The Wisp. Great joke, I bet so many people are going to fall for it. Apparently TavernCast is disbanding. BurgerCraft – ace. Just ace. This is great, this is an obvious joke, makes the other more subtle jokes look even more real!

… well Think Geekoolery. I particularily like this one.

Every man and his dog has seen this, however, I still think it is hilarious and very poignant when reading web forums.

Or not. Mike sent me the link and I wet myself. Figuratively speaking.

So this week I have, in my non-work time, been consuming films.

On Tuesday I went round to Bailey’s house and we grabbed Thai food, SAW and SAW II to watch. I had seen SAW before but couldn’t remember how it ended so that was still excellent to watch. SAW II had me on edge, I really wanted it to be a good film and it didn’t disapoint. It followed the same pattern as the previous film: one long piece of building horror interlaced with several shorter bits (either flash backs or other people). One thing I was very eager to see was a neutral or bad ending which it provided. I can definitely recommend the films.

Last night, Mike picked me up and we went to the chinese take out (I know, I know, two take aways in one night, but you have to be positive! *cough*), grabbed some food and picked up some wine and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang on dvd. We then went back to his and Helen’s house and we all watched, ate and chatted. It was all good. The film was a good choice, the trailer is funny and keeps you smiling and there was a certain amount of fear that the trailer would be the funny bits of the film. However, the film was very good, the plot was nice a curvy and the humour was second to none, very dry and witty.

I have found a generational gc bug which is a pain where ferite is being far too agressive in pushing objects up a generation even though it isn’t necessary to do so. I hope this is what is causing me my current headache.

… of officially quiting the PhD is that I can now openly talk about ferite without feeling guilty or that I am taking the piss out of the University. This is a good thing.

Today, yesterday, part of Sunday and Friday morning, was spent trying to fix a show stopper bug in ferite. The problem exhibitted itself in the multi threaded RMI (Remote Method Invocation) server platform that ships with the language. The main problem arose when trying to do a more than one RMI request, the server would Bus Error (or segfault on different platforms) which made for a very un-productive bit of code. I call it a show stopper because we use RMI in a piece of software that is being developed at the moment. As with all bugs within ferite nowadays, they are usually one line fixes and this was no exception.

The problem was that a number of exception blocks next to each other where causing the current error handler code to smash the stack. I was being naughty and not doing low-end bounds checking with the result being an under-write on the array holding the opcode locations for error handling. This in turn caused the variables before this array in the stack to be manged. The bug exhibited it self as a pointer derefrence crash (You can’t dereference 0xbe) hence the inital confusion. Had the array been allocated into the heap rather than on the stack, jedi would have caught the under-write instantly.

I now have a one line check in place now, the code runs great but I still need to inspect the compiler to work out why it is generating incorrect code. The moral of the story? Be very careful using arrays and their bounds. This is a lesson I shan’t be forgetting soon.

On the subject of development, there are few tools I use day-in-day-out now that make my life so much easier. The first is TextMate and after using the 30 day trial I had to purchase it because it has changed the way I work. It is not a perfect editor and there are a few enchancements I would like to see but apart from that it rocks. There are 4 things I really like about it:

1. It took me 30 minutes to get it correctly syntax highlighting and reading ferite code and webframework page files.
2. I have got about 15 text ’snippets’ that allow me to very quickly write ferite code.
3. It has a LaunchBar style file finder – you type a few letters in and it’ll locate the right file for you.
4. The project management draw is sane and works really nicely.

LaunchBar works. It just works flawlessly, I can’t use a computer without it now. If I want something Command+Space, a few letters and blam! the item is in the list. Whether it is a web search, file, application, contact, email, recent document etc. I strongly recommend looking at the examples on their site. It has been around for years and I have been using it for that long, but I still revel in its power. Both this and TextMate are shareware and well worth the price.

CyberDuck is a recent addition to my toolset, this allows you to access FTP and SFTP servers with ease, and when combined with a supporting editor, such as TextMate, you end up with the ability to “edit files in place”. This means for quick changes to remote files you need not download, edit, upload. It is opensource source as well.

First of all. I currently hate Alex. The reason being is that with the currently flurry of posts to his website, it is making me feel guilty about not doing the same. Maybe I am just more busy… we do hear all the time about doctors flaunting their position

Tuesday was down time, I had a nice quiet evening all to myself.

Wednesday, a number of us piled round to Dave’s house and we played Cranium and Perudo. It was combined with drinking and all in all we all left with a warm fuzzy feeling that we could go old sk00l without the general requirement of playstation or xbox.

Thursday saw Rob coming round and resorting to the modern board game: playstation. We played Fahrenheit which is a pretty sweet game which is more of a point and click / plot motivated game that the standard issue release of today which general involved bang-crash-brrrmmmm. (Guns, cars and well, a car engine).

Friday morning saw Maz and Ro (who is back from a year in NZ) popping over for a cheeky cuppa. In the afternoon I stopped work and went into University. I have unofficially quit my PhD now. The reasons for the decision are long, complex and not over-night or blog material. Mainly because if you know me in real life and are reading this, you are more than likely to know the reasons (or at least a handful or them) and if not, they aren’t really that exciting. My supervisor took it well and we have agreed to try and do some post PhD communication because I am still very interested in taking the research I was doing and folding it into a ferite release at some point in the future. I know that if I can succeed with that goal ferite will be exceedingly kick-ass in the multi-threaded-easy-and-safe coding arena. To make it official I need to clear out my desk, hand my keys in and deliver an official letter to the University. Headed down to the Pear for some drinks and then ambled back to Harborne and grabbed a dvd called A History of Violence. Don’t watch it, I found it was reasonable plot wise, but there was too much emphasis on certain aspects such as the sex and violence scenes which seemed to detract from what, I personally consider, the more important parts of the film, such as the fact the guy was trying to escape his history.

On Saturday, a number of us (Si, Maz, Ant and I) went out for lunch and then sum of us (Russel, Maz, And and I) went to Mai Thai for some food in the Plough. All in all, it was a really good evening. I spent most of Sunday playing World of Warcraft and looking at ferite bugs. In the evening, I whipped up a roast dinner of sorts with special chicken (Special because it was my own sauce. No Alex, not that kind of sauce.), potatoes, potato and carrot mash, peas, carrots and gravy! Maz came round to help eat it and we basically, to use a phrase of my mum’s, slobbed and watched Poriot.

Well it is my birthday on Saturday which means that I have finally made it to 25 years and 9 months. I would say Hurrah but I think the jury is still out on that one.

Once upon a time there was a female brain cell which, by mistake, happened to end up in a man’s head. She looked around nervously because it was all empty and quiet.

“Hello?” she cried, but no answer. “Is there anyone here?” she cried a little louder, but still no answer. Now the female brain cell started to feel alone and scared and yelled at the top of her voice,

“HELLO, IS THERE ANYONE HERE?”

Then she heard a faint voice from far, far away…………..

“We’re down here …”

Top Jack Bauer Facts!.

A few choice cuts:

- If everyone on “24″ followed Jack Bauer’s instructions, it would be called “12″.

- Superman wears Jack Bauer pajamas.

- Jack Bauer played Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun and won.

- Jack Bauer is the leading cause of death in Middle Eastern men.

- Jack Bauer doesn’t speak any foreign languages, but he can make any foreigner speak English in a matter of minutes.

- When Google can’t find something, it asks Jack Bauer for help.

- When you open a can of whoop-ass, Jack Bauer jumps out.

- Jack Bauer could strangle you with a cordless phone.

- Sun Tzu once wrote, “If your enemy is weaker, conquer him. If he is stronger, join him. If he is Jack Bauer, you’re fucking dead.”

- “Jack Bauer” is Arabic for “I’m fucked”.

Last week was Crazy.

I can’t remember exactly what happened. But Last Saturday I was out having Curry and drink with Dave, Julia and a fist full of other people. Sunday escapes me and I can’t remember what happened. I guess I probably sat and played some WoW and did not too much. Monday and Tuesday escape me, I know I did stuff. I think on the Tuesday or Monday Russel, Santos, And and I went to the pub. I am not sure.

Wednesday a number of us introduced Julia to three great English items: Fish n’ Chips, Trifle and a real pub. The best bit of the evening was seeing her eyes almost pop out of her head at seeing The Bell. The trifle was a disaster as I rushed it and completely managed to mess it up. It still tasted good though.

Thursday saw Russel, Santos and myself ambling out to a Magnetic Four gig. It was a really good night and there were a fair number of friends there. M4 where on first, the second band wasn’t too bad if not a little pretentious and the last band Midas was just too loud and very hard to hear. The gig was at the Sunflower Lounge which was really cool and had some really good beer/larger on tap.

Friday I went over to Robs gaff and had a chinese with him and his brother. We generally had some beers, ate, talked rubbish and watched the television. I managed to nod off on the sofa as I was bloody exhausted. It was a relaxing end to a week.

Saturday saw me getting up early early doors. I legged it into town and picked up a new laptop battery as my current iBook one was dying a horrid death. I then jumped on a train and headed down to see Elle and Dan. It was Elee’s party night and I went down for the event. Arrived about midday ish and had lunch with Elle, Dan, Nat and Dan’s parents. We then had a nice and slow afternoon putting the world to right and we then headed over to Chelmsford to another persons house for pre-night-out-drinks. We then headed into Chlemsford centre, drank at a couple of bars, avoided a fight with a double hard midget, carried Elle on my back, and returned to eat olives. Woke up on Sunday with a sore throat and in the quietness that was everyone else asleep proceeded to hack some code. Once everyone was alive, we grabbed some greasy food from morrisons and then went to Jimmy’s Farm. It was a good strole about in the country and everyone seemed very excited about it all (I didn’t know who Jimmy’s was except that he apparently is on TV). We then went for a cheeky afternoon drink and I then ambled back. Hit Birmingham about 9ish to come in and do not very much except suffer the cold I had caught.

Yesterday was spent not leaving my flat and having Dave come round to play WoW.

I remember that we did go to the pub last Monday/Tuesday, it was the Greene Man. Hurrah.