Interesting Flickr video (apologies if you hate Flickr video; I'm somewhat ambivalent to it myself) where someone dissolved away all the covering of an Oyster card and tested various antenna configurations of the embedded RFID chip.

Très cool!

Possibly the coolest article I've read in a while:



A real post soon, with lots of news, just waiting to sign on the dotted line first…

Tags: zombies
Current Location: Home
Hwyl cyfoes: avoiding doing stuff
Dw i gwrando neu gwylio: BBC News 24

The meme is all trishpiglet's fault. And it's nice and easy, so I expect lots of my friends to do it:

1. Use Wikipedia's Random page selector; the article title is the name of your band.
2. Use the Quotations Page.com's random quote generator; the last four words of the very last quotation is the title of your album.
3. Use Flickr's most "interestingness" explorer"; the third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use your graphics programme of choice (Paint or Gimp will do here, people!) to throw them together, and post.

Tags: art, flickr, meme, photo
Current Location: Home
Hwyl cyfoes: full

Books

Books I've read in 2007 (by author):

( List of books… )

Miwsic

Music I've listened to in 2007:

( List of music )

Tags: 2007, books, miwsic, music, retrospective
Current Location: Home
Dw i gwrando neu gwylio: Burnley vs Arsenal, FA Cup Third Round

One of the advantages of a Writers' Strike is that you get some *very* funny content about it being, erm, written.

Found via Wil Wheaton.

www.unitedhollywood.com

Tags: entertainment, media, politics, strike, writersstrike2007
Current Location: Work
Hwyl cyfoes: frustrated
Dw i gwrando neu gwylio: Razorlight — Somewhere Else

For reasons too dull to explain, I’m trying to use regular expressions to postprocess an HTML-stream. I want to find all anchor (<a/>) tags that link within our site, in this case using the domain name.

My regular expression looks right to me, but .Net is convinced I don’t have enough close-parentheses. I’ve added line breaks for clarity:

   (?<=<a[^>]* href=['"]?)
   (?<before>https?://[a-z0-9.-]*uswitch\.[a-z]+/[-\w_,.%/~]+)
   (?<querystring>\??[-\w&=~]*)
   (?<fragment>#?[-\w&=~]*)
   (?=['"]?[^>]*>)

I’ve tested both the above code with the line breaks removed and the original code (which is compiled with RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace and has embedded comments for ease of maintenance. Each time, I get a System.ArgumentException: parsing "..." - Not enough )'s.

Despite that I’m quite certain they’re perfectly matched.

Anyone?

Cross-posted to ms_dot_net and regexp.

Tags: .net, bug, pissed off, regex, work
Current Location: Work
Hwyl cyfoes: frustrated
Dw i gwrando neu gwylio: Elton John — Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting

Flickr is now engaging in outright censorship.

The ridiculous over-prudishness of their safe-search settings, which mean that entire photostreams disappear from public view because of non-adult nudity, was bad enough.

Now German users (amongst others) can't turn off safe search at all, even if they're firmly over 18 and want to see content that the Daily Mail might not approve of.

Worse, Flickr is deleting dissenting comments in its discussion fora.

I don't feel I can continue to support a site that's more bothered by appeasing religious nuts in the US than freedom across the globe. I doubt I'll renew my Pro status and I've yet to decide whether or not I'll be staying on Flickr for much longer.

Flickr, if you really loved us, you'd set us free.

Tags: censorship, flickr, pissed off, stupid
Current Location: Work
Hwyl cyfoes: angry

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Tags: activism, politics, tech
Current Location: Work
Hwyl cyfoes: working
Dw i gwrando neu gwylio: Sumerland (What Dreams may Come) — Fields of the Nephilim

Why is it that Microsoft appear to be completely incapable of writing decent code and documenting it?

I'm trying to work with SharePoint 2007 for a project at work. The developer textbooks haven't yet been published (and the release dates have recently been pushed back), so all I have to rely on is the MSDN Library's documentation of the API.

So when I see method descriptions like this (BaseFieldControl.RegisterFieldControl, fuck only knows what it does), I get pretty pissed off.

So I gave some feedback:

This is a public API, that developers need to access to work with SharePoint. Why on earth is there absolutely no documentation on some of these properties and methods?

Ridiculously poor; if one of my developers passed it to me for QA, I would have failed it and sent them to go do it all again, whilst hanging their head in shame.

I wonder if anyone will actually ever read it.

Cross-posted to ms_dot_net

Tags: crap developers, microsoft, rant, work
Current Location: Work
Hwyl cyfoes: pissed off
Dw i gwrando neu gwylio: Feeder — Forget about Tomorrow

Tags: chris lightfoot, friend, mysociety, no2id, obituary
Current Location: Work
Hwyl cyfoes: mournful
Dw i gwrando neu gwylio: Twin Peaks OST