02.26.07
Pigeon
Eatting a pigeon and peach pie for lunch I am remindered that pigeon tastes like a livery bit of rabbit, which much the same texture as the latter. Possibly not suited to pie - stayed very dry.
Ring pull size
many things need commenting on in this field (for example why is it the new washing powder always makes things as clean as the old one did in it’s advert), but have you noticed that the hole created by the ringpull in drinks cans has got much bigger? This means you drink faster and thus, possibly drink more.
The thing that has caused me to notice this is that Idris Fiery has an old-school narror openning. Brilliant.
02.23.07
Sigs
Signiture files. I think they are a little silly, especially when yu get huge disclaimers etc, but I can see the point. However on forums, people seem to use them to blag about things, and it’s completely pointless. Some might argue that you can use them to spot who actually has the kit and the knowledge, but I think thats rubbish - you can fake it all after all
I think their main purpose is for bragging. In the name of internet geekdom, I present several which have caught my eye in the last few days. People fill them with the most amazing junk, huge images, lists so long thatthe forums are unreadable, etc etc etc. Idiots the lot of them 
First up - on a mobile phone site, I was amazed to see the demarkation of which phones were free and which were paid for (presumably so people didn’t think him/her a sucker for having some of them)
Mobile Phones History
HTC: TyTn
Nokia: N-Gage*, 9300i, N70*, E61.
Motorola: StarTac 85, StarTac 130, V66, V600, A835, V635, V3*, V3x*, K1*.
Samsung: A100, A300, S100, E700, D500.
SonyEricsson: T610, T630*, K750i, K800i, Z610i.
*Free phones
Next up - what animals you keep! There was a link to a reptile rescue centre I cut out because I think thats quite a valid thing, unlike…
<2:2 baird rats, 2:4:2corns, 2:2 royals, 1:1 beautys, 1 burm, 1:2 boas, 1 yellow rat, 1:1 bloods, 1;2 bearded dragons, 1;1 night anoles, 1:1 green anoles, 1:1water dragons 26 terrapins
What there hell are 2:4:2corns? a football team arrangement? Odd.
One I did like however was a simple oneliner on a problem solving forum that says lots about out education system, company structures, etc etc.
“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.”
By fa rthe worst offenders however are… geeks! Now I’m geek and proud, but the day I write something like this in my sig, shoot me.
P4-3.4C @ 218*16, 3.7, ASUS-P4C800E-Dlx, HyperX3200-4×512 Rdn9800 XT/AC-AT3 AM2 4600X2 @226*12, 2.72, DFI Infinity M2, GSkill DDR2-800-2×512 doing (@906|5,5,5,15),ATI X850XT Opti 170@ 250*10, 2.5, BFG-VNF4U, OCZ XTC 3200Plats-2G, ATI X600XT. Samsung 160GB(Sata300) Tower Layers Brisbane 3600X2 AM2 2697, ECS RS485, PQI 5400VR(256×2) @680 CL4 A64-4000-Sandy, MsiRS480 GeIL GD3200 @ DDR416
Holy fuck! Whats all that rubbish about?
Dissolve the BBC?
I’d rather eat my own shoes, every morning, than loose the BBC. It’s one of those things that might loose huge amounts of money, be available to people who don’t pay for it (how do you regulate who can view news.bcc.co.uk) and have a million and one other problems, but it improves society in so many ways. In The Wisdom Of Crowds the argument that by everybody giving a little society can benefit more that the total sum is argued, and I would agree. The BBC gives a huge amount, and I wouldn’t loose it for the world.
02.21.07
Audioscrobbler and Songbird?
I’ve replaced iTunes with Songbird, but annoyingly I can’t get the audioscrobbler pluggin to work annoyingly. Anybody else had any luck?
02.20.07
The dangers of htaccess, wordpress, and rss feeds (or How To DOS attack your own site for shame and humiliation)
On friday night I decided to do a bit of a clean up, and removed some old code which was knocking about from the previous incarnation of coldclimate. In doing so I set myself up for a big fall, and caused a few headaches (and I lot of ear ache for my very wonderful hosts demandtechnologies). How you might ask - surely just deleting things means people get errors and not eat all your bandwidth? Surely it should go down if anything because you’re serving up (or rather not) the thing you deleted?
All very well put, but to get the fnky URLs that Wordpress is so handy for (I’d mujch rather have http://www.coldclimate.co.uk/2007/02/18/site-buggered/ than http://www.coldclimate.co.uk/?id=34567 ) you need to put a little file called htaccess into your directory. What this does is sets up rules for redirecting, so people going to http://www.coldclimate.co.uk/2007/02/18/site-buggered/ actually see a page which is served up by http://www.coldclimate.co.uk/index.php using the information that was passed as “2007/02/18/site-buggered/” in the url. Clever huh?
All goes well until it turned out I’d deleted the code which pulled in my posts from LibraryThing.com and last.fm via rss and displayed them. each and every page opened on coldclimate sent the page off looking for a file which is couldn’t file, and because it wasn’t there it redirected to index.php, which was then pulled, causing it to go looking for the rss feed, and on and on and on. Basically each page somebody tied to view caused 8megs of pages to be pulled form coldclimate, and fed back to itself.
Grand result - site ate up all the bandwidth going from the hosting, making it look like the entire site (as in building, not website) was being attacked, and it was all being directed at my site. Also, because it was repeatedly trying to pull other peoples stuff, they probably got upset too, thinging I was trying to get hold of their stuff 80million times an hour.
So - lessons learned. Watch your logs like a hawk! Code carefully, with error trapping. Include “RewriteOptions MaxRedirects=X" where X is the maximum number of times you don’t mind it having.
Be prepared to pull your whole site down at no notice to fix it, because you are screwing other people too.
02.19.07
Site un-buggered
OK, so I managed to DOS attack my own site. I’ll write up a bit about it later when I’m not tired and tireder, but basically a combination of htaccess, deleting files and some jiggery pokery, I managed to create an infinate loop within my own site. *head V’s desk moment*
02.18.07
Site buggered
Well, it looks like something has hidiously wrong with the site and it was eatting all the bandwidth for everybody. In fact, I got barred, because I ate 76GB in a couple of days.
Possibly it is now fixed. Maybe.
02.16.07
Darwin at work
Making your kids fight each other for your own entertainment - sick.
Filming it and and saying “I didn’t see any harm in toughening them up. I done the same with my own children.“ when interviewed - very very stupid.
02.13.07
Kilroy-silk is a nutter
As if we need more proof, it would appear he belives that M+S use bent mirrors to make people lok slimmer. Possible, technically, but very unlikely as you pick up on slight visual disturbences because they “feel odd”. Nutter.
DVD hacking live!
Wanna watch/read history in the making? It appears doom9 memebers have broken hd-dvd. watch the coversations roll.
02.08.07
3 column joy
Everybody eants 3 eqal height columns, with three different coloured backgrounds, because it is the halcyon of web layouts. A List Apart shows you the way forward. Old coldclimate.co.uk used to use three columns, and it was a pain and rendered buggily on some browsers, but aparently this will work better.
02.07.07
Lazyweb - a neat idea
Here’s a neat idea. Just post an idea, and see if somebody is interested, then follow it’s progress with RSS because its Wordpress backed. Neat.
Strange banana
This is very wierd, and a very silly idea, but ultimately might be useful. Everytime you reload you get a different site layout which has been generated. Strange indeed, strangebanana.com in fact.
02.06.07
Fuck Vista
The more I hear about Vista, the more I worry, and it appears I am far from the only one. So here we go - I’m going to make a mini-stand, and try and get others to do the same.
“I will not install Vista on any of my machines, and I will not help anyone install it. Where possibly I will not use it, and shall continue to promote other operating systems which I feel are less restrictive of peoples freedom and the ability to use computers for what they want, not what they are told.”
Fuck Microsoft and their pervasive shit.
02.05.07
BBC clocks
Strictly one for the geeks - I love these flash representations of old BBC (and more) clocks.
Unfeasibly easy spicy chicken
Dead easy chicken for boys to cook on their own (possibly even after a beer). Invented because we had a jar of really crappy lime pickle which was mostly chilli and very greasy.
Chop up as much raw skinned chicken as you need (roughly a handful per person), of whatever bits of chicken you like (breast would seem traditional but boned leg would be juicier).
Throw it in a plastic food bag with a couple of heaped teaspoons of lime pickle. Squidge it all around and leave it for a few hours, sqidging every so often to mix it all up.
Tip it all out onto a piece of tinfoil, and thwak it under a medium to hot grill. due to lime pickle being oily stuff, you should not need to lube the foil. Turn it once or twice, and once blackened on the outside and cooked right through (cut the biggest chunk in half and see).
Pile it into warmed pitta bread or tortias with a hand full of salad (tossed in yoghurt possibly) and away you go.
Blend for your happyness
A few weeks ago I bought a blender for about 12 quid. I nearly bought a “smoothie maker”, but decided not to for 2 basic reasons. 1) I want to make other things in my blender (such as soup). 2) every eejit seems to swear by smoothies, and I think they are nothing more than milkshakes.
Anyway, I have completely falled in love with stuffing the blender wth fruit and veg, blending till smooth (often adding a little fruit juice just to get things started) and then pouring it all through the sieve to remove the pulp. The oddest things go well together, for example this afternoon I had in one:
A cucumber (a whole one)
A kiwi (whole again)
a few mint leaves
a spoonful of honey
and a splash of pinapple to help lubricate it all to beginwith.
So good! Nothing that green can be unhealthy. Nothing.
02.01.07
If you’re going to rip the piss out of the the president…
…do it in front of his face. In front of the rest of the world, and be funny about it.
