My parents were, if nothing else, organised at all times. I don’t recall at any point realising that they had no idea what was going on, or that they weren’t absolutely in charge of what we did. In contrast, Eric and I muddle through day-to-day, just about keeping it together — sometimes we forget to …
Blog
a thousand words: GETting and POSTing
Another day, another bunch of functionality added to a thousand words. With the main public-facing interfaces largely complete, I have moved on to the guts of the site’s user interaction. The site now has working, but ugly, implementations of: E-mail address / password authentication, with cookie support based on a secret phrase generated at registration. …
Adrift in Time
As Mark pointed out to me, it’s probably rather strange to pick for your Best Man someone who you’ve seen only three times in as many years. But although some small part of my brain insists that some time has passed since I left university, it’s easily overruled by the rest. I mean, graduation was …
Politics, meet Videogames. Everybody Loses.
On Sunday, Britain’s Defence Secretary Liam Fox called for the upcoming Medal of Honor game to be banned by retailers (BBC). Apparently he finds it “hard to believe any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game”, which shows quite a remarkable lack of understanding of the people he is …
A Farewell to Summer
The day began with mist rolling in over the sea, but before long it turned to morning drizzle and on into a rainy afternoon; big, lazy raindrops falling in patches from the sky. Then as evening came the mist rolled in once more, cloaking everything in dampness and white. Here by the shores of the …
My Longest-Running Bug
In March 2007, a long-running project that I was working on was drawing to a close. A much busier colleague of mine was struggling with his workload, and since I wasn’t too busy, he passed a simple job on to me. That job was to build a software emulator for a bit of hardware they’d …
The Cautionary Tale of Sultan Hamnvik
That the car park was eerily futuristic, with automated sensors telling you how many spaces remained in each lane, should have been your first warning. No, yet earlier than that. You should have realised when it took you four attempts to leave the dual carriageway at the right junction. No amount of poor navigation skill …
My Contribution to Big Society
Today, Prime Minister David Cameron launched his ‘Big Society’ initiative, aimed at empowering local communities to fix their own problems. On the surface it sounds to me like a nice idea, getting neighbours to work together to save their post office or whatever. But of course, no-one really knows how it’s going to happen yet, …