Thanks to a group of Finnish computer scientists, you can now get an air guitar that works.
It uses a computer to monitor your hand movements, and adds in all the riffs and licks to match. How cool is that?
(The Virtual Air Guitar Project)
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Posted at 11:00 on 29 November 2005.
I’ve now got a “contact me” form up and running on my website for anyone who wants to get in touch. Coding and testing it on my laptop this evening threw up a rather bizarre bug in IIS 5 though.
It seems that IIS 5 doesn’t like you to do a POST request to a default page without explicitly specifying the name of the page. So for instance, if you have a form like this (very simple) one on your site:
RSS feed
<html>
<head>
<title>Bizarre test page</title>
</head>
<body>
<form method="POST">
<input type="text" name="test" />
<input type="submit" />
</form>
</body>
</html>
If it’s saved as index.php or default.aspx or some other default document name, and you call it up using “http://localhost/test/”, clicking the submit button gives a “405 Resource Not Allowed” error. It works fine if you use “http://localhost/test/index.php” or “http://localhost/test/default.aspx” or whatever though.
However, if you call the file default.htm (or indeed anything else ending with a .htm extension) it gives you this error whether you specify the filename or not.
It turns out that this is a bug in IIS 4 and 5, which has been fixed in IIS 6. Not very helpful given that you can’t install IIS 6 on Windows XP Professional.
It’s not much of an issue, given that my live blog is running on an Apache server on Linux, but since I’m using Windows XP/IIS 5 for testing tweaks to the template and new widgets such as the contact form etc, it’s only slightly irritating. It is also something that you need to be aware of if your website is still running on Windows 2000 Server rather than Windows Server 2003.
Or perhaps I should just use Apache for Windows…
Posted at 21:31 on 27 November 2005.
Tiobe Software conducts a monthly survey on the relative popularity of all the different programming languages, based on searches through Google, MSN and Yahoo! on courses, third party vendors and skilled engineers.
At the moment, Java is the most popular, followed by (in descending order) C, C++, PHP, Visual Basic, Perl, C#, Python and JavaScript. It’s interesting to see which way the different languages are moving, with PHP (which is particularly popular with beginners in web development) aiming for number three.
Posted at 18:40 on 25 November 2005.
For a sudoku to have a unique solution, you have to start off with at least a certain number of boxes already filled in (“hints”).
What is the smallest possible number of hints for a sudoku with a unique solution?
Gordon Royle has collected 24620 examples of uniquely solvable sudoku with seventeen hints. No examples with only sixteen hints are known, but it has not been proven that none exists.
Posted at 19:37 on 6 November 2005.
Dear Mr McKay,
I am writing to advise you that our request to provide our broadband internet service has been rejected by BT.
The reason they have given is that your local telephone exchange has not been upgraded to support broadband services.
Please contact BT to check if there are plans to upgrade the exchange. We will be delighted to re-start the transfer process when broadband becomes available in your area.
Please accept our apologies for this delay and we thank you for your patience in this matter.
Yours sincerely
(my prospective broadband supplier).
What kind of place is this where you can’t get broadband in a built up area in November 2005?!
Posted at 23:38 on 2 November 2005.
It’s now about two years since I finally managed to get to the dentist following months of pretty agonising toothache. I must confess that I’d never been a great one for looking after my teeth, and this had finally caught up with me, as a result of which I needed to have two of them root filled.
This is known in the trade as “repentance.”
Root canal treatment gets a bit of a bad press, but it isn’t as painful as its reputation suggests, and despite claims to the contrary, it does not cause serious illness. It’s certainly not easy — it typically involves two one-hour sessions per tooth — but in my case at least, it was nowhere near the Abu Ghraib experience that it’s often made out to be. In fact, if anything, it’s a bit of a relief, since the moment that you get numbed up at the beginning, you wave goodbye to the agony that drove you to the dentist in the first place, and the Number Nine Hedstroms poking into the deepest recesses of your molars for the next hour or so are a piece of cake by comparison. In fact, the most painful bit of the treatment is the bill that you get at the end of it. Root canal work is not cheap, even on the NHS.
However, today I was back for some more punishment.
A chunk broke off one of my root filled teeth at Faith Camp and this needed a bit of attention. Now because I was away on holiday throughout August and I attend a fairly busy dental practice and they are usually booked up a month or so in advance, it was only today that I managed to get the appointment to have it fixed and prepared for a crown fitting. It’s worth the wait though — my dentist is a real pro who sets herself very high standards. However, I do wonder a little bit about not fitting a crown to this particular tooth right at the beginning. It’s apparently not always necessary to crown root filled molars, and given the price of a crown it isn’t something you would exactly want to splash out on unnecessarily, though in the light of my experience it seems that it’s probably best to veer on the side of caution.
Today’s course of treatment involved cauterising back my gum round the offending tooth — again, relatively painless since I was all numbed up, though the smell of burning flesh is a little bit disconcerting and somewhat surreal, especially when you think that the flesh in question is your own. Nevertheless, I wasn’t in too much pain at the end of the session, which surprised the dentist, since she said she had had to cut further back on my gum than she was normally comfortable with.
I said, “Well I was praying before I came in.”
She said, “It’s obviously worked then.”
So in a couple of weeks I go back to get the crown fitted. There are four different types of crown that you can get. £400 gets you a top of the range one made from a compound of zirconium that for rear molars is apparently in the “more money than sense” category. £300 gets you a gold one, or gold with a porcelain coating. But these are the private options. The only one that the NHS covers is a metal one — nickel or something, for £100. This is a real cheapskate option — non-precious metal crowns are banned in most other countries because they react with the acids in your mouth.
Guess it’s the £300 option for me then. Ouch.
Posted at 23:05 on 1 November 2005.
Welcome to my blog. My name is James McKay, I live here, I work here, I write computer code, and you can find out more about me here.
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