I just emailed the Solihull Times with a response to Cllr. Bramham’s letter. Hopefully somebody slightly more knowledgeable than I will destroy his arguments in a wittier style, but I couldn’t in good conscience not respond. It just winds me up so much that such extraordinary and ridiculous claims are stated by people whose job is to know better.

I’m going to calm down now.

A tirade is coming. I have maths to do now, so it’ll be later, but be warned. It’s coming.

The reason I needed to install iTunes was that this morning I received an A-Level Physics revision program, which includes various videos. I have a book of questions that I’m working through, but I thought that a program that I could quickly load up whenever I had a spare five minutes might not be a bad idea. Now, bear in mind that I’ve just downloaded and installed iTunes, and was impressed. iTunes worked on me. Within moments I saw something I liked, and it just worked. Moments after closing that down I loaded up the Physics program…

First thing it does: change my desktop colour depth to 8bit. Now, that’s just annoying. It quickly became apparent that this wasn’t going to be a program I could run on one monitor while browsing on another. It took over the entire screen. Changing the colour depth also meant that the refresh rate dropped to 60Hz, which made my head hurt after only a few seconds. Then, on the first screen, it says ‘Please enter your name’. So I did. Then: ‘Enter a password’. I couldn’t be bothered, so clicked ‘Next’. No: ‘You must enter a password’. Why, exactly? Is it likely that someone is going to steal my computer in order to better my thermodynamics mark? Do hackers regularly prove their evil genius by proving they know more about relativity than the average student? I suppose if I were one of twins, and we were both studying Physics, and we hated each other, then we may not want to share our scores. But, really.

If you compare first impressions to Hogwarts houses, iTunes is Gryffindor to the revision program’s Slytherin. The good news is that the questions seem to be very good, and the testing methods are smooth and easy. It’s just a shame they couldn’t have put it all into a nice Windows GUI!

I needed to install Quicktime this morning, and headed over to the apple site to download the latest version. Turns out you can’t download Quicktime on its own any more, it only comes bundled with iTunes. Cunning I have nothing against iTunes, so have installed that too. First thoughts are that it looks like it could be quite expensive. I saw a few singles on the first page that I thought ‘ooh, I’d quite like that’. And at 79p each I may get tempted. Thinking about it, I wonder if that’s including VAT…’course, I don’t actually have an MP3 player. Yet. Maybe I should ask for an iPod for christmas.

This may turn out to have been a mistake.

Madonna says: “Creation comes when you learn to say no.” I don’t know if that means anything, but I’m going to assume it’s profound in a way I don’t understand.

So I finally got Half-Life 2 working! Kinda, anyway. After Valve updated the official FAQ entry with a recommendation to try out the latest beta video drivers, I gave it a try. 67.02 are the latest Detonators, so I nuked the previous set with Driver Cleaner and reinstalled. First thing that became apparent: there’s a major bug involving multiple monitors. It can’t run with Display 1 on the left and Display 2 on the right. Just doesn’t work - they’re always reversed. So I moved the toolbar etc to Display 2. Programs open on the wrong monitor, but it’s no big deal. Anyway, upon loading up HL2 the stuttering was vastly improved. Not totally gone, but certainly bearable. Restarting with “-heapsize 256000″ in the advanced options helped even more. Major w00tage! More w00tage than could fit in a cherub!

So I’ve been playing Half-Life 2 all morning, and wow is it good. You ask Mum and Dad how much I’ve been yelling (through joy, fright and disbelief). Excellent graphics, great sound, fantastic level design…It’s Just Great. Buy it now. You don’t even have to leave your desk. Just download Steam, whip out the credit card and within hours it’ll be delivered right to your desktop. You won’t need the CD to play then, unlike me!

Madonna now says: “I have truth on my side, you only have deceit. You’ll see, somehow someday.” Is that profound too?

Up late repairing broken virus scanners. Thought I was done when I discovered the most recent definitions were from March ‘03. ‘Netsky’ doesn’t even appear in the list. I’d best fix this before the morning, or someone’ll only open an email or something! LiveUpdate isn’t even looking for new definitions at the moment, and I really can’t figure out why…

I’ve also completely changed the mail server software on our office server. I used to use the freeware Mercury, however it’s been becoming more and more sluggish as the number of emails creeps into the thousands. Not a big surprise, it’s not designed to handle that much! I’m trying out a 30-day evaluation of Kerio MailServer. It seems quite good, although neither of my 2 virus scanners will integrate natively with it. It’s a bit pricey too, so we’ll see whether anyone notices any difference!

Wow, my eyes are going foggy. I really must be tired. Best time to be working on computers, this is.

The Half-Life 2 stuttering patch came out last night, but sadly it hasn’t made any difference for me I hope it gets sorted soon, I really want to play!

Latest HL2 news:

We’re still working through some testing on this release. It might be something we’ll want to hold for another day and release tomorrow.

Hmph. And I had a free evening, too.

The first officially sanctioned Psycho Bitch Woman was Mrs Palmer in 24. She was crazy. I won’t go into what she did, but it was nuts. Her character had a few plot twists in the second series, too. She turns up in various other tv shows from time to time, and I must frequently restrain myself from exclaiming her phrase at many decibels. Then, as official Psycho Bitch Classifier, I made a mistake. I remember issuing a decree as to the Psycho-Bitch-Womaninity of someone, but now can no longer remember the identity of said person. This suggests, in hindsight, that they did not warrant the moniker.

People, we have a new deservee, and her name is Maya.

She’s completely psychotic, and not in a Trinny-and-Susannah good way. No. She blows up shops.

If you don’t know, I’m talking about last night’s Coronation Street, which was the best episode since Richard killed Maxine 18 months ago. Woohoo, it was fun. Dev, the best actor in the program, spent the final (of 3) episodes racing around his various shops, as they promptly exploded. The first hit as he opened the front door to investigate the wailing alarm. As a connoisseur of all things combustible, this was an excellent explosion. Dev was thrown across the street, but happily recovered enough to drive around madly for the next 25 minutes.

I should probably explain, for the uninitiated amongst you, that Dev left Psycho Bitch Woman for Sunita. A wise decision. Maya then, as you do, stole Sunita’s birth certificate and married various illegal immigrants, tipping off the police on Dev and Sunita’s wedding day. Sunita was arrested in church and carted off to prison. Much crying ensued. Dev sorted it, though, and Sunita was released and Maya questioned. That was a few weeks back, and I thought it was all over. Not so.

My mind insists on second guessing tv programmes, and my cunning theory was that the end of the episode would see Sunita, who lives in the flat above Dev’s Coronation Street branch, hearing the alarm go off. I then predicted that we’d witness the scene inside the pub as they heard a loud explosion, and the episode would end. I was wrong. The final moments saw Dev suddenly realise that Sunita may be in danger, and frantically phone her. The phone rang, and we saw Sunita tossing and turning in bed, not hearing it. Dev keeps trying, and finally Sunita looks up. She reaches for the phone, the camera angles changes and we see Maya standing behind her. We cut back to Dev as he hears screams down the phone. Episode ends.

Most cool. I haven’t been so entertained by Corrie since Richard tried to gas his entire family in their garage. So the club of the Psycho Bitch Woman has a new member, and she is most worthy. The next episode is on Wednesday.

From the excellent Half-Life 2 Stuttering Problem Page:

A solution for the stuttering problem has been found and a fix is coming. I’ve been talking with Gary McTaggart about this today and it turns out that my texture management theory was correct. A patch will be coming for this issue that will load all of the required textures into video memory on level load, rather than doing it during game play. There is currently no ETA for this patch, but I will post an update as soon as I get more information.

Excellent news
UPDATE:

Another update:

We’ve found a fix for this problem, and we’re planning on shipping it no later than tomorrow.

Woo!

A1 is a circle drawn about centre M. A2 is an arc with centre O. The drawing is not in any way to scale!

a) - Find the area of triangle OCD

Splitting the triangle into two right-angled triangles:
Height^2 = (17^2) - (15^2) = 64; so height = 8

Area = 0.5 * base * height
Area = 0.5 * 15 * 8 = 60

Therefore the area of the entire triangle is 60 * 2 = 120

b) - Find the angle COD in radians

Area = 0.5absinC
120 = 0.5 * 17 * 17 * sinC
sinC = 120 / (0.5 * 17 * 17)
sinC = 0.8304
C = 0.9799 rad

c) - Find the area of the shaded region R

Area of sector O - C - A2 - D - O = 0.5 * radius^2 * OCD
Area = 0.5 * 17^2 * 0.9799rad
Area = 141.5956

Area of semicircle A1 = 0.5 * pi * 15^2
Area = 353.4291

So, area of R = 353.4291 - 141.5956 = 211.83

———————————————————

Except that answer is wrong.

This question is in my Pure 1 maths textbook, and I was figuring it out yesterday. I kept getting the wrong answer and couldn’t understand why. Eventually Mum and I worked out that, in part b, sinC has 2 answers between 0 and 180 (or pi, if you prefer), and I got the wrong one. Had I used trig on the right-angled triangle to find half of OCD, like they did in the textbook explanation, I’d have come up with the correct answer. I didn’t, though. It’s quite annoying in that I didn’t actually do anything mathematically wrong; the only way I could realise something was wrong would be to think of the angle in degrees and then to realise that it would be 56deg. Were it 56deg then it would be nearly an equilateral triangle, which it isn’t. So it’s more of a logic thing than a mathematical one. There’s just no chance I’d realise this in an exam situation, though.

Can anyone think of any other reason I could have spotted my mistake?

I’m still back.

Two weeks have gone by! All sorts of things have happened:

• Fox hunting got banned! Wooooo. They’re apparently planning a campaign of ‘civil disobedience’. Sure, that’ll win you public sympathy. Not at all pathetic there, guys.
• Boris Johnson was sacked. Hands up who knew he was even in the shadow cabinet? I like Boris because I quite often mistype his name as Biros. However he apparently had an affair, which means he ranks only just above wasps on the Johnny Vaughn scale of annoying.
• I bought an Asus 6800GT graphics card, along with a copy of Half-Life 2. I was excited Unfortunately I’m suffering from the stuttering problem which spoilt it somewhat, so I’ve stopped playing until that’s fixed. Hopefully it won’t take too long. I’d recommend you don’t hang around in the steam forums, btw, as I’ve seen a couple of spoilers I wish I hadn’t People do put major plot points in the post titles, and although the moderators stomp on them pretty quickly there’s often something.
• My friend Helen was on TV. That’s yet another famous person I know! I’m an IT guy. Heh. See what I did there? Yeah.
• I found out that Katie Melua is the best selling UK artist of 2004. Cool or what. That’s entirely due to my blog post of last year pushing her album, I think. Maybe a bit of help from Terry Wogan.
• Argh, I’ve just discovered that all the old posts have lost their paragraph breaks. Sigh. I’ll try to fix that later.
• I’m HUNGRY! I haven’t had any breakfast!

I’m bloody well back.

It was hard, but I made it. I was a bit like Supergirl climbing up that cliff thing out of the phantom zone in the somewhat camp film. Other than the sexy outfit, superpowers, breasts and secret identity, she and I are very similar. I’ve been scaling that cliff for the last two weeks now; somewhere along the way I lost the pants I-can’t-climb-any-more bloke and today I finally made it back out of the mirror (hmmm, maybe my analogy’s stumbling slightly) and am now set to vanquish Faye Dunaway while Peter Cook bemusedly watches.

I had no time to do a proper export of my data before everything broke, so I had to re-import all of my data the hard way. Am I good to you or what. It’s not quite perfect yet, and I should really take the opportunity to undertake revampage, but it’s late and I’m just going to go with it.

Congratulatory gifts, kisses and holidays gladly appreciated. Unless you’re a bloke. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Only on the second. I don’t mind being given gifts by a bloke. In fact, if you give me a holiday, your luck might be in whoever you are. Forget I said that. That was unsaid.

I should really get some sleep.

My friend Nod has measles. That’s not good - it’s much more dangerous in adults than in children. Hopefully he’s doing all the right things (calling NHS Direct is great for this kind of thing) to make sure it’s treated properly. I haven’t been able to find much information on the actual risks to adults, so we’ll have to wait and see. Get well soon, Nod!

Incidentally, the MMR vaccine does inoculate most people against measles, mumps and rubella. But not everyone. Half the point of a vaccine is that anyone who does get infected is surrounded by people who are immune, so it can’t spread.* So if you’ve seen Nod recently you should check yourself even if you’ve had the MMR vaccine.

*This is why the recent MMR scandal was so dangerous. Nutso parents who refused (based on hearsay, against government advice, and a complete lack of any kind of common sense or, more scientifically, risk-assessment) to give their children the MMR vaccine were in fact endangering everybody else (including adults), not just their own children. I’ve never actually met anyone who refused, but woe betide them if I do

This is childish and not at all funny. No no no. Not funny. Well, it is. But not.

I don’t support athletes based on the country they come from. This annoys a lot of people. They think I should be more patriotic, and always support the brit. Well, that’s silly. If someone seems nice, I support them. I’m susceptible to comeback tales. The latter is the reason I’m quite chuffed that Paula Radcliffe just won the New York Marathon! In spectacular fashion too, with a race that came down to the last 100m. Twas sad to see her in distress at the Olympics, so this is a particularly sweet victory.