BootBlock.co.uk

Imagine the scene: I’m in a hall way. Nothing is happening other than me walking through a door.

Moments before I close the door behind me, someone comes up to me and, without a hint of any context, blurts out: “You know the circle with the four corners?”. Then silence. No information on which plane of reality this imaginary circle inhabits. It could be a fucking dream for all I know.

I stand there like a bird just shat in my mouth. What just happened?

Rather than - even causually - mentioning where this circle exists, they go on to trace a circle in the air with their finger and say “The circle with the corners, with lines through it”.

The bird-plop is still sitting in my mouth as I just stand there. They just came from putting their children to bed, so could it be a toy? Yeah, it might be, so I enquiringly ask “Is it… a toy?”. A somewhat annoyed look appears on their face.

Apparently not. Having established that it isn’t a toy, that means there’s now only a billion-minus-one things it could be.

“The circle thing with the four corners. Black and white corners, where is it?”.

Ohh right! Black and white corners! So it can’t be a pizza cut into quarters. Or a life preserver floaty ring thing as they’re red and white, plus they’re not quartered. What about an onion ring? Nah. So that means it now could be either one of a billion-minus-four things. We’re making progress!

Dunno about you, but I’m fairly confused. All I could muster was saying “What?” a couple of times. This circle thing could literally be anything for all I know. I finish off with a “What circle?”.

Yep, they’re annoyed now. Annoyed that I’m not a fucking mind reader, no doubt. “In Excel or whatever! The Circle!”.

Right, Excel. The spreadsheet/chart thing in Office. The speadsheet/chart thing I don’t use. But, seemingly, because I use a computer, I automatically know how every fucking application in the entire world works.

“Excel… I don’t use Excel… er, is it a pie chart?” .

Oh, now they’re really annoyed. “NO … doesn’t matter” is half-heartedly spoken as they suddenly just vacate the area.

That’s it. The whole moronic ordeal lasted about 25 seconds. It’s a little while later and I still don’t know what the damn circle was supposed to be. But all this does is merely highlight a problem that really annoys me.

I use computers all the time - it’s what I do. This does not mean I wrote every single bloody program (out of hundreds of thousands, if not millions) ever created and that I automatically know what someone is talking about when they just walk up to me and say “circle”. It’s like walking up to a random doctor in the street and saying “Fx it”. Fix what? Your spleen or your house’s damn guttering? How about you start from the beginning and say what you’re talking about and what the problem is (this includes exactly what you’re trying to do) ?

This can also be applied to bug reports. Submitting reports that say “An error appeared and I clicked OK; how do I fix it?” is entirely useless. I’ll fix the problem when you fix the buzzing.

Wait, what buzzing?

Exactly.

What a bunch of scummy bastards.

I decided to move away from 1and1 Internet a while ago because the features they offer are still stuck in the 90s with their tiny monthly transfer and instead went with UK2.net as they’re not so freakin’ archaic (although they have a terrible-looking control panel). I’m still with 1and1 because I want to make sure no more mail is incoming via my tnk-bootblock.co.uk domain and their domain transfer procedure is a massive pain in the arse.

What prompted me to write this post is the fact that this morning I received a fucking debt collection notice! I make it a policy never to never owe anyone anything, seemingly unlike the current UK culture these days. Then out of the blue I get this. Lovely.

I recieved a replacement credit card but kinda  forgot to update my details with 1and1. I get an email saying that payment couldn’t be taken, so I login to my admin panel ASAP and whack in the new details. Done. The site’s “We couldn’t take payment” notice disappeared and the account was all working fine. That was a month ago.

Today I get the debt notice from some company called Arvato Finance Services. I immediately phoned up and paid the charge (which included a £15 “late fee”) as I’m not in the mood for this shit.

This is actually the second time 1and1 have done this, minus the debt crap.

Fuck you, 1and1. And your mothers.

My main email account has spacked out; I can recieve mails fine, but I just cannot reply to them. I thought this would have been solved quickly, but it hasn’t - so I’m making this posting. If you’ve mailed me and haven’t gotten a reply back yet… this is why.

Woah, wait! I’m not going to blather on about Chrome like a lot of people are currently doing. Okay, I’m not going to slag it off like a lot are doing, and I’m not going to praise it as the best browser in the world. Like a lot of people are also doing.

What I am going to say is in regards to the WebKit engine contained within.

WebKit is supposedly the most standards compliant browser code-base out right now, but I, like a lot of people, have only ever seen it used within the Safari browser. Chrome may be a featureless skeleton of a shell (the screenshots look terrible, but actually look okay with Vista’s Glass replacing the blue background), but the WebKit devs must be ecstatic that people will actually be seeing their engine used in a browser that isn’t a rancid mess of an abortion. For that, Chrome is good.

While I’m here: Having the address bar contained in the tab pages is actually a good idea which doesn’t work too well in practice. Opera has this enabled by default and it’s, well, crap. I even had the same design in one of my apps back in 1999 - it made sense from a coupling point of view, but I removed it. One reason why is code duplication; having the same controls duped across tabs was just needless redundency. With browsers, it just seems to also “feel” wrong.

Anyway, that’s it. I basically wanted to say what a heap of shit Safari is and that WebKit is not Safari.

It seems like I lied about the blathering part.

Update: Lots of people are calling certain parts of Chrome invovative. For their information, the each-tab-as-a-process thing is from IE8. The “Incognito” mode is also from IE8 (which it calls InPrivate). The page with thumbnails of websites is from Opera, but Opera only shows pages you’ve specifically placed on the “Speed Dial” page. Chrome automatically showing it as a list of most-recently-viewed sites sounds like a problem, to me.

I’m impressed with Chrome’s start-up speed, that’s for sure. Hopefully it’ll get plugins and will become much more. I hate the current available web browsers and so I’m hoping Chrome may be The One.

I’m not entirely sure how I found this site, but randomally hopping between sites while clicking on links that seemed mildly interesting seemed to be somewhat responsible. OCR is a site dedicated to providing high-quality remixes to existing video games.

Not much more to say than that, really. I’m particularlly fond of the Da Bomb Lemmings remix. The built-in Last.FM player doesn’t work for me, so click on the Download MP3 link underneath it if you’re also experiencing the same.

View: OverClocked Remix

Why do I even bother installing Wordpress updates? I installed 2.6 and it toasted the entire admin area so I couldn’t log in. Almost every update has caused the installation to spew, which is quite amazing considering that the files that get updated aren’t touched by us mortals. Lame-o!

Anyway, Romulator has been released. It’s an application that renames ROM files for the Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Colour, Nintendo DS, Playstation Portable, and Wonderswan systems. It uses the magic of the CRC hash to work out which files are ROMs and then renames them according to a user-specific naming mask. Unlike other ROM renamers, there’s no need to put it into a specific system mode.

This release is v0.90 Alpha. There are missing features and I personally want to redesign its interface. Rather than delaying the thing for a billion years, I’ve decided to go ahead and just release it. I’ve done a load of testing and all that and it seemed to work without a problem.

While I’m here, WoWus v1.09 will be released soon which fixes a bug that can stop WoWus installing addons on some systems.

View: Romulator

Doctor Who series 30 (new series 5? Eh, whatever) just finished. I’m not a Who fan and I probably only watch it because of Tennant, but… my impressions? I’ll be brief:

Russell T Davies, you smug wanker. You suck (cock, probably).

People are jizzing over all of the good bits in GTA IV, so I’m gonna blow a sticky wad on the bad bits. Just because I can. So, despite it being a great game and all (it’s like an updated version of Saint’s Row, woah!), here’s some stuff. Since relaunching the site, I’ve gone a bit soft - so I’m gonna try and up the swearing and ranting quota. Alreet?

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I took a bit of a PC break, but now I’m back and working on a new application. The application allows the clustering of data (hence its name: Cluster), along with metadata, genres, and so on. Here are the reasons why Cluster is now in development …

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Wow, that was unexpected.

For me, the best games I’ve ever played were back in the 16-BIT era from the likes of Sega, on the Megadrive/Genesis. There were so many classic games released like Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Toejam & Earl, Comix Zone, and so on.

What I couldn’t understand was why Sega wasn’t doing updated versions of those games - gamers like myself would have a jizz-fest*. I don’t mean like what Nintendo are doing: constantly re-hashing the same shit over and over again. Just how many damn Zelda games are there, for example?

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