I had an idea a while ago for a bit of fun, and finally got around to making it:
The UK’s current threat level, portrayed by Doomguy.
For those that don’t know, in the classic and mighty first person shooter Doom your health is represented pictorially by an image of the main characters face, as you take damage his face makes it clear. So i wrote some code that scrapes the UK’s current threat level page, takes the current level, and displays the relevant image from one of the following:
Low
An attack is unlikely
Moderate
An attack is possible but not likely
Substantial
An attack is a strong possibility
Severe
An attack is highly likely
Critical
An attack is expected imminently
The Home Office page that displays the threat level is fairly weighty and the scraping code isn’t all that efficient, so it’s fairly slow to load (though does cache the result for 10 mins or so), but considering this is just for fun i doubt i’ll re-write the backend. Sadly considering our current state of affairs it’s fair to say our threat level won’t be changing all that often either.
What i may do, however, is make a nice new frontend for doomguy, in flash, with mouseovers for the other statuses - and animations. I also intend to write one for the American threat level.
Threat level
Changed my desk again
Re-Jigged my desk again.. I like it more than the last two attempts.
Macbook pro on the left, can’t close the screen at the moment for a reason i’ll explain in a later post. It’s driving the 24-inch dell in the middle.
On the right is a 19-or-20-inch Dell LCD driven by the dual xeon linux workstation under my desk. It’s running ubuntu at a pitiful resolution at the moment because i can’t find a PCI-E 8x graphics card. Stupid diminutive slots.
In the lower left is my new MSI Wind, which i should post a review of at some point. It’s running Windows XP because i know the wifi card is troublesome in both Linux and OSX - i need wifi working when i’m in Berlin, so i’ll tinker with it after i’m back.
Tidying
I’ve spent the last little while trying to sort out my shelves. It’s not going so well.
This is how they looked before i started:
Click the image to view the photo notes in flickr.
Oh no.
I’ve been distracted a lot lately, but it doesn’t look like that’ll be happening again for a while..
Yeah, i know. :(
