richard-slater.co.uk

Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog

I have been meaning to post about this since I first heard about it, and spectacuarly didn’t. As of Tuesday last week www.drhorrible.com was host to the first of three episodes of Dr. Horrible\’s Sing Along Blog. The title is great in itself, however as it has been said seeing is believing and honestly if you have enjoyed any of Joss Whedon’s work then you will really love this.

The mini-series covers a snapshot in the lives of Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) the protagonist and his arch-nemisis Captin Hammer (Nathan Fillion of Firefly/Serenity fame). Unusally for Joss Whedon’s work it dosn’t have a strong feminist female character as such, however you will have to watch it to see why that may be!

It is no longer available for free on the web, although US and Canadian iTunes users can download it, international iTunes users have been promised it Soon™ and a DVD and Soundtrack look pomising.

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Site Upgrade

Upgraded the site to WordPress 2.6, also switched the style to use widgets so everything down the left hand side is now a widget rather than some hand coded SQL stuff, that worked but could have been much better, now it is!

As you can probably see I am experementing with Twitter I don’t know if I am going to get along with it, but I do like the idea of blogging with less than 140 characters.

As always if anyone spots anything that is not as it should be do let me know and I will fix it, well try to, or perhaps phone a friend.

Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »

SMART Notebook File Format

The SMART .notebook format is simply a zipped set of XML and SVG files, This may be common knowledge but it is certainly the first time I have come across it.

To test it you can create a file in SMART Notebook rename the extension from .notebook to .zip, double click to open, you will be presented with several files named pagen.svg where n is a number, as well as a series of other files and folders including settings.xml, preview.png and metadata.xml.

The XML and SVG files can be edited in notepad, or perhaps more useful for the SVG files in a program such as Inkscape.

Posted in Sys. Admin., Things You Find | No Comments »

Visual Studio 2005 Web Development under Vista

I have had an issue today with Visual Studio 2005 and Vista today, specificly I have been unable to use the built in mini-web server that is used for debugging web projects. When you run a project from within the development environment it starts WebDev.WebServer.exe and then points an instance of Internet Explorer at http://localhost:port/path/to/default.aspx.

Now I remember this working well in the past, and indeed if I replace localhost with 127.0.0.1 it worked fine, I didn’t fancy having to type this every time I went to build and run a program. I could not find any way of configuring Visual Studio to point to the IP address rather than the host name.

Upon trying to ping localhost (fairly futile I understand but I was getting desperate) I noticed that packets were being returned over IPv6 (::1:) rather than IPv4 (127.0.0.1), my first port of call was to disable IPv6 on the NIC - which unsurprisingly didn’t work as anything to do with localhost shouldn’t use the NIC, and unlike Linux; Windows does not appear to expose the loopback adapter to the end user.

The soloution as it turns out was to remove the IPv6 record for localhost from %WINDIR%\etc\drivers\hosts. Editing this file requires an instance of notepad.exe to be running as a local administrator (i.e. press the windows key, type “cmd”, right click cmd.exe in the list and choose “Run as Administrator”. I realised had this before, in the time between then and now all trace of the problem occuring was wiped from my memory leaving only the soloution in my head. Never mind all working now!

Posted in Programming | No Comments »

Driving

I have had my Provisional driving licence for some time now, however I have done little or nothing about it since the idea of driving doesn’t exactly fill me with joy. I don’t know why that is but never the less I don’t particularly want to spend the time and money on learning to drive.

That said, it would make sense now Catherine and I are living in Peacehaven to be able to drive, it would also open up more job opportunities for me as I would be able to travel further than the bus can carry me, as well as being able to drive company cars and the such.

Well as it turns out I booked my theory test, so I have a little over a month to learn everything I can about the theory test and driving in general, then after Catherine and I get back from holiday I can start on lessons with my good friend Kev!

Fun Stuff!

Posted in Diary | No Comments »

Artists Open Houses

Several of my friends and one of my colleagues are presenting their work at the artists open houses as part of the 2008 Brighton Festival. In no particular order other than that of the Fiveways Artists Group trail listing:

Rex Matthews - A colleague of mine.

Deborah Fleming - A friend from church, who is also displaying work with Liz Calmiano and Maureen Hawthorne.

Impressed with how creative everyone is!

Posted in Things You Find | No Comments »

Lakeland Revival

Catherine and I have been watching the GOD channel over the past three days, there has been and still is a great outpouring of the holy spirit in Lakeland, Florida, and the GOD channel have been broadcasting it to the world (well most of it).

I don’t know what God is going to do, but I am sure that he is changing lives there in Florida and all over the world through the ministries of the leaders there. It is not without criticism, I don’t know enough about everyone involved to make up my mind, chances are I will never know till I get to meet my Lord face to face.

Posted in My Faith, Things You Find | 8 Comments »

Bartle claims victory in battle

I am sure that title is going to annoy someone an awful lot, but never mind. Richard Bartle submitted an opinion piece to The Guardian today, and as he puts it in his blog it is “Opinionated”.

I like it! I think it is something I had realised and accepted a long time ago (I was born in 1981) games are part of the norm for me. I learnt to program on a ZX Spectrum when I was 8, what did I write - computer games of course - pong, breakout, Thunderbirds (TV Series), rolling shooters. I even tried to write a Windows like GUI in BASIC (yes it had some serious design flaws). All of that was normal to me.

In case you missed the link above, here is opinion piece:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/28/games.censorship

Posted in Programming, Things You Find | No Comments »

Rescueing Kittens

I did something today that I have never done, that is rescue a kitten (maybe it was a young cat) from a tree.  Initially I was going to leave it, as it is going to have to learn how to get down somehow, then it tried to get down forward and ended up clinging on to the tree. It was quite happy for me to coax it down as I stood below till I could reach down and lift it from the trunk.

Chances are the same kitten will be up another tree in the next few days, maybe its experience today will have taught it a better way to get down in the future, or perhaps just to meow until a kindly stranger comes to the rescue.

Did make me think about how we learn by trying things and making mistakes, I know it has been said over and over again about children being wrapped up in bubble wrap dosn’t help them develop good judgement. I do wonder if we protect our children and indeed ourselves too much by not taking risks when perhaps the reward is only to learn not to take the same risk again.

I am not advocating being reckless or careless in our decisions, just perhaps taking a risk once in a while when we don’t know for sure and, perhaps more importantly, we can’t practicably find out by other means.

Posted in Diary, Things You Find | No Comments »

Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare

Bought the game last week, finished the single player campaign a couple of days ago. It plays more like being in a film than a game, which for me is great, as a cinematic experience it is superb, the game play is better than any other game I have played before (which doesn’t say much really - have been out of touch of the FPS market over the past few years).

The multiplayer is great fun too. I had some initial issues connecting in the first place due to PunkBuster connect issues, resolved them by updating PunkBuster manualy with PBSetup.exe then running the game as Administrator under Vista 64.

All in all, great game - well worth the spend, and brought a lot of enjoyment to my Christmas.

Posted in Misc. | 1 Comment »