Fruit

Honestly, the only funny strip I’ve ever read on Penny Arcade.

Monday, May 31st 2004 at 11:33 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Seance

Just finished watching this on Channel 4, I do like Derren Brown. Mostly because he always admits that what he’s doing is complete mince and it was quite clear throughout the whole programme that this especially was.

It was fun though to see the students reaction, they all certainly seemed to believe it was real. Of course, maybe they were all actors, but I’d at least like to think the whole thing wasn’t that obvious and he really is that good at suggesting things to people.

I of course did want to see their reaction when he brought Jane in at the end, that was a missed opportunity.

Considering the dearth of good entertainment on TV these days, it’s always nice just to see something like this. Most people probably just dismiss it as pop television, or pointless because obviously it’s all made up. But I think the point with Derren Brown has always been that it’s made up, but that people are suggestable enough that you can make them believe anything.

Monday, May 31st 2004 at 10:44 pm / TV / Permalink / Post Comment »

Mixture

Today is a bank-holiday, which meant a working day of just 9am till 1pm and only three staff (myself included). That’s the kind of day I could get used to, especially since it let me sleep for the rest of the afternoon.

Been looking on ebay for 300 and 400 disc DVD changers, since Sony don’t seem to market them in this country. Seems like an odd decision, do they figure that people in the UK don’t buy that many DVD’s?

Speaking of items not marketed in the UK, why does nobody sell The Clapper or equivelant here? Again, ebay comes up trumps, but it only works with US plugs/voltages. Does anyone know of a UK version that I just can’t find on Google?

Soup for dinner, forgot to go shopping, so that’s all that’s in the house. The lentil soup smells really nice, but it tastes funny. Might be the mixture with the Irn-Bru.

Monday, May 31st 2004 at 8:13 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

24

Finally getting around to watching the second season of 24, which I bought on DVD as soon as it was released all those months ago. Only on the second episode, but it still has the ability to get me on the edge of my seat. The music alone has the power to get me on edge. They certainly know how to increase the tension.

Of course, once I’ve finished this one, I’ll have to buy the third season so I’m ready to watch that in another year.

Sunday, May 30th 2004 at 6:56 pm / TV / Permalink / Post Comment »

Strict

As a practice session for the Bearthing site and administration system, which will all be done like this, I just finished recoding all the HTML here by hand, using strict 4.01 HTML. All CSS, and no tables. It validates too. If you’re geeky and care about that sort of thing (generally I don’t).

I did all this while half-asleep and battling a killer headache. And now I’m done, I feel no satisfaction whatsoever. Which makes me wonder why I bothered when I could have just gone to bed.

Sunday, May 30th 2004 at 1:43 am / My Blog / Permalink / Post Comment »

Panda

Tonight I actually used the phrase, "I don’t want Panda! I want Lobster!"

Certainly a sentence I never expected to use in my lifetime.

Monday, May 24th 2004 at 12:06 am / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Excerpt

“Nick stood up from the chair which had occupied him for the past couple of hours and walked towards the door and bed. He flicked the switch to the lights and found himself just standing there in the dark, as his head filled with thoughts of what once was. A few minutes went by and he rested his weight on the wall as the emotion became difficult to cope with.

He thought of the laughter that used to ring throughout the room, the love that once occupied the four walls and the promise that the place held when he and Sarah moved in. A promise that now seemed so distant and unattainable that he wondered how it had ever happened in the first place, or if he could ever get it back.

As the moments ticked by, a tear swelled in the corner of his eye, and Nick realised it was time to sleep. That was one place where he could hide from the darkness that now seemed to perpertually surround him.”

Tuesday, May 18th 2004 at 10:10 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Arrrrrgggghhhhh

“FilePlanet Subscribers enjoy ad-free browsing”

And slow-ass downloads.

Thursday, May 13th 2004 at 6:02 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Answers

Some questions have come up regarding Bearscript that I was going to post in the comments but I thought I’d lay some of it out here instead for all to see.

1. Why? I mean, what’s the point?
The reason for existance is simple, it allows me to give everybody full customisation over whatever services they take. So rather than just being able to edit the HTML on a Chatbear board or a Blogbear blog, you can edit all the code too. And write your own. And take advantage of all the pre-written code for doing all the things you’re likely to want to do. Or you can just edit the HTML. Or just choose a pre-designed template.

2. Most people just want a service that works, free forums, blog or whatever - isn’t this more than they’ll actually need?
Then don’t touch Bearscript. The level of customisation can range from choosing all pre-defined designs and functionality, through to editing HTML, perhaps tinkering with functionality through the visual code editor right up to full on code editing of every line.

We’ll be catering for all levels of user and we’ve got plenty of innovative ways to let users without HTML or programming knowledge to still go about modifying the way their site looks and works. Some users might find that they’re writing code without really knowing it (much as millions of users use Excel formulas every day without knowing they’re actually doing basic programming).

3. Won’t somebody who has the ability to edit code already have their own domain and server and just use PHP/Perl/some other language instead to do what they need?
Very possibly. But they can also take advantage of all the pre-written components that will be available here instead of writing everything from scratch. Put their domain on our servers and use what they need.

I just have to make sure and make a compelling argument for why we’re worth using. Just like any new product.

4. Won’t people with the ability to code just demand full control, and really want to experiment?
Let’s hope so! There’s very little I’ll be holding back or that you’ll be unable to do and I’ll be doing my best to build an environment that caters to the geek group as much as the granny group.

We’re already providing many tools for website construction. The boards, the IRC channels, the blogs, the consolidated user system. Eventually the image gallery and perhaps more. But they’re all seperated, there’s no automatic connection that enables my board link to automatically appear on my blog when I create it. Or even a way to add new pages to my blog, like “About Me” or similar. If I wanted to put a list of my latest blog posts on the boards, or the latest updated topics from my boards on my blog, could I? No.

Internally, there’s things I’ve done in the past to enable such things. It’s possible for example to put a list of the people in your IRC channel on your boards, but this is a very isolated process, there’s no real connection between the services. I could keep enabling items like that everywhere, but it would get messy pretty quickly. Therefore the need to standardise each thing like that was necessary and that’s where Bearscript comes in.

The original idea came from Lego. Small number of bricks, millions of combinations. With Bearthing, it’s the same way. A list of your blog posts, that’s a brick. A list of your favourite websites (or links, friends, books), that’s a brick. A list of the topics posted on your board, or even the content of those posts, all bricks. Now what Bearthing allows you to do is create a page and then stick those bricks on it. You might be creating that page manually in Dreamweaver, and simply dropping in tags to indicate where you want bricks to appear, uploading it to us via FTP and being done. Or you might be creating that page entirely through our wizards, picking your design, picking your bricks and arranging them where you want. Or you might just be saying “I want a blog” or “I want a messageboard” and being done with it.

The key thing to note about the bricks is that they’re all written in Bearscript and that all of them will be source editable by the user. None of them will be hidden away. There will of course by stuff that is (you won’t have the ability to add or delete whatever you want from the users table for example), but nowhere that should have any impact. And if you want to create all new Bearscript to access a database you’ve created yourself (which you will of course get full control over) then that’s fine too.

I get the nice, clean, extensible system I need to make administration simple and the user gets as much or as little control as they require. From granny to geek, everyone’s a winner.

I’d say more, but I don’t want to give the whole game away. But if anybody has any more questions, whack them in the comments.

Tuesday, May 11th 2004 at 9:44 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Example

Here you go, this is some Bearscript that would query a table called test in the database called bear for the three fields id, name and age. No condition specified, so it would just bring back all records and then print them out until readrow returned zero and therefore no records were left to read. For extra fun, we’ll make the name field all capitals.

text = new text()
db = new database("bear")

while db.readrow() == 1 then
  output db.value("id") & " - "
  output text.uppercase(db.value("name")) & " - "
  output db.value("age") & "<br>"
wend


And here’s the code in action.

Sunday, May 9th 2004 at 4:50 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Updates

Made a few changes to the ol’ blog. I replaced the WOPR graphic in the top corner with some funny faces. My excuse is that it was 5am in the morning and I was bored, and I’m sticking to it. I also registered and pointed the domain www.joshuacalledme.com here too.

Finally I’ve removed the Amazon links from below each post because its choices of DVD were always a little suspect. I don’t know how many times it suggested New Sex Now for seemingly no reason.

Unless there’s a sexual undercurrent to every post I make that I’m not aware of.

Thursday, May 6th 2004 at 6:23 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Language

It appears, that after three years of planning and trying, that Bearscript is at last reality. Despite seriously considering throwing in the towel on a number of occassions (including as recently as this past weekend), code written in it is at last compiling correctly.

Most of the major language features have now been implemented (most of the remaining work in that area concerns objects), meaning I’m about to embark on the process of writing all the inbuilt functions, which could potentially number in the hundreds. These will cover all the main uses of the language, database access, image manipulation, HTML & XML control, string and math functions etc.

After that, I’ve got some error checking to tighten up (to make it as easy as possible to work out where your errors are occurring) and a boatload of documentation to write.

All meaning that there’s no shortage of work left to do. But the important part was the compiler, and that works. Everything from this point on is just sugar.

Thursday, May 6th 2004 at 6:14 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »

Moved

Well that’s the whole network moved to the new server, now hosted in London Docklands. So if you’re in the UK, it should be much faster for you.

Was a bit of a nightmare, from a messed up partition setup to bad decisions on my part regarding the way I transferred over the content from the old server, it took way longer than it should have done.

But the cost savings are significant, so it’ll be worth it in the long run.

Sunday, May 2nd 2004 at 3:38 am / General / Permalink / Post Comment »