Posted on: 26/09/2005 09:29:59 - 2 comments
Tagged in: blog.
Terrorists or Freedom fighters? Which are they? Could you say that acts committed here in the UK are terrorism? Would you have said the same if the Shia in Iraq started to bomb innocent civilians when Saddam was still in power as they tried to rise up against his tyranny? No, I think you'd be calling them freedom fighters. Does the nature of the Israeli land grabbing mean that Hamas and others are freedom fighters rising up against a repressive country that breaks international law on a daily basis and gets away with it based solely on the fact that America backs them? Were the French resistance terrorists or freedom fighters? Did they not blow up innocent civilians in the name of riding France of Hitler and the Nazi's? Were the IRA terrorists or were they too trying to rid the north of Ireland of the colonial rule of British forces which no longer needed to be there, did America not back the IRA? Freedom fighters? Or terrorists? Are the Sunni insurgents terrorists or freedom fighters, are the Shia rising up in Basra and now Baghdad freedom fighters or Terrorists? Did anybody really need to invade Iraq? Is all of it worth it?
What is a terrorist? What is a freedom fighter? Does anyone even know anymore? Does it depend on which side of the fence you sit if you actually sit at all? Should it matter? Does it matter? Why should anyone care? Is it the fault of religion? Countries? People? Communities? How many more people have to die before one persons point is proved over the other? How can it all be stopped and when will it end aye?
Posted on: 22/09/2005 09:05:10 - 2 comments
Tagged in: blog.
Indeed I am, it was my birthday last Friday. I guess it feels somewhat strange to now be 29. It will be the last twelve months of my twenties before I hit the big 30. All my friends tell me that is when life slots in to place but I have to say judging by the look of them I disagree. What is more likely is that the older you get the less you give a shit and so you think life is slotting in to place when it actual fact it is you that's giving less of a shit about actually slotting in to place. We'll have to see but until then I will enjoy as much as I can of these last twelve months.
I'll be honest because well I always am. I'm not writing as much on this blog as perhaps I wish to and it seems I am having that blogging block that others warned me about. I've been writing these entries for years and for some reason when I come to write an entry now I open my text editor and I find I have nothing to say. Well that's not true I just feel I don't want to write about current events anymore because they have become boring or a parody of themselves and the only, what I feel to be, worthy bits of my life are now things like birthdays and blah blah. I've all but stopped coding when I am at home because I'm under so much pressure to build large things at work that I don't feel like doing it all again when I get home. I no longer accept freelance work and I think this is depressing the coder in me and I'll tell you why.
I'm getting more satisfaction out of writing for work then I can muster when I am writing for myself. At the minute I am producing a huge user system that will cater for the management of a LOT of documents/information that both internal and external users will be accessing in a variety of formats (text, xhtml and pdf). As you can imagine the text and xhtml has posed no challenge whatsoever but the pdf has been something fairly new to me in this particular implementation. I absolutely hate the format and have in the past stayed very clear away from having any dealings in it at all. Not this time though.
PHP offers a pdf library of sorts but requires you to have something else installed (which has an astronomical fee involved for commercial use which I am unwilling to even approach my director for) and we don't have it and we won't have it in the future either. Without going in to huge amounts of geek speak trying to create a pdf from fresh air is insanely hard. The more I delve in to reverse engineering the format the more I realise that it is actually as CRAP as I thought it was.
It uses deflate as a method to compress stuff, so we're now involved with not just a closed source format but also one that deals with compression; one that isn't widely open source and so yet again a closed format. Groovy. So we're talking about being down almost to the bare bones level here. I might as well be writing this in Assembler; after all I am having to calculate offsets (for the none geeks that is a way of mapping information to a specific point in memory), compress parts of the document and create things most people would visually do with a mouse in Pagemaker™ in code. I am visually blind as it were and so it is all maths, plotting, abscissa's (the coordinates representing the position of a point along a line perpendicular to the y-axis in the plane Cartesian coordinate system; getting the idea of how extreme yet?), images in a range of formats and not just displaying them but processing them at binary level to find out what they are (rgb, cmyk, jpg, jpeg, gif, png ahhhhhhhhhhhh). Let's not talk about fonts, I've even had to design char maps for them to.
I have no instructions, no book; nothing. All this is being achieved literally through reverse engineering of the format on my own and I'll tell you something, its been a challenge and as much as I have hated it I have loved doing it also. Sorry Adobe but your format still sucks, I just fully understand it now; so bite me.
Posted on: 14/09/2005 10:30:36 - No comments
Tagged in: blog.
I'm currently off work with a really bad throat infection. So much so that I have spent the last 24hrs with the shakes and a throat that feels like someone has poured molten glass down it. Towards the end of last year I had tonsilitus which I can only describe as agony. This is different but just as horrible in the sense of dehydration headaches (even though I have consumed huge amounts of liquids) and a fever. I could also most handle the throat if it weren't for the headaches. My brain feels like a brillo-pad at the moment. I can't sit at the computer because the screen feels like it is burning my retinas.
Hopefully I will be back to work tomorrow.
Posted on: 07/09/2005 08:57:36 - 7 comments
Tagged in: blog.
So today on my way to work I was in a new cafe getting my morning caffeine dose. This isn't the normal one I go to, that has unexpectedly closed (until further notice) which is gutting as that made just the best coffee and it was reasonably priced. The one I now have to go to is more expensive and a bit of a rip off; not to mention it has crap coffee. So anyway I am asked if I would like a large or a small coffee. I decide for the 20p extra I'll have the large (trust me I'm already paying over the odds, fine super size me I might just get my cash worth). Except this is still made with the amount of coffee in the machine that they would use in the smaller version. So hold on, I'm paying 20p extra for what, more water? Resulting in a more watery coffee. "How many sugars would you like with that Sir?", "Three please". At which point she produced 3 sachets of sugar. sachets... not teaspoons (which might I say are a real dose of sugar) and so I now have a under sugared', watery cup of coffee. So I ask for some more sachets and that could they actually put some milk in it. She looked at me like I just took a shit on her counter. She finally asks for the 1.40 for coffee (which is expensive in my book) and I hand over 1.50 she chucks it in the till and I have to ask for my 10p change. This isn't America, we don't tip. I did consider saying "keep the change" when I was handing it over but considering the crap service and watery drink I was getting thought, fuck that. I left whilst she muttered something, so as I crossed over I gave her the finger and left her staring out her cafe window with her mouth open.
Rule no 1: Don't think because it's early I am some how thicker and won't notice a short change.
Rule no 2: Continue to repeat rule no 1 until it sinks in.
You work in a cafe and you are paid to be there. Tips do not come as standard in the UK. If that's what you expect you're in the wrong job.
Sorry had to get that off my chest. Carry on as you were.
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