Yesterday I managed to cross off one of my new year's resolutions - roll a kayak

This is a very big deal for me, as I've been failing at it for several months now, without any obvious signs of improvement.  But last week I had some kind of breakthrough where it nearly worked, and last night I finally did it   And more than once too, so it can't have just been a fluke

Right now it's half 3 in the morning.  Ask yourself what I'm doing up at this hour...  One reason could be that there's currently a total lunar eclipse going on, but unfortunately Birmingham is rather cloudy at the moment so I can't see anything.  I'll have to make do with my photos from last year, heh. 

Of course, the correct answer involves the words "software" "engineering" and "assignment".  Due in at midday   I've done pretty much all of it, just finishing writing it up and I've got a few more diagrams to draw (surprisingly time consuming!).  Oh, and one 10 mark section of stupid research that I haven't particularly done yet, oops... 

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I love broken websites

I've ended up on this particular site before (it's some kind of coding tutorial site, which I won't link to for obvious popuppy reasons). Last time it stopped at 359.

Today, however, it's even more broken.  Whenever I move the mouse it tries to spawn a load more popups.  And fails.  But keeps trying anyway, even though it's never going to win.  That number is now up to 3015.

Anyway, I found the bit of javascript that creates this mess.  The 'interesting' bit can be simplified to this:

if (!popupdone) {
    window.onclick = popup();
    window.onmousemove = popup();
} 

Clever  

On a slightly similar and possibly even geekier note, I got far too excited when I spotted this in the pub at lunch time:

Malt Vinegar.  Ingredients: malt vinegar, some other stuff.

mmm, recursion...

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I installed KDE4 the other night.  Kubuntu will install it alongside 3, so as there was no risk of me destroying anything important I thought I may as well (plus I have loads of java and software engineering work that needs avoiding...)

Anyway, it lasted about 7 minutes before I angrily removed it.

Don't get me wrong, I do like KDE.  Mainly because it works, and I've got it customised to (almost) exactly what I want from my desktop.

But 4.. hmmm.  let's make a list:

•  Sound.  It made noises.  Lots of noises.  Some kind of fanfare on startup (and probably logout but it crashed then so who knows), and even worse, a very quiet yet incredibly irritatating "spoiiiing" noise whenever I moved a window, or did pretty much anything. grr
  And I couldn't find any way of turning the sound off.  Not good.
  
• K Menu (start menu).  Rather than the usual 'programs list', it's more like the vista start menu - recently used stuff, with icons at the bottom for other menus.  Which is fair enough, but they change on hover rather than click.  Very annoying.  Apparently you can change it to get the old-style menu instead, but I couldn't find that option anywhere.
• Everything's huge!  Especially the clock - and there's no way of changing its font size. 
  
• Widgets widgets widgets.  Everything's a bloody desktop widget.  Overkill much?
• Customisation.  Like I said, I like being able to fiddle with stuff.  Meaning that I get quite frustrated when I can't find the right menu option (or whatever) to change things.  Or even worse, I find the settings and discover that actually, I can't change certain things!
• No integration of themes with GTK apps. Firefox loaded up looking fucking ugly, which made me angry.

If I'd used it for more time, I could probably add to this list (or could have found fixes for some of the above). I know it's only a recent release, and especially as a ubuntu package, so obviously it's not all going to work perfectly, but ewww.  Hopefully some of these 'issues' will vanish with future releases.

Did look quite nice though.  In a trendy, 'shiny' web2.0/mac kind of way... 

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