Zorac's LiveJournal

On a scale of 0-10, how much do I want one of these?

That would be, oooh, at least a 12. I was literally drooling while I looked through the demos on the Apple website. iPhone rumours have been floating around for years, but the reality actually manages to top the hype (assuming that reality lives up to the demos). Obviously there are some unanswered questions (third party - and home-brew - application support being top of my list), but it has the potential to be the coolest gadget ever.

On the downside, it is quite pricey (not unsurprisingly, but cheaper and more featureful than getting separate 'phone + iPod + PDA), and not overly well-endowed in the storage department. Also, us Europeans have to wait until Q4 and there's no word as yet on network support.

Still, OMGWANTZ!

PS. AppleTV: Hmmmm. It is rather shiny, but the feature set is rather minimal. Big unanswered question: can it play video that comes from anywhere other than the iTunes store? If not, I certainly can't see myself wanting one...

Notes to self:

1. Do not use the washing machine and the tumble dryer at the same time.
2. Spare fuses are good things to have.
3. When a plug is scorchingly hot to the touch and both it and the 4-way it was plugged into have melted patches, that's bad.

Laundry is such fun.

So much for the weather. The distressingly nice Friday was, of course, followed by a wet and gloomy weekend. The rain forcing everyone indoors means that everywhere's full for lunch and the packed shops have ridiculous queues for the changing rooms. To add to the joy, both Slither and Silent Hill had moved to evening showings only, leaving me with my third choice, M:I:3. It's actually a pretty reasonable action flick, marred mostly by the annoying Tom "shark sofa" Cruise trying to insinuate himself into virtually every frame. Oh, and the new Superman trailer is rather promising.

Now that The Da Vinci Code Quest on Google is drawing to a close, the puzzles are really starting to get tricky - the first three tiers were fairly straightforward, but the fourth, not so much. Yesterday's sudoku-style puzzle was really quite nasty, and today's "Restoration" one was taking so long by trial-and-error, that I ended up writing a program to solve it (what, me, a geek?).

Ages ago, I started coding up a perl-based sudoku solver and managed to get it solving lots of puzzles with only a very basic set of rules for solving them. Recently, alnitak (who is also writing a solver, this time in java) showed me a really nasty puzzle which neither of our solvers could completed (although a human could spot the next step). After some discussions we came up with a new solving rule, which I've implemented in my code and now allows me to solve the puzzle.

Anyway, what I'm looking for is some truly evil sudokus to test my solver with, so if you've got any nasty ones that you can send me, that would be much appreciated.

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So, I had that strange feeling that something wasn't quite right on the way to work this morning. Come lunchtime, I figured out what it was - the missing weight of my bag on my shoulder. No bag = no wallet, no wallet = no way to buy lunch. Thankfully, I have a well-stocked snack drawer in my desk. Even less fortunately, my web browser had a tasty meal of freshly prepared LiveJournal posting. Meaning I'm retyping the whole blasted thing now.
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See my new icon? That's today’s Dilbert strip - whatever day you're reading this (except Sundays at the moment). Nifty, huh? I have a bunch of perl which grabs the latest strip from the Dilbert website, cuts it up, resizes the parts to make an animated GIF then uploads it to LJ in place of the existing one.
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Update: W00t! It works! Todays strip is there completely sans human intervention.

The rebuild of Visar into its dinky new case is finished for now. I finally gave up on trying to get the PCI ADSL card working last night and fell back to the USB modem I was using before - and which I had working in ten minutes flat. Meh. At least I have my routing an firewall all working again. Currently it's running Red Hat 9, although I'm leaning towards putting Debian on there, but probably not until Sarge goes stable. I guess this means that I can go back to software rather than hardware hacking this evening...

Thursday: Memories of two years earlier.

Friday: Went to work. Came home. Started to learn PHP. Developed obsession (and the beginnings of a webapp).

Saturday: More PHP. Went into town and wandered round the shops. Picked up Billy Joel CDs for £2 in a charity shop - go me! Went to the Order of the Phoenix Picture House to see Spirited Away, which was cool, although subtitled rather than dubbed. Came home. Coded more.

Sunday: Slept late. Coded more PHP. Watched Gigi. Only just remembered in time to go to Sainsbury's. Did some more perl hacking on my new code for RS.

Today: Work again. Took delivery of two hefty tomes containing the Illiad and the Odyssey plus new toys. Managed to cook dinner despite having forgotten to get more olive oil yesterday.

Tomorrow: Tomorrow, I love you, Tomorrow, you're only a day away!

And finally: GIU!

I was idly playing with numbers in my head the other day, something to occupy my mind while I trudged back from Sainsbury's with a load of shopping. In particular, I was looking at number sequences (you know, what number comes next - 1, 3, 5, 7, ? or 1, 4, 9, 16, ?) and came up with the following (related, but calculated in opposite ways):

1 ... 4 ... 19,683 ... ?
1 ... 4 ... 7,625,597,484,987 ... ?

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Sunday was the symposium's closing morning. The last event was the charity auction over brunch - we only caught the tail end of it, but a few of the items went for really quite impressive prices. We said a lot of goodbyes, and there was much hugging and taking of photos.

In the afternoon, we made our way over to DisneyQuest - home to neat interactive games. Among other things, we got to don VR helmets to fight comic-book villains with a lightsaber or fly a magic carpet, paddle a raft through a virtual jungle, pilot a multi-legged rescue vehicle on an alien planet and do battle with the Pirates of the Caribbean. I also got to play on a bunch of classic arcade machines - the original Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man etc.

In the evening, there was cheesecake - and packing.