heavydog

Yes dear readers, no posts for a month! Why? you ask, here is why:

I’ve won NaNoWriMo. 50,000 words in a month. What a month!

Now to find me a publisher…

NaNoWriMo begins tonight at 12:01 and I shall be beginning too!

I’m psyched, ready to rumble. I’ve got the writing bug. Every fibre of my sumptuous and well presented being is straining at the leash to get this gibberish out of my head and into some kind of digital document, probably guarded closely by the great and omniscient god Google.

Have I got a plot in my head? Have I fuck, I’ve got this half conceived idea rattling around in the lowest recesses of my brain. It’s formed enough to allow me to get to grips with some characters and an opening scene. From there? Who knows?

I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow. I’d like to blog about my experience, but I need to write 1,667 words a day, so the blogging may be out the window. You can always check my progress here: Mikes profile at NaNoWriMo.

When I read that this book was written by a ‘director of specialised management consultancy’, I took a sharp intake of breath. How can someone who isn’t a developer write a book about a subject as in-depth as a PHP framework? Surely he’ll miss the point? At least he’ll miss out pertinant information about how the framework functions? It’s core? You need a larger understanding of OO PHP and frameworks to make the best use of CI, no? He’ll fail to explain the concept of MVC well enough to the novice developers this book is aimed won’t he?

I was right.

David Upton has written a book that falls short of appealing to the hardcore PHP developer market who would be interested in a book about CI frameworks and has over-reached when it comes to trying to explain how to create a basic website with what is possibly one of the most powerful frameworks available. On a few occasions he outright insults and belittles those readers who actually use and understand the intricases of PHP by referring to them as ‘geeks’ from the first chapter.

Claims like CI saving you time and reducing the amount you code, thus making the site faster, are misleading if you only want a simple brochureware site with a contact form and a means to include a common set of elements on each page. Of course, he is perfectly correct if you want to write a web application — but who is this book aimed at?

There are some good chapters in this book though, ‘Code Igniter and Objects’ is a more high-brow look at how CI actually functions, for the most part it’s well written, but it occasionally glosses over points that need expanding — the section on namespaces comes to mind. ‘Production Versions, Updates and Big Decisions’ is another good chapter, although this wouldn’t be anything new to a long-in-the-tooth developer. Finally ‘Resources and Extensions’ is a good overview of some of the better extensions and add-ons available for CI.

Overall, this book will only satisfy the needs of a very niche group of developers. Those who either know about PHP, OO and frameworks but have never laid eyes on CI, or those whose needs are basic and need a framework because it will save time in the short term, this brings about issues of whether CI is neccessary for those with only basic needs however.

The books biggest shortcoming is it doesn’t really show you anything that User Guide hasn’t already explained in detail, or that the forum can provide with a brief search and they’re both free. It misses out one of the most poweful tools in the CI kitbag, Hooks, and that is unforgivable. This is, however, the only book about CI. So if you’re after something to read away from the computer, then it might be worth chance, otherwise, visit the CI website where you can find all that’s in the book and more.

Igglepiggle, iggle onk. What’s in the Night Garden?

My son and I love to watch In The Night Garden; a BBC childrens TV show based on the goings on and characters of that land of the Night Garden. The inhabitants of the Night Garden are strange and interesting creatures such as; Igglepiggle, he carries a red blanket, has a bell in his shoe and a rattle in his hand. He falls over whenever he is frightened, surprised or just mildly taken aback. Upsy Daisy is the Night Gardens token mixed race character. Although she sleeps in a sentient bed, outside under the stars. Makka Pakka is a tiny little dude, makes himself busy by stacking rocks in a “Blair Witch “style and washing everything and everyone with the same sponge. Then there are the Tombliboos, the Pontipines, the HaHoos and the Wottingers.

Not to mention Ninky Nonk and Pinky Ponk.

As you can tell, my house is a shrine to the Night Garden. I am as equally enamoured to the gratiutious goings on as my offspring. I love it. I even made a website in tribute. It’s a way to find out what goes on In The Night Garden after the cameras have stopped rolling, check it out: fromthenightgarden.com.

I know what it means:

Slow down

To decrease the speed of one’s current action.

That’s all well and good, but when you really think about it, what does it mean. Taken out of context, it’s complete gibberish. “Slow Down”, OK, so the slow bit I can work out, but the down? What’s that all about, what’s going down? My speed? Wouldn’t speed decrease? You wouldn’t hear Murray Walker screaming “As Hakkinen goes into the corner, he downs his speed, after he’s reached the apex he ups it again” would you? You might, but then you’d think he was taking the piss, wouldn’t you?

Visiting a bank today in the town where I work, it didn’t take me long to notice the line drawing of a naked woman on the wall. It was, however, not a very good drawing (it was black ink on white paper, the artist had made a mistake drawing one of the breasts and subsequently used Tip-ex (Whiteout for the yankee doodle dandees) to correct it) and there was another, equally bad one on the wall next to it. It wasn’t so much the fact the pictures were poor, mounted badly or framed differently to all the other pictures in the bank, it was that the artist wanted £95 for what was, essentially, a childs drawing.

Looking round the bank further, I noticed there were other utterly purile and disingenuos works hanging on all the other walls. Some were oils, some acrylics all atrocious and all had a ridiculous price tag attached to them. Although I am aware of the “one mans meat is another mans poison” analogy, I think these works would poison any viewers opinion of the Reigate Art Society.

I decided to take the issue into my own hands and make a public comment on quite how ridiculous the whole affair is, perhaps greater hubris than should be allowed for such a simple peice. Anyway, et voila:

Customer: waiter, waiter, there’s a monopod in my soup!

Waiter: stop creating you piece of shit, it’s only got one leg and it can’t even swim. You wait until you find a biped in your soup - those fuckers can swim AND
kick. And clean your trousers.

Holy shit!

A pub in Bicester demanded that patrons entering the premises be subjected to a banned substances scan, consisting of swabbing the palms of your hands and then scanning the swab.

Drug scanner checks public.

If you decided not to submit to the test, you were banned from entering the pub, if you submitted to the test and it showed you were positive for a banned substance, including cocaine and weed, you were searched and banned from the pub — what happened to guilty until proven innocent? What happened to personal freedom? WHAT’S HAPPENING TO THIS FUCKING COUNTRY!?

Apparently, by testing positive, the police have “reasonable suspicion” to search you. It’s this paragraph which amazes me the most:

Mr Duffy explained the machine also picked up tiny traces of drugs that innocent people could get from handling contaminated bank notes.

Essentially, if someone you don’t know, have never met, or even SEEN hands a £20 to someone in a supermarket that they spent the morning snorting charlie up their nose with, you’re then given the £20 as change and head to The Litten Tree in Bicester, you’re going to be arrested. Arrested? Yes. Read the following quote:

The drug itemiser was also used in Witney and Banbury two weeks ago. About 260 revellers were tested, with one person arrested on suspicion of possessing class A and C drugs

“Hah!” Thinks you, “drugs on money! Never”. Read these:

Banknotes ‘tainted with cocaine’ (This was in 1999!)
£15m of notes tainted by drugs are destroyed

What amazes me is the look of gurning foolery on the fuckers face in the photo. Does he not realise that his civil liberties have been eroded just a little bit? By relenting your freedom and offering yourself to this kind of Orwellian badgering by the government, we’re taking one step closer to a police state and the government maintaining strict control over every aspect of your life. Not only that, once you’re inside the pub, you can drink as much Stella as you’re capable of paying for and then, on the way home get into a fight and punch/kick/stab someone/smash a window/etc/etc! It’s OK, just don’t smoke that joint when you get home, you’ll be breaking the law and will have to go to jail.

The 1.77-million-year-old remains of three adults and a teenager unearthed in the Caucasus point to a far greater variation in early humans than once suspected, according to a study released Wednesday.

Fossils raise fresh questions over mankind’s evolutionary saga

Please, please, PLEASE take a look at Jill Greenbergs Monkey Portraits.