2005 is nearly over. This year I’ve started a company, quit my job, deferred the end of my Masters (again), walked away from that company (and two good friends), started another company, missed two weddings (Tom & Tehm, Andy & Tahira - so sorry!), started contracting, escorted Japanese wrestlers and their entourage through Coventry, done things I’d never have thought I’d done (hello Sophie!), moved house three times and seen my honorary-niece learn to say “Howard”. It’s been a wake-up call of a year. Continue reading ‘Goodbye 2005!’
Monthly Archive for December, 2005
You can tell I’m on holiday, I’ve had time in the last five days to sit around reading. These are the books I’ve read recently: Continue reading ‘More books…’
I took my mum to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
I liked Firefox on the Mac - it was fully featured (whereas Safari has some limitations) but it always ran too slowly to be an adequate replacement for the built in browser. It was more effort to put up with how slow it was than it was to put up with the few missing functions in Safari.
Now though, I can use Firefox again. Over on BeatnikPad the G5-optimized Firefox 1.5 is available for download. I’m posting this from within it (including proper editing buttons that Safari won’t render) and it works beautifully - and much, much faster.
There’s even a G4 optimised build, should you be so inclined. Go, download, enjoy.
I’m going to quote Tycho’s post in its entirety here, because I agree with him 100% and there’s not much I can add to it!
Rise of Nations was a great game, but if you were flipping through screenshots seeking out some new addiction it wouldn’t have stood out - you’d get the impression that you had played “that game” before.
It’s hard to dismiss Rise of Legends in the same way. Big Huge Games could probably have put out another Rise of Nations in the same vein and done alright, but instead they chose to go completely batshit insane and I think we’re all the better for it.
Teech, Shep and I spent a good amount of time this evening (morning, whatever) trying to find some concrete information on the minimum spec required to play RoL. We’ve yet to find anything, though judging by the screen shots we’re going to need some pretty beefy graphics cards to run this baby. Like Tycho, we’re looking forward to it!
Working semi-regularly for Microsoft, I’m now even more aware of when people criticise the company. Sometimes it is justified, sometimes it’s not. Here’s a very funny critique of what Slashdot readers make of the Xbox360 and it’s backwards compatibility.
Funny. Rude, but funny.
For ages I’ve been meaning to keep track of the books I read as I finish reading them. My friend Ryan has been doing this for some time; he doesn’t write full reviews, just the date when he finishes a book and maybe a one line comment about what he thought of it. I’d intended to do this starting at the beginning of this year, but what with one thing and another never got round to it. But now… Continue reading ‘A Deepness in the Sky’
I needed to rename over 3000 files across several thousand directories the other day, and sure as hell wasn’t going to do it by hand. This was to change the name of the file used to show the cover art for my albums from “cover.jpg” to “folder.jpg”. For my benefit, should I need to do this again, here’s the Windows command script that’ll do the job:
for /r %i in (cover.jpg) do @rename “%i” folder.jpg
Simple. cover.jpg is the file you want to find, and folder.jpg is what you want to rename it to.
If I had thought it through properly I’d have written a script that actually found all the cover.jpg files then ran the rename against that list. This script actually attempts to rename the file even if it isn’t in the directory it’s looking at. This is less of a problem for me as the majority of the folders do contain a cover.jpg. ymmv.
Anyway, this is for my (and Phil’s) benefit rather than anyone elses! 
Maxi Jazz, the maestro behind Faithless, is well titled as “the grand oral disseminator.” I saw Faithless at the Brixton Academy last night. Fantastic. Sound problems on a couple of tracks momentarily killed the vibe, but apart from that it was magic, and besides Maxi Jazz brought the crowd back up again almost effortlessly.
Great stuff. Pictures in the usual place. And big thanks to Phil for organising (and to Mike & Phil for getting me home afterwards, you’re gents, sirs!).
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