

HTC Touch Diamond2 Launch Video


HTC Touch Diamond2 Product Tour


HTC Touch Pro2 Launch Video


HTC Touch Pro2 Product Tour


HTC Magic Launch Video

HTC has just announced the HTC Touch Diamond2 and the HTC Touch Pro2. Check them out now here and here.

Sorry that I can't elaborate much, but I am very tired, and I have loads of work to do. From glancing at the specs, the Diamond2 seems to have more ROM and RAM than the Diamond, a WVGA 3.2 -inch screen (rather than 2.8-inch and VGA), a bigger battery, better camera and a microSD card slot. Also, TouchFLO 3D is now quite amazing for random usefulness, and there is a zoom bar rather than the original Diamond's zoom wheel. The stylus may have been abandoned too - it's not clear from the pictures on HTC.com that there is one...

This is a funny video, but it's a shame that the only smartphone in it apart from the iPhone is a BlackBerry (I agree with the iPhone though, interestingly - the BlackBerry has too many buttons). Poor Americans. Poor Rory.

I haven't just finally got around to putting my arrangement of What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor? on this blog - I've done something "much more better". The playlist below starts with the finished piece of music, but then goes back in time through previous versions of the piece of music, right back to my initial ideas. My Drunken Sailor arrangement was submitted along with my arrangement of Isn't She Lovely (involving an electric guitar, bass guitar, piano and drums) as coursework for Music Technology, obtaining a result of 86/90 (unfortunately, Edexcel doesn't return the marks for individual arrangements, sequences, compositions, etc. By the way, the marking of this piece of music was based on the score I provided (you can ask me for the score, if you want), whereas the marking of Isn't She Lovely was based on the recording I produced (a proper recording with real instruments - Drunken Sailor is only synthesised, as you will hear).

Why am I not including my arrangement of Isn't She Lovely? Because, as far as I'm aware, that will lead to copyright infringement.

Anyway, enjoy.



Here are some brief notes on each of the items in the playlist:
- Drunken Sailor Ideas: This is a series of ideas based on the Drunken Sailor tune, rather than a coherent piece of music. Some of the ideas were awful, whereas others made it into the final piece of music, virtually unchanged.
- What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor? (Version 1): Already, the first minute or so is virtually finished (the articulation, dynamics and that dodgy timpani are subsequently fixed). I don't know what was going on with the random section that is replaced, in version 2, with some Pirates music instead.
- What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor? (Version 2): When in doubt, take a mishmash of themes from Pirates, and hide it in your music (obviously, it's not very hidden at all, yet, in this version).
- What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor? (Version 3): The ending is halfway between the (dodgy) transposition of a bit near the beginning, featured in version 2, and the final ending (version 4).
- What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor? (Version 4 - Final Version): This is the version of the song that I submitted. The dynamics and articulation have been worked on a lot, and bad notes have been removed (I didn't bother keeping the piece of music musically prefect during the development process).

HTC should ban Verizon from selling anything to do with HTC. That phone call is seriously fail. Does their CEO even know the difference?

Well, apart from the bit where he somehow became an asexually reproductive chinchilla, the video below is very similar to what happened to Rory, except he had an original (second hand) iPhone with a broken screen, and I had the Touch Diamond which (the successor to the phone in the video - the HTC Touch - if you don't know, it's not simply a 3G version of its predecessor, unlike the iPhone 3G).



The other admins are still around - check out FatJoe on twitter.

The website of the month for February 2009 is Searchme - a very innovative search engine, with a fancy interface.

By the way, earlier this evening (technically yesterday) I decided to fiddle with the blog, and fixed a very old counting issue which mainly affected older posts. I could go into details, but meh.

Yes, believe it or not, I've decided to start using twitter, both to let you know what I'm up to, and to let me share random facts that, if they were posted on my blog, would significantly reduce the quality of the blog. Also, it might help me remember what I do, better.

I do plan to integrate what I say on twitter into my blog, somehow. Perhaps I'll add the tweets of the other admins too, somehow. I haven't really decided exactly where/how the tweets are going to be displayed here yet, but I am opposed to the idea of giving them an equal status to blog posts.

Anyway, in conclusion, check me out on twitter, at twitter.com/g400. You can follow me if you want, too.

(BTW, I'm currently treating 'Mark ' before each tweet as given, as I intend to add that automatically when I start displaying tweets on this blog).

I upgraded the ROM on my Touch Diamond last night (from version 1.93.405.1 WWE to version 2.03.405.2 WWE) and thought I'd share changes that I've found (as usual, there are far more changes than the ones listed on HTC's website). I've reduced the size of my screenshots because VGA screenshots are actually massive, so do try to remember that if you don't have a Touch Diamond, the amount of detail on the screen probably rapes your phone (unless, of course, you own a Touch Pro, Touch HD or XPERIA X1).

- When you connect the device to your computer via USB, there is now an internet sharing mode option, as well as active sync and disk drive options. However, it should be noted that this isn't a new feature - there has always been an internet sharing application - it's just even easier to use that feature.

- The Full QWERTY keyboard has been shrunk. I haven't found it harder to use, yet, and the extra screen space is nice, but I am still unsure about the change. Anyway, the old keyboard is on the left, whereas the new one is on the right:


- Windows Mobile UI tabs are smaller too (again, old on the left, new on the right):


- 'White' areas of TouchFLO 3D (e.g. the music library and the sound settings) now instantly appear, rather than fading in.

- The HTC logo and music no longer appear when the device is turning off (turning off is consequently much faster).

- A rather broken version of the taskbar at the top of the screen used to appear shortly after the Windows Mobile 6.1 screen appeared when starting up (although it did fix itself when the WM screen disapeared) - this has been fixed.

- The menus generally seem to be slightly smaller - especially the arrows in them (indicating submenus). From the screenshots above and below, you get the idea - HTC seems to have abandoned all of its WM UI tweaks (or, I was thinking earlier today, they've deliberately got rid of them, to make whatever they've got coming out this year seem even better).

- On the email tab, the envelope fades in on first view of email tab (or, if there are no messages in current account it fades in when an account with messages if first switched to). It used to flip and open when the tab appeared. However, the flipping animation has not been takin out altogether - the envelope still flips when you switch between accounts.

- Also, items in lists have been made smaller. Compare this photo of an email inbox, with the picture of my updated version:


- On the weather tab, when it's updating the weather it shows a generic weather icon and says "Downloading weather data..." where a description of the weather would normally go, rather than continuing to show the old weather data while it updates.

- There seems to be a new bug when closing ActiveSync - after pressing the 'x' button, it appears to stay pressed, and the ActiveSync window does not go away (you can use the start menu or the back or home buttons to get rid of it). However, there has been an improvement: it no longer shows up in the task manager.

- So far, I haven't been asked to send any error reports (a bug introduced in 1.93.405.1 caused many applications - mainly manila.exe - to make Windows Mobile occasionally send error reports about them).

- The bug in the tasks application has been fixed - before, if you wanted to add two tasks without closing the application, you had to type a space into the 'Tap here to add a new task' box before it would start accepting the name of the second task (I can't remember if this carried on for the third, fourth, etc. tasks).

- The contents of most tabs used to fade in (fairly rapidly). This no longer happens - the contents just appears virtually instantly.

- When the calendar is launched by tapping a calendar item on the home tab, the calendar now starts up in your preferred view (set via Menu > Tools > Options) rather than the agenda view, every time.

- There have been improvements to the way the device plays music. One particular improvement that I've noticed is that the very start of a file is not missed out (often not a problem, as most things have a moment of silence at the beginning).

- The updates released since the last ROM (such as the G-sensor calibration tool) are included in the new ROM, as well as several application updates (a random new icon for Google Maps).

- TouchFLO 3D starts up much faster - it even seems to be starting before the task manager.

- When the device is first started, the network connection configuration takes place just after the HTC customisations are applied, which means only one restart is needed to use the device.

- Last night, I woke up to find my Touch Diamond's screen on, twice. This may be a new, and really annoying, bug.

- Finally, on a minor note, after returning to the hope tab from an application launched from the home tab (clock, call history or calendar), the thing you pressed is no longer highlighted green. Not really an error or much or an improvement, but I didn't particularly like the greenness partially obscuring my wallpaper, so the change makes me happy.

For more information about the changes, check out XDA-Developers. BTW, the most (possibly only) significant change between version 1.37.405.1 WWE and version 1.93.405.1 WWE was the removal of the 3D tab switching animations, and the tab bar animations. Basically, all the ROM updates have done is take out fancy bits of the UI to speed up the device - not good for people like me, who were happy with the original speed.

On a side note, people like Rory the chinchilla (don't ask...and why is that article semi-protected!?) say that the iPhone is clearly good because people have copied it. Well, unfortunately for him and his kind, not only has a Touch Diamond clone been made, but it was actually made within a few weeks. It doesn't appear to run Windows Mobile but, if there's an English version, I'd definitely consider getting it, just to have a version of my phone that I don't have to worry about so much...

It has been a while since I did any work on this blog, so I decided to rework the viewing options a bit, in preparation for the additional post ordering options that I started working on during the summer (you will eventually be able to order posts by the number of views they've had, and the number of comments they've had). Anyway, now you can choose to view any number of posts by any author, in one go! This also gives me the option, in the future, to make the author list dynamic (this would mean that if they're entered into the admin database, they'll show up in the list of post authors without me having to do anything extra). I haven't abandoned the updates I promised during the summer - I've just been too busy to make much progress. The updates are not simple - I want to implement them as efficiently as possible and I might work on a view decay system, which should stop old popular posts from permanently dominating the blog when viewing posts by the number of views or comments.

By the way, if I have time, I'm planning to start working on the Emptosoft Render Farm Manager again by attempting to write an image-stitcher in ML. Should be interesting.

The website of the month for January 2009 is xkcd. Try hovering your mouse over the images to get interesting messages, summaries and/or explanations. Also, the t-shirts available on that website look pretty good.

Sorry for this being a bit late but, naturally, I was not really capable of doing this post until now...

Oh yeah, happy new year and everything...

See title.

Aer Lingus has decided to resume the Heathrow-Shannon route, almost undoubtedly due to Michael O'Leary. In conclusion, thanks Ryanair!

I was thinking that perhaps some readers of this blog don't know much about the touchphone war, or don't follow it much, so I thought I'd do the work for you. Below are videos and some commentary, which should give you a reasonably accurate history of the war. I have not included any iPhone videos because you will undoubtedly have seen far too many already. You'll notice that I do tend to ignore those companies that are not leading the market, like Samsung and Blackberry - their devices are not bad, but they're either not interesting - and devices that are difficult to compare briefly, such as those by Nokia.

The beginning: the HTC Touch and the Apple iPhone
Many (if not most) people are under the false impression that any touchphone is, to an extent, an iClone. Well, actually, the first touchphone came out in about a month before the iPhone was released in mid-2007, and was made by what was, at the time, a relatively unknown Taiwanese company - hence the fact that very few people (especially in America) hailed the launch as a breakthrough. Even I didn't know about the device initially, or the company that made it (I have Rory to thank for coming across the company). What was the company? HTC, of course - the company behind far more phones than people expect. Most phones that have the branding of their network (i.e. the O2 XDAs, the T-Mobile MDAs and G1, the Vodafone VPAs, etc.) were, and still are, made my HTC. However, a few years ago, the people at HTC decided that they should develop their own brand (for multiple reasons - I suspect, because HTC knew that they could make far more money and be far less reliant on networks). That was a big move for the company - many networks did not like the change in attitude, and cancelled contracts with HTC. However, HTC slowly began releasing devices under its own brand and slowly gained some recognition. HTC really struck gold, though, with the HTC Touch - their first real attempt to reach general consumers. They started the touchphone revolution, though to claim that they were responsible for it would be foolish - Apple, Inc. had also undoubtedly been developing their similar (more well-known brand and style, but less function) device which would come to define the war, due to Apple's blanket marketing. Anyway, here is a video demonstrating the first HTC-branded device to sell over a million units and the world's first touchphone - the HTC Touch:


Diversification
Over the following months, HTC naturally did what it knows how to do, and made a business-friendly version of their Touch (with business-friendly meaning a lot more buttons) - the Touch Dual. They also made a random third member of what they now called the HTC Touch Family. The third member apparently had a chipset which was used in other HTC devices, all of which were plagued by driver problems which caused the UI to respond really slowly. During this period, Apple was secretly working on the iPhone 3G (apparently the battery life was the biggest problem). Anyway, here's a video of the first few members of the Touch Family:


Round two: the Touch Diamond and iPhone 3G
2008 saw round two of the battle between the iPhone and the HTC Touch Family. Again, HTC beat Apple, releasing the HTC Touch Diamond in mid-May. The Touch Diamond had everything that its predecessor (the HTC Touch) didn't, unlike the iPhone 3G, which still lacked basics like the ability to cut and paste, the ability to record video and the inability to send bulk texts. The iPhone 3G also had few hardware improvements, whereas the Touch Diamond had more than double the CPU speed and amount of RAM of the Touch and significantly improved the screen and camera (the Diamond's screen is VGA (640x480px) rather than QVGA (320x240px) and the camera is 3.2 megapixels with autofocus rather than 2.0 megapixels with fixed focus) of the Touch. Comparing the iPhone and Touch Diamond directly, the Touch Diamond has more RAM, a better camera, a better screen (VGA, rather than HVGA (320x480px)), better 3G radio (the iPhone 3G supports 3.6Mbps HDSPA, whereas the Touch Diamond supports 7.2Mbps), possibly a better battery life (it's difficult to compare) and is smaller and lighter. Probably more stuff too, but I don't want to bore people with specifications. It must be noted, however, that people did complain about the interface improvements on the Touch Diamond (I haven't really talked about the interfaces, and I won't) - TouchDLO 3D (the user interface on the Touch Diamond - much better than TouchFLO, on the previous three members of the HTC Touch Family) did initially have far too many fancy 3D animations and a subsequent ROM update cut some of these out, in order to make the device faster to use (you can't really do much while stuff on the screen is moving). Anyway, the Touch Diamond represented another leap forwards for HTC in design and marketing skill - such a leap that HTC subsequently purchased the company that helped it to design the HTC Touch Diamond. I think you'll agree, from this video, that HTC did move into another dimension with the Touch Diamond:


Explosion
Since the summer, a large number of devices have hit the market. From HTC, there's the Touch Pro (a slightly upgraded version of the Touch Diamond, with a keyboard - a move which echoes last year's Touch Dual), the Touch HD (an even more upgraded version of the Touch Diamond, very similar in size and shape to the iPhone, but somehow with a bigger screen with an amazing resolution - WVGA (800x480px)) and the T-Mobile G1 (the world's first phone running Android, and HTC's first multitouch touchscreen...although it should be noted that the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro have areas below their screens which have multitouch sensitivity). Also, Sony Ericsson has released the XPERIA X1, which was manufactured by HTC (and possibly designed or co-designed by HTC - nobody seems to be sure). HTC has also released the Touch Viva and Touch 3G, which are aimed at poorer consumers and do not attempt to push any boundaries other than value for money. Blackberry has also (finally) entered the market, and Samsung continues to provide less expensive solutions, similar to the Touch Viva and Touch 3G. Anyway, my final set of videos are below. The first two are the HTC Touch HD and T-Mobile G1 respectively and then, for comparison of marketing styles, the Nokia N97 (which looks suspiciously like the old HTC TyTNs) and the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 (made by HTC but, interestingly, marketed in a style similar to the style HTC used to use - focusing more a function the device provides, rather than the device itself).

The BBC has actually done something more than acknowledge the existence of HTC in an article about smartphones. In fact, that's the only article by the BBC about smartphones that I've seen that doesn't mention the iPhone again and again. A truly unbiased review for once - Windows Mobile has a poor UI, Symbian devices lack power, Blackberry is new to (and therefore struggling with) touch phones, Android is new (and therefore lacks software and security) and the iPhone is a victim of the Henry Ford philosophy ("Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.").

Anyway, in conclusion, well done to the BBC...despite the errors:
"When HTC launched the Diamond, using its "Touch-Flo" (TouchFLO) screen (UI) felt like wading through treacle. Now, one memory upgrade later (WTF? They just cut out the animation overkill - no memory upgrades), the phone begins to deliver on its promise, albeit still reluctantly."

Perhaph this is the moment that the tide turns in the UK - I went around the mobile phone shops in Cambridge during the week and noticed that, while the HTC Touch Diamond was falling in popularity (being replaced by the HTC Touch HD, T-Mobile G1 and SE XPERIA X1...all HTC devices, by the way), The Carphone Warehouse was finally recognising HTC - a page in their brochure was dedicated to the Touch Diamond, Touch HD and T-Mobile G1. The HTC brand now may have more strength than brands such as the O2 XDA and T-Mobile MDA brands so hopefully 2009 will be the year that HTC begins to become a brand that most people in the UK recognise, and the year that Windows Mobile begins to fight back. Hopefully HTC will stop ignoring Ireland too.

This video needs no explanation. Just watch it:


In conclusion, check out The IT Crowd on Channel 4 on Friday evenings at some point. Or if, you have a life, check it out on 4oD.

This video shows Michael O'Leary (CEO of Ryanair) talking about Ryanair's takeover bid of Aer Lingus. Personally, I don't think he makes it clear how suicidal Aer Lingus is being - Aer Lingus has no future without Ryanair (other airlines would steal its resources if they took over). As O'Leary says in the video, everyone can work out that Aer Lingus cannot survive in its current state, apart from the Aer Lingus management. It's a low fares airline with a major problem: the fares aren't low, which means you pay a reasonable amount of money for a rubbish in-flight experience. It also has the problem of not doing anything significant that's not already done by at least one of its two fellow Irish airlines Ryanair and Aer Arann. Add to that the fact that it will make a loss this year and the next, and any sort of a rescue deal should look appealing. So...competition concerns? Ireland already has no competition - as I've said, Aer Lingus has high fares for a low fares airline. Also, airports like Knock are already basically owned by Ryanair, and Aer Lingus has pulled out of Shannon Airport (which is much larger), basically handing the airport over to Ryanair and showing that it is not interested in competition...or survival. Anyway, in conclusion, if Ryanair is unsuccessful in taking over Aer Lingus this time I'd be surprised if, in a few years, Ryanair didn't have to pick up the pieces of the failed airline (although the one strength that Aer Lingus has, at the moment, is large cash reserves, which may slow its death just enough...).

Random fact of the day - The Late Late Show, on which Michael O'Leary appeared, is the world's longest running chat show.

Oh yeah, I'm busy with work, as is Liz. FatJoe is stylishly upgrading his website, and I haven't the faintest idea of what Rory is doing (hopefully he's crying, somewhere).

Just thought I'd let people know that Ryanair has bid for Aer Lingus again. The theory behind the new bid, apparently, is that it's best to merge companies in the current economic climate - the fact that Aer Lingus has been raping itself for a few years now significantly helps this bid. Hopefully Ryanair will bring back the Heathrow-Shannon route.

Anyway, I would say more but I need to go to a lecture soon.

The website of the month for December 2008 is CollegeHumor. That website has many funny videos (the best ones appear to originate from that website) - one of which was posted on this blog a few weeks ago (the second video here).

One of Apple's iPhone adverts has been banned because it misleads people about the speed of the device. The advert in question showed web pages and maps on Google maps loading in fractions of a second. Also, more importantly (to me), they noticed that 'the advert repeatedly stated that the phone was "really fast"'. Clearly brainwashing. Apple defended themselves by saying 'the average consumer would realise the phone's performance would vary - a point that was made clear by the text stating "network performance will vary by location". ' However, that implies that there's a location where everything loads virtually instantaneously (which, of course, there isn't).

Anyway, in conclusion, yet more proof that the iPhone isn't particularly good, and that Apple is pulling all of Microsoft's old tricks in an attempt to gain perpetual dominance in the mobile device market. Certainly, there is a major battle ahead - Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, the iPhone OS and Android are now all competing against each other...

In case you haven't noticed, I have been performing maintenance on this blog over the last few days - it's now even harder for the admins to make a mess of the blog. Also, I have removed some old stuff, and made a proper blog sticker (a bit like these, but better).

Anyway, that's the blog news over with for now. Here are a few interesting links that I found a few days ago:
- Google is suffering from the financial crisis too.
- Spam is down by 70%! Did you know that spammers only get one response to every 12.5 million emails they send, and that they still manage to turn a profit?

Finally, here are some (old) funny videos of the Matrix running (and failing) on Windows:

There's no one as Irish as Barack Obama (O'Bama). Except for Rory, possibly.
The original version of this song is on YouTube, but it seems to be private...

Edit (17:51 GMT):
Some of the original video can be found on the BBC News website, here.

So, Obama won. America finally made the right choice. I don't really need to say much more, apart from apologise for the lack of visible support for Obama on this blog - I have been busy, and haven't had much opportunity to watch, listen to, read or consider the news lately.

On a side note, I am not particularly against McCain and Palin. I do think McCain could be a good leader of the USA - just not in the current situation. Sarah Palin is not too bad either, but she definitely needs more experience - perhaps in 4 or 8 years, she would be a good candidate.

In other news, Rory said a few days ago that he'd do a post about Windows 7 (I think) so, like his previous post, it will hopefully be done, eventually. Also, I think he still needs to post about his AAO. Hahaha...I think it can be said that we are a bit keen when it comes to technology.

The website of the month for November 2008 is Media Converter. This month, I've definitely been getting back to the main point of the website of the month post, which is to find and spread the word about good and/or innovative websites. Media Converter does exactly what it says on the tin, and it does it very well - it can convert from videos, audio and documents between most formats. It allows you to upload files, specify the URL of a file, or you can even put in links from websites like YouTube and it will find and convert the video. There is also a downloadable version, which I haven't investigated yet. As the website provides a free service, which is probably quite expensive to provide, videos converted for free aren't of particularly high quality - you can pay money to get higher quality conversions (I'm not yet sure if the downloadable version has the same limitation).

By the way, sorry for the lack of posting recently. I was thinking of posting just before last weekend, but Rory said he'd do a post...
(Which he did, eventually, but I still thank him for it).

This guy who did this has recently died from cancer aged 17, so this is kind of in memory of him.
thread is here
and this is the actual conversation

(Boomp3 link)
may he rest in peace
x

So, this is my first post from Cambridge. Cambridge is just big enough to have at least one of pretty much everything (from an Apple Store to a Caffè Uno), but just small enough for lectures held on the far side of the city to not be extremely inconvenient. Anyway, I thought I'd say a bit about my room. It is a nice room - not too small, and it has a shower and washbasin. Among other things, there's a good radiator, enough plug sockets and a decent desk.

Moving on swiftly, the world university rankings were released a few days ago. Cambridge dropped from second to third, but is technially better off - it is now ranked higher than Oxford, which used to share joint second place with Cambridge and Yale. Loughborough has, once again, failed to make the top 200, but someone has already pointed out (as Rory cleverly spotted last year), that over 30 UK universities are ranked higher than Loughborough in the world rankings, whereas Loughborough is ranked much higher in the UK rankings. I agree, that that doesn't make sense at all. The rankings for the UK, Ireland and Europe are due out today - I would say that hopefully they will have resolved the issue, but due to Loughborough's lack of inclusion in the world's top 200 universities, that would mean that resolving the issue would drop Loughborough a long way down the UK rankings. In other news, UCL is up from 9th to 7th, ICL is down from 5th to 6th, TCD is up from 53rd to 49th and UCD is up from joint 177th to 108th.

I spent most of the 'summer' (check out 'A song to celebrate our "Summer" weather') listening to some funny lyrics for currently popular songs by the Morning Crew on Dublin's 98. Conveniently, they're also available online, so I'd recommend that you click here to listen to them. Listening to them is certainly much more fun than aimlessly browsing the internet - even if the singing isn't of the highest quality...

I was randomly helping someone find a good new laptop today, and I came across two very good laptops. I thought my laptop was beastly, but the two linked to below are amazingly huge and have unrivalled (as far as I'm aware) specifications. The Z/B is alightly worse than the XU/Q but, as it's over £1000 cheaper, it's a much better deal.
- Sony VAIO VGN-AW11XU/Q
- Sony VAIO VGN-AW11Z/B

If you can't be bothered to click on the links, but do want a summary, they're both 18.4" full HD (yes, that's the built-in screen - not just via the HDMI port) laptops filled with components that would each make a laptop good, on their own.

The website of the month for October 2008 is the website of Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. That website is quite relevant to me at the moment, but until recently I wasn't considering making it website of the month (because that would just be randomly biased). I was eventually inspired to make it website of the month by the addition of a webcam, which lets you watch the construction of what will probably be an award-winning building. Cleverly, the webcam stops updating as it begins to get dark, so you can always have a good look at the progress.

The original news item that attracted my attention to the webcam is currently here. However, it doesn't appear to have a permanent link, and old news no longer seems to end up in the archive, so the news item will almost certainly disappear eventually. Anyway, if you keep a close eye on that webcam, you might randomly see me...

As I have seen quite a bit of the internet now, and the new stuff that is being put on it is generally random blog posts like this, I'm finding it harder and harder to be inspired to post on my blog. Nevertheless, I have found useful software and bring interesting news.

Bluetooth Remote Control for Windows Mobile is a piece of software which lets you control your computer via bluetooth - very handy if you can't be bothered to get up to do something like change the current track on a media player. I've used it before, although I'm not sure whether or not I posted about it here. The latest version (which, because I am so busy these days, I am yet to try, despite the fact that it was released at the end of March) seems to be much more versatile, and more expandable, than previous versions. I would say that it's worth checking out.

My news involves the rapidly improving marketing department at HTC. I've been seeing HTC Touch Diamond adverts all over the place recently (strange that I'm seeing them months after the release of the device). As well as being on most bus stops I've encountered, today I spotted a building near Waterloo, which is covered in Touch Diamond adverts. In the photo below, you can just make out a load of Touch Diamonds (sorry for the low quality - I was quite a long way away).


Anyway, I'm might try to do more personal posts and posts linking to stuff that I've created (such as software and video podcasts) - however, that's dependent on the amount of time I have (which, unfortunately, I think is about to rapidly decrease). Also, I haven't forgotten about the blog upgrades - I'll get around to continuing them at some point.

Today (yes, I do mean the day that has just started) HTC announced three new members of the Touch family. I don't think anyone saw that coming!
Click here to read the press release about the HTC Touch 3G and the HTC Touch Viva.
Click here to read the press release about the HTC Touch HD.

Now, it is the middle of the night (I do have work tomorrow), but I have done some preliminary investigations of the specification of the devices. Here are my conclusions so far:

HTC Touch Viva
Basically, the HTC Touch, but with more ROM, more RAM, TouchFLO 3D and Windows Mobile 6.1. Quad-band.

HTC Touch 3G
A HTC Touch Diamond in the style of the original HTC Touch. Bigger battery (1100mAh - the same as the original Touch). Quad-band. The screen is only QVGA (240x320rather than VGA (480x640). The 4GB of internal memory has been dropped in favour of a microSD expansion slot. The buttons below the screen are in the style of the old Touch, so there are no home or back buttons, nor is there an area with capacitive touch sensitivity. Very light (96g). HSDPA, but no secondary camera.

HTC Touch HD
(Covered this in the previous post, so I'll be brief). A HTC Touch Diamond in the style of the iPhone. Lots of ROM and RAM. 3.8 inch screen (yet the device is virtually the same size as the iPhone 3G - how did HTC do that, Apple fanboys?), WVGA (480x800) resolution. 5MP camera. 3.5mm audio jack (finally). Large battery (1350mAh). microSD expansion slot.

TouchFLO 3D?
In the specifications, the Touch HD claims to have TouchFLO 3D, whereas the other two devices only claim to have TouchFLO. However, looking at what the devices are depicted displaying, it looks like the Touch 3G and Touch Viva have QVGA versions of TouchFLO 3D - and these versions look as if they might have been cut-down a bit to conserve resources (the contents of several tabs are different, and more 2D, which may have inspired the use of the old name). It's worth noting that the Touch 3G and Touch Viva seem to have analogue clocks on the home tab and a differnt background image throughout TouchFLO - the clock is most probably another thing that has changed because of the removal of 3D stuff, but the background image on the QVGA version of TouchFLO may be changable (after all, a lot of the changes in those devices are exactly what people wanted). TouchFLO also seems to be acquiring new tabs, randomly - the 2D version seems to have a "Map Search" tab, whereas the 3D version has a tab that looks like it might have something to to with tracking stocks.

General conclusion
At first glance, HTC looks like it's aiming for a key market with each device:
HTC Touch Viva - For the budget market. HTC has been selling expensive devices lately, and I think they hope to gain more normal customers with this device.
HTC Touch 3D - For people who had members of the first generation of the Touch Family (the Touch, Touch Dual and Touch Cruise) who didn't like the Diamond's small battery, lack of memory expansion, vulnerability to fingerprints and price. (I really did like my Touch, but I prefer the Touch Diamond - however, many people didn't, for good personal reasons).
HTC Touch HD - A direct iPhone competitor, and actually a better device on paper - just to put Apple in its place. One of the main reasons HTC decided to make this device, in my opinion, is to raise its profile through direct comparison of their device (a member of the 8-strong HTC Touch Family) with the much smaller and less diverse Apple iPhone family.

Anyway, we'll hardly have time to absorb this news, before two of the three begin hitting markets in "early October 2008". The HTC Touch HD is due in "Q4 2008" - also in time for Christmas!

Rory really should have posted this earlier, but he didn't, so I'm going to fill in for him.

Photos and specifications of the newest member of the HTC Touch Family have been leaked. The current name seems to be the HTC Touch HD - I'm not sure if that's going to be the final name, but it may well be (HTC doesn't normally put the family name - Touch - in codenames). Also, apparently, the device is going to be available in time for Christmas. The latest thinking is that the device has a 3.8" screen, which makes it considerably bigger than previous members of the HTC Touch family, although it's no thicker than normal. Finally, to conclude this general summary, the device has a specially designed version of TouchFLO 3D, which is faster, more efficient and just as stylish as the iPhone's UI. I have two extensions to this summary of the device - one for people familiar with WM devices, and one for people familiar with the iPhone:

Extended summary for people familiar with WM devices
The HTC Touch HD is basically an iPhone-sized Diamond, with a large 5MP camera and a large screen with a higher resolution screen (WVGA - 800x480). The d-pad has been removed and the four buttons beneath the screen have been put in a single row, to maximise screen space. The battery has been significantly improved, and the RAM has received a decent boost too (despite the fact that the Diamond was hardly short of it). The HTC Touch HD also has a microSD slot, for all of those who need to store huge amounts of data. The most unexpected thing about the device though, is that it has a 3.5mm jack (or minijack) socket. That's unusual on a HTC device (HTC likes it's proprietary ExtUSB). Other things, such as the processor, generally remain the same.

Extended summary for people familiar with the iPhone
This device shows you how un-iClone-ish previous members of the Touch family are. Also, it's designed to lure some of you away from Apple. The screen has a WVGA resolution - a significant improvement on the VGA resolution on the two previous members of the HTC Touch family which, again, is a significant improvement on any iPhone. Similarly, the camera is 5MP - the two previous members of the HTC Touch family had 3.2MP cameras, and the oldest members of the HTC Touch family had 2MP cameras, like the iPhone. The HTC Touch HD also comes with a stylus. This does not mean that you'll need it - rather, it's for writing on the screen (faster than any on-screen keyboard, and very handy during a phone call). In conclusion, I could go on, but the HTC Touch HD is basically an iPhone that can do twice as much, twice as fast. Also, it's not from a company that brainwashes individuals into thinking that controlling developers, introducing ancient features and lacking newer features is innovative, and it should be competitively priced and available on most networks in most countries.

(Normally, with HTC, there's a significant delay before the American version comes out. However, due to the fact that most people who own the phone it's aiming to compete with - the iPhone - live in America, that might change...or it might not. Nobody knows much at this stage.)

Despite the fact that it could theoretically harm competition, it's good that Ryanair, a sane company, is a major shareholder in Aer Lingus. I don't actually think that Ryanair would be anti-competitive if it took over Aer Lingus (such a takeover would probably give it control of most flights within Ireland and between Ireland and other countries), because nobody would know what to do with the extra money. Getting back to the point, Ryanair hit out at Aer Lingus a few days ago for, to put it bluntly, being rubbish. I found this extract particularly pleasing:

Ryanair believes that Aer Lingus's Belfast base has been a financial failure. As the attached CAA traffic statistics (Jan-June 2008) confirm, Aer Lingus's load factor at its Belfast base is an uneconomic 50%. Some of Aer Lingus's Belfast load factors are truly awful, with Paris at 31%, Amsterdam at 36% and Nice a very poor 38%. In all cases it would appear that Aer Lingus's load factor is considerably lower than that of Easyjet or Jet2, its competitors at Belfast International Airport.

Of course, I'm still pretty annoyed by the lack of flights from Heathrow to Shannon due to Aer Lingus making a Belfast base. The Heathrow-Shannon route was profitable and had a load factor of something like 80%. As everyone but the people at Aer Lingus predicted, the Belfast base has been a massive failure. Now the interesting bit comes - will Aer Lingus continue the base, and attempt to improve its load factor and profitability? Will Aer Lingus revert back to the perfectly good routes it used to have (like Heathrow-Shannon)? Or will, as some people suspected, Aer Lingus pull out of Belfast and move all operations from there down to Cork? I hope for the second option, expect the first, and fear the third (there would have been even more local outrage if Aer Lingus had moved operations directly from Shannon to Cork, rather than from Shannon to Belfast).

I was phoned O2 about a week ago and I was waiting for ages for my call to be answered. They had some music, from one of their adverts, playing while I was waiting. It was strangely addictive and I consequently listened to little else for a few days - I'm sure they employ people who can and do make annoying but addictive music intentionally...

Anyway, so that you can enjoy it too, here's an MP3 version and here's the advert:

The website of the month for September 2008 is Tibus. Among the clients of Tibus are Pizza Hut and the FAI. It hosts a mirror of the PHP website too. Sorry for the short post, but I am very tired and I have a very bad headache.

Just in case your compass, GPS, watch and whatever else you use to find north, all manage to break, apparently you can use the cattle and deer to find north.

Anyway, I am amazingly, and most unfortunately, busy at the moment. Exam season was much easier. Still, as always, I am trying to do things which should benefit this blog...eventually. I shall conclude this post with a random fact: I was watching the weather last weekend, and it gave a map of Ireland showing the rainfall that various areas actually had in the previous two weeks as a percentage of the rainfall they should have had. The highest value was 450%. I can't remember the lowest value, but I'd bet that it was at least 200%. Typical Ireland.

I'll get straight to the point. I got the necessary results to have my place at Fiztwilliam College, Cambridge, confirmed. To make it even better, I applied in the last year that the Cambridge Application Form (CAF) was required by the university, and I will be around for the 800th anniversary. Sounds like fun.

Anyway, I apologise for the lack of posting and development lately. As well as having to fill out a mountain of forms and accept congratulations from many people (some of whom I barely know - but I'm not complaining) as a result fo the above news, I've been dealing with yet more requests.

Well, yes I am. It's a bank holiday. But I have not been wasting my time. I have been implementing behind-the-scenes stuff, which you will soon benefit from. Specifically, I have implemented a system that keeps track of the number of views that posts have had, and I'm letting it run for a while, so that a decent amount of data is generated. Soon, you'll be able to view posts in order of views and comments, as well as in chronological order. Inevitably, new posts during this period are going to have an unfair advantage (as everyone reads the new posts), which is why I got the system running as quickly as possible after the planning stage for the current set of updates was complete.

OK, I admit, the system took about 10 minutes to write. I have been busy fulfilling the requests of annoying people. In case anybody is curious, the view counting system started at 21:00 on the 31st of July. I would give preliminary statistics, but I haven't written any systems to analyse the data yet...

The website of the month for August 2008 is RealSnailMail. The website has slowly been taking shape for months - the last time I visited it, the snailCAM wasn't up (now it is up). The snail profiles will be up soon too - apparently they'll have information about the number of deliveries made by each snail, the average delivery time of each snail, and the current status of each snail.

Anyway, the basic point of the project is to have email delivered by snails - the slogan is "The world's first webmail service using live snails". To find out more about "how" and "why", visit the website. Oh, and once the 11th of August arrives, the service will be officially launched and you'll be able to send your own emails via the snails. Don't work them too hard!

Thanks to the Dr Who prom, the music that angie wanted was played there and some clever person decided to record it.

If you want an mp3 use vixy.net

I love my iPhone lol. Everything is so esay on it. And this is coming form someone who has owned 6 HTC phones and 1 UIQ device in the last year.
It trumps them all for me. But this is me. When there is a reason to jailbreak it, I will. I haven't yet because I'm on O2, so don't need it unlocked, and because there are no launchers or apps for 2.0 yet so...
But I am finding it hard to find fault with it, and I'm sure an upgrade to the 3G one will come when the price is more like £300 - £350 rather than £450 - £500.
That said, I do love the way on all my WM phones, I could download any one of a million cabs and it would probably work, no such luck with my iPhone. The google app is great but is basically just links to the web versions of things. Apple remote for itunes won't work properly, Carling's iPint is funny but lasts about 2 minutes as a game, and all the rest of the good apps cost, and I'm not prepared to pay.
Jailbreaking will probably bring pirated apps I guess.

But one last thing, no matter what I've seen anyone do on wm to wmulate the iPhone, nothing comes close to it's smoothness. But it does have a Diamond-like lag in that it loads the background to the app, then about a second later the rest of it. Similar to the diamond loading tabs from what I've seen.
Anyways, I'm not some iPhone fanboy as you can probably see from my join date and post count (although a bunch of my posts are, I will admit, pretty useless) So don't come over here flaming me for foriming aa balanced opinion.
Rory

(taken directly from a post by me on XDA-Developers My User Link)
Ok, so what didn't i say up there...
Oh yeah the iPod is absolutely f**king amazing
So easy to use, so much easier than a scroll wheel, and plays about twice as loud as my iPod nano 2G (the one that looks like a shrunken iPod mini) because that had a volume limit.
It was annoying at first that it had a recessed headphone jack, because it meant that I couldn't use my Shure headphones, but it's ok, because i've gotten used to the included headphones, and they do have a pretty good range of sound, and as they're so loud, there is no need for them to e sound isolating like my Shure's and previously my Sennheiser CX300's.
The web is amazing, and having used opera 9.5 from the very early betas, I can safely say that opera should be sued for sopyright infringement. Every single thing on the iPhone is copied by Opera. But I guess apple are happy that peopple love their browser so much that competitors (kind of anyway) just rip it off.
I also love the mail app, its easy to useworks perfectly with fingers, and well ust works. Although sometimes it doesn't say I've read stuff wehn I ave, but I'll forget that.
Earlier today, i began putting in last names for a few of my contacts so I could differentiate between them, and I ended up doing all of them ebcause it ws so easy. I actually enjoyed editing contacts.
Then there's stocks, I'm not a broker, but I follow my BB.L stock and today finally found out that it was higher than the price theyre selling me extra stock at. (my stock was at about 500p a share 18 months ago, 180 in may, and plummeted to 31p at the beginning of july, so I'm glad to see it on the rise.) And B&B have been offering to sell me extra shares at 55P for ages, while the actual price was way below that, idiots)
Back to my iPhone
The camera takes great pictures, and takes them very quickly too.
The app store is great, but doesnt have much I want on it, but there are some good proof of concepts like iMaze, basically a rip off of teeter on the Diamond with no holes. But it doesn't interpret small movements at all, so needs loads of improvement.
Feel free to ask questions, and look forward to my upcomign review of my Acer Aspire One. Which should have pictures of both Vista and OS X leopard running on it.
Rory

I was just thinking that the EU ignoring the Irish 'No' vote over the Lisbon treaty (check out that link for some very funny responses there to the question "What would you say if you had three minutes to tell French President Nicolas Sarkozy about the Lisbon Treaty?"), or getting Ireland to vote again, would be quite similar to the actions of Robert Mugabe. That's something for the conspiracy theorists...

Now seems a relevant time to share a funny Mugabe-related video that I saw a while ago...

Robert Mugabe ringtone:

@angie

I did a little research into that song you requested.

Turns out it was an original score by Murray Gold and performed by the BBC National Chorus of Wales. I'm afraid it won't be out until the 4th soundtrack comes out

Peace out

Sorry about the lateness, but I'm extremely busy. The one downside of having a Touch Diamond is that there's no excuse not to deal with everything as it comes up - and a lot of things that require my attention have been coming up over the last few days...

Anyway, the website of the month for July 2008 is C&C Group plc. C&C Group plc owns Irish Bulmers and Magners, which you should all be drinking.

This post is a response to a comment on my review of the HTC Touch Diamond. I was asked for some sample pictures taken with the Diamond's camera, so I now present x photos and a video, demonstrating the quality of the camera. My opinion is that if you're looking for professional-quality photos, it's not the camera for you (why are you looking at camera phones anyway?), but it's quite good at doing reasonable photos.

Anyway, click here to download my HTC Touch Diamond sample photos and video.

If you're interested in Ireland at all, there are a few interesting photos in there, including some from the Luas, and ones of O'Connell Street, Supermac's and Heuston station.

Exams are over. I will shortly be leaving the nest, so to speak, so things are getting reprioritized. As I will soon be commencing a degree in computer science, development of this blog, my old (Emptosoft) software, and possibly some new software, will be accelerating once again (I need to reacquaint myself with stuff). My preliminary targets (which will be added to, and possibly changed) are:
1. Significantly develop the admin system for this blog (the current system is really just a skeleton - each admin can submit posts, and edit or delete his/her own posts). More information will be given to the admins in due course.
2. Generally improve the blog. As you may have noticed, I've started already: the default number of posts has gone down from 15 to 5 (I did, stylishly, just change one number in my core settings). This lower number of posts should make the blog load faster - especially on dial-up connections, which I noticed that I was slowly abandoning. I have also enabled emoticons in the 'latest comments' section of the sidebar - something that has brought to my attention the fact that I need better emoticons, with transparency.
3. Release the Emptosoft Download Manager through the Program Management System! I never really did finish making the necessary modifications to the multi-user system. This could take a while, as I'll have to bring myself up-to-date with any changes to NSIS, recompile some of my plugins, and generally move loads of stuff between computers too.

While I'm "leaving the nest", I will not have time to post. Rest assured that I will come back with a post offering pictures and videos demonstrating the quality of the HTC Touch Diamond's camera.

Anyway, the current admins are generally splitting to do their own things. They might post, they might not. I might recruit new admins at some point - perhaps in a month, perhaps in a year. While I decide which people become admins, ultimately it's all dependent on others.

Actually, I might make a change to the category system on this blog too. I feel that this post should, as well as being in the blog category, be my last post in the school category and the first post in the university category. In fact, while typing thost last two sentences, I've worked out how the multiple category system is going to work...

I've had my HTC Touch Diamond for a few days now, and I think it's time to finally share some of my findings. It should be noted that this review is aimed at correcting false information found elsewhere on the internet and adding information that other reviews don't seem to have. I'll cover the the areas that I'm going to cover in a series of points. If I think of any other points, I might edit this post or comment on it.

It should be noted that, overall, I am more pleased with the Touch Diamond than I've been with any other piece of technology. I'm not just saying that because I have one, and you don't - the device is undoubtedly stylish, and you can do basically anything you want with it using the included software, in a stylish and efficient manner. I have never wanted to use the stylus, and I have never found myself frustrated by not being able to do something or by not being able to do something quickly enough. The device is both nice to admire, and quick when there's time pressure.

1. Battery
The biggest issue for a lot of people is the battery, which is rather small (900mAh) in order to keep the size of the phone down. For me, the battery has actually been amazing - it has never fallen below 71%, despite the many tests I've managed to put it through. The biggest test, I think, was today, when I listened to the radio for an hour, listened to Windows Media Audio files for half an hour, spent about an hour on the internet via wifi (checking the score of this, checking my email, refreshing my RSS feeds and synchronising Windows Live Messenger contact data), sent and recieved some text messages, showed off the device a bit, and spent about 40 minutes using the camera (10 minutes fiddling and 30 minutes taking photos and capturing videos). After all of that (which happened over the course of an entire day), the 76% of the battery power was left. However, after synchronising the device via bluetooth and copying all of my photos and videos via bluetooth, only 71% of the battery was left. While that's nowhere near the most stressful day for the phone's battery that I could imagine, less than a third of the battery power was used. I'd say that's pretty good - my older devices would certainly have struggled to perform that well.

However, there is one battery problem that I can confirm. The battery heats up a lot when you try to charge it from a computer via USB. It seems strange that this happens, especially when you see how similar the other charging method is (the USB cable plugs directly into a mains plug).

In conclusion, the battery life is reasonable, but avoid charging the device using a computer.

2. TouchFLO 3D
Another big issue that people seem to have is lag in TouchFLO 3D. I have experienced very little lag (it would be impossible for there not to be some lag, but I think HTC has minimised it very well). I would therefore come to the conclusion that people have amazingly unrealistic expectations, or that the people who complained about TouchFLO 3D were using devices from Hong Kong with the old ROM (UK versions have a new ROM).

It should be noted that TouchFLO 3D is amazingly comprehensive compared to TouchFLO - I can see myself literally never seeing a standard Windows Mobile interface for weeks. The gestures with which you can manipulate it are very natural too - I've never found myself trying to learn any. I just do what feels natural, and it works. Also, everything has been thought of - I particularly like the feature which makes the icons in the top right-hand corner easy to select.

However, I have encountered a bug with TouchFLO 3D. Today, when I started it up, it seemed to be under the impression that the device was searching for a wifi connection, despite the fact that wifi wasn't on. Interestingly, I encountered another bug with wifi a few days ago - I turned in on in the comm manager, but it didn't actually turn on. Both problems were solved by changing the on/off status of wifi twice.

3. The (main) Camera
The camera is quite good. Obviously it does suffer in dim conditions from a lack of flash, but I still got respectable photos from the Turkish party in Palmers Green on Friday night. None of them were unacceptable.

Nobody seems to remark upon how handy the accelerometer is for taking photos. The device seemed to automatically recognise when I took portrait photos, so the photo was saved the right way up. I'm not sure if that applied to videos too...

4. Screen
The screen is another area that doesn't seem to get the attention it deserves. Having such a high resolution packed into the screen means it has amazing detail. Also, it seems to be more sensitive than previous HTC touchscreens (making it easier to use). I actually haven't had any moments when I've wanted to pull out the stylus to increase efficiency (which may say as much about TouchFLO 3D and the included keyboards as it does about the screen). The automatic brightness adjustment works very well too.

5. Speakers
The speaker quality seems to be average, but what I'd like the point out here is that the external speaker is on top of the phone. This may seem like a weird place for a speaker, but it actually makes any noises that the phone makes, easy to hear, if the phone is in a pocket. With other phones I sometimes only notice that they're ringing when they're halfway through their ringtone, but so far I've heard the Touch Diamond every time it has made a noise. Best of all, due to the position of the speaker and general design of pockets, most of the sound is carried to the owner of the pocket. This means that you can hear your device without others being disturbed - even those who you may be conversing with.

This also seems a relevant section in which to say that the deafult ringtone is quite nice. If you've seen any of the Touch Diamond promotional videos, you'll recognise it.

6. FM Radio
Just a bried note on the FM radio - the reception os great. It outperforms all other radios I've had (yes, all types - not just phones with radios). I don't really know how it manages to do that though...

7. Opera
Again, another brief note. I noticed that the 'secure connection' icon was skinned like the rest of the browser, but it didn't quite match the other components. A small unimportant error, but it shows that the UI isn't perfect. Also, it should be noted that the text re-flow only works when you double tap a column and then try to zoom in further - don't expect to have the text re-flow if you randomly zoom in. However, having said that, the browser is far easier to use than Internet Explorer or Deepfish. After a few moments of getting used to it, I think that you'll agree with me when I say that it's the most efficient and easy-to-use PPC browser available.

8. Buttons
Another brief note. Despite what people say, I found the assignment of the buttons below the screen quite logical and useful - there's a home button, which will always return you to the 'Home' tab of TouchFLO 3D, and there's a back button, which will generally take you back to whatever was on the screen before.

9. Picture!
Finally, here is a picture of my HTC Touch Diamond:

It's so thin, that it can't actually be seen when I have it in a pocket.

hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

i dnt no what to say so im jus gona say 'im eating custard... its really nice'

'mark... how r u?
hows ur computer, apparantly u cn watch tennis on HD'

'how many exams have u got left.... mark is in yr 13 n doing his Alevels'



i dnt no if this is th sort of thig to write so dnt think of me as a freak

bye
xxxxx

OK, we're right in the middle of exams now, but I need to say something to stop the hype from causing bad decisions. Here are the important truths about the iPhone 3G:

1. Apple have implemented a load of software features which look like more great innovations. Actually Windows Mobile and probably other mobile operating systems have had these features for years.
2. Assisted GPS. I can't believe that got the crowd excited. That's already in loads of other devices (the HTC Touch Diamond is there twice at the moment ).
3. Battery life. Yes, it has improved...but it's still not particularly good.
4. The screen. Loads of people go on for ages about the screen. Yes, it's big, but the device is consequently big. Too big for a lot of people. Other devices have smaller screens with higher resolutions (such as the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 and the HTC Touch Diamond and Touch Pro.
5. Third-party software. Again, years behind other devices.
6. That MobileMe. A bit of an unnecessary middle-man and you're sometimes forced to use the website so it would seem likely that there are already similar services out there, albeit with less integration. Also, Windows Mobile has had the 'cloud-based' contact synchronisation thing for ages through Windows Live Messenger.
7. Other devices now have slicker, shinier and more useful user interfaces (such as TouchFLO 3D on the HTC Touch Diamond and Touch Pro, and the XPERIA X1's panels). The iPhone was always beaten in terms ot the efficiency of its interface - even the old TouchFLO got users to what they wanted faster, on average.
8. The iPhone has been out-handy-featurised by more innovative devices, again, like the HTC Touch Diamond and Touch Pro.
9. The iPhone now has worse specifications than other devices (Touch Diamond, Touch Pro, XPERIA X1).
10. Price. Yes, the iPhone is now cheaper, but that does not make it cheap. Apple didn't let network operators subsidise the cost of the old device, as they usually do for people with contracts. Now, they are letting the networks do that, so you'll end up paying for it through your phone usage anyway.
11. Networks. The iPhone is limited to one network per country in most countries. HTC sell their devices unlocked (as well as through networks - some networks even hand special branded versions), so you can use it on any network.
12. The HTC Touch Diamond has beaten the iPhone 3G to the market, similar to the way its predecessor, the HTC Touch, beat the old iPhone to the market.

So, Apple are late again, with a product that is now comprehensively beaten by a range of other devices. And I only know about HTC's devices (yes, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 was designed and manufactured by HTC) - both Nokia and BlackBerry probably have better devices too. Therefore, I would like to conclude that you should not buy an iPhone 3G.

Anyway, the iPhone is going to be available on Pay & Go with O2 in the UK (but, interestingly, only on Pay Monthly in Ireland) so that may mean that, finally, O2 is introducing mobile internet for Pay & Go customers. I think I'll ask about that now...

I'll be back after the exams are over (last one on the 18th of June).

The website of the month for June 2008 is Bitey Castle. I don't actually know how it has never been the website of the month before, because it's really good and I've known about it for ages...

People who say things like this obviously do not have an appreciation of what happened last night. However, he admits that when he was at Liverpool Street station, nobody else was, so fair enough.

Two things lead to the chaos by the end of last night. Firstly, loads of people are complaining about the mess that was left. This was because of a lack of bins in central London (all of the bins have been removed for security purposes). Secondly, whoever was in charge of the trains decided that they were going deliberately annoy people by keeping the trains between stations for ages. Not only did people desperately need to go to the toilet, but it got incredibly hot down there (the trains were completely packed), so it's no surprise to me that several of the trains are now out of service.

I could go on, but I need to do the website of the month post.

By the way, yesterday I randomly went to Chesham. I might upload photos...

It seems that the politics in Europe has changed. No longer is Ireland a country that maintained its identity and spirit and won its independence, despite being ravaged by famine and being arguably* treated worse than any other country by the world's largest empire, which other countries pity. "Maybe we just have no friends in Europe anymore. One observer remarked to me that we were now the rich kids of the continent and lacking the charm of old."

I am, of course, talking about Dustin's early exit from the increasingly weird, and still geopolitical, competition known as Eurovision.

* = If you disagree, I've got a really nice quote which will change your mind: read page 6 of "How the Irish Saved Civilisation: The Untold Stort of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe" by Thomas Cahill.

Normal school has finished for all of the admins, so we are now officially preparing for and doing exams. I therefore leave you for quite a while (apart from a 'Website of the month' post around the first of June, of course) with these two videos:

Hans zimmer giviving guests a tour of his post production soundtrack studio:


Symphony Orchestra of Radio Television of Serbia playing a medley from the first Pirates film:

Oh my God!
Myself and Mark are starting a new site, which will hopefully make us some money.

Having been inspired by the launch of the HTC Touch diamond, and the amount of coverage it got on MoDaCo.com and TracyandMatt.co.uk, I suggested we make our own equivalent site. Earlier today, we did discuss selling the Diamond, and this seems the perfect place to do it. Also, it may well [if we make the right connections] give us the chance to unbox new devices, which would be so amazing its untrue.
So time for us to get someone to design a logo, me to get researching contacts, and calling the right people, and Mark to get making the site (most of which I'm sure will be stolen from here)
So my next post may well be on the new site, although, im hoping its more technologically orientated than random occurrences like this
Rory
x

On Tuesday the 6th of May, the world changed. HTC announced the HTC Touch Diamond, the successor of the HTC Touch. The Touch Diamond is probably less revolutionary, when you consider that the Touch (not, as idiots believe, the Apple iPhone) introduced the idea of a 'Touch Phone' to the world, but it does add a new dimension to what the Touch had (literally) and does so in amazing style.

Of course, I shall have more to say about the Touch Diamond in the coming months (of course I'm getting one) so, for now, I think it's best for you to see the beginnings of the revolution yourself:

- Main promotional video - Available to watch in different formats. To download that video, and/or two others that focus on individual aspects of the Touch Diamond, see the 'Download HTC Touch Diamond Video' section near the bottom of this page.

- Some people playing with the Touch Diamond - A nice long video that has a proper look at some of the features. They even try the old TouchFLO gestures to see what happens.

- The Touch Diamond on Expansys - They already seem to have a release date (19th of June - the day after my last exam ) and a price (£464.95). I'm not sure whether or not they can be relied on though...

- The official photo gallery - Desktop wallpapers available.

- Specification - For those of you who want the full details. It's amazing how much they've fitted into that phone, and yet it's thinner, narrower and lighter than the HTC Touch.

- Watch the HTC Touch Diamond event in London - This is good if you exhaust everything else and still want to see more because, for example, you get to see that TouchFLO 3D isn't just skin-deep (like the original TouchFLO). The music player, for example, has tabs at the bottom that are similar to the main tabs but, of course, relevant (e.g. artists, albums, etc.).

Politics first:
This is good, but this is so bad that I'm considering spending all of the 31st of May drinking Magners on the tube in protest...

Pirates second:
I was bored one night a while ago, so I tried to find pirate music in a style that Rory would appreciate. Both surprisingly and unsurprisingly (yes, I know it's confusing, but accept it), I found a vast array of suitable videos on YouTube - some of which are below. Of course, Rory's going to say he hates it anyway, because he's like that.

The website of the month for May 2008 is O2 Broadband, as I have now tested their product properly and am very happy with it.

We have all been busy recently and unfortunately, hence the lack of posts. So, I thought I'd post about what we're busy doing.

So...me first. As well as doing quite a lot of work over the last week, I have been to this (stylish, cool, relaxed and just a brilliant day) and this (where I met the guy who won the Mexican A1 GP for Ireland).

Liz has been generally offline due to the fact that the computer that she normally uses to access the internet broke (I've been helping to fix it).

FatJoe has been busy upgrading and finally using his website again.

Meanwhile, Rory has been busy continuing to be depressed.

Anyway, below is a video for you to watch.

Grand Theft Auto IV First Review:

I'm bored, so here's some music to listen to (I seem to be posting music here more and more lately...I should probably try to work out why):

All the Strange, Strange Creatures:


Doomsday:


By the way, both of the pieces of music above are by Murray Gold.

My old website (the Emptosoft website) seems to have gone down recently. It may come back up at some point, but I'm going to transfer the downloads that were available there to this website - I've been planning to do so for ages. Anyway, without further ado, here are the downloads:

Emptosoft Software:
- The Emptosoft Installer - This lets you download and install as much of the Emptosoft software as you want. Software currently available through the Emptosoft Installer: The Emptosoft Rendering Tool for Terragen, The Emptosoft Rendering Tool for Terragen (Network Version), The Emptosoft Network Simulator and The Emptosoft Updater. Also, The Emptosoft Download Manager may be made available again at some point.
- The Emptosoft Software Package - This is quite old, but it contains portable versions of The Emptosoft Download Manager, The Emptosoft Network Simulator, The Emptosoft Rendering Tool for Terragen and The Emptosoft Updater.
- The Emptosoft Render Farm Manager (Beta) - This is a beta version of a render farm manager for Terragen 2. It is released under the Beerware licence (which I hope to eventually release all of my software under), so it contains all of the source code and files as well as the software.

Software previously only available to members of the Emptosoft website:
I have decided to make this software public now - it was limited to members before simply to boost the number of members.
- Hacker, version 1 - Makes your computer look like it's hacking something. Smaller in size (both file size and window size) than version 2.
- Hacker, version 2 - Makes your computer look like it's hacking something. Similar to version 1, but more impressive.
- Annoying Program - Confirms whether or not you really want to be annoyed and, upon confirmation that you're sure that you want to run it, starts to rape your computer. It doesn't destroy any data - it just creates general visual mayhem, including opening and closing your CD/DVD/BD drive and constantly restarting and killing Windows Explorer.

Screensavers:
- The Adventures of Guy - The screensaver version of most of a huge frame-by-frame PowerPoint slideshow I made years ago...

Im actually amazingly happy right now
United are on course to win 2 trophies
I have my athena and AP4
And omfg can you get better than a PS3 on a 37 inch 1080p tv? Yeah you can
GT5P and NFSS and MGO :O
Gran Turismo 5 Prologue is so amazing it makes your mind boggle. The graphics look like real life
Need for speed has actually a great game engine, but i liked it better when it was a street game, now its a bit too keen. Plus, due to trying to get linus on my ps3, ive lost my NFSS save files as they were copy protected which is slightly gay
And im waiting for Metal Gear Online [yes i did say Metal Gear Online] to download its update, i only downloaded it today, but it seems to want to get an update and its a compulsory update. It does however have a great update method in that you can do it like it was a torrent, or a direct http download.
And of course, GTA IV on tuesday, ill be at HMv getting mine at about 4pm so school might be given a miss on weds...
And the MGO download is aping my internet, so im now connected through my athena, getting speeds of about 1.8Mbps [well im guessing but what the heck] on HSDPA

So in general life is good...

But on the downside, i maybe should have done at least some revision in the holidays
i literally did none...

So go fuck yourself mark and be depressed somewhere else

I think it's time to thank the admins for all that they do for me. As well as contributing to the blog (some more than others, Rory would like me to point out), they each help me on a daily basis. So, let's have a look at what each admin should be thanked for:

Liz
Liz is, generally an inspirational person. She thinks of things that I wouldn't normally think of - both musical and non-musical. And, of course, her catchphrase ("No offence, but...") is very useful.

FatJoe
FatJoe is very good at watching, and then sending me links to, interesting stuff (especially videos). He is also useful when I run into problems to do with my website because, as a website designer, he has sometimes run into similar problems.

Rory
I can credit Rory with introducing me to HTC, and the world of pocket PCs. He is also good at getting me cheap (and tasty) meals, and he sometimes helps with gaps in my mathematical knowledge (although I think I help him more than he helps me).

Of course, I could say much more about each admin and why I value them, but I'm tired and the internet is a cruel place for such information.

This post is actually doing two useful things. Firstly, it is testing out a new simple way in which the admins can post videos from YouTube on my blog, while maintaining the XHTML validity of the blog (now that the system has been created, it can easily be expanded to other similar things). Secondly, and probably more importantly to you, this post is demonstrating what I consider to be some of the best pieces of music ever written. I apologise in advance for the randomness of the visual aspects of some of the videos below.

Disagree with me? Comment on this post, and perhaps suggest other pieces of music which you consider to be better.

Anyway, here's the music, in order of awesomeness (starting with the best):

Hoist the Colours Suite


Drink Up Me Hearties


Jack Sparrow


Up Is Down

Good, good and good. China deserves all that it's getting. By the way, Ireland did recognise the independence of Kosovo.

I did intend to write up the Technology Thursday post but, once again, time seems to be in a hurry to get somewhere...
(I should really stop going on about that post, as it's not going to be amazing - just good).


Anyway, for now, here is an entertaining video to watch (found by FatJoe):

I think I'm going to turn the website of the month into the post in which I dump all of the random links that I have built up over the last month, simply because I find so many links which are interesting but don't deserve their own post.

Anyway, the website of the month is One.com for the outstanding web hosting service it provides. The only minor problem I've found so far is the previously mentioned inability to turn off Magic Quotes. However, the ability to have IM-style conversations with the support team, coupled with the unlimited transfer, unlimited email accounts, the fact that the services provided are very good (not intermittent or basic) and the very low price, makes me wonder why more people don't use One.com.

Has O2 lost I hear you ask? Not necessarily. While O2 broadband has been amazing so far (my connection is about 50% faster than it should be). The only reason I've been unable to fairly compare O2 is because some idiot decided to have fun with the cables at the local telephone exchange, and I consequently had no phone line whatsoever over the Easter weekend...

Anyway, now onto the random links section!
- This section of the Island Ireland website is interesting - particularly this page (full of stuff that Rory fails to understand).
- This website is a bit late for St Patrick's Day 2008, but it should nevertheless give you a few cool things to say. This pub cheat sheet looks quite handy, and the recordings on the home page should help you make sure you get the pronunciations right (with regional accent and common vocabulary differences taken into account of course).
- This article is a load of rubbish (see how the votes disagree with the article)
- I remember this! Do you?

This has been preventing me from posting recently...

Only joking! I, and all of the other admins, are just quite busy at the moment - the slowly approaching exams are leading to an ever increasing workload, and there also seems to be just about every possible reason for parties and going out to drink at the moment. I will post about Technology Thursday when I have time...

The website of the month post should be roughly on time, however. I want to say more about it now, but I shall save what I want to say for that post...

And, by the way, Cambridge may have been unlucky today, but Arsenal were lucky (and Derby were worse than a team of sheep)...

Finally, don't forget that Western European Summer Time starts in a few hours...

Like Rory predicted, we did test three phones today, but we were too lazy to make a video - the results were quite obvious. For example, in terms of boot times, the Athena beat the Kaiser, and both raped my Touch. Anyway, I'll properly write up the conclusions we came to at some point during this Easter weekend. However, I will tease you a little by revealing that I'm working on a Touch modification that will enable the recording of 'large' (320x240px) and CIF videos. The Kaiser is helping with the registry modifications - I've found the important bits of the registry, but I'm still ironing out issues (I can see the larger sizes in the settings on my Touch now, but when I try them, the camera application goes mad and crashes...

Anyway, I wish a happy Easter to you all!

Yes, you read it right, I am awaiting deluvery of two phones. Both of super specification so i shan't be disappointed. And seeing as I've had one of them before, I know I wont be. But sadly, eBay sellers just dont post things very quickly at all. So both phones are going to take a day longer to come than they should have. My MDA Vario III comes tomorrow, with my T-Mobile Ameo coming on Thursday.
And... Myself and Mark are going to make a series of video comparisons between the Vario, Ameo and Mark's Touch. The things tested will be video playback, soft-reset times, internet speed, general benchmarking, and gps software. Also, we will assess the general 'feel' of each device, so things like how easy it is to write with the keyboard, or how many buttons you have to press to get to a specific application, basically usability issues.
So you better look forward to it. It should be up on Thursday
Rory

Many things are going on at the moment. Liz was, until a few minutes ago, composing some rather nice music (which I'm hoping to use in a video podcast at some point, although that may be hard as it's not written for that particular purpose - I may produce an arrangement of it instead). FatJoe, meanwhile, is (as far as I know) watching space shuttle videos, and poor Rory is trying to get wasted on a budget of £2.50. Today, I realised how easy FP1 is now that I've done C3 and C4, and I have come to the conclusion that the (wrong) order in which I was forced to do maths and further maths A-Level modules has lead to the inefficient use of time (due to retakes) and should be changed.

Also, it should be noted (and you may have noticed) that the time zone is now shown at the end of all dates and times on this blog. I've intended to do that for a long time, but the change to a server in a different time zone forced me to sort out how the blog handled time zones. Hopefully, if the system works, during WEST the submission times and time zones recorded by the server will change accordingly.

Anyway, that's all that's going on at the moment - not very much, and not very interesting. However, St Patrick's Day should change all of that.

In conclusion, I'd like to remind you of yardley.g400.co.uk.

Facebook is being really slow and intermittently failing at the moment, so I think I'll offer a preliminary review of the hosting facilities of one.com. Overall, I think one.com is better than PlusNet - PHP 5 is available with one.com and my domain name is used much more effectively (most of one.com's services are provided through subdomains of my own domain name). Also, one.com does subdomains a lot more effectively than PlusNet (which doesn't really do them at all) - but, one.com can't do sub-subdomains. An example of a subdomain that I have created since moving to one.com is yardley.g400.co.uk (related to this blog post). One.com also has a most interesting feature which effectively enables customers to have instant message conversations with staff - a feature which I have already used.

So far, I have only encountered one problem with one.com - Magic Quotes. Magic Quotes are on by default, and they can't be turned off, which is really annoying because I don't need any data 'escaped' and my blog was designed for a non-Magic-Quotes-environment - it's hard to believe how much Magic Quotes screwed up this blog. However, I have turned this misfortune into opportunity, and while writing a function to reverse the effects of Magic Quotes I standardised the variables used by the different files powering my blog and moved them into a single central file, thus reducing the size of the blog, making the code slightly easier to understand and significantly reducing the size of the blog. I am currently moving common functions into the central 'blog core' file, and I will give an exact figure for the percentage reduction in size of this blog when I have finished.

Anyway, exam season is rapidly approaching (around two months away), so all of the contributors to this blog will be posting less than usual for a while.

Sorry that this post is a bit late, but I have been ill recently.

This month, I decided to do something interesting. In late January I added Google AdSense ads and a PayPal donation button to my blog. My intention was to see which I preferred, to keep that one, and to make that one the website of the month for March 2008.

Why couldn't I say this earlier? FatJoe did mention the donation button (and he tried to mention the ads, but I edited that out). The reason I did that is because Google have a retarded invalid-click-detecting algorithm which has already been set off without any invalid clicks, so telling people that there are ads about would have made things worse.

Anyway, moving onto the main point of this post, PayPal won easily, primarily because it's easy to use, customer service is good, and it just works. As well as random invalid-click-detection problems with the Google ads and the ads were causing the blog to take up to 60 seconds to load in some older browsers. However, the worst thing was that the relevancy of the adverts was poor (should have expected that really, considering the randomness of the adverts on Google's own website). The HD DVD post, for example, created a vast array of dodgy ads, ranging from those selling 'cheap' HD DVD players (rather entertaining for a brief time, but increasingly annoying) to those offering funeral services. There was also a huge random bias towards adverts that had anything to do with a touchscreen - most of which were just not relevant. Overall, these adverts were just spoiling the blog so, while PayPal does not make me as much money, it's much more sustainable. Also, Google AdSense wasn't making me a huge amount of money either (around $30 per month) and I'm switching to much cheaper hosting soon (so be warned - the website may go down), so the extra money is not really needed.

By the way, the hosting change (mentioned at the end of the last paragraph if you got bored of reading it) will involve the permanent loss of the emptosoft.plus.com domain name. It will also cause me to post less frequently for up to a week, because I am moving ISP too (my hosting is currently with my ISP, but I'm changing both because offers that are both better and cheaper than my current deal, at the same time, are now available).

Conclusion: Google AdSense is really disappointing, while PayPal is good (as expected). Next month's battle will be between my new hosting provider, and my new ISP.

I posted a while ago about i dilemma with myself being torn between 2 women...
It now seems that i will have neither, as one shows no interest, and to be honest I've gone off her...
While the other, [the smart one] is best friends with someone who hates me, because i supposedly called her a slag... which I didnt... And he one that I hate more than any other was almost alone with both of them, [the one I like and the one that hates me] and probably stirred stuff up like the true ***** he is...
He is also never happy... and true to form, he moaned all day..
He also came to the moon and killed it for everyone i should have grassed him up like i was supposed to..
x

Yes, you read right... Tonight at Goals [It's a 5-a-side football tournament] we got kicked off the park by a bunch of real pikeys... by the time we left, they were gone, so we don't know if they came in actual caravans...
But they were definitely irish, and were pikeys...
They didnt know how to play the greatest sport ever: Football, and seemed to think taking both legs with no effort to get the ball was a good way to play....
Probably were used to some pikey sport calle hurling. According to Mark, it draws 80,000 pikeys to some caravan site called Croke Park, it must be a big caravan site.

On another note, the UK's Eurovision entry will be Andy Abrahams.
Its kind of ironic that Mark loves eurovision, though he ferevently denies it, and the UK's entry lives in Enfield, literally 2 mins walk from many of my friends houses.
I wonder if thepikey making the stupid turkey sing is from Scariff?
I doubt it
Rory

Ireland's Eurovision entry this year is so mad that it's either going to win or get no points. Click here to watch the song, and click here to watch the six finalists on Eurosong 2008.

Hopefully one of the other admins will let us know what the UK is entering this year...

This is what Ireland was like before alcohol. I told you that those Celts were good (for those of you who do not know, I am reading a lot about the Celts and the early history of Ireland at the moment).

Now, here is a recording of something I was involved with in the Royal Albert Hall in April 2005 (a few months before I started this blog, back in my musical glory year when I did Les Mis, got 877 at KS3, performed at the Royal Albert Hall several times and passed grade 5 in piano with merit):

That performance single-handedly (well, many-handedly, when you consider all of the hands involved in playing that) introduced me to, and make me become a fan of, Hans Zimmer (although the music for the first Pirate film is not credited to him, he did write "something like 90% of the themes").

Now, to conclude this post, I have two fragments of information. Firstly, did you know that around 4% of people suffer from some form of amusia? That's quite a large proportion of the population when you consider how important and prevalent music is in society these days. Secondly, I want to link the two videos in this post with a quote from Hans Zimmer, on the music he composed for the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy: "If you strip the orchestration away, it could all be Irish sea shanties."

Firstly, you may have noticed that I haven't actually posted for well over a week, so I'd like to thank the other admins for continuing to post on this blog. Where have I been? Well...here. I've just been busy working on the admin side of the blog, which is now virtually finished in terms of features (still looks horrible). There are only two features that I haven't yet added that I can possibly see myself needing in the forseeable future - one is the ability to add new admins (through the admin system, without the complex editing of databases and files), and the other is a master account that lets me have control over everyone's posts (again, through the admin system, without editing random files). I'm probably going to work on making the admin system look better now, as those two features aren't of huge importance (I can trust the admins, and there are enough for now ).

Anyway, now onto the main subject of the post...

Overall, the product in the title of this post is well worth the money it costs (and the trouble that's required to get it if you don't live in the USA), but I'm going to focus on one song, which was my favourite song (even if I didn't quite know what it was). If you're familiar with the soundtrack for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, and the credits of that film, you will undoubtedly have noticed that, while the credits start with Drink Up Me Hearties, the last track on the soundtrack CD, about halfway through the credits, Drink Up Me Hearties finishes and merges into a much more epic song. I can now reveal that that song is called Hoist the Colours Suite (yes, non-American spelling of colour), and it is on the fourth CD in the Soundtrack Treasures Collection. And, as if that wasn't good enough, the version in the soundtrack treasures collection is even more epic! I would honestly pay the whole £35 ($70 - both values are only approximate) just for that 5 minutes and 43 seconds of perfection.

Just to make this review complete, I should probably mention Hans Zimmer and Klaus Badelt. Awesome people - I'd love to be able to, and have the opportunity to, do what Hans does, as well as he does it.

So, there you have it. Buy Pirates of the Caribbean: Soundtrack Treasures Collection, and if you are ever looking for theme music for me, look no further than Hoist the Colours Suite.

Is it the imcredibly smart and beautiful one or the kinda stupid yet equally as beautiful one that i chose [they still may chose against me i must say]..... hmmmm
decisions decisions
: (

Today marks the start of a great era, the era of Blu-ray!

Toshiba, one of the main backers to HD-DVD, has decided to pull out of the controversial format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Obligatory quote:

" it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders."

So now all you lot who bought HD-DVDs are now pedaling a dead technology.

Vivá Consumer choice!

I am now going to review some music, because that's the sort of person I am. In order to produce meaningful reviews I will be focusing on music I am listening to at the moment (both in general and literally, and other than the soundtrack of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, which I always listen to and which I've reviewed before (I think)).

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
A rather entertaining soundtrack, rather well adapted from the musical. Highlights include the disturbing songs sung about Johanna, the simultaneously hilarious and sad desperation of Mrs Lovett (who loves Mr Todd), and a duet by Johnny Depp and Alan Rickman (two very different voices). Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), Depp has some Captain Jack Sparrow moments, which occasionally make you wonder which character he thinks he's playing. Overall though, the singing and acting is great throughout the film.

Les Misérables
I feel I should mention Les Mis, even though it has been a few years since I took part in a production of it, as I have recently rediscovered the music (I seem to be listening to a lot of musicals at the moment - Sweeney and this). Anyway, while the music is, of course, legendary, I'd like to point out a few of my favourite songs. At the End of the Day is a very energetic song and such a joy to sing - it has a beautiful harmonic sequence. Do You Hear the People Sing? is an inspirational song, and is great for making up new words for, to create a personalised version. One Day More is probably my favourite - I love it when very different musical themes are shown to actually have been planned to overlap in a magnificent way. I personally only know one other example of this - Drink Up Me Hearties from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Finally, the Finale starts with some emotion-stirring singing, which concludes the story of the musical (with the words 'And remember The truth that once was spoken, To love another person Is to see the face of God.' - a very powerful statement and, I believe, an accurate description of love), and then moves into a version of Do You Hear the People Sing with slightly different lyrics, which concludes the music of the musical.

Rory's music
Rory becomes a strange fellow when I try to talk about music to him (he once refused to let me teach him Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano - a fact which has been remarked upon, even though he won't believe me), so you should probably ask him about the music he likes.

Elizabeth's music
Liz is doing music coursework at the moment, and composing some pretty nice music. However, because the coursework is still in progress, I probably shouldn't disclose any more information...

Just the title of this post makes me drool...

Fancy drinking to someone's health? Soon, you may be drinking to your own too, as the possibility of cancer-fighting beers is investigated...

Get into shape the fun way! If you go to the gym, you're just boring...
Interestingly, this article, which is also from around two years ago, is also one of the BBC's top 5 emailed articles at the moment. Love just seems to be in the air...

Click here to watch the ESA Columbus science laboratory being installed on the ISS. It's fun watching life in space live - much more interesting than whatever's on TV at the moment...

Click here to watch the launch of the NASA Space Shuttle STS-122 mission, which is due to bring the Columbus science laboratory to the International Space Station. The launch is scheduled for 19:45 GMT, so I should have posted this earlier...

Meh.

People,

As you may know when you are a student you need certain things like, sex and.... cake, both of which cost money. So to help Mr DarkFire buy this sex and cake, donate money (buttons coming soon) and visit his blog regularly, so that he may enjoy the moistness... of cake.

Joe

It's good! (By the way, this demo is from quite a while ago - 25 November 2007 - and I made it).

I feel it's about time I started sharing the handy modifications I've found for the HTC Touch. Some I have already shared, without mentioning the Touch (like Slide2Unlock Pro), but others are specific to the Touch. This modification is specific to the Touch:

Increasing the sensivity of the touchscreen of the HTC Touch


One of the small number of complaints about the HTC Touch has been that the touchscreen is not quite as sensitive as it should be for optimum efficiency of use. This is, in fact, not a hardware problem, and it can be solved by a very simple registry edit.

Using appropriate software (such as PHM Registry Editor), find the following registry entry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Drivers\TouchPanel\PressureThreshold

Now, very simply, change the value of the entry. Mine was initially 11,000 (decimal), although other Touches may be different for various reasons.

That's it! Your screen should now be more sensitive. The only thing I know that reverts this change is re-aligning the screen, which is both good (in case you forget what the value originally was) and bad (because I find myself aligning my screen often when it has to endure large temperature changes, which happens often in winter).

By the way, for anyone who is new to registry editing, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (mentioned above) is often abbreviated to HKLM.

Also, I'd like to thank Rory for testing this on his Touch too (the better, 'Enhanced' version, which I'm quite annoyed that I don't have because I have about 4MB of ROM left on my 'original' Touch and I typically have 0 to 20MB of free RAM).

The website of the month for February 2008 is the Irish Stock Exchange. The website is good and Ireland seems to have been pretty immune to the recent worldwide stock market turmoil...

Irish ISPs are quite rightly defending the privacy of their customers.

Does this mean the end of Lincoln biscuits?

The ASA (Advertising Standards Agency) has, once again, disagreed with Ryanair. Ryanair have reacted to the decision by the ASA to ask them to withdraw their advert as follows:

It is remarkable that a picture of a fully-clothed model is now claimed to cause 'serious or widespread offence', when many of the UK's leading daily newspapers regularly run pictures of topless or partially-dressed females without causing any serious or widespread offence.

Ryanair then went on to describe the ASA:

This bunch of unelected self-appointed dimwits are clearly incapable of fairly and impartially ruling on advertising.

Ryanair also said that they're simply not withdrawing the advert.

I'm completely on Ryanair's side with this, as their argument for the advert is virtually flawless. I think that the ASA has either proved that they are dimwitted and clearly incapable of fairly and impartially ruling on advertising, or that the UK is, to put it in a combination of the words of Rory and Liz, gay (no offence).

By the way, I am fiddling around with the blog at the moment. The current systems on the main side of the blog are being augmented, whereas the admin side is having lots of fancy new stuff added.

No money.... how gay is that. Means I cant go out, unless i scrounge off people until like march... not fair.. And i want my athena back... But selling it is what means I dont have to wait till approximately june to go out...
*sob*
I need my athena..
[will do anything for good money]
Rory
x

What's better than a drunken text? A drunken post of course! I am really too tired to write more (and typing on a phone isn't a particularly fast process, even with PCM keyboard)...

Firstly, I should explain that I am calling the system that I use to display posts from a single category or by a single author, a filter. I announced in an update to the previous post that small errors were occuring with that system.

The good news is that I have now not only fixed those problems, but I have fixed problems that this blog had before I introduced the filters. To make it even better, I've done this all while tidying up my extremely messy code into lots of small useful functions .The code not in functions is down to 70 lines (which could actually be condensed much further, but that would make it harder to read).

Anyway, here are five augmentations and/or fixed errors as a consequence of my work this evening:
- The number of posts actually displayed is given at the bottom of every page (the requested number, which is given at the top, is not always satisfied).
- The filter system had a problem displaying messages which are meant to inform people that some posts are old. That was due to the fact that I was using two post counting variables, neither of which had a clear purpose. Three counting variables are now being used - obviously not an optimisation, the purpose of the third variable will become clearer as you read on...
- The blog now recognises when it has returned no posts, and offers some help.
- The purpose of the third counting variable is shown here - it tells you how many posts there are that match any filter applied, if the blog returns no posts .
- This fix requires the most processing power. Before, it was assumed that if no errors were encountered when loading the posts shown that there would be more, older posts, to show. Now all of the blog data is checked so if there are no older posts, that's what the blog says.

Obviously, all but one of the links above will loose their meaning as more posts are submitted, so if you're not reading this in the next few days you'll be quite confused. A summary of this post for those who are confused for that reason, or any other, is as follows: I have paid attention to detail.

By the way, only one exam left (in this exam season).

I feel I should formally announce the fact that there are three new administrators (admins, for short) on this blog, and tell you a little bit about them. If you don't know what I mean when I say they're admins (and I'm fairly sure even one of the new admins doesn't know what that means), all it means is that they can post on this blog, just like me.

Anyway, below is a short bit about each of them. Eventually I'll make more permanent profile pages (and/or link to their profiles on Facebook if I ever get the Facebook integration done).

Mark Hogan - To be fair, I should probably summarise myself. I am primarily a computer scientist, but also a physicist and musician. However, unlike most computer scientists, I don't sit in front of a screen all day - I can often be found shopping, doing random sports, making music, going out and generally doing fun stuff. I am often a source of frustration by having such a varied lifestyle while also outperforming people who spend more time working. My secret? Extremes. I work hard and play hard.

Liz - A much better musician than me (which is saying quite a lot), and the youngest contributor to this blog so far. Liz also has superpowers and is the least attached of all of the admins to correct spellings and grammar. In my opinion she's generally a fun person to be around.

FatJoe - Bow before his weightiness, as he says. FatJoe is a biologist and the oldest admin. On his own blog he describes himself as "the most clever, funny and sophisticated man on the planet". In my opinion, that's rather a large claim to live up to, but he certainly tries...

rory - Another admin who isn't too fond of correct grammar, he started his last post well, but then "got lazy" - a kinder way of describing his attitude to work is "relaxed". Anyway, Rory is an automotive engineer, a blackbelt in karate, and an expert on Windows Mobile devices. He also generally quite clever and fixes broken things.

I'll work out some way of getting the admins to introduce themselves better soon, perhaps by giving them a questionnaire or by getting them to each do a post about themselves. Anyway, the main reason I've waited until now to do this post is because I have finally introduced a system on this blog that enables you to view posts by a single person - click on the links above, or click on the links in the options part of the sidebar, to try it out. [Update: Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:00] You can now also view posts from a single category. I have also found some minor errors with the new systems, but I'm keeping the updated blog running because the errors are very unimportant and hard to find. I will do a post about the errors (of which I believe I've found two) in due course and I will, of course, fix them soon.[/Update]

Nobody has noticed of course, but I have been making lots of small changes to this blog recently - some changes are only improvements to existing systems to make them less prone to errors, but others make existing systems more useful. A notable recent change is the copyright information displayed at the bottom of every page.

I've also failed to mention, until now, that I shortened the RSS feed to the latest 15 posts a few days ago. Previously, the RSS feed had every post from this blog in it, but it was getting too large to be useful (and changes to the structure of the feed were causing Facebook to re-import all of the posts as notes - such a large number that my account was suffering from various warnings and restrictions).

There is one bit of bad news, and that's that every time I make a large number of changes, Facebook integration is slowed down considerably, because the changes are made to older versions of the blog, rather than the Facebook development version. This is done because the Facebook development version is obviously nowhere near ready to start using. The slowing down is specifically caused by me having to recombine the two versions of the blog.

Anyway, before I finish, I should mention that this is the middle of the January exam season - hence the infrequency of my posts at the moment. If you're doing exams over the next few weeks, good luck! Otherwise, goodnight!

I'm not even going to try to summarise the videos below. Just watch them - they're so funny.

Part 1


Part 2

This is one of the most well-researched posts I have ever done, meaning that its content is not only as reliable as my other posts, but much more verifiable. The purpose of this post will be to show that Irish people drink lots of alcoholic beverages with good reason: they make Irish people as healthy as everyone else. It may be argued that such a reliance on drink comes simply from the ancient Irish (and Celtic) relationship with alcohol, which has lasted for thousands of years and continues to last. Undoubtedly, more research needs to be done into both Irish genetics and celtic society in Ireland to better understand this connection, but the best knowledge we have so far follows...

My first source, rather unfortunately, has been lost over the last few years. I believe it was on the BBC website (although I can no longer be sure) and it was an article on the fact that Irish people are unfairly treated because they are treated by the NHS as, rather simply, being part of a much larger ethnic group (possibly just 'white', but again, I can't be sure). The article went on to show that this treatment was unfair, as Irish people have been shown to be far more succeptible to heart disease than all of the other members of the ethnic group they had been placed in. This article conveys similar information:

The Irish community suffer from the highest rates of cardiovascular disease in men and women of all ethnic groups, and have a greatly increased risk of heart disease. Even more worryingly, the Irish have the highest rates of stroke amongst all ethnic minority communities, and far higher than the White British population.

As you can see, I have now established that Irish people are far more prone to heart disease than even British people, their geographical neighbours.

Guinness was shown, in 2003, to reduce blood clotting. Blood clotting can combine with heart disease to produce heart attacks. Therefore, drinking Guinness should help to counter the succeptibility of Irish people to heart disease.

However, only Guinness reduces blood clotting. To show why other drinks (such as Bulmers, which is known as Magners outside Ireland) are healthy, I must draw on a very recent piece of research. This article demonstrates the health benifits that can be obtained by drinking moderate amounts of any alcoholic beverage regularly.

In conclusion, I believe I have shown that research is pointing towards alcohol not only being an important part of Irish (and previously Celtic) culture, but that it is essential for the health of Irish people. The only question that remains is, will you buy me a life-augmenting drink for enlightening you about the needs of Irish people with this post?

I just sold my HTC Advantage, and at almost the same minute, bought an MDA Touch Enhanced. It's basically Mark's Phone, but with double the RAM and ROM. Haha Mark, now there can be no arguments about whose phone is better, they're identical except mine has double ROM and RAM like I said.
In selling mine, I also made £125, thats after buying my new phone. So now my money situation has improved greatly, and I have about £330. Which is good, and is getting saved. Its funny how wanting one thing can make you buy something much different, and wanting to buy something can weirdly make you money. This is what happened to me. I wanted a Macboook Pro that was going or amazingly cheap on eBay. So, i decided to sell my Advantage. Then the listing got cancelled by eBay [I suspect by ebay, since it does not appear in the completed listings view], i would guess because the seller is illegitimate. Anyways, having put my current phone on eBay, it gave me the push in the direction i needed. Do i need GPS? No... The same could be said for its 8GB Microdrive. However, i will miss the 3.5G internet [really fast no matter what you say Mark] and the massive screen. But, I decided I wanted to make some money, and that's exactly what I did.
Only time will tell if it was the right decision.
Rory
x

Today, after seeing how cheap the asus eee pc is, I contemplated the £200 outlay, plainly to experiment, have something mildly cool to use at school. I however realised that i should use my HTC Advantage first as a trial run. Its great to type on, but typing in lessons may become a chore due to the inaccurate keys, and lack of feedback from them.
If my typing experiment is successful, [which it inevitably will be unless I'm undecided on the keyboard quality] i will either sell my athena and buy an ASUS eee notebook, or keep my athena. Either way, i forsee myself buying a HTC Kaiser or Touch Cruise. Probably the former, because its much cheaper. However, seeing as i wont be needing the kaiser's keyboard, i might well go with the Cruise.

However, after a small rant i just recieved [mothers] im reconsidering buying any of the above, and sticking with my athena and k800i. The only problem is I cant make or recieve calls on my athena [not that id want to hold it to my ear, i just would like the option to allow my mates to call] and so it might well soon be calling for a trade-in.

Ill get about 275 pounds for it, and ive got 230, plus whatever i get paid the day before the test, giving me a total of approx 650 pounds for something to type in school with and a good windows mobile phone.

But then, do I want to save some for my inevitable need of a laptop, holidays [posisbly] singapore [definitely] and READING 08! And more importantly do I need to save? Ill work all of June and July, so ill have some money before [and if] i go to singapore...
Ah the trials and Tribulations of Being poor : )

UPDATE (Thu, 17 Jan 2008 09:55):
Im now selling my atehna, to raise money to get a macbook pro. 2.8Ghz Processor and 4GB of ram... £460 from ebay... how i love ebay

Yes, It is I Joe, Ruler of all.

I have come to dispense justice on you, bow before my weightiness!

Aer Lingus has sold, on average, just a third of its seats on the controversial new Belfast-Heathrow route for the first month of its operation. Some of these seats have been sold for as little as £1 - compare that to the €80 seats and an 80% load factor on the Shannon-Heathrow route. To make it even worse for Aer Lingus, even the less controvertial routes from Belfast are struggling: the majority of return flights from Amsterdam currently cost just £2.

Aer Lingus said they switched to Belfast for commercial reasons, but clearly either they have a complete lack of understanding of the market, the politics of Northern Ireland (for Aer Lingus is still treated by some as the national airline of the Republic) or they're hiding something else. There has been a rumor going around recently that the Belfast move is only a disguise for a move to Cork. Indeed, it's now questionable whether or not the public would let Aer Lingus come back to Shannon if their operations from Belfast fail, making the movement of operations currently in Belfast to Cork one of the few options available. A move directly from Shannon to Cork would have undoubtedly caused even more outrage than the move to Belfast did, so a temporary move to Belfast with an intention to rapidly move to Cork is quite possible.

However, I don't think that's the case - I just think that whoever is in charge of Aer Lingus is mad. The inevitable Ryanair takeover can't come soon enough.

Oh, and by the way, you may have noticed that I have changed my signature colour from the traditional 'Dark Fire' orange I established way back in 2005 to green. The green is actually the green from flag of Ireland, and the change has been prompted by the fact that everyone I give a blog admin account to chooses to use red or orange for their signature. The new colour is, in my opinion, both different and easily readable.

Warner brothers, the last major studio releasing films in both HD DVD and Blu-ray formats, has backed Blu-ray. That means that 5 major studios are releasing films only on BDs (Blu-ray Discs), whereas only 2 major studios are releasing films only on HD DVDs (none are releasing them on both). The pie chart below shows the current state of affairs. Clearly, Blu-ray has virtually won the war, as I predicted a number of years ago...


I think it's worth mentioning the apparent death of Flourescent Multilayer Discs (rebranded in 2003 as High Definition Digital Multilayer Discs) too. HD-DMD was a promising format but the collapse of the company that originally developed it caused enough of a delay for the HD DVD/Blu-Ray war to take centre stage instead. Maybe we'll see FMBDs (Flourescent Multilayer Blu-ray discs) one day - the concept of transparent storage media has long been a preserve of sci-fi films. The amount of storage space on a FMBD would also be immense...

mark got into cambridge!!!!!!!!!!!!! (n u didnt)

I have fixed the problem internet explorer had with my post page that caused nothing to appear on the page. The fix was ridiculously tiny. Compare the lines of code below - both are valid XHTML, but the first line does not work in internet explorer and the second does:
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.g400.co.uk/thisisnotarealscript.js' />
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.g400.co.uk/thisisnotarealscript.js'></script>

That weird error could be helpful to someone trying to probe the algorithms behind internet explorer. Anyway, this post is also testing some of the new features I've added - I've typed in this post as you see it, but notice how the code examples above are shown rather than processed by your internet browser.

Oh, by the way, I can't resist mentioning the fact that I've got an offer from Cambridge.

I've been working on some really nice stuff all night. It only affects the admin side of the blog, so you won't be able to see any changes, but contributors to this blog will have a much easier time posting - all they have to do is decide on the category, title and the contents of their post. Everything is, of course, XHTML valid and there is absolutely no way that any invalid XHTML is getting through the system. However, on a sad note, Internet Explorer does not seem to want to try to render the post submission page so I am having to post this from Firefox. Later today I'm planning to go to Brent Cross, so I'll test the page on Safari in the Apple Store. If it works there, I'll know that the page is technically correct and that I've just proved Internet Explorer's inferiority...

It's been a while since I've posted some videos, and that's because it's been a while since I've seen any good ones. The four below, however, are some of the funniest I've seen for a long time. If you don't want to watch all four, I think the first is marginally funnier than the others. Anyway, here they are:

Arsenal 3 Tottenham Hotspur 1


Arsenal clinch fourth place


Banned part 1


Banned part 2

This post is just a brief notification of the fact that I have moved my first video podcast (and therefore all future podcasts) to this blog due to the fact that I wrote a permanent link download system earlier today. Click here to see the post for my first video podcast which, incorrectly but informatively, appears to have been posted on the date the video podcast was released. Feel free to spread the direct links to the downloads, as they look rather nice and will not change for a long time.

Welcome to 2008, the year of the games of the XXIX Olympiad, the year of the first asian street race and first night race in F1, the year of the first Formula Zero Championship and the international year of the potato . Indeed, many things are due to happen this year - some known, some not yet known. The best picture of what has happened so far this year and what will happen can be found, as always, on Wikipedia.

For me this year will hopefully involve the completion of my A-Levels and the commencing of a degree in Computer Science. Exactly where I will be doing this degree is becoming increasingly clear but, rather unfortunately, nothing will be definite until I get my A-Level results back in mid-August. Rest assured that I will announce all here in due course, for there is one thing that (hopefully) will not be seen in 2008: the end of my blog.

The website of the month for January 2008 is Slide 2 Unlock Pro (on Windows Live Spaces), the home of what has now become a simply amazing piece of software - a cross between the attractive interface of the iPhone and the undoubtedly superior functionality of Windows Mobile 6 and TouchFLO. Crucially, not much RAM is used and the animations are smooth on any reasonable device.

I was going to do a post about the health benifits of Guinness, but that will have to wait until 2008...

I would like to wish all readers of my blog a very merry Christmas and a happy new year! I would also like to thank you all for reading through, commenting on, and sometimes writing posts on this blog - you each help to add a little extra fun to my life and I hope I do the same for you. (If not, I hope I'm at least useful).

Anyway, this is goodbye for the rest of 2007 from your friendly neighborhood computer scientist and musician...bye!

Sorry to suddenly bring a lot of Emptosoft news, but the first update for almost half a year is pretty important. Yes, I have released version 1.8 of the Emptosoft Network Simulator. I have got over the problems announced in the previous post by making the Emptosoft Network Simulator automatically select which pinging program to use. If the build-in Windows ping program can be found, it will be used - if not, my pinging program will be used. Therefore, the Emptosoft Network Simulator will almost certainly work on every Windows Operating System from Windows 95 onwards. I'm not sure what the security features in Windows Vista will make of the software, but meh.

I predict that I will make one more post before Christmas, after which I cannot predict when I'll be posting (due to exams and other important stuff). Anyway, when life does get back to normal I shall be working on making this blog work with some ID verification systems - probably only Facebook for the forseeable future, as it's such a widely used and rarely abused system with a good API.

I think it's time for some news on that long-overdue update, the Emptosoft Network Simulator version 1.8. The news is that it's almost finished - the built-in pinging program is working perfectly (it could be more efficient, but it's a start). The only reason that I'm not releasing the update now is because I am still investigating one flaw I found in testing, which can make the whole thing fairly useless. The flaw is the fact that when a lot of instances of the built-in pinging program are started, they all seem to stop pinging rapidly. This may just be a simple defence mechanism of everything I've tested the software on so far, or something more complex. If it is something more complex I shall still release the update, but I will let the user choose which pinging program they want to use.

In other news, I now have proof that this blog can cope with people other than me posting stuff on it (that post also demonstrated to me how watertight the validity checks are, and how useful the emoticons are ). I could say so much more, but I won't...for now...

did u know that Twat meant Pregnant fish

xxxxxxxx

The website of the month for December 2007 is HTC Source, the place to go for information on the HTC Touch family.

Click here to see the article by RTÉ. Click here to see the article by the BBC.

In other news, it's quite disturbing that these remains went undiscovered for so long...

Over the next few weeks I will be very busy because I have lots of university interviews to go to. I don't think I'll be posting much until all of the interviews have been done. Hopefully, by that time I'll have a much better idea of which university I'm actually going to go to.

Late last night I discovered a very good alternative to the popular software for Windows Mobile called 'Slide2Unlock'. The latest version (1.01) of Slide2Unlock Pro, the new software I discovered, is available here. You can keep an eye on this blog for updates although, at the moment, the original announcement post is simply having the update information added to it..

Slide2Unlock and Slide2Unlock Pro both imitate the iPhone's lock screen and (obviously) the button that you have to slide to unlock your device. The original Slide2Unlock was slow and used a lot of memory, and had a seperate program for configuration. The new Slide2Unlock Pro doesn't have as many features, but it's much faster, less memory-intensive and can be configured from within the program.

Today I went to see part of the North London Line for the last time. From tomorrow, the line will be under the control of TfL, and it will form part of the new London Overground line. The official launch of the new line, however, will take place on Monday (12th of November). Interestingly, I will also be passing through St Pancras railway station on the 14th of November, the day on which Eurostar services move from Waterloo to St Pancras. If anything interesting is going on while I'm there, I may take photos and post them here.

Click here to read an interesting article about the music which was cleverly hidden in a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci called 'The Last Supper'. I want to listen to it - I hope it's good...

Click here to see a review of the Apple iPhone.

Click here to watch a comparison between the Nokia N95 and the Apple iPhone. I think they both need the HTC Touch with the PocketCM Keyboard (instead of their respective phones) and I also think their imitation of the 'Mac vs PC' advert would have worked better with the HTC Touch rather than the Nokia N95, as the Touch runs Windows Mobile 6 (which really would have made it a mobile version of the Mac vs PC adverts).

Click here to see the world's top 10 universities (now including 4 in the UK). How many of those 4 do you think I've applied to? I'll give you some help: you can't (as far as I'm aware) apply to both Cambridge and Oxford in the same year.

Oh, by the way, I have had more feedback than I appear to have had on the modification suggested in this post. Basically, everyone has told me to go ahead with the modifications, so I will. However, I'm more concerned about the fact that people are apparently afraid of posting comments...

The transformed St Pancras is now open. High Speed 1, Britain's first high speed railway, was also officially launched today. I want to get a train from there to Paris, so I can see for myself just how fast high speed rail travel is...

In fact, when will Ireland get high speed railways? Ireland would be so much better if Dublin, Cork and Limerick were only short train journeys apart.

In the comment submission form, should I ask for Facebook IDs instead of email addresses and URLs? It makes more sense to me to ask for Facebook IDs, as that enables people to find out some very basic information about the author of a comment and prevents any advertising. If you have an opinion, even if it's the same as mine, please comment on this post.

Apparently our brains can divert activity away from visual areas during listening tasks. However, after a certain point, musicians do not appear to suppress the visual parts of their brains, suggesting that their years of training provide a distinct advantage in the way their brains are organised. That is both predictable and good for me...or is it? Does anyone know of an inability or bad trait posessed by all (good) musicians?

The website of the month for November 2007 is Banksy. Some of the art on the website is entertaining, whereas other items make you think...

It's halloween, and here is a spooky video (watch out for the pit of bones).

Here is a scary video:


Happy Halloween!

Watch the video below for some good close harmony singing and funny lyrics...


You may have noticed that this post is in a new category called 'Music'. I will be going back through the archives soon, moving some posts into the new music and technology categories.

I purchased a computer running Windows in 2001 that came with built-in software that could do all of the fancy realtime video effects in Leopard...

By the way, leopards (Panthera pardus) are my favourite species of cat.

It's also worth mentioning the fact that this is the first 'official' technology post on my blog. Really, the category has been around since I started the blog, and I will shortly move all of the old posts about technology from the 'General' category to the 'Technology' category.

Print this off, and use it to justify taking a nap in a few lessons...

I'm crossing my fingers for the collapse of the UK. If that happened, Scotland would apparently be the third richest country in Europe (Ireland is the richest). Also, if that happened, I would laugh a lot, and then emigrate.

...practical problems. Being a musician is handy too, if you want to be an engineer.

This is annoying. I can already hear myself talking about it in years to come. "In the good old days...". Such a move is not unexpected, however - Ireland is rapidly adopting a lot of european ideas in an apparent attempt to remove traces of the UK. The random change from miles to kilometres is a good example of the sort of changes taking place...

Other things that are disappearing at the moment could include A-levels, the current degree classification system, and the Shannon-Heathrow route.

This is a hard post to categorise...I think I'll keep it in the Ireland category, as that's clearly the category I intended to write a post for.

Anyway, finally, here is some random, but handy advice. Also, for more information on the Common Travel Area, click here.

Here is the most important news from Ireland today:
- The Dublin Airport Authority failed to warn anyone at Shannon about the Aer Lingus plan to withdraw the Shannon-Heathrow service. Now everyone in the mid-west hates the Dubs even more (if that is possible).
- Ireland will be the first country to successfully extend its underwater territory to a distance of more than 200 nautical miles from its coast. Now the world will have to deal with even more Ireland than before. Would the extra territory be near Poland by any chance?

The Discovery Space Shuttle is due to launch shortly. Click here to watch the launch live.

The emoticons are now working in the posts and in the comments. There aren't many yet, but expanding the system is very easy. Here is a list of the emoticons that are available so far, and their shortcuts:
:)
:D
{) or ^_^
:P
(H)
;)

Don't forget that, for those who cannot post items on this blog, the emoticon shortcuts will only work in the actual comments - not in any of the other fields on the comment submission form.

When you compare the title of this post to the first few seconds of the video below, you may be confused. However, if you watch the video to the end you will be amused.

I have finally released the long-awaited update to the Emptosoft Installer (and Uninstaller). The new installer acquires an installation ID, which is then used to report back information on the programs you install and uninstall. The licence has also been updated to the beerware licence first used recently for the Emptosoft Render Farm Manager. It should be noted that no personally identifiable installation will ever be reported - only the version numbers of the Emptosoft programs you have installed will be sent. In other words all data collected will be anonymous.

To start using the new data reporting, you will need to uninstall all of the Emptosoft programs on your computer ('Everything' in the uninstaller) and download and run the new version of the Emptosoft Installer.

An update for the Emptosoft Updater will come at some point in the next few months, as that will also need to report back data. When that happens, all people who have not used the new Emptosoft Installer will be unable to update any more, and will be given instructions similar to those above when they try to update.

The data collected will simply make me better-informed of what programs people are using, and therefore programs that I should concentrate my efforts on.

"Dumbledore dies!" seems to have gone down in history as the biggest Harry Potter spoiler phrase, but a revelation by JK Rowling yesterday could threaten that. Dumbledore is gay. Exactly how that fact managed to slip her mind when writing the Harry Potter series is a mystery to me - it's not like she had a lack of opportunity to mention it, and it does explain a lot about Dumbledore...

In fact, the Harry Potter books describe a very large and very tangled web of love - maybe the ending isn't so happy after all...

Strangely, I don't seem to be particularly busy and yet I don't seem to be finding time to post here. I think it's because I've mainly got a lot of mid and long-term things going on now...

Anyway, Click here to watch an interesting and random video.

Oh yes, I might as well mention this game too. It is not particularly easy to play (which makes it fun) and it provides a broken bones count when you deliberately try to die (which makes it even more fun). The fact that I've only played it in HD, and that the HDTV in question was huge, made it seem even more fun too...(I could write an entire post on the size of the TV, but I won't)...

Our Lady of Lourdes Church has a new website! It actually looks pretty good - definitely better than the St Ignatius College website, which is still pretty new.

Despite the fact that they do taste right, my omlettes never look like an omlette either...

This is something I've put together in the last few minutes - it's an RSS feed for the comments. I haven't worked out exactly where to put a link to it yet, other than in this post...

In other news, I sent off my UCAS application and CAF yesterday. If you don't know what a CAF is, you probably don't need to know, so don't ask. Those two items are the main reasons for this being my first post since Monday...

Read this, paying close attention to the last two paragraphs. If you read it right, you should be shocked. Yes, Arnos Grove tube station is in the Guardian's list of '...the best modern architecture around the globe,' along with eleven, inevitably more famous, other buildings, including the Empire State Building, Sydney Opera House, the Guggenheim Museum and the Pompidou Centre.

Confused? I am. Apparently there was something on TV this week where people were noting the fact that nobody seems to know much about where Arnos Grove is, other than the fact that it is somewhere in north London...

Anyway, apparently there may be a 'stunning architecture pull-out' about Arnos Grove tube station in the Guardian in the next two weeks. I would advise you to get it if you can...

I have added the emoticons feature to the blog. From now on, if I type certain shortcuts, an emoticon will appear instead.

At the moment I haven't added the feature to the comments system because I am not happy with the level of dynamicity of the system which replaces the shortcuts with emoticons, mostly because I'm stuck with PHP 4.3.10. PHP 5 has a few handy functions such as 'array_combine', which would make the system better. Anyway, I'll work on it some more when I have time and I'll post again, with the list of shortcuts and emoticons, when I enable the transformation of shortcuts in comments into emoticons.

No, a gay bomb does not make me laugh - it makes me want to make an anti-gay bomb for protection. Why are Americans more interested in making a gay bomb rather than an anti-gay bomb anyway?

Now, as well as having a Facebook 'Share' button, every post from this blog will now become a new 'note' by me on Facebook. It should be noted that I have disabled comments on posts (or 'notes') on Facebook - I want all comments on posts to be on this blog, so everyone can appreciate my comment system (they are also potentially more anonymous and private on this blog than they are on Facebook). If you're reading this on Facebook, click here to see my blog, and click here to see the RSS feed for my blog, which you can subscribe to.

While most of this blog has remained XHTML-valid since I wrote it, the CAPTCHA (ReCAPTCHA) and Facebook 'Share' button, which were recently added to the comments/permanent link pages, were not XHTML-valid. However, they are now valid and, as a consequence, I have started working on the smiley thing I promised.

This post is a development of the story in this post.

I just thought I'd post a development to the 'Dark Matter filaments' story. A recent edition of New Scientist (22nd of September 2007) concludes a brief news item on warm dark matter and the filaments it forms, with the following paragraph:

That fits with the discovery of ancient small stars in the Milky Way that are very low in heavy elements. "It is suggestive that dark matter is warm," Theuns (Tom Theuns of the University of Durham, UK) says.

Basically, it seems that there is evidence for dark matter being warm rather than cold.

Anyway, this article, has a lot of interesting information on the simulations of the temperature of dark matter, as well as better pictures than the BBC article.

I want one! I love mysteries - I wonder what it all means...

I think I've used 'I' too many times in this post...

The website of the month for October 2007 is D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E-L-Y. It is a very simple and yet informative website - I want the t-shirt...

Click here to see some funny pictures, like this one:


This video contains phrases such as '2 exabytes' and '1 to 10 terabits per second'. You shouldn't need any more persuasion to watch it.

Is there a connection between this and this, or is it just coincidence?

Look at the projected population of Ireland. If things has gone differently, Ireland could have had a population similar to England today...
This article fails to mention that the end of the long-term population decline in the west of Ireland is caused almost entirely by the recent and ongoing influx of Polish people. The article also discusses where the blame lies for the Great Irish Famine. I don't blame anyone - random things like famines and pandemics happen. However, it is not unreasonable to say that England has benifitted recently from the lack of people in Ireland - imagine how much Ireland could have challenged England's power with a population of over 10 million.

Clearly I'm starting to dream already - I should get to bed...

Here are some random good videos related to The Simpsons Movie:

A summary of the film, with the intro music.


The real movie intro (looks like it is from the german version of the film).


The intro from episode 1 of season 19 of The Simpsons...
I was wondering for ages about what happened to Spider Pig...

I have finally released an update to the Emptosoft Rendering Tool for Terragen 2 Technology Preview, which has now been renamed the Emptosoft Render Farm Manager. The update (version 0.4) has some new icons, a new licence and includes, for the first time, the source code! Now you can look at how messy it is...

By the way, I will be introducing 'smileys' or 'emoticons' or whatever you call them, to this blog soon. They will have the same keyboard shortcuts as Windows Live Messenger.

I just thought I'd announce that I've decided to release my software and source code under a beerware-type licence, once the source code is released.

If you've never been to Amsterdam before, you've missed out on so much.

Why is the liver so damage-prone?

How stupid is this?

Click here to see an interesting video about the improvements in special effects technology. The length of time some of those renders take makes Terragen 2 look fast...

O2 has won the contract to sell the Apple iPhone in the UK.

"We are coming to the UK and wanted to pick the best carrier and that is O2," Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said at a news conference in London.

I can assure everyone that, at least until now, O2 has not been the best network in the UK. As far as I'm aware, O2 don't even allow 'Pay & Go' customers to access mobile web pages, which is the main reason for my recent move to Vodafone. Unfortunately, I haven't transferred my number to Vodafone yet, and O2 are due to add EDGE mobile internet access to their network as a result of getting the iPhone, which is enough to make me wonder whether I should move my number. If O2 make EDGE available to 'Pay & Go' customers and do a reasonable deal for internet access (like Voadfone's 15MB for £1), then I'll stick with O2. However, having been with O2 for what must be around 4 or 5 years now, I have enough experience to predict that they won't change their mobile internet access policy for 'Pay & Go' customers. How depressing...

I really wish that Meteor would start a mobile network here...

A computer model of the early Universe indicates the first stars could have formed in spectacular, long filaments. My opinion: interesting article, and equally interesting pictures. If only it wasn't just based on computer modelling and simulations...

This could only ever happen in America...

I am currently enjoying two consecutive free lessons at school. Well, actually, I'm not - I'm so bored. At least I have my Touch and GPRS (why doesn't this country have EDGE?), which I am using to stay in contact with the rest of the world...

I feel like wandering off to get a drink now...

Ryanair lodged its formal appeal today, against the decision by the European Commission to block the low cost airline's proposed acquisition of Aer Lingus. Hopefully Ryanair will win, keep the Heathrow-Shannon route and cut prices even further.

An amazing legal battle? I think so. The two best touchscreen-only phone manufacturers in the world and also, to an extent, Microsoft vs Apple.

Here is the article. I disagree with it because I don't think chocolate gives me any kind of "buzz". Eating chocolate is just like eating any other food. Meanwhile, I don't feel I need to explain the other half of the article. It clearly beats chocolate.

Sorry about the randomness of this article, but the BBC website seems to have a lot of articles on kissing today - here's another one.

By the way, I am back at school tomorrow (technically I was back today but I didn't do any work - I just decided what subjects to continue with).

The website of the month for September 2007 is TheAppleMan (Vasaka). The captions for those pictures are very funny...

I think Spider Pig deserves an entire post, so here it is:


Homer singing 'Spider Pig'.


An arrangement of 'Spider Pig' for a choir by Hans Zimmer.

Now I have my results so you can ask me what they are. As with previous results, I will not be unsecurely giving them away, so if you don't know me you'll have to register on the Emptosoft website to get them. I also passed my driving theory test today (despite being in a country with a very different road system for 6 weeks and doing no revision - I expected to fail), which means I have a lot to celebrate and, rather conveniently, a free weekend.

This is my second post from Shannon airport (there is free wifi here), and my first from my phone. Obviously I will finally be back at home in a few hours, for the first time in over a month (I left on the 22nd of July - the second day after school finished). Quite depressingly, there are only a few days left before school starts again. Overall, I think the summer here in Ireland has been fairly good, although that may just be because of the dreadful weather in London before I came here. When I get back I hope to start making preparations for several large changes to the stuff I have put on the internet. As well as releasing a lot of source code, I am planning to get a proper domain name. However, I am not sure what the new domain name should be. Does anyone have any ideas?

A small bit of news: the situation here at Shannon is getting worse. The Belarusian national airline, Belavia, is apparently considering withdrawing entirely from Shannon. Meanwhile, the department for tourism, culture and heritage in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia is investigating the possibility of establishing a direct flight between Shannon airport and Nova Scotia.

By the way, I would like to point out the fact that I am now very fast at typing on this phone, and that I think phones with keyboards are poor because they are huge and offer no typing speed advantage over my phone. Even bright sunlight, which makes the screen hard to see, no longer slows me down because I am used to the layout of the keyboard.

I really want to keep on typing (it is quite fun at this speed) but I can't think of anything else to say, other than 'Why is this departure lounge teeming with American soldiers?'. I think I'll explore the internet a bit now and send some emails...

It seems that the Shannon-Heathrow route has a good chance of surviving. If the EGM, requested by Ryanair, does not result in a reversal of the decision by Aer Lingus, BMI may take over the Heathrow-Shannon route. I still can't understand what madness is causing Aer Lingus to try to close the Heathrow-Shannon route. The route is profitable and Aer Lingus has enough resources to support both the Heathrow-Shannon and Heathrow-Belfast routes (they have several slots at Heathrow that are currently leased out to other airlines). On top of that, the pilots and cabin crew are not happy with the cost-cutting at Belfast. Shannon is the key to the economic miracle that Ireland has become. Cutting it off from most of the rest of the world will not only destroy the airport but could potentially damage the economy of the whole of Ireland, which Aer Lingus should really want to avoid because it is still based in Ireland. I agree with the local papers - I think the shamrock should be stripped from Aer Lingus. Such abandonment of Ireland means that Aer Lingus can no longer be considered the national airline.

I have noticed that I haven't said anything about the decision by Aer Lingus to transfer their Shannon slots at Heathrow to Belfast, and therefore end the Heathrow-Shannon route. I would like to make it clear that I thoroughly oppose the decision, not just because I use the route a lot, but because it is pure madness. Why would any airline close a profitable route on which they have no competition? I hope the decision is overturned and I also hope that Ryanair eventually take over Aer Lingus to stop any more random route closures.

Now it's time for my usual report on the weather! It is sunny here, and it is due to remain fairly sunny until I leave. London has been considerably wetter than the mid-west of Ireland lately, which has made me happy, but the difference in weather is due to become virtually negligable over the next few days. I hope the weather remains good in London after I get back, because all of the rain in London in June and July destroyed the start of the summer, and I want a full-length summer.

As I am not in the UK, I have absolutely no idea what my results are yet, so don't ask me what they are.

I am back in Clare, and the weather is good but weird here at the moment. Last night there was lots of lightning, but absolutely no thunder or wind. It is currently sunny here and, according to the weather, London is getting a lot of rain at the moment, so I'm happy. Unfortunately the end of the summer holiday is approaching rapidly, which is depressing. Anyway, I really should have planned this post, but I obviously didn't have time.

So far I have mainly been in Clare, which is quite a modern county (Shannon airport has free internet access, supplied over a wireless network!), but tomorrow I will be going to Kerry, where I don't think I'll have any internet access. Don't expect me to be online at all for at least the next week. If I get bored, which I doubt I will, I may write another post on my Touch, ready for when I get back to Clare.

By the way, I think summer has ended here - it was drier at Christmas than it is now.

WARNING! HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm planning to make most Emptosoft programs open-source. I have come to this decision because, as you may have noticed, I don't have much time to do programming any more. I have yet to decide exactly when or how I will release the source code, but I have a fairly good idea of which programs will remain closed-source. If anybody wants to buy the source code (so it will therefore not be released), please leave a comment. If anybody wants to become an official developer when the source is released, also leave a comment.

I never thought Irish weather could ever be as great as it was today.

Well, actually, it wasn't great all day - it was raining lightly this morning, but the afternoon was sufficiently sunny to give me a suntan.

Nothing much is happening here at the moment because I am so busy, but over the next week or two I will become increasingly less busy and, as a consequence, I will probably be spending less and less time online. Therefore, I would like to wish everyone a happy, and hopefully increasingly drier, summer.

The website of the month for August 2007 is Heritage Week.

I have thought about this post a bit - there is a lot in it that I should have written about quite a while ago.

Reviews
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Erm...What happened to the ending? Too many questions are left unanswered and too many stories within the story are left unfinished.
The Simpsons Movie - Not much better than the stuff on television. The pig is undoubtedly the highlight.

News
Ireland - Summer has finally arrived, and after a brief investigation I declare Meteor the best mobile network in Ireland by far.
UK - There may have recently been lots of floods, but now the UK seems to be having better weather than Ireland. That's quite annoying.
Tenerife - For once, I'm glad I'm not in Tenerife.
Left-handedness - Apparently I'm naturally able to think quicker and fight better than 90% of people but I'm more prone to accidents and some diseases. Now that I'm virtually ambidextrous, do I still have the advantages of being left-handed but without the disadvantages?
Poisonous printers - I always thought that laser printers gave off a funny smell...

Actually, I thought about this post less than I thought I did. Oh well...I'm doing a lot of thinking at the moment, and it's hard to keep track of time here...

I haven't bothered linking all of the key words to their respective articles on Wikipedia because I am using a dial-up connection and therefore finding the articles would take ages. Also, this post could go in any category, so I have put it in the 'General' category.

Annoyingly, it is now the end of July. The extra-long, extra-hot and extra-fun post-GCSE summer holiday I had last year is making this generally wet summer seem shorter and more miserable than any previous summers...

I am in Ireland, as you may have guessed, read or even been told. Here, the broadband penetration is so shocking that mobile phone companies are now offering 'wireless broadband,' which looks suspiciously like HSDPA. Anyway, now I'm annoyed because the internet has distracted me enough to let my can of Bulmers get warm. I can't think of much else to say at the moment. I think I'll prepare my next blog post before I get access to the internet.

I was at this match...

Good times...

I was also at the match that lead to this replay, which lead to another replay. Clare should have won the first two matches.



Everyday happenings in Ireland...

This is my first post using my nice new post submission system. At the moment it is only just working enough for me to post - a lot of features are still not properly 'wired-up'. Anyway, this means that I should be able to post from Ireland.

It's time to reveal how much of the work on this blog that I posted about over a week ago has been done. I am pleased to say that I have done almost all of it and, surprisingly, quite painlessly. I had done everything I planned to do to the comments system and latest comments system within a day or two of announcing the imminent undertaking of the work, but it has taken until now for me to get the difficult bits of the administration system, including my second ever database and first ever cookie manipulation system, done. Hopefully I should get the basics, primarily a posting system, done before I go to Ireland (on Sunday). Things I need to do after that will include writing fancy administrator tools enabling me to add and remove users and delete comments without needing to manually edit the database and various files on the server. I probably won't get those things done while I'm in Ireland, and I'll be quite busy when I get back so I don't know when I'll do them. But, anyway, enjoy the vastly improved comments system - apart from a proper CAPTCHA, I don't think it needs improving for a long time.

I am pretty annoyed with all of the spoilers for the last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, so I have decided to make my own by combining them all:

Everybody marries each other and a huge number of random children with even more random names are produced, and then everyone dies (apart from the children).

I hope I haven't ruined the book for you too much.

I've just thought of a cool new feature I will add in the next week if I have time - a 'most popular posts today' bit on the sidebar. Building the feature shouldn't be too hard, but I need to find some way of automatically deleting data from past days. That shouldn't really be hard either, but it might still take too much time...

By the way, the latest comments system is now hugely improved - the titles and authors of the latest comments are shown, as well as the start of the comments (first 20 characters, in case you're curious). If you want to see it, submit a comment!

I'd just like to make clear what I plan to do to this blog before I become busy again (end of July and all of August). Firstly, I plan to add date and time data to comments. Secondly, I plan to improve the 'latest comments' system (invisible at the moment because there haven't been any comments recently), so that the date, time, title and the start of the latest comments are displayed. Thirdly, I plan to write a basic posting system for this new blog, so I can post to the blog from anywhere in the world. I will also try to find a way to make the video here valid XHTML. I will not finish adding posts from my old 'MSN Space' to this blog in the forseeable future (it's a very long process and there are lots of posts to move).

Anyway, don't forget that I may allow people other than me to post here. Posts not by me will be obvious because they will have a different name in a different style underneath them...

Check out the diagram of how Windows Live Messenger works here. Look closely at where the 'notification servers' are. If you don't believe that diagram, here is the same list of 'notification servers' on a MSDN blog. Dublin is misspelt as 'Dublic', but I've checked to see if there actually are any places called 'Dublic', and there aren't so it is therefore not unreasonable to assume that the author meant Dublin. Anyway, my point is that the other three 'notification servers' are in countries that you would expect, but the fourth and final 'notification server' is in Ireland.

This video is no longer embedded because it just won't work when I try to use valid XHTML. To see the video, you must now click here.
Here is a nice summary of my objections to the summary of the HTC Touch in the BBC News video (above):
- Windows hell? Surely Mac OS X is more like hell?
- Mimicked the iPhone's gesture interface? Do you really think HTC started development of the Touch after the iPhone announcement and still managed to release it before the iPhone?
- Of course you can't make the interface work! The 'Today' screen is not part of the TouchFLO cube! Stop trying to flick it in different directions!

By the way, I hate Nokia.

You may notice that, as a consequence of this post, the blog is no longer valid XHTML 1.1. This is because the BBC News player seems to have major problems with my valid method of embedding flash. I am currently working on a solution...

The website of the month for July 2007 is PDAdb.net. It really is the best PDA database ever...

While America has the Apple iPhone, Europe has the HTC Touch. I decided to join in the battle between the touchscreen smartphones and got myself a HTC Touch from Inkino. According to the people who work there, Inkino was the first shop in the world to have the Touch. Anyway, in conclusion the Touch is cool (I will not be using my computer much at all any more because the Touch can do anything) and I will soon be putting an iPhone/Touch poll on the main website. Here is a picture of my Touch:

Dubliners are clearly struggling to get used to the concept of underground tunnels talked about in this proposal. Ignoring the natural amazement in something so unheard of in Ireland, I think that linking the DART, the Luas and the Dublin Metro would be cool - it would eliminate the need to use the crazy road system in Dublin.

The PlusNet staff have kindly posted pictures of the floods in Sheffield here. You can also read about what happened at PlusNet during the floods here.

I have come across a lot of things recently that would struggle to make posts on their own, so I'm combining them into this big post:

Thierry Henry leaves Arsenal. While we will all miss Henry, I think he has been at Arsenal for long enough. A replacement will be found...

A carnival in Tottenham!? I would strongly advise avoiding going anywhere near Tottenham - it's not a very nice place at all...

ESA Mission Tracker - see where all of the satellites that ESA are invloved with are. A better satellite tracker can be found at n2yo.com.

Finally, I would like to announce that my exams are over.

I have now effectively finished this blog. The blog now works in all browsers, it is valid in every way and I have finally implemented the comment count system. I still need to work on a better system to prevent bots from posting comments, but that will be a separate project. I will start working on the admin side of the blog now, creating a simple interface that will allow me to easily add post authors and that will allow those authors (including myself) to easily write and submit posts anywhere in the world. As I think I said before, I have no immediate plans to give anybody other than myself the ability to post on this blog - it's just nice to have the option to do so if I wish.

Anybody up for another B-uprising? I am.

Despite the fact that, as Ken Livingstone said, "It's just a logo", I think Lord Redesdale's proposed boycott of London 2012 merchandise is worth taking part in.

Ever wanted to know what the adventures of James Bond would be like if he was homeless? Watch to find out...

What's even more scary than the concept of some of these weapons is the fact that at no point in the article is the feasibility of making the weapons questioned.

The Canadian Grand Prix is my favourite F1 event. However, that crash was like nothing I've ever seen before (in a bad way) - I was quite surprised that Kubica survived.

Both the RSS feed for this blog and the blog itself are now valid. I have put some handy buttons in the sidebar so you can enjoy this marvellous spectacle. If you use Firefox, you will notice that the stylesheet doesn't appear to be working. This is a problem with Firefox - as you can see, this blog is totally valid.

Click here for more information on the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis.

Click here to read an interesting article about WiTricity on the BBC website. People who know me will have heard me mention the discovery, of how to transmit electricity wirelessly, several times.

A few of minor software updates are on their way in this brief period of calm before the FP1 exam.

Development here will cease for the next few days, as I have exams.

The new RSS feed is up. Click here to see it. A link can always be found in the sidebar (on the left of the blog), and most browsers have an RSS button that will link to the feed while you are viewing the blog. At the moment, all of the posts on the blog are displayed in the feed - I may limit the number of posts displayed, in the future...

It's time for an update on the things I have done to this new blog! Firstly, I have moved all of the posts from my blosxom blog to this blog. I have also started moving posts from my very old 'MSN Spaces' (now called Windows Live Spaces) blog. The posts from the 'MSN Spaces' blog will take a while to move, as they are formatted quite differently to the way this blog needs them to be formatted (the blosxom posts required only one or two format changes). Secondly, I have added an interesting system, which you may recognise from Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, important messages are often displayed at the top of pages, and are accompanied by a 'dismiss' or 'hide' link. Similar notices can be found on this blog, and they are generated in two different ways. One message for old posts, which warns about potential broken links, is displayed for posts more than a certain number of posts older than the latest post. One of a number of messages can be 'called' using a different system, where the name of the message to be displayed is stored with the post. A separate database stores all of the messages, their titles and their style (they are all coloured to make them stand out, and also to make messages that are the same, easily identifiable). All of these messages are displayed both in the main blog and on the comments pages. Click here to see an example of both methods of displaying messages at work. Some features are still not finished yet - the RSS feed and comment the count system are the most obvious examples. The layout, however, is virtually finished until I substantially modify the blog again. To conclude, I would like to point out some features that the blosxom blog really needed, that you may not have noticed yet. The first feature is the 'Number of posts' section on the left which gives you a real post number selection, unlike the poor '15 or all' blosxom (a feature I had to build into blosxom, anyway). The second feature is at the bottom of every page - the links that let you view newer or older posts than those you are currently viewing. The third feature is at the bottom of every comments page, and not only allows you to view the 'previous' and 'next' posts, but gives you their names.

The website of the month for June 2007 is Blackle - save energy while searching the internet...

I have finally finished writing my new blog, as you can see. I am currently converting all of my posts for use with this new blog. As a consequence, you will notice that this blog doesn't yet go as far back in time as the old blog. The Blosxom blog will stay up for the moment because I haven't yet finished the layout of this new blog (I will be bringing back the sidebar) and because I haven't yet written the code for the RSS feed for this new blog (won't be too hard). While converting the posts, I will also be making some improvements their permanent URLs, which will mean that all of the RSS feeds will now be valid. Anyway, this new blog has a lot of new features, like the ability to have post authors other than me (only relevant people, however, otherwise this would no longer be my blog) and comment counts. As you can see, the comment counts have not yet been implemented because I need to first implement a bot-repelling system (their spam comments would cause too much damage to the comment count system). In conclusion, if things don't work, you can finally blame me.

Of course, Pirates of the Caribbean would be nothing without its music. Here is some 'behind the scenes' footage from the recording of the soundtrack for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest:


Click here to listen to an interview with Hans Zimmer (the main composer of the music for the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy) about the music for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is a great film. I don't care what anybody else says about the film, especially this ninja:

Clearly ninjas and pirates do not get along well.

Anyway, I seriously recommend watching the film, and then buying this CD and this DVD.

Watching hilarious videos today in the music studio, when I probably should have been revising for my music technology exam (not an exam that you can revise for much, anyway), reminded me that some of the videos I was watching have been uploaded to YouTube.

Here is a particularly impressive performance:


...and here is the performer 'raving in his chair':

(The chair is now broken).

This post could be considered the second part of a two-part post. The first part can be found here. This article gives a very detailed account of the final week and, more specifically, the final day of Sendo. I will always wonder what would have happened if Sendo had managed to finish the Sendo X2, which was a phone well ahead of any other phone at the time - as the Sendo X2 article on Wikipedia says, "The Sendo X2 was the first 'music mobile' ever announced..." and it was due to be released a matter of weeks after Sendo went into administration. If only Sendo hadn't been so badly financially damaged by Microsoft, it could have survived for long enough to release the Sendo X2 and, as a consequence, could have ended up being one of the largest mobile phone makers today.

Click here if you want to hear a sneak preview of the music in Pirates of the Carribbean: At World's End, which is due to be released soon. The website of Hans Zimmer, the composer of the themes for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and all of the music for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, as well as many other great films, is apparently coming soon...

Click here to see an article, on the ESA website, about the detection of a ring of dark matter by the Hubble Space Telescope. This picture should help to show why the ring exists. This film shows just how powerful the Hubble Space Telescope is, as it zooms in on the location of the ring of dark matter.

Click here to see a suitably short and gloomy news article. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Albania. Click here to see the full results.

Click here for a special preview of the Eurovision song contest, 2007. Click here to watch Eurovision live. The Octoshape plugin will be required to watch Eurovision live.

The website of the month for May 2007 is TheAppleMan (Arcane) - a brave attempt to save a Linux distro.

Three members of the Emptosoft website, Rory, Joe and Tom recently became prefects. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate them. Once again, I think that all of those promoted fulfil the original criteria.

I forgot to congratulate all of the members who were made prefects a while ago, so I would like to do so now. All of the prefects are now, on the Emptosoft website, members of a new 'Prefect' user class that I made last night, which means that I can now restrict parts of the website to prefects. As you can see, I was extremely bored last night. This post will probably mark the end of my largest group of consecutive posts in the 'school' category so far (4).

I have uploaded some photos from the music department trip to Paris, last weekend, to a new subgallery in the Emptosoft gallery. Click here to see them.

I am in Paris. There are lots of french people here. This is the third random place I have posted from. I can't think of much else to say at the moment...

Memory is quite random. This article about HD 209458 b managed to trigger a memory of a film I saw on the ESA website several years ago. Click here to find out more about the video and to watch it.

I thought I'd post from here (Tenerife, in case you haven't worked it out by now) for several reasons:
1. I put several webcams on the new Tenerife webcam page before I left, but my last blog post was written when the new Tenerife webcam page was a redirect, potentially causing some confusion. The direct link in my last post is no longer a direct link - it links to a page with several direct links to webcam images.
2. I want to announce that, hopefully, my next video podcast will be based on the famous coastal path in Tenerife from Los Cristianos to La Caleta (via Playa de las Americas and Costa Adeje). I have enough material between Playa de las Americas and La Caleta, but I will have to walk quite a distance to get enough material to include Los Cristianos.
3. I wanted to prove, for a second time, that I can post on my blog from anywhere in the world. The first post from a random place can be found here.

After a long wait, another webcam seems to have appeared in Playa de Fañabé, Tenerife. Click here to see the original webcam page. This is a direct link to the webcam image (for use with widgets and similar stuff). As you should be able to see when you follow the image link above, you can fiddle with the image url to increase quality and other settings (100% quality is amazing), but the url above sticks to the original settings - I want that webcam to be kept in service for as long as possible. Also, as you can see, I have created a Tenerife webcam page, which should hopefully always redirect you to a working webcam on Tenerife. I have created the new page for several reasons. Firstly, robots should not go to that page (it is blocked by my robots.txt) - stopping the direct image link from appearing on search engines and therefore stopping the webcam from being overused and withdrawn from service. Secondly, I always seem to be posting new Tenerife webcam links, so it seems sensible to always have the most up-to-date link in the same place.

I have used many Sysinternals programs over the years, but I have only just come across this Sysinternals screensaver: BlueScreen Screen Saver. The resaon I have never bothered reading the page about that screensaver before, is its particularly uninspiring name. Most experienced computer users refer to an instance of the dreaded 'Blue Screen' as a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) - even Wikipedia calls it the 'Blue Screen of Death'. Anyway, I would seriously recommend that you download and use any Sysinternals software that seems useful to you - Sysinternals software is so amazingly useful and of such a high quality that, as you should be able to see if you follow the links, Microsoft recently bought Sysinternals.

Click here to see the article about Sysinternals on Wikipedia.

Click here to see the BSOD I made for Doors.

Click here to find out about all of the mischief that is taking place today.

The website of the month for April 2007 is The Museum of Hoaxes - Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes Of All Time.

It hasn't been long since the last historic game between England and Ireland, but another historic game is upon us now. I'd like to take this opportunity to be honest - not even I was aware of any cricket in Ireland, until a few weeks ago (I always thought the weather prevented cricket from being played). Click here for a BBC report about the impact the Irish cricket team has had on the tournament and and also on people back in Ireland.

Some parts of this trailer cannot be described by any phrase other than this: 'What the...?'

Click here to watch some RTÉ webcasts. Unfortunately, the webcast service does not appear to be particularly related to any of the RTÉ channels - the programmes seem pretty random and generally only run from 1pm until about midnight. The highlights of the day occur when RTÉ News is shown live. Click here for the webcast schedule. Even more unfortunately, not all of the programmes are available to everyone - some, such as the live 'Euro 2008 Qualifiers' programme currently being broadcast, require an Irish IP address for you to watch them. I am currently trying to find an Irish proxy server to solve the problem.

Let's face it; Japanese technology is amazing - even the final frontier is now being conquered by Japanese technology. Hinode, a Japanese solar observatory launched in September 2006, is sending back never-before-seen images showing that the sun's magnetic field is much more turbulent and dynamic than previously known. Click here for an article by ESA about the information Hinode has sent back so far. Click here for a page, on the ESA website again (the ESA website is, in my opinion, the best of all of the space agency websites), with links to amazing high-resolution images of the solar chromosphere, and amazing animations.

Not only was yesterday a day when most of the world celebrated Irish culture (one of Ireland's great contributions to the modern world), but yesterday was a good day for Irish sport:
- Cricket
- Rugby (almost)

Anyway, in other news, the first F1 race of the 2007 season will take place today.

Click here to read about quantum code being wirelessly transmitted between La Palma and Tenerife (both members of the Canary Islands). Click here for a picture I took of Tenerife, or more specifically, Pico del Teide (which you should recognise from the Emptosoft website).

Click here to see a BBC News report about a very expensive pizza. Personally, I don't like it. You can't beat the plain old Margherita from Pizza Hut. My local hut is now accepting online orders! Unfortunately, the online order system looks rather complicated, so making a 'Pizza' key combo program may be difficult...

In other news, a cool-looking species of leopard has been discovered after genetic research proved that the clouded leopards on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo are reasonably different from their cousins found on mainland southeast Asia. This newly discovered species is very interesting because the leopards are fairly large and not very rare - there are between 8000 and 18,000 in the wild. Click here to see news report on the new species by the BBC.

I have just found this plugin, which looks very interesting. I can see myself having a lot of fun with it - especially the 'Open/Close CD-ROM door' function. Perhaps I can modify it, so it can overclock the CR-ROM drive speed...

Click here to see a picture of the first ever Pizza Hut. Also, the trivia section of the Pizza Hut article on Wikipedia has some very interesting facts.

Finally, Pizza Hut have significantly updated their website and they now have an online order system. Click here to find out about how the system works. Unfortunately, not all stores are taking online orders yet. Hopefully, soon, I will write a program that lets you easily submit your regular order to Pizza Hut with a single click or a button combo ([Ctrl] + [Alt] + [P] has already been suggested as a suitable combo).

Here are random interesting stories from RTÉ:
- Does anybody even check what laws are created and destroyed in Ireland? Blame the Guinness!
- First the Swansea Cork ship gets sold, and now this mess!
- This is not good for my health...

I thought I might as well link to this nice page on the St Ignatius College website, while it still has my name and a summary of my GCSE results on it. (See just above half way down the page, in the GCSE 'Notable performances' section: 'M Hogan - 6 x A*, 3 x A, 2 x B').

I have only just realised, this evening, how special that page is - not many people are featured on parts of the internet they don't control for 'noteable' academic performances. As a consequence, I have now have archived the page in several ways...

The website of the month for March 2007 is RTÉ. The RTÉ website has been revamped, and is now very good - why not watch RTÉ News live?

Unfortunately, there were no snakes on any trains today, but you could easily have been fooled into thinking there were - the train service between London and Cardiff today (the day of the 2007 Carling Cup Final) was absolutely dreadful. I spent most of my day on trains - I woke up very early to get on a train, but the train only arrived at Cardiff Central just in time for the match (the journey took about 5 hours). After the match I ran out of the Millennium stadium (Chelski won, so there was no reason to stay) and just managed to catch a train, which took over an hour longer than it was meant to take to get back to London. Anyway, I'm back at home now, trying to work out where the day has gone, why Drogba's offside goal was allowed, and why Emmanuel Adebayor got sent off...