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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.

.. of something beautiful




It’s a pyramid made out of blu-tac. Maybe one day it’ll be huge.



Here’s my new desk too. Looks a bit to the way it looked a few days ago. New desk which is finally suitable for my height (6′4), new monitor (24″ Dell), new laptop stand (griffin elevator), new speakers (cheap logitech 2.1 set), new mouse (logitech laser), new server (HP Proliant) and the corner of a new motherboard which i have to send back!

Note the 500gig western digital external drive fits perfectly under the griffin elevator. Weee.