Why Google's patented PigeonRank™ works so well

Genius. How Google use pigeons to make their search engine so fast...

Google Technology

VB-esque packages for Linux

I'm an annoying git who likes Visual Basic... to a degree, at any rate. I like the development paradigm, and I like dragging widgets around on forms rather than sitting down with graph paper and working out where things go. I don't like having to worry about creating my own callbacks, and pointers do my head in. I'm destined to never get into C or C++.

Linux has a general lack of programming environments that I can take to. Kylix is close, but costs money and I'm not into pirating when I can have something legally free instead. The free, open version is crippled to a certain degree, but is usable... but I've not tried Delphi before. (Actually, maybe I should...)

The work on Mono is interesting and C# is alleged to be wonderful, but it lacks an IDE at present. The VB support in it is somewhat more lacking, sadly.

RapidQ is okay but it's long in the tooth now, and isn't going to be updated ever again. Shame, it had promise. It didn't help it (in my mind) the IDE wasn't particularly integrated either!

Runtime Revolution would be okay if they didn't insist on the same stupid programming style that Macromedia decided was too crap to stick with five years back. And if the IDE was any good. (It sucks.)

But I've just found Gambas, which could be my saviour.

As the developer says, "Gambas is a free development environment based on a Basic interpreter with object extensions, like Visual Basic™ (but it is NOT a clone !)."

The only thing I'm not so keen on is it's KDE roots. I don't like KDE. But beggars can't be choosers, and it should function well enough under Gnome.

So... I'm going to give it a whirl, and try Kylix Open as well I think. See what's best for me and my needs.

Gambas - Gambas Almost Means Basic

Brother Beyond star in sex arrest

Looking for business, mate? Tee hee!

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | Brother Beyond star in sex arrest

A bit more testing

We'll get Gaz's script working soon =)



That's Aubrey, that is. He likes to sit like a human at every possible opportunity.

Fluff

A test of Gaz's script =)

Another photo

Spotted this heading down the M4.



Hey kids - it's not cool to take photos whilst you drive at 70 mph. Unless there's a funny van in front and the road is otherwise clear =)

[Edit: for Gaz (and anyone else who doesn't get the joke), here's the explanatory link at Urban Dictionary. And I left the number plate there cos... it's free advertising for Munters *snigger*]

Best photo ever

My cat, Mackerel =)

Paper arcade machines

This is great. It shows that some people really do have too much time on their hands, and how good that is for the rest of us.. Make Sindy-sized arcade machines from the print-outs on this website =)

WotR - Paper, love and glue - mmmm

BBC NEWS - bad puns

The last sentence in this news report is great...

"The final decision on whether it becomes law falls to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who can approve it or decide to terminate it."

Har har har har har!
*sigh*

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google faces Gmail advert limits

Radio and streaming

[You may want to skip to the end of this post if you're not a boring geek like me!]

I'm at an awkward stage in my life. I'm far too old to listen to Radio 1 and not old enough to listen to Radio 2 fulltime. When Mark and Lard left Radio 1 I really had nothing left to listen to it for. Radcliffe's starting his Radio 2 show next week - the graveyard shift, same as what he used to do with Lard on Radio 1 nine years back (when I first heard them), which will be nice... except now I'm 9 years older and don't listen to the radio in the evening. Lard - now back to being Marc Riley - has an excellent show on digital radio station 6Music on Saturday afternoons called Rocket Science, but here's another problem: I don't tend to be near my satelite box or a PC on Saturday afternoons, and I don't have a DAB radio in my car or anything.

Fortunately, as far as Rocket Science goes, I can listen during the week on the BBC's On Demand thingy. It's Real Player, which is a bit smelly, and they try and force you to use their web-based player thing to listen, which would be fine if I wanted a bleedin' webpage open for hours... anyway, I peeked at the source of the web player and discovered references to .rpm files - in my world that's a RedHat Package Manager file for Linux software, but Real have hijacked the extension for their own nefarious means. These are the modern version of their .ram files of yesteryear - they're text files that hold the URL of a media stream. When you install Real Player it does all kinds of MIME type trickery to make these open in the Real Player plugin, hiding the info inside. No help for me though, cos I want to bookmark these streams for WinAmp. Anyway, whereas Mozilla and IE obey the MIME type strictly, opening the .rpm in Lynx under Linux causes it to spill the stream URL across your terminal. One copy and paste later, and I have a few URLs that you can bookmark and 'that'. No more webpage nastiness.

ANYWAY. Here's the URLs for a few BBC streams. You might find them useful. They're in no particular order (bar the order I happened to copy and paste in). If Radcliffe's show turns up on the On Demand player, I'll add that as well.

Radio 2 (Live stream)
Radio 1 (Live stream)
6Music (Live stream)
Rocket Science with Marc Riley (Last Saturday's show)
Jonathan Ross (until Radcliffe's on, this is the best show on Radio 2 - this is last Saturday's)

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Just been updating this again... check it out =)

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