My employers Mendeley have made the recent wise decision of employing some excellent other software engineers, including KDE’s own Fred Emmott who is working in my team. He’s a great guy to work with but is annoyingly productive; every time I find something to do and get on with my own work it seems like five minutes before he’s fixed the bug/added the feature and is looking for more stuff to do! Any suggestions on how to make him less productive?

It was a nice surprise to view the 2.6.26 kernel changelog and find that some of the code I wrote at Wolfson Microelectronics two summers ago has finally been merged. I can now grep for myself in the kernel! Yey!

I hope to blog more regularly now, hopefully with less self-indulgent posts and more useful ones as I’ve been having some interesting battles with the mighty CMake at work that deserve sharing.

I guess I’m signing off for the evening as it is late o’clock but hopefully see some of you soon as:

There is something that open-source software seems to suck at and that is making good games. I play almost every OSS game I can get my hands on and the prettiest are graphically inferior to games from the average games of a couple of years ago, the audio is terribly mastered, the games are usually unbalanced and the stories are usually either ridiculously awful or involve Tux in some way.

Interestingly the freeware/mod scene on Windows seems to produce far better quality games than the open-source scene. I think this is because you where software fulfils a need for the user a game is a more creative act and needs a clear leader and a very undemocratic approach to aspects such as storyline and artwork. Games also tend to need to be “done” before they are released as no-one wants to play a story-driven game that just stops abrubtly.

I’m sure people are going to come onto this blog and complain that I’ve forgotten about all these great open-source games but I don’t really care. I’ve tried playing too many to find myself spending hours wishing I was playing even a poor paid-for game.

The only real exceptions I’ve found to the above rules are games which have been retroactively open-sourced such as Quake 3, Transport Tycoon, Tyrian and Star Control 2. These were all good games on release and open-sourcing them means they can be made more portable and keep being played for a long time. I highly recommend you check them out.

What if our “climate chaos” and all the weather changes we are seeing are just the fact that the rotation of the earth is at a slightly different speed so years are now the wrong length! That would explain the whole warmer winters but colder summers!

Disclaimer:
I make every effort to reduce my impact on the environment, this blog post is intended to be humour not a complex rebuttal of common scientific theory. However, I reserve the right to merciless mock the entire scientific community.

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Virgin.net Broadband Plan One
Important link
Up to 8 Mbps
No 12 month contract
Unlimited downloads

Sounds good, eh?
Well looking at the FAQ:
What are usage allowances?
With Virgin.net Broadband Plan Three, you can transfer up to 3 GB of data per month, Plan Two allows up to 6 GB of data to be transfered per month and Plan One, a massive 20 GB

Plan One = infinite download limit
Plan One = 20GB download limit

therefore:
infinite download limit = 20GB download limit

therefore:
infinity = 20

therefore:
infinity = 1

Take that, maths!

(Also, people who make the website for Virgin.net clearly aren’t told basic English skills such as “transfered” having two Rs [transferred], but that’s another rant…)

I’d imagine most people know about adrenaline. It’s the fight or flight reflex that makes your reactions quicken and you can feel stronger and more alert. Peedrenaline does the same thing, as I discovered on the way home today.

I decided it would be a good idea to drink about 4 pints of water at work today, and not pee, and just wait till I got home. Just after I got my bike unchained, the water suddenly kicked in, and I cycled the fastest I think I ever have, and my body didn’t hurt or burn (well, except for my bladder, which seemed to be saying in a Scottish accent “Cap’n, we can’t take much more of this!”).

So basically, if you need to exert yourself physically or mentally, drink loads of water and don’t go for a pee first. It’ll make you into some bizarro Superman whose kryptonite is releasing your bladder.

Now that I’ve pioneered this scientific discovery, I predict peedrenaline junkies, who will hold as much urine in as possible, just for the rush (hopefully mental rather than liquid), although, it seems, Neil Costley has been doing this for a fair while already.

Oh dear me.
“I can trace her physical location using the binary”. I can’t believe that was just said.

Members of Fox and the 24 production team, I am officially offering myself as a free consultant to 24, where you can run “computer talk” by me to ensure that it doesn’t make you sound as ill-informed as retarded as it does.

I mean, come on guys, you are just embarrassing yourselves! Kief deserves better.

In other, better news, my exams went OK, both were 2 question papers, and on both, I had an average question and a good question, so I’m unsure how I’ve done, but it shouldn’t be too bad.

Also, BMC, my progtastic fellow Kiefer Sutherland and Neal Morse lover, has got offered a 2:2 for entry to his masters next year, meaning it is almost 100% certain he will be living with me next year, which is good news for both of us.

Anyway, back to 24, and up earlyish for revision tomorrow.