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)
Comments closed » 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:
Posted at 11:00 on 29 November 2005.
<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…
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.
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.
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?!
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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