Shake ‘n’ Not Stirred Android Alarm

I recently released an Android app called Shake ‘n’ Not Stirred which is basically just the default Android alarm clock but I added the ability to shake to snooze the alarm. I also added a mode for the alarm so that the volume begins fairly low and gradually increases so it doesn’t make me jump first thing in the morning.

I decided to go ahead and create a website for the application, so I threw the site linked to above together in a couple of hours. It’s completely basic, but it’ll serve the purpose for now. I should probably add some screenshots and a contact form at some point, but there’s no immediate hurry because I’m currently working on a complete rewrite of Remote Recorder.

Yay for Android applications! 😀

Riga

A couple of weeks ago I went to Riga with Gordon, Matt, and Lee. It was a fairly eventful trip for everyone involved, and turned out to be quite a bit more expensive than any of us was expecting. Still had loads of fun and saw lots of interesting things.

There was still snow on the ground! Big piles of the stuff just sitting there ignoring the fact that it’s April.

We found some interesting bars to hang out in, and at one point decided that it would be a great idea to dance in the middle of the square in the middle of the night… On camera.

I helped out a completely pool-inept Matt in our doubles games against Gordon and Lee to bring us in a close second (or last).

We found an awesome tea house where you sit on cushions on the floor looking out onto the park from the circular mostly-glass building. It did get pretty boiling hot in there on the sunniest day though. I can’t imagine it’s very comfortable in the summer.

When we got back to Luton we found that Matt’s car window had been wide open from Tuesday to Saturday and nothing had been stolen. Quite incredible!

Many things happened, but I don’t think I can really be bothered to type it all up. Perhaps I’ll come back at a later date and do this blog entry better. I doubt it though.

How exactly am I 26 right now?

Seriously… How am I 26? I remember being 16, I was just about to finish school, and that’s now a decade ago. I don’t understand where the time has gone!

Hell, I can remember when I got hit by a car when I was 13 years old, and that was now half of my entire life ago!

The passage of time can be quite depressing. Just think of all the things you’ve left behind already. You’re going to be doing that for the rest of the time you’re here. Nice, huh?

You might say that’s an incredibly pessimistic view, and you’d be right, but I’m a pessimist today, so go fuck yourself. 😛

Cash Gordon sucks

Just been looking at the Cash Gordon website and decided it’s not very good. Thought I’d share that with you all. 🙂

More info
I just thought I’d take a second to explain this post… The Conservative Party put up a website that I’m not going to bother linking to that had a Twitter stream of all posts with a certain hashtag. They had no filtering of content, and no sanitising either. All HTML and Javascript got rendered directly on their page.

Cue carnage. People posted massive pictures, huge text, and a few people (myself included) posted Javascript redicrects to various other sites around the Internet.

The site appears to be down now. Whether that’s on purpose by the sysadmin team in the data centre, or because of a DDoS I don’t know. I guess it won’t be coming back up in its original form though. 🙂

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It was fun while it lasted.

London for the grand prix

On Saturday I got a lift to London with Gordon and Claire because they were going to see Noel Fielding and I was going to watch the grand prix with JonP, Emma, Rachel, and then JonP’s friends Sam and Stephanie too.

On the Saturday night I met JonP at Oxford Circus and we went to Hamburger + and had burgers and Coke floats. From there we went for a fairly long walk around parts of London. I saw Nelson’s Column, Big Ben, and some stuff like that, and then we walked right under the London Eye and along the south bank of the Thames for a while until we reached the OXO Tower (snigger).

We found a pub there, but it was too busy, so we walked into the city again where we found a bar that was too quiet. I said the next bar would be “juuuust right,” and JonP said “only until the bears get back.”

We reached a third bar on the way to another and decided to go in. It was a Canadian themed bar. JonP got the first round of Sailor Jerry at just over £12 for 2 drinks. We moved away from the bar, and this was when we noticed that there was a stuffed bear in a glass case right beside us. I don’t know how to work out the chances of something like that, but they must be absolutely minuscule!

From there we went to a bar called The Porterhouse and had a couple of pints of Frulli. A man we introduced to Frulli did not like it at all! One of the rounds came to £8.80 and I gave JonP £10 for it. Imagine my surprise when he gave me £8.80 change! The bartender apparently isn’t very good at his job. 😀

After that we went for a walk that took us through Soho at night. A very interesting place, to say the least. One woman asked if I was looking for girls and one man asked if I was looking for anything, and JonP and I agreed that he probably meant pretty much anything.

We took the world’s longest route to the next bar, which was a blues bar. We spent the rest of the night in there drinking Sailor Jerry, listening to a band who sounded like they performed the original recording of the Pulp Fiction theme tune (they actually did play it, as did the following band), and hanging out with a couple from Sleaford named Daryll and Kerry.

We stayed out until 3 and then gradually made our way to a bus stop without any food shops near it, caught the N7 to JonP’s street. I tried to get off the front of the bus, which you’re not supposed to do, but the driver eventually let me off. 🙂

When we got in I put my phone on charge and everything else on a table. JonP promptly poured a glass of water over my belongings and then we cleaned it up and went to sleep! It was after 4am by this point.

At 9:30 we woke up so we could get ready to go to Emma’s. JonP’s friend Stephanie arrived before we were quite ready and then we waited for Sam, who had decided to join us. 🙂

It was really sunny and quite warm all the way to the tube, which was nice.

The grand prix itself wasn’t super-exciting, but much fun was had at Emma’s house anyway. A short while afterwards I had to get back to the other side of London to meet Gordon and Claire, so we left again.

I travelled most of the length of the Victoria line and then hung around for a little while for Gordon and Claire to arrive. I also gave away my tube ticket, after much effort. 🙂

All in all I had a really great weekend, and now I’m moving to London. 😉

Final Fantasy XIII, Formula 1

I recently bought my first Final Fantasy game since the day FFVIII was released. I’m really enjoying being immersed in that sort of a game/world again.

I can see me spending quite a lot of the near future battling monsters, spending gil, and wondering exactly why Sazh has a chocobo chic in his hair. 😀

I can also see that the immediate future will involve a lot of weekends spent watching the Formula 1 season progress with intense interest. Starting today! Yay!

Tomorrow I will go to London to hang out with JonP and Emma (and possibly Rachel, I’m not sure) and spend Sunday afternoon with my eyes glued to the screen. Yes yes yes! Can’t wait.

Smartphones are awesome

I went to York to visit Ania this weekend as a last minute sort of thing. It was a really good weekend.

Most of Saturday afternoon/evening involved being by myself while Ania worked. I decided to go for a York walk to buy a book and maybe get a haircut.

I put a star on the location of Ania’s work on Google Maps and then searched for a local Waterstones. I found the shop straight away with no messing (admittedly it was a straight journey aLong one road). I bought a copy of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and set off in a random direction.

I found a street that looked like it might have a barber shop on it, and walked along for a while. Towards the end of the street I found that it actually did have 2 hairdressers. They were closed, so I looked at the map on my phone and saw where I was, then sauntered along a different route back to the city centre.

I went for a fairly twisty-turny walk through the city centre and then found my way back to Ania’s workplace. At absolutely no point did I worry that I could get lost, knowing that I had my phone with GPS and Google Maps.

I love smartphones!

List separation

I was just reading a BBC News article about the death of presenter Kristian Digby, who I’ve never watched on TV before, or even heard of before he died. I found a sentence that I completely misread because of the grammar.

“The property expert, who was born into a family of property developers, worked on a number of other shows including Double Agents, Living In The Sun, House Swap and Buy It, Sell It, Bank It.”

The problem I had was in the list of shows. Due to the lack of a serial comma I read one of the show names as “House Swap and Buy It” which is obviously not a show once you read the rest of the sentence, but seemed like one at first.

Adding the serial comma would be a nice start, but would still potentially cause confusion in the final item of the list, which contains 2 commas of its own. Normally when one or more list items contain internal punctuation (their own commas, for example) you should separate the items with a semi-colon.

I was going to use point 2b on this page on the Northern Illinois University website as my source, until I read the rest of the page and noticed that they’d written poles instead of polls. That’s not to mention that the top of the page includes the phrase “weak period” which I don’t particularly want to get into.

Instead I point you to Essentials of English Grammar: a practical guide to the mastery of English by L. Sue Baugh. 🙂

Now you know. 🙂

Unclear language

I was just reading a bit of documentation–the RFC in fact–for SRV records when I had to stop and read the same sentence a couple of extra times because it was so unclear the first time. Here it is:

Name
The domain this RR refers to. The SRV RR is unique in that the name one searches for is not this name; the example near the end shows this clearly.

I did a bit of a search around and I found a site called Debian Help that had this to say on the topic (emphasis mine):

name
Incomprehensible description in RFC 2782. Leaving the entry blank (without a dot) will substitute the current zone root (the $ORIGIN), or you can explicitly add it as in the above _http._tcp.example.com. (with a dot).

Oh well. It seems I don’t need it.

Back to work

I finally got back to work today after the flu kept me off last week. It was quite nice to be back in the office, actually.

I managed to get quite a bit done on something that had me stumped before I became ill, as well as fixing a couple of new bugs with some Javascript changes. Felt good to make progress.

Hope the rest of the week goes so well. 😀