Palfrey's life

so, this is nothing against you or against your stuff in general, but seeing
that you rip the heart of the MF appart -- apparently without really
understanding it -- makes my heart bleed...

Part of an email I received earlier. Apparently my doing some coding has now caused heart complications for someone living in another country. And I wonder why I just did stuff rather than arguing with these guys for a week....

Heavy wizardry stuff begins here....
( Geeks only... )
Oh, and I'm on the lookout for a better "geeky stuff" icon. Any offers?

For those of us who are male, single, and doing something that can be broadly described under "engineering" (well, anything "science" is close enough), you should have read today's Dilbert (ok, if you're male, single, engineering-type and *not* reading Dilbert you probably need your head examined, but hey...)
( Exhibit A )

PhD posted a good one on debugging today that I felt needed sharing (as it's getting added to the wall near my door)
( Copy of said comic )
On the same sort of topic, I'm *still* trying to wade through the backlog of unread comics. My grabber software didn't update over most of Xmas/New Year because there was a brief power-cut and the machine didn't properly start up again (hey, it was a Linux box that hadn't been rebooted in about a month or two, and I hadn't noticed I'd done something stupid and messed up the bootloader). I'm currently somewhere in the middle of the comics starting with "E", and I'm thinking about doing a bit of pruning....

Due to a whole variety of issues the lovely people currently running BITS (who despite my having not been their President, or resident at the university for a number of years now, I'm still leeching hosting off of) have been having some issues lately. Mostly because some f*ckwit didn't update their copy of PhpBB (and then some other unmentionable exploited the security holes in said), but that's beside the point. In short, they've just switched over to the new, updated and hopefully more secure server (well, it's now running Debian and the procedures are certainly more secure), but due to a number of problems with the switchover I was without email these past couple of days. I've just gotten about ~130 emails popping up this evening, and I think I'm missing a few, so if you sent me anything important recently, or if you've commented on something you think I should have seen the email notification for, then tell me now.

In related news, I'm looking for a new web/email host.... unfortunately, my requirements are somewhat expensive and hence why I've stuck with BITS so far. If anyone can tell me how to get ~500mb of storage (not much bandwidth needed, but lots of stored photos that I like to have access to), IMAP, PHP and a database (preferably MySQL, as otherwise I'll need to rewrite things), without having to pay an arm and a leg, then I would be most grateful. SSH access (so I can run the spam filter I like) would also be very nice.

I've just been playing a lovely little game called BreakQuest. At one level, it's a bat-and-balls, Arkanoid-style game that we've all seen a million of. Except, it's not. The first bright idea was to embed a decent physics model into the game, and then they started playing around with weird blocks - not just the "sit there, die when hit" ones, but odd shaped ones and ones that bounce around. And then there's more coolness - ever had the situation where you've been playing one of those games and the ball bounces into the top section of some blocks only to fly out the other side with practically zero damage? Well, in BreakQuest, there's the "gravitor" - press the right mouse button, and the ball is temporarily under the effect of gravity i.e. you can shape which way it goes in flight :-) The game is quite thoroughly psychotic, and utterly fun.

Now, this is a damn good game. So good, having played through the demo levels, I frantically paid up for the full version (~£12 - I *like* indie games). Why is it damn good? The physics engine, and what it lets the game designers do with an old genre. This got me thinking: two other games I've really liked in recent times are Gish (crazy platformer) and Half-life 2. Both have a full physics engine, and both use it to make the game more fun (HL2 less so). Can a physics engine be applied to other genres in interesting ways to create new genres? Maybe. I'm currently envisioning a Pac-man like game, except with the player in a spaceship under the effect of gravity (with trivial landing, not the damn hard landing of most thrust-style games, and probably bouncing off of walls). The "ghosts" become wall-crawling aliens who will eat your spaceship if you fly in the same corridor as them.

That's probably not the best example, but I'm betting some of you lot can come up with better ideas....

A few things have made me want to explain something that's a bit technical to non-technical folks. Namely, because the latest "next big thing" that's running around: AJAX. Now, in common with most things of this type, it may well be not around in 6 months time (despite the doubt of how this could be from people right now), and at a certain level it's just another confusing buzzword that no-one aside from web designers needs to know. But on the other hand, for those of us who spend a significant portion of their lives on the web (and most people who read my LJ are likely in that category), it's starting to effect us, and so I'd like to show why it's an interesting paradigm shift.

Blah over. AJAX is an enabling set of techniques for web applications. Up until this point, a web application has generally consisted of the idea "fill in form, click submit, wait, wait, recieve results". This model is annoying however. The major problem is the response time. That couple of second wait (even on fast connections+computers) makes a web application *feel* so much different to a program running on your desktop. Contrast this to something like Google Maps. Try dragging the map around. Watch as it loads up new map sections as you move around. Try moving the zoom slider on the left hand side. Even try searching for somewhere. Especially if it's somewhere nearby to where you're already looking, you'll get dragged there rather than loading a whole darn new page. And that's the big thing about AJAX. If the page needs a small change (e.g. shift map small distance to the right), why reload the whole page to do it? Only reloading what's needed, and keeping everything else makes it seem so much faster. Your browser is still doing the same old "request a page" thing in the background, but you're not noticing it so much because most of the page doesn't change. And that's true for most programs. Most of the interface does not change from one moment to the next, so why bother reloading the whole thing? Here's another fun thing that many AJAX apps do - they respond to keypresses. Google Maps for example - make sure you've got the map selected (click on any part of it to do so) and then try pushing an arrow key. Watch how it acts like you'd expect a desktop application to respond. And all of this without any plugins :-)

So you get the idea. Google has quite a few things like this (Gmail for example - although they don't refer to them as AJAX), and Flickr is another good example (have a look at an item from my photos page for example, and note the boxes that popup as you go over the picture. They were added using a simple AJAX app). The thing that actually spawned me towards doing this was the Google Suggest extension for Firefox. As the privacy notice says 'The Google Suggest Extension sends your search query to Google while you are still typing it, instead of waiting for you to hit the "Enter" key' - think of it as autocompletion for search queries, but based on what has been searched on before by *everyone* as opposed to just you. It's very cool. It's not a pure AJAX app, but in the context of Firefox's XUL nature, it could practically be considered as such.