I’m once again in DEC-10 working on coursework, this time on graphics. The number of late nights I’ve racked up lately is quite simply ridiculous. To keep me company in the pits of code despair and mild elation when that darn file that wouldn’t compile for the last hour finally does I decided to connect up to my home machine and play some of my music collection though my headphones.

I’m currently listening to Womack & Womack and I’d forgotten how good this stuff is to listen to and work along to. I’m currently half way through the Love Wars album and will be moving on to Conscience shortly. I’ve not decided what other music is going to keep me company throughout this evenings late night work session in the lab, so why not make some suggestions of music thats enjoyable to listen to and motivating to work with in comments. If I play it, I’ll say so in reply. Be quick though, I’m only here until 2am!

<soapbox>

I was pondering today just exactly WHY the Leeds School of Computing newsgroups are public.

Every time support remove a post for having inappropriate content the reason that is almost always cited is that the groups are accessible from the outside without a SoC username and password. My question is that if this presents a problem, why is it so? I mean, the groups are SoC related and if they are not they are most certainly predominantly aimed at SoC students.

Why should our freedom to post be governed not only by the fair use policy (which I accept and respect) but also by the potential offense caused to outsiders who have nothing to do with the school just because internal groups are world readable with no authentication. Just seems daft to me that if a post doesn’t contravene the fair use policy it cannot exist because it might be read by an outsider. If a post or discussion abides by the school’s policies the answer is to block the outsiders, not us from posting. That is all.

</soapbox>

As an aside, if someone from the school wishes to give me a good reason that I am staring blindly at as to why news is public without authentication then feel free to post in comments.

Heather is a fan of horror films so last night we decided to watch Hostel. Although IMDB didn’t have it rated very highly we weren’t looking for a masterpiece so figured it would be an OK way to spend the evening.

Sadly this was not the case. The plot was non-existent and what little of the film you could call a plot you could figure out in five minutes or less. The violence was senseless and irrelevant. It was supposed to be a horror film but instead it just presented its self as an opportunity to watch senseless violence. There was no horror in the violence, just disgust at how the film makers could ever have though people would enjoy this type of “horror” movie.

We didn’t even finish it. We reached about half way through and then looked at each other and said words to the effect of “Do we really want to watch this?” and with a resounding no we hit the eject button.

In short we both thought the movie was complete and utter crap and isn’t worth watching whatever the reason given. Personally I think watching paint dry would be more worthwhile use of your time.

After a recent report of incompatability of my calendar plugin with MySQL 4.0 I have refactored the 4.1 and above only queries to be much more backwards compatable. If you previously had problems installing the calendar (strings of SQL errors at the top of every page) then you might like to try reinstalling it. You can grab your updated copy from my programming page

If you discover any more bugs please continue to report them. This plugin is actively supported and I will update any and all bugs or errors discovered.

Thanks to all who have already installed and started using my plugin and to those who have thanked me personally in e-mail and over MSN.

Its a very special time of year for RouterTech - we are officially 1 year old! Little did I know when I first made the site live by removing the beta testing password that it would be as much of a success as it has. We now never fail to have a user online at any one time and frequently have over 10 concurrent users browsing and posting in the forums. We have produced a resource valued and respected by many and succeeded in releasing firmware that allows many people to get far above the factory specification out of their “budget” routers.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t have lots planned or lots still to do. Our overall aim is provide open source firmware that works on all AR7 routers, and furthermore provide exemplary technical support where no problem goes unsolved and no releveant question goes unanswered. We’ve come a long way in this but we still have some way to go. In this regard special thanks go to thechief and biro for their amazing work on the development of the firmware and to Neo and Shotokan101 for their support responses on the forums and for the testing and authoring of tools and scripts to assist users of our firmware.

This is a fabulous project and one we hope to continue to work hard on and make thrive in the technical world.