Archive for Uncategorized
my about page has changed
check it out:
I’m currently 22, living in Llandudno in North Wales.Somehow, against all my better efforts to avoid graduating, I have come into the possession of a 2:1 degree in Mathematics from the University of Wales, Bangor and am currently working as a software developer at karova making e-commerce thingys. I am also married to the astonding, incredible Gemma.
More on that later, but right now, we’re off on our honeymoon.
Whats that song again?
You know the one.. It goes da da da dum da da da dumm dum da…
No I don’t know the lyrics, no I don’t know who its by. Oh well I guess we can’t find out what the song is.
Well not anymore! Previously if you had a song stuck in your head going over and over and over again, the only real way to find out what it is, even who its by would be to hum it to someone around you (assuming you don’t know any of the lyrics that is). But what if you have no friends, or worse, you have lots of friends but their all deaf and thus unable to help you on your musical quest.
INTERNET TO THE RESCUE!
A new site (still currently in beta) called midomi. It lets you hum, sing or whistle your tune to it and it will run off and try and match the melody. Hell, you can even just concentrate hard and it will pick up your thoughts and find it for you. Ok, it can’t really do that but it’d be cool if it did huh? Lets hope thats in a future release.
More than just a site to help you find that single song stuck in your head, it lets you listen, rate and even download the song once its found it. And if it can’t find a match for your hummings in it’s database – it will save it and when (and if) it eventually finds it in the future it can let you know. Great stuff.
The site uses something called MARS – short for the catchy titled Multimodal Adaptive Recognition System, developed by the company Melodis to figure out what on earth it is your singing to them. Its only the first trial run of the system but if it goes well, I’m sure that we’ll end up finding it all manner of places before too long.
python fun
So you’re writing a system that runs through xml files huh?
And does it dynamically each time you load the page.
Sounds like you should do some load testing.
Well heres a lovely baby small python script that helps you do just that. It makes 10,000 files for you. Oh so pretty.
s= """
---the test data---
"""
for i in range(0,10000):
f = open ("%d-%d.xml"%(i,i),'w')
f.write(s)
f.flush()
f.close()
(and if your interested the system passed – 2 seconds to run through 10000 files isn’t bad)
vista boxes
Do you remember the horrid old boxes you used to get software in. Ive got many of them floating around – from the original XP box to the office box. They haven’t bore the test of time great. They invariably end up either in the bin within the week or stuffed to the brim with manuals and cds from all the other computer realted things.
Anyway – whats making me talk about this now i hear you cry. Well, with the announcement of the release dates for Windows Vista (30th November for businesses and 30 January for everybody else) they’ve also shown us what the retail boxes will look like.
I know I’d be more inclined to keep it around than some scraggy little cardboard thing. Which is apparently one of the main motivations for making out of a more durable plastic this time around. Apparently losing product keys and the actual discs is the cause of 25% of the calls to Microsoft help desks these days.
Something else that was news to me was the fact that the installation discs will have every flavor of the operating system including 32/64 bit versions. So in the future if you don’t initially go for the ultimate edition, all you need to do is purchase an upgrade online and use the disc you have to move your system up a notch or two.
I know its dirty, but I’m looking forward to it.
For now, heres the line up of boxes that are coming out (in order of ascending price).