Brussened

Anyone heard this word before? I'm told it's a Yorkshire word meaning "to be full to bursting", but I can't claim to have ever heard it before, and googling for it returns nothing.

So there you have it. Brussened. I say we start a fashion. Your homework for this week is to use the word "brussened" in polite conversation with at least 3 people in the next week. If you have a blog, use the word "brussened" in it. If you have a website, stick the word on it. In fact, make a page with lots of words such as "XXX hardcore fuck cunt sex cock facial cumshot" and have, in big letters in the middle of the screen the word "brussened", and submit the whole lot to Google.

Brussened.

Har!

Just been demonstrating. Afterwards someone got their laptop out to show us what was wrong with it and see if we could give him some advice. He was using Windows XP Home Edition (*shudder*). The machine looked like it was quite healthy, it didn't take too long to start up, but when it reached the user screen and helpfully prompted with "Click your username to continue" there were no usernames to click. None at all. Not one. Zero. Count them: None.

I was interested by this. We tried all the usual Windows hacks (trying the Administrator username, the Guest account etc) but they were all securely locked down. Typical. After we'd determined that Windows needed to be reinstalled I asked what was the last thing he did before it "broke". "I'll show you on this computer" he said, pointing to a public workstation. Guardedly I replied "okay... but don't break it!"

He logged in and then started to search through the menus but was unable to find what he was looking for. I could see what was coming next but waited patiently. Eventually he explained: "It was just this thing in the menu and I deleted the username from it".

"Was this 'thing' by any chance called the 'Control Panel'?"

The stupidity of some people amazes me. He deletes his user account off the computer and then wonders why it doesn't work. What amazes me is the fact that Windows let him. Home Edition is marketed for, well, for home users. How difficult would it be to have a tiny bit of code that looks like this before they perform the delete?

That took me about 30 seconds to write. I even wrote it in VB so it would be usable on a Windows machine. Personally I am of the opinion that if I say "delete this user" then I am big enough and stupid enough to suffer the consequences if it were the only user on the system, fair enough. A system that tells me to go to hell when I try to do something slightly odd would piss me off something chronic and I would hate the above code to exist on MY system - but that's because I'm a power user. When I do something slightly stupid there's (usually) a good reason for it. When a Home Edition user does something stupid it's because they're stupid, and so a piece of code like that above is essential.

People never cease to amaze me.

Natural Language Processing

Went to the public lecture last night on Natural Language Processing. It was very interesting, providing a concise overview of what research has been done in the area, its findings, practical uses for these findings and what research still needs to be done. I find NLP fascinating, although I suspect the maths side of it would do my head in if I were to do any work in that field :) Anyway that's an item ticked on my "must do before leaving Aberystwyth" list. I've been meaning to go to a guest lecture since the first week of my first year here, and last night I finally did it. That's the nice thing about being just across the road from the campus, it's easy to do these things.

Afterwards I got soaked, standing in the dense fog that had descended upon Aberystwyth, talking to a mate for an hour. Oops.

Managed to get a really nice long sleep last night. Mmmmm, sleep! And now it is my day of doom. By which I mean Tuesday. I hate Tuesdays, half of my weekly stuff happens on Tuesday. It goes something like this:

Demonstrate, hour off, badminton, immediately demonstrate again, lecture, hour off, lecture.

I'm constantly walking up and down the hill for those hours "off". Plus badminton really takes it out of me. And each time I do the demonstrating, that's basically an hour of walking around. I must get 90% of my weekly exercise on Tuesday alone.

That's Right, Kids

I'm finally getting over this blasted cold. My sinuses are settling back down, my head has stopped hurting and my throat feels fine. But the important difference - the one that tells me I am getting better - is the fact that I woke up starving hungry. And I mean starving. Nothing was getting between me and my cornflakes this morning, not even the fact that I didn't have any.

I dashed to the COOP and bought some. One big bowl of cornflakes later and I was still hungry. Good job I also bought bread while I was there. Two slices of toast later and here I am, feeling pretty good and full of life.

Oh Yes, The Tables Have Turned

Now feel the wrath of my antibodies, Rhinovirus Picornaviridae

Thanks, Flatmates

Tonight was the first night since I can remember where I actually felt tired around 11 and fell asleep at that time. It was perfect. In bed and asleep by 11pm, all ready for my 9 o'clock lecture tomorrow. So why, then, am I now awake? Because two of my flatmates thought it would be a great idea to have a nice loud conversation outside my door at 1:25am. I woke up toward the end of their conversation as they parted. I still had a good chance of falling asleep again, except then my body decided to throw a wobbly. My temperature shot right up and I was dripping with sweat, even when I threw the covers off me. I got up after half an hour of sweating and sat on the end of the bed waiting to cool off.

Dying of thirst I went and got a drink. It's probably just as well that I wasn't asleep at this point because one of the flatmates who'd had the conversation (he's a bit of a twat, I don't like him) decided to have another loud conversation in the hallway. He asked "how you feelin' now? Shit?" To which I replied "well a few minutes ago I was asleep and feeling nothing." and sourly fucked off to the kitchen to get a drink. Then when I came back to my room I realised, all of a sudden, that it's freezing in here. At the time I was hot it felt like the room was roasting, but it's actually really cold. I believe that is what is called a fever, so I took a paracetamol - they're supposed to be good for fevers.

Odd thing is my nose seems to have started controlling itself. Fantastic. The bad news is, my has started hurting again, my ears hurt, my head still hurts, I've started feeling like I'm going to throw up and I am dizzy again. This "cold" has hit me hard.

RSS and XHTML

I know at least 2 people read my humble little blog via RSS, and I also know that the code that handles RSS on my blog is utter shite. So I decided it was about time to fix it.

In fact, after the modifications I made to the blog script on the last update, the RSS got completely destroyed. It's a good job I noticed really.

I did some work to find out a little bit more about RSS, and then set to work fixing the bug with the formatting. Anyone who reads this via RSS will have noticed that everything appears on one line, with no gaps between blocks of differently formatted text, making it rather unpleasant to read.

Not anymore. The formatting is now on par with what appears on the website. Paragraphs appear as paragraphs, blocks of differently formatted text have space between them.

While playing with RSS I came across another RSS toy: This time it's for Firefox. It's called Sage and it isn't a bad little aggregator. I'm still a big advocate of Bloglines though.

As well as fixing RSS, I've also modified some of the code that parses the blogs into HTML to try and make it a little more XHTML compliant. There are issues because this code was designed for HTML-4.01 Transitional, not XHTML-1.0 Strict. That's why the page often does not validate on the W3C Validator (if you've tried). It will do eventually, as soon as I find the time and energy.

Oh and another thing, not that it affects any of you lot, but I've also added some extra features to the new blog page which make my life considerably easier. Now I can preview my writing before making it live, and I can also save it as a draft and reload it at a later date. Very handy.

My reason for all this work? At some point I'd like to release the script as open-source freeware. I say "at some point" because at the moment I'd be embarassed to let anyone see the code as it's a bit of a mess; although it is getting better with each of these updates.

Anyway, enjoy the RSS. If you're using one of those inferior browsers that doesn't autodiscover RSS feeds in the page, then the link is http://nic-nac-project.de/~lowey/cgi-bin/blog.cgi?mode=rss

A Rh+

Got my blood donor's card today, which means that my blood passed all the tests. I do not have Aids, HIV, Hapatitis B, CJD, BSE, OBE, CCJs or whatever else they test for. It also means I finally find out what blood-type I am. I've been wondering for a long time. And here it is: A+, the second most common blood-type there is. My blood is as common as muck! There was a tiny possibility that I could have had a very rare type as my Mum has one of the rarest types (one of the negative types, I can't remember which) but, of course, it was always unlikely that I would inherit it. Still it's good to know that I can give blood to people who are A+ or AB+ (about 36% of the population).

It is an interesting fact that many people who are of type O or A do not donate because their blood is of a common type, so they assume their blood isn't needed. But to quote a website I was reading about blood-types:

A Little Cosmetic Surgery

Oh look, LoweyBlog has gone all different! Thursday night I was having trouble sleeping, and so started poking around with some images. Then I found myself writing a basic XHTML page. Then, before I knew what I was doing I'd delved deep into a stylesheet for the page, made a logo, and got a basic design... When I woke up Friday morning I began tweaking and ironing out the few minor bugs (all Internet Explorer related, what a surprise).

Well I'd done that much, I now had a new layout ready to go in the blog - except that's where the problem lay. The blog script has always been a bit of a hack. In fact it's one gigantic hack. So all the HTML for the blog was, that's right, in the script. I had to write a load of code to seperate the page structure from the code and make it sane. Then, with the change in design, I needed to make a few changes to the underlying blog. I've spent most of this evening ironing out the bugs (hopefully I got them all) and then very quietly uploading all the images, stylesheets, templates etc etc. The transfer was very simple, which makes a pleasant change.

Anyway I hope you all like the new layout. One of my many plans is to, at some point, make some other layouts and allow you to choose which one you want to use from the menu. Why? Because I can. Oh, and because it'd be good for showing off my 1337 design skillz0rz.

:1 s/Febraury/February/

Gotta love Vim. I've fixed all the incorrectly marked months now. Still ill :( I feel a lot better today but my sinuses are still killing me. This is typical of me getting ill. I recover from the cold quickly, but my sinuses just never get over it. If they've not sorted themselves out by Wednesday I'll see the doctor and ask about antibiotics as I'm not playing silly buggers this year.