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From the BBC News Website

New Kids On The Block have cancelled their forthcoming Australian tour, blaming the economic downturn.

It’s not because they’re shit then?

mark Uncategorized

I stupidly decided the other week that I could run a half-marathon in late September.

I’d been thinking about doing something like it for a few months (since my brother completed the London Marathon in 2009,) and when my friend Tom asked if I wanted to do a half-marathon, I jumped at the chance.

This now leaves me with a problem though. Although I do a reasonable amount of training for rowing, and I don’t consider myself to be unfit, I’m not a runner and now I have to do a load of training in three months in order to get myself prepared in time. Add to this the pressure that my experienced half-marathon running girlfriend is also doing the same half-marathon, and you’ve got yourself a little challenge going on (there’s no way I’m being beaten by a girl!

So, I’ve begun my research into half-marathon training schedule. Most of them fit into a 12-to-10 week schedule, which is perfect. What’s not perfect, is the amount of running they get you to do.

The assumption is, is that you’re not doing any other exercise. For example, there are some that get you to run 6 days a week. With my schedule 4 days a week rowing sessions, that just isn’t suitable.

I’m going to have to come up with my own schedule so that I can work out a sensible plan.

First thing to do then, is to work out how far, and for how long I can currently run before I drop dead in a heap on the floor. I need to do this both in the gym, and on the roads.

mark Half-Marathon, Rowing

Last night, I spent an hour and forty minutes of my life watching an absolute heap of crap.

It was a programme regarding the “Tunguska Phenomenon” in 1908, where supposedly something crashed into the Earth somewhere in Siberia.

The documentary on More 4 was complete drivel, had no direction, was difficult to follow, showed no evidence, challenged no theories, had no scientific content and drew no conclusions.

I would not have minded so much, if it failed to prove one way or the other, as long as it at least attempted to prove something, except it did not. Instead, it jumped around from place to place, from local so-called expert to local so-called expert; and did little in the way of investigation.

Even the so-called Italian scientists in the programme were questionable. On investigating the bed of a recently formed lake, they found a forest of dead trees. However, to me, these “trees” appear to be about 3 inches tall, and swayed from side to side as the relatively small camera was moved near by. They also appeared remarkably small compared to the sediment that was kicked up by the camera. Yet still, they proudly proclaimed they had found “a forest”.

The other thing that bothered me was that the main presenter, who incidentally never showed himself on camera and only filmed things, came up with this little gem:

One afternoon, I took a walk in the woods and found the last fallen trees from 100 years ago.

But yet, in the programme, it explains that the original explorers took weeks to find these pieces of evidence. Are we to believe that actually, they could have found them in just one afternoon instead, if they had just gone “for a walk in the woods”?

If it gets repeated, save your self some time, and don’t watch it. It’s one of the worst documentaries I’ve ever seen.

mark TV

Again, I’m doing the London to Brighton Bike Ride.

Please please please please please sponsor me!

Thanks!

mark Bits and Bobs London to Brighton

Rejoice! My new shuffle has arrived and it is small!

Having accidentally snapped the USB connector off my first gen Shuffle, I required a new one for the gym.

I ummed and arrred about getting the new style or the previous style as I have a habit of breaking the Apple headphones and there aren’t that many for other manufcturers that support the new style with the controls on the earphone lead.

Still, vanity prevailed and I bought the new style one in order to improve my lagging street cred!

mark Computers Apple, iPod, shuffle

Today, I have reached the pinacle of stupidity.

On Tuesday, I had an appointment at the physio. It was at 8am. I know this because for my last physio appointment I was half an hour late because I thought it started at 8:30.

NHS hospitals and waiting lists as they are, I didn’t want to miss this one otherwise I’d potentially be put back on the waiting list again.

So, I awoke early, got dressed for the physio, ate breakfast, and generally prepared myself for more body-bending antics. At 7:30, I thought “I’d better just check that it’s 8:00″, so I did. To my shock, there was no appointment in my calendar (on my phone) for that day.

Looking through the calendar, I found the appointment for today (Thursday) instead. I cursed loudly, realising I was going to be late for work now, showered, shaved, changed and hurriedly got out the door.

On Tuesday, I had to rearrange my trip to see my girlfriend on Wednesday night, so that I had to drive and not catch the train so that I could get back to the hospital in time for Thursday morning.

Fast Forward to Thursday morning (today), I’ve been up since half six, no breakfast, bed hair, driven for an hour, I arrive at the physio fifteen minutes early. There’s no one on reception, it’s too early. I take a seat and play with my phone until my physio walks in.

5 minutes later, he walks out with the diary and says “Errr, you’re not due here until tomorrow…..”  Crap.

Not only did I get ready 3 days too early, I got ready 1 day early as well - just for good measure.

Fortunately, for the second time, his 8:30 appointment had cancelled so he was able to see me straight afterwards.

Next time boy, READ THE CALENDAR PROPERLY!

I’m a spaz.

mark Life idiot, Life, physio, spaz

The slightly observant of you will have noticed that I have changed the theme on this site. I was inspired to do whilst I upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress.

Whilst the old theme was OK, there are a couple of annoying little glitches that bothered me, not to mention that it made no attempt at (visually) indicating that there was an RSS feed available.

Hopefully, the new theme should solve a lot of those problems (although, I’m yet to try it on a slightly smaller screen).

The other benefit of upgrading of course is that the app for my iPhone now works. Well done to the developers that changed the app so that it would only work with the latest version, and didn’t tell anyone. Genius!

admin Blogging

Recently, I wrote an application that used a SQLite database and wrote data into a common database rapidly, over several connections.

I initially wrote the application to use one thread, and only one database connection, but as I improved the software, I converted it to use multiple threads with one connection per thread.

I quickly ran into the problem though that the database quickly became locked - one thread would block out the other and would not return the lock. It wasn’t consistent though as to which thread would be blocked - it was usually the second thread, but not consistently.

Having read a post from the pysqlite mailing list, I think it explains the problem a little bit more accurately, and kind of exaplins a solution. Although, it does seem a little bit drastic (essentially, reconnect everytime you need to run a concurrent query).

I’m now very interested to find out whether this will cure my problem. It does seem a bit drastic, and quite IO intensive, but it’s worth a shot!

I’ll let you know my mileage….

mark Computers, Programming Computers, Programming, SQLite

The other day, I took another look at Tango, for D.

For those not initiated, Tango is a replacement library for the Digital Mars D programming language. It operates differently from the standard Phobos in terms of architecture, ethos and implementation style.

Having previously looked at it, my initial reaction was “Hmmm, seems silly to have implemented this, it doesn’t seem worth the effort to implement a second standard library”. I decided the other day to take another look at the project to try and understand it further.

Having read more about it, and tried to understand further, I can only say: “Wow”. It provides the langauge with the library to “do stuff” no simply a library with which to “implement stuff”.

I have an idea to resurrect my old FTPro software, and I’m now thinking that this would be a great backbone to develop this with. My only major hurdle to this at the moment is rebuilding my laptop….

mark Programming Computers, D, Digital Mars, Software, Tango

Note: I’ve recently found this as a “draft”. I thought I’d published it. Forgive the time references, I wrote this in January, not April!

For the past couple of years, there has always been something about the appearance of KDE that I didn’t like.

I don’t know when this dislike started, I think it was around KDE3 - I’m not sure.

The problem is, I’ve never been able to put my finger on it. I always used to think it was something to do with excess pixels around items that just wasted screen real-estate. Recently though, I begun to think that it maybe wasn’t just that (although there is still a lot of waste!).

Today, following the release of KDE4.2 RC1, I’ve managed to spot what my problem is.

Have a look at this picture: http://kde.org/announcements/announce_4.2-beta2/panel.png

Every single piece of text in that image, apart from the clock in the bottom right, is not vertically aligned particularly well.

Take for example, the list of running applications - why isn’t the text aligned vertically centred with the application icon? Look at the day in the calendar - why isn’t the text aligned vertically within each “cell”? It’s even wrong in the input element in the calendar!

Aaarrrgh! It’s enough to drive me to OCD distraction!

If you want an example of the wasted space - have a look at the vertical lists of applications open under the “Konqueror” moniker. Why is there a massive space at the top? There isn’t one at the bottom, so why at the top? Also, looking at it, the border around window list is different on all four sides of the list….

mark Computers