Backgammon on Mac

Backgammon is my game... it's a lovely combination of skill and chance and offers an almost mystical experience. I really do love the game (unless I'm losing, thankfully I don't do that that often though ), thing is I was looking for a nice game to play on my Mac and came across BGBlitz and I think I've made a new friend. Give the demo a go and by all means shell out the piddling amount for a Player licence... it's well worth it!

How odd

My trusty PC must be feeling a bit left out at the minute, a bit neglected really. It's not it's fault really, it's just that I've fallen for mac in such a big way that it really doesn't have look in anymore. I've pulled it up today (The PC that is.) and tried to do stuff but I'm left thinking of something a mate said when they learnt how to drive in France... was something along the lines of being able to drive badly in both place, non of the keys are in the right place and the short cuts are all different.

My mac is slow but it's got apache already installed and has PHP and MySQL all easily installable - and you know I've installed them too - and I'm developing stuff on that quick as a flash... mainly because it's just so nice to use I think.

Anyway, enough of this, it's time to get back to some work again.

As an extra nugget of data purely for my own benifit:

I've come to understand where my somewhat mystical bent came from after coming across The Complete Adventures of Robin of Sherwood from the popular TV series by Richard Carpenter with Robin May and Anthony Horowitz (ISBN 0-14-034450-0) at work. I'd forgotten about the series staring Jason Connery until I came across this and then all I could hear afterwards was the music by Clannad in my head. It was a cracking bit of telly and no mistake and I can remember being well naffed off when it ended... ahh well.

Needless to say I'll be plowing through it (along with all the other books I'm in the process of reading at the minute).

More cool links for AJAX

Found these via a story on slashdot.

This has some nice illustrations that'll have to get borrowed for my stuff.

This is probably repeated somewhere, but what the hell!

This is a very quick tutorial.

33 today!

Well, it's nigh on half-past midnight so I guess that I'm officially 33 now...? 33 and bald as a very bald thing too!

When they say on a bottle of Immac that it's not to be used anywhere else other than legs they're not messing about, when they say that you're not to use it on broken skin they're not talking rot either!

To sum up: Putting the best part of a bottle of hair-removal cream on your head as a radical cure for near-terminal dandruff isn't a good idea. You leave it the prescribed 5 minutes and your hair doesn't come away nicely with the applicator thingy... it turns into some sort of strange rubbery goo and you pray that you've not put some on your eyebrows by accident, and you're left rubbing the remainder off like you did when you were at school and you purposefully covered your hands in glue just so you could rub it off when it dried... or maybe that was just me? That and the stinging isn't to be recommended, I can tell you.

Still, live and learn ehh...?

To Mac or not to Mac

Well, after many, many, many expensive upgrades I've fanally got Mac OS X running on a graphite clamshell iBook. Goodness me it looks lovely too . It's only Panther but anything more modern won't work I'm afraid... ahh well.

I keep getting pestered to join the .Mac thing and have an iDisk on the interweb or something but I'm not too sure about that really as it seems a bit of a faff. May well be worth it for online storage but I've got my website and ftp access for that anyway... we'll see ehh?

I do like Macs though and it almost feels like I've actually got Linux running on a laptop when I play with the lovely little bugger. Cost an arm and a leg and took bloody ages too, so I guess it's almost like getting Linux running on a laptop really . Could do with upgrading the HDD as it's only 6 and a bit GB... small ehh? Remember when that'd seem like tonnes? Just had to upgrade my external HDD solution to 50GB so that I've enough space... we'll be drowning in storage soon! Would like my own server really but that'll just have to wait for a bit .

In terms of the other stuff that I was talking about in my previous post it seems as though the consequences of the lie aren't all that bad really. Was getting all ready to change my life and making plans up to here but now I'm going back to normal... can't help but think of it as something of an anti-climax really *shrug*.

Nice picture to be getting on with though!

...and a battery on it's way to the dump:

Take it easy until next time...

Interactive Lock

Well I managed to finish the SVG lock I mentioned in my last post and it's here, like I put in my last post . I had a devil of a time getting the logic of the thing worked out but it all seems to work properly now.

This is a png of the image for those without the Adobe SVG viewer plugin:

For those without the plugin be aware that the image uses specific Adobe script constructs I'm afraid as I borrowed heavily from the work of Kevin Lindsey.

I put the link there as it was originally done for my youngest as he's doing a project on water at school and in the adsence of a working engine I couldn't take him through a lock but I wanted him to be able to see how one works. I figured that the address would be more school friendly rather than camshag... my fault for buying a domain name when I'm so tired I guess .

I'm interested in what people think about the buttons on the right, I've made them a little more user friendly by making animated arrows appear when the mouse goes over a functioning one but I'm still not overly sure that it works well enough for a kid to understand... please let me know using the link on the page if'n you can think of any way to improve the GUI.

Been a while

Seems like I should be getting paid by the city council to catch all the flies in Cambridge as I get off my bike after cycling to work and I'm covered in the buggers.

Went to the Midsummer fair (Been going 800 years... or so I was told...?) last weekend and had loads of fun... just a shame there seems to be bad blood between the travellers and the boaters on the Cam. Loads of boats ended moving from the common after all the nastiness last year.

Got a new canopy at long last:

Which means that I can sit out and read and see the ducks:

Still not got anywhere fast in terms of my dissertation but I'm working on an SVG canal lock, which should be cool as my youngest is doing a project on water... the link to it will appear here when I've finished.