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.
Archive for the ‘Coding’
Threat level
AWOL
I haven’t written in a couple of days because i’ve been pretty busy.
This administration system i’m developing is due for a demo on Sunday morning, so i’m polishing it and sorting out a few additions.
You know you’re working too hard when you start having an existential crisis over variable variables while sitting in the first class section while zooming across the country in a train, and complaining that your code has become “way too abstract”.
Yeah.
The good news is that i have my collectors edition of Bioshock. Though there was some drama getting it. Since i had the day off work today i asked a friend to collect my copy. The shop enthused to me a few days ago that there would be absolutely no problem with that. But, you’ve guessed it, there was. Some employee didn’t want to hand it over, because my friend did not have a receipt. I had to call them from home to explain that i was the first pre-order. The line started with me, and that in the front of his ringbound pre-order folder he’d find a hand written slip with my name on it (which he did). So, long story short, i got my copy. Six inch big daddy statue and everything.
I haven’t played it yet, because i’ve been forcing myself to work. How’s that for willpower?
In other news, i’m really enjoying a show on The History Channel called Human Weapon and the latest episode airs tonight. Sadly that’s “tonight” in America. It’s already “tomorrow” (01:46) here in Scotland and i’m shattered. I don’t think i can stay up till it hits the torrent sites. Bleh. As you can discover by clicking the link i’ve provided, it’s a martial arts show - a subject i have much interest in.
Oh! My new connection got enabled today. Brand spanking new ADSL2. It’s rated for “up to 24mb” but at the moment i’m getting just over 16.
I spent ages staring at:
Till finally i got desperate and called up and asked for an ETA. I was told “sometime before 9pm”, which was lovely to hear except that i called at mid day, so i had anything up to 9 bloody hours to wait. Thankfully it kicked in just after lunch, and it wasn’t long before i saw:
That’s one point six MEGABYTES a second.
We’ve always suffered from slow connections here in the UK, because we were dominated by one telecoms company. In America there has always been a lot of competition to drive prices down, so people have been used to things like “free local calls” for as long as they can remember. We on the other hand got to enjoy extortionate prices and dial-up internet for wayyy too long. It all began to change when Ofcom (or possibly Oftel at the time) forced British Telecom to give other companies access to it’s telephone exchanges. Other companies could step in and install their own equipment. Offer their customers new exciting things. Provide some much needed competition.
The horror of dial up still lingers in my mind during dark and stormy nights, no matter how much i try to suppress the memories. When MP3s became popular, and we were all stuck on 32kbps or 56kbps modems it was a luxury to download a couple of them. We were so used to the speeds that it was common parlance for us to refer to 1 megabyte of data as “five minutes”, seeing as that was how much time it would take to download. A three megabyte MP3 would have taken fifteen minutes to download. Though i shaved off quite a bit of time because i insisted on using external modems (because internal “software” modems shared your CPU, and could cause a fair bit of slowdown.. or be affected themselves if you were doing something resource intensive like.. playing tomb raider 1) and had a high end ISP.
The point i’m struggling to make is that these recollections are ingrained in me, and it still boggles my mind to think that i can now download in two seconds, something that would’ve taken fifteen when i was in school.
Sick.
When we first had access to DSL in my area i signed us up to an ISP who happily stuck with their unlimited use policy. This was important to me because now that i had ultra fast broadband (512kbps.. yeah) i planned to download everything i had ever desired. We stuck with this company for years, slowly upgrading as the tech was available. Eventually we got to a claimed speed of 8mbps (though in actuality we weren’t getting nearly that much bandwidth), and with that speed bump i learned that the company had changed some things around. Most importantly their policy regarding usage. No longer did you have the luxury of “unlimited”, now things were very much limited. 13 gigabytes of downloads a month before they’d start imposing limits on your account. Thirteen gigabytes a month!! To put that into perspective i just checked my modem stats: The modem has been running for pretty much dead on 12 hours, and in that time i’ve downloaded just over 12 gigabytes.
So we’ve established that my monthly limit was lousy. But that wasn’t the only problem. The ISP also implemented strict traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is the notion of detecting and categorising different types of network use (like web surfing, video use, peer to peer downloads, gaming, etc) and allowing them certain percentages of bandwidth use. Web traffic for example would be given the largest percentage of the network traffic because it’s the most important, but peer to peer downloading would be given the smallest because it’s disruptive to other users and potentially criminal. It’s all well and good on paper, but it is absolutely disgusting to fire up a torrent and discover you’re getting something like 800 BYTES per second. Not megabytes, not even kilobytes.. just bytes. I could fax the data and get a better transfer rate.
To contrast that, here’s the transfer rate i got in bittorrent earlier today:
Yeah. It’s a big difference.
I’m rediscovering what it’s like to have a bit of freedom on the internet. I can download new game demos on my Xbox 360 without feeling guilty. I can watch streaming videos. I can download linux distributions. Freedom.
I got a bit carried away with my ranting here, it’s 02:21 and i really should be sleeping, this was only going to be a tiny quick post. Heh.
Goodnight.
Tags: abstract, administration, bioshock, broadband, busy, demo, dial up, game, martial arts, peer to peer, rant, traffic shaping, variables, xboxContent Management Systems
So i’m working on a Content Management System for a small business startup. I’m not really going to go into any detail about who and what because it’s none of your business. I am however going to tell you about some of my thoughts on the subject.
I love administration systems, always have. For some reason i’m wired to really appreciate running systems and services. Providing resources from a technical perspective has always appealed to me. I’ve run servers, worked on games, developed websites and set up infrastructures.
To me it’s all about providing technical solutions to real-world problems. Digital solving analogue, cyberspace providing for meatspace. I enjoy a lot of things for similar reasons. I like firearms because they’re a technical solution to a very valid real world problem (people may want to kill me, i need to kill them first, you may not agree with the rationale, but it’s still a valid problem). I like engines because, again, they’re an example of humans using technological advances to conquer a pressing problem (this horse is nowhere near fast enough!). I read a very appropriate quote somewhere about flamethrowers being awesome because someone once sat and thought:
I want to set someone on fire, but without being close to them.
Awesome.
Anyway. I think i got a bit distracted there, you’ll notice i do that a lot.
Technology, ooh, Content Management Systems, that’s it. Yeah. So i’m working on this new CMS, and because the company it’s for work in an area that’s very close to my heart i’ve decided to do a good job on it. Not to say i don’t always do a good job.. Just that this time i’m doing a good job. I’ve changed my methodology a bit, and deployed some techniques that i’ve been meaning to get going for a long time.
I’ve been working on a form to add team members. It would’ve been very simple to make one big ugly plain HTML form with a load of fields and next to no descriptions.. But i didn’t do that. I spent considerable time and effort turning it into a multi-page form with validation. Good validation too, with appropriate notification and everything.
I even devoted a bunch of time to getting the simple progress indicator buttons the way i wanted them. It’s not often i’m inspired enough to let the user know how much more they have to do ;).
I’m happy with the way it’s been going. Really happy.
Which is kind of good considering i have like two days to finish it.
Tags: administration, analogue, cms, coding, content management system, cyberspace, digital, firearms
