Archive for April, 2008

Puppy Dog

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

We took a trip to Huddersfield yesterday and returned with a seven week old puppy. She’s half Border Collie - the mother is a rescue dog who started getting fat when they got her home and then produced four large puppies, so the identity of the father is unknown.

Brimham Rocks

Friday, April 25th, 2008
Brimham Rocks

Brimham Rocks has been on my list of favourite places for a long time, so it came as a bit of a surprise when I realised we’d never taken Mia there. We’ve put that right more than once recently.

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A New Toy

Friday, April 18th, 2008
W123 Driveshaft

Can you guess what it is from the picture? It’s a driveshaft. Not very exciting to most people I suppose, but if you’d been waiting six weeks for the bloody thing to turn up, you might see it my way.

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It Crashes

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

Any software developer will be able to tell tales of bug reports that don’t give enough information to reproduce the problem. My all-time favourite said just this: “When you take off from the aircraft carrier in the F4 Phantom, it crashes.” Not an unusual scenario - a complex flight-sim written entirely in 80×86 assembler tends to either work perfectly, or crash.

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Mika Dog, 1995-2008

Sunday, April 13th, 2008
Mika

Sadly, a very important member of the family is no longer with us. Apart from the postman, Mika was everybody and everything’s best friend.

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Inquiry

Saturday, April 12th, 2008

Why are hardware manufacturers so incompetent when it comes to software? The wonderful message below was followed by three more equally insane error dialogs.

Inquiry

Super Mario Bros in Javascript

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

This excellent piece of work raised a smile - the first level of Super Mario Bros implemented very neatly in Javascript. It’s 35K for the whole lot, compressed down to 14K. For comparison, the small screenshot in the article is 24K!

Mobile Web “Acceleration”

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

How do you make web browsing faster on a GPRS connection? The answer seems to be by injecting huge blocks of javascript into pages, turning 6KB of well-formed XHTML into 23KB of junk that refuses to render because it’s invalid.

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