Myself, Coding, Ranting, and Madness

Scraping the Election Results

I've been a bit quieter than I'd like to have been this week, partially because I've been working, and more because I've been following the UK election. There are up coming posts on some of the interesting technical features used, as well as my two cents on the present situation (that's currently pending the situation really going anywhere). In the mean time, I've been trying to get hold of the results. Sure, I know it's a hung parliament, but there's a world of numbers which I can find, albeit very slowly, showing the exact number of votes cast.

The UK Election

A lot of blogers are currently typing away on their keyboards, reporting every little fact, such as the fall of Kingswood from Labour to the Conservatives. I, on the other hand, would rather talk a little about the technology.

I'm watching the live BBC feed, starring all sorts fun politics people. It's also showing lots of fun charts and screens. Some of you may have even seen the weirdly composited swing room - with the slightly dodgy camera work, and the wobbly presentation. We may have even seen the data table, which was done brilliantly (probably by a lovely green box). It's good to see that the BBC's tech budget isn't going to waste. The room sized holo-composited Swingometer (pictured), or the surprising well rendered data desk (or which I've not been able to find a screen capture).

Belated New Years

Well, at least I hope it was happy for everyone. People who've been around me in real life may have noticed that I've been a bit all over the place the last few months with a variety of family related dramas. Hence the slight lack of posts. But now I'm back.

So, now I'm back, I should probably have some kind of content here. So the first thing I'm going to mention is RobotFindKitten (robotfindskitten.org). Remember, Robot must find kitten. This is all that is truly important.

Chrome 4.0 (Beta)

And the people rejoiced, for the new browser was born. From the great google server was released Chrome 4.0, with shiny new...shininess?

Well, there's a bit more than shininess that new. Apparently it's even faster than before, and some tweaking to the V8 engine and other things. But the biggest change is the addition of extensions, and bookmark synchronisation.

Blarghhh!

I could just leave this post at the title, but I feel like I owe you some content. I have unfortunately been feeling rather Blarghhh! over the last week. And the week before I spent pretty much entirely in a theatre (I may have menitoned at some point that I do crew work of amateur dramatics. This has left me slightly behind on both programming and work for my course.
Anywhom, time to stop complaining.

x! - A Programming Problem

This was originally posed to me sometime last year by a group who'd been given it in some test or another. It's quite a simple problem, with a reasonably simple solution, but it's still worth having a go (unless you've seen it before). Basically, you have to write function(s) which calculate n factorial in less than factorial time. The only arithmetic operation you may use is +. Solutions as a comment, or on a postcard of somewhere nice.

Office 2010 (Beta)

It's now been a couple of days since I downloaded the Office 2010 Beta, which also happened to be the day that my legal copy of Office 2007 finally arrived (which is almost ironic).

Not much seems to have changed in the basic layout, apart from the swapping out of the 'Office Button' is favour of a good awful file menu. Also, the start up speed is much, much better. There seems to be some new features on the ribbon in word - mostly pointless. Everything you'd expect to work, works. Excel charts are slightly confusing, but I think anyone who's used 2007 will be fine with that. PowerPoint looks nice and shiny (although I confess that it's not a good as Apple's KeyNote). And for most people, that's it. If you really want some more in depth info, leave a comment, or take a look yourself.

A Belated Rant

In fact, a very belated rant, so much so that I've lost interest, and most of the logic, behind it. So on to problems new.

The first which comes to mind is the matter of brithdays, presents and the like. The Birthday episode of David Mitchell's Soapbox¹ probably says lots of things which I agree with². Anyway, I'm now old, and have some more useless possessions³, and...nothing else has changed. Well, that's obvious enough, but it did make me think of the universe of arbitrary cycles. The years, the months, or even the eternal cycle of creation and destruction as overseen by the triad of the Trimurti. And I came to one conclusion, It's a load of sh*t.

On Wizards and Witchcraft

First, Wizards
Specifically, Matthew Lewis, who portrayed Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter films, who I was mistaken for again. The fact is that I, unfortunately, look more like Neville than he does (the wiki section on his make up gives an idea of the amount he changes). I (and many others) have heard rumours that he is studying at Imperial College, which properly explains the number of people who ask. It's still strange, being approached in a darkish street and being asked "are you the guy from Harry Potter".

My First GUI

Yesterday, I was asked a question that I've been asked lots of times. The typical situation is a programmer, who's been taught C or C++ in order to solve maths problems or process text files, or else have taught themselves some basic or C as a past time. And what they want to know is how to create a GUI¹. My answer varies depending on mood, what language I'm currently working with, what languages the person asking me knows, and how much I think they're going to ask for help.
None the less, I thought it might be useful to write my thoughts² down