The coding blog of Alastair Smith, a software developer based in Cambridge, UK. Interested in DevOps, Azure, Kubernetes, .NET Core, and VueJS.
These headphones provide superior sound quality and immerse you in your music thanks to the noise-cancelling attachments. A little bit of time should be spent with the headphones to find the right attachments for your ears, but it is ultimately time (and money) well spent for a quality listening experience. [4/5]
One of the things I do with my blog is to review stuff that I’ve bought or seen or read or listened to. As a result, I wanted to be able to rate this stuff as a concise summary of my view of it.
There are a couple of Drupal modules available that could help me out with this, such as review, bookreview and moviereview, but these are all in various stages of death, and I didn’t necessarily want all the extra, sometimes stuff-specific, functionality of those modules, so I sat down last night and wrote myself a little filter module that nicely converts ratings of the form [x/y] to stars. It handles half stars and everything.
The following implementation is a very simple one: it deliberately doesn’t expose any settings to the administrator or the user. As such, the default out-of-the-box behaviour is all that is available. No, you can’t customise or change the images. No, you can’t customise the ratings input formats (e.g., using percentages). No, you can’t do anything but replace the [x/y] with x whole stars and y-x empty stars. However, it’s a pretty good introduction to developing for Drupal, so here goes.
I came across a useful directory of freelance musicians the other day. Cunningly, it’s called Freelance Musicians, and can be found at http://www.freelance-musicians.info. It’s UK only (currently; that may or may not change), and provides facilities for listing individuals and groups/ensembles. You can check out my own listing at http://www.freelance-musicians.info/musicians/231/.
It’s quite a new service, and there’s only 152 musicians currently listed, but go sign up and swell their numbers if you’ve got a musical talent to flaunt!
Multiplicity. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines multiplicity thus:
Multiplicity, noun
- a: the quality or state of being multiple or various b: the number of components in a system (as a multiplet or a group of energy levels)
- a great number
Multiplicity is not something new to computer science or computing environments; indeed, parallel computing (processing with multiple, simultaneously-executing processes) seems to date back to Babbage’s Analytic Engine. And every time it’s introduced, it benefits the end user in some way.
So it seems there’s currently a problem with the comments’ system. First of all, DON’T PANIC! Your awesome comments are being posted correctly, and are making it through to the moderation queue fine (or being posted if you’ve got an account).
| [img_assist | nid=8 | link=node | align=left | width=190 | height=200]…or Pigeon Transport Protocol/Internet Protocol. RFC 1149 defines a standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers. That is, computer networks run by carrier pigeon. |
From the overview,
Avian carriers can provide high delay, low throughput, and low altitude service. … The carriers have an intrinsic collision avoidance system, which increases availability.
I learned my second lesson from this blog today. What was the first, you might ask? The importance of peer code reviews, and I learnt this pretty much as soon as I’d started.
The second lesson was to improve my writing style! After a comment or two on my last post (in conversation rather than via the blog itself), it appears that I didn’t explain the situation particularly clearly. I will try not not be so arrogant as to assume that my readers know what I’m talking about all the time!
[4/5] 2002’s Chicago, directed by Bob Marshall, is an excellent and faithful adaptation of Kander and Ebb’s musical, and seemingly kick-started a small, slow revival in musical cinema (such as 2005’s The Producers and 2007’s Sweeney Tood).
Set in 1920’s Chicago, the plot follows the lives of Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger) after they are charged with murder, Velma for a double homicide after finding her husband in bed with her sister (with whom she performed in a Vaudeville act) and Roxie for the murder of her lover (after she discovers that he wasn’t going to make her the Vaudeville star he’d promised).
I’ve been running a couple of coding projects at home over the last couple of months, one of which is a personal finance program. I’ve used this as an experiment in new technologies (mainly .Net 3.0/3.5 stuff, including LINQ and WPF/XAML), as well as one in architecture and design patterns. The program is based around a plug-in architecture and the time has come to consider message-passing between plug-ins; for example, I need non-storage plug-ins to inform storage plug-ins when their data has changed, and what data has changed, so that the storage plug-ins can schedule these changes for serialisation to their storage format (be it an SQLite database, an XML file, or whatever).
Yes, my blog has a new home, and by some weird twist of fate, you’ve stumbled upon it. It could also be that you followed the link from my old blog.