All posts by bigpresh

Wibbles, WTF

Jacko dominates the charts, again

5 Comments

Michael Jackson was a true legend, one of the best musical entertainers for a long time, and of cause his untimely demise was a big shame.

But, what’s with the number of his songs in the charts?

I don’t understand this – the real fans who will really miss him will already *have* his albums, so why are his singles now suddenly selling so much? Who are these people who presumably didn’t think much of him when he was alive, but now want to buy his music so much now he’s passed on?

Granted, it’s good to see the quality of the music in the charts inproving, but how’s this for mad (this is looking at the chart for the week of 2009-07-06):

Position Song
2 Man In The Mirror
10 Billie Jean
12 Thriller
13 Smooth Criminal
19 Beat It
25 Black Or White
26 Dirty Diana
32 They Don’t Care About Us
33 Earth Song
34 The Way You Make Me Feel
35 You Are Not ALone
38 Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough
40 Bad
43 I Want You Back (Jackson 5)
46 Ben
50 ABC (Jackson 5)

That’s just those within the top 50 – there’s a few more between 50 and 75 too.

It’s a fitting tribute to a great entertainer, but it still puzzles me.

Uncategorized, Wibbles, WTF

Ryanair “standing room only” plans?

5 Comments

Ryanair passengers could soon fly for free – if they want to stand for their journey

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary told Sky News the low-cost airline was considering ripping out the back few rows of seats on some flights.

Um, what? I’m pretty sure that won’t fly.

The FAA regulations definately require suitable seats with safety belts:

Sec. 121.311 – Seats, safety belts, and shoulder harnesses.

(a) No person may operate an airplane unless there are available during the takeoff, en route flight, and landing —

(1) An approved seat or berth for each person on board the airplane who has reached his second birthday; and

(2) An approved safety belt for separate use by each person on board the airplane who has reached his second birthday, except that two persons occupying a berth may share one approved safety belt and two persons occupying a multiple lounge or divan seat may share one approved safety belt during en route flight only.

(b) Except as provided in this paragraph, each person on board an airplane operated under this part shall occupy an approved seat or berth with a separate safety belt properly secured about him or her during movement on the surface, takeoff, and landing. A safety belt provided for the occupant of a seat may not be used by more than one person who has reached his or her second birthday.

Pretty sure the CAA/JAA will have similar rules.

My first instinct was to check whether this story was published April 1st, but clearly not.

Now, does someone think this will really work, or is it just a PR stunt to get people talking about Ryanair again (much like previous suggestions on charging to use toilets etc)?

Uncategorized

Looking for phishing scripts, and other strange searches

2 Comments

A glance at my web stats reveals that I’m getting fairly regular hits from scumbags searching for phishing scripts, with queries like “where to find phishing scripts”, “php mailer by Mr.Brain”, “phishing script” etc.

I assume it’s all because, ages back, I wrote about the Mr-Brain.php phishing script.

I also get some other quite strange search hits – some of the stranger including:

  • "is ainsley harriot an arsehole"
  • "girls peeing in the sink"
  • "essex girl"
  • "pissed my pants in front of my girlfriend"
  • "i peed in my panties today blog"

There’s some strange people out there. I can only assume the piss-related hits are due to either If you’re having a bad day or Never piss off a JCB driver.

Oh, and the guy searching for “smoke from breather pipe motorcycle”? I’d say you need to get your engine looked at :)

Perl, Programming, Uncategorized

Subversion – show commit details when editing commit message

5 Comments

Something I’ve wanted to do for a while is get the list of changed files and a diff into the commit message in my editor when I make a commit with Subversion.

With Git, you can pass the -v (verbose) option when committing, and the commit message you edit will include diffs as well as the list of modified files.

Subversion provides no such option, so I put together a little wrapper shell script to do this for me.

The script provides a function named svncommit (which I alias to just ‘ci’ for supreme shortness :) ).

When used, after the “–This line, and those below, will be ignored–” marker line, the list of files and then diffs will be inserted, as shown in the screenshot below (click for full size):

Subversion commit message being edited

The script itself is relatively simple (it was knocked up quickly; I’ll probably improve on it sometime):

# Do an svn commit, with diffs included in the commit message
svncommit() {

    # Start preparing the commit message which we'll then edit
    COMMITMSG=/tmp/$USER-commitmsg
    echo > $COMMITMSG
    echo "--This line, and those below, will be ignored--" >> $COMMITMSG
    svn status "$@" >> $COMMITMSG
    echo >> $COMMITMSG

    # Now do a diff; work out stats on lines added/removed by looking at
    # the diff, add that info, then the diff itself
    svn diff "$@"   > /tmp/$USER-svndiff
    LINESADDED=$(  grep '^+[^+]' /tmp/$USER-svndiff | wc -l)
    LINESREMOVED=$(grep '^-[^-]' /tmp/$USER-svndiff | wc -l)
    echo "Added $LINESADDED lines, removed $LINESREMOVED lines" >> $COMMITMSG
    echo >> $COMMITMSG
    cat /tmp/$USER-svndiff >> $COMMITMSG
    echo >> $COMMITMSG

    ORIGMD5=$(md5sum $COMMITMSG)
    $VISUAL $COMMITMSG

    if [[ "$(md5sum $COMMITMSG)" == "$ORIGMD5" ]]; then
        echo "Commit message unchanged, commit aborted";
    else
        svn commit "$@" -F $COMMITMSG
    fi

    rm $COMMITMSG
    rm /tmp/$USER-svndiff
}
Humour

If you’re having a bad day…

8 Comments

Found out about FMyLife from a colleague. If you’re having a bad day, have a read, and I’ll bet you won’t feel so bad anymore.

A few class examples:

Today, I was holding a lit cigarette in one hand and a lollipop in the other. Guess which one I licked? FML

Today, my family was preparing a turkey for my grandma’s birthday dinner when my aunt noticed a utensil on the counter and asked what it was for. My mom said it was used to keep the turkey’s legs together. My aunt responded to her by saying, “Maybe you should get one for your daughter.” FML

Today, while driving home I had to pee really bad. I decided to speed to get home quicker. I got pulled over for speeding and peed my pants. The cop, assuming I was drunk, made me take a sobriety test. I had to walk a straight line with piss all over my pants at 2:00 in the afternoon. FML

Today, I met my girlfriend’s parents for the first time. We got on the discussion of animals, and I showed them a picture of my cat on my phone. Being a touchscreen, when her father grabbed it, it changed picture. To a picture of my girlfriend, fully nude. FML

Today, is my mothers birthday. I decided to take her out to lunch. On the way there, we had a car accident. It was my fault. For my mothers birthday I gave her: 3 broken ribs. FML

Today, was my first meeting with business partners as I am new to the team. Instead of saying that I was looking forward to “stretching my legs” or “spreading my wings”, I told them I was anxious to start “spreading my legs”. FML

Today, I was driving home at night when I saw a billboard flash “report drunk drivers”. 15 minuted later, I saw someone drive recklessly as if they were drunk. When I called the cops, I got pulled over by another cop for talking on my cell phone. I got a $150 ticket. FML

Today, I went to meet my girlfriends parents for the first time. I accidently drove past their house the first time, but saw the whole family outside waiting to meet me. I pulled a U-Turn and heard a thud. The whole family watched me run over their dog. FML

Today, I had my first real meeting with my girlfriend’s parents. We had dinner at a pretty upscale restaurant and everything was going great. When the check came, I offered to pay and I stood up to take out my wallet. When I opened it, 3 condoms fell out on the table in front of them. FML

Today, I was on Facebook looking at pictures of my boyfriend, who was in his friend’s wedding this past weekend. He said that none of the girlfriends could come because it would cost too much for the couple. I spent the weekend alone, and all his friend’s girlfriends are in the pictures. FML

Wibbles

Exam bosses demand hosts cover up their leaks

Heh, just read this Exam bosses target faster cheat takedowns article on El Reg.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), which is responsible for producing national curriculum assessments and the security of papers, said it was worried that normal procedures for removing illegally posted copyright material online were not fast enough.

“Previous instances of unlawful publication of QCA copyright material have demonstrated that the usual public routes for the notification of a copyright breach (which may be sufficient for dealing with post-exam publication of papers) may not react swiftly enough to limit the damage in an emergency pre-test publication,” the QCA wrote.

To help speed up the process, the authority has asked hosting firms to supply it with an emergency hotline phone number, staffed by employees authorised to take down pages. It also asked for the hotline to be manned outside working hours.

So, they can’t manage to prevent information being leaked, but expect UK web hosts to have staff on call 24/7 ready to jump into action to remove any pages they want removed?

What planet are they on?

Wibbles

“Swine flu” branded offensive

2 Comments

Oh, do fuck off: Swine flu name branded offensive

The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, an Israeli health official has said.

Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and “we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu,” he told a news conference at a hospital in central Israel.

Just fuck off, how pathetic can you get?

Uncategorized

Facebook vs Twitter is a flawed comparison

Marshall Fitzpatrick writes on ReadWriteWeb that "despite new openness, Facebook remains fundamentally closed".

What are people saying on Facebook about the swine flu? Facebook knows, but they won’t tell you. The company made a major move today to open up some of the data on the site in some interesting ways – but the conversation on Facebook remains fundamentally closed due to extensive privacy limitations and the company’s disinterest in overcoming those limitations in an appropriate way.

Ask Twitter what people are saying on that site about the swine flu and you can get the full story to parse until you’re blue in the face.

Um, I can’t help thinking he’s comparing apples with polar bears here.

Twitter and Facebook are two very different beasts. On Twitter, it’s expected that whatever you say is public, and can be seen both by your followers and the general public on the public timeline (unless of course you’ve protected your updates, but I don’t think many Twitter users do that (I’d be interested to know the percentage that do, actually)).

On the other hand, you have different fingers Facebook is built from the ground up to facilitate sharing information with your friends, and only your friends – there isn’t much public access to the data.

The fact that you can’t readily find out what people are talking about via Facebook APIs in the way that you can with Twitter is not a surprise to me.