Aaron Bassett

I’ve been putting a little bit of time in with Battlefield 3, and I’ve had some thoughts about what my ideal 4 man squad would be. I’ve actually got a couple of different squads depending on how the opposition is playing.

I also tend to play only objective based game modes (rush & conquest) not TDM, so that has an impact on the setup. It should also go without saying that the squad should be actively communicating on Mics and playing the objectives and their roles (dishing out medi-packs, throwing down ammo, etc).

2 Engineers (with SAM), 1 Support & 1 Assault — Engineers should concentrate on bringing down the air-support working as a pair. Both lock-on to same plane, Engineer 1 fires, target will likely fire flares, Engineer 2 waits for flares and then fires before the pilot can re-deploy counter-measures. Support keeps the engineers stocked up with rockets and looks out for ground-troops. Assault should hang back ready to revive if necessary.

1 Engineer, 1 Support, 1 Assault & a Recon (with SOFLAM) — Recon needs to be marking vehicles for engineer. Support and Assault the same as before.

I’m still astounded by how many agencies are still rolling their own CMSs. There is no reason to be doing that in this day and age.

I’ve just read an announcement from a previous agency I worked with, an agency who I setup with an awesome Django stack, that they have released a new version of their own proprietary CMS. Within this announcement they post links to some of the sites they’ve completed in their new system. Every one of them has XSS holes.

If you do not know enough to prevent against XSS you are in no position to be developing such a complex piece of software. Other much smarter people have done the hard work for you already. Use it. There is zero benefit to your clients from rolling your own, but many, many disadvantages. As well as the security there is the issue of vendor lock-in.

If you need a website developed please, for your own sake and sanity, ensue the agency is using an open-source system* or be prepared to pay a premium to make another agency eat their proprietary dog-food, if you ever need to move.

* even if it is not open-source, ensure that it is from a 3rd party and has a healthy developer community such as Magento, Perch or Expression Engine.

I hate flipping through TV channels trying to find anything on. I don’t even want something to watch, I simply need background noise. But it still needs to be something which doesn’t annoy me too much.

So what is the solution? A site where I can enter the TV shows I like (or at least don’t hate), which then scans the currently playing TV listings and gives me a short list of channels currently playing something which would suit me. Recommendations should contain the show title, episode title, season and episode number, short description, time played, time remaining, network and channel (it should also show the name of the show immediately following the recommended episode so I can tell if I will need to repeat the process after the episode finishes)

There should be a couple of conditions as well.

• It should not recommend programs with less than 20 mins remaining, unless the show immediately following the suggestion is also on my “like” list.
• It can recommend shows which have not started yet, as long as they are due to start in the next 3 minutes.
• It shouldn’t recommend the same episode within any 6 month period, irregardless of which channel.

So who wants to build it?

As @afocs was recording her voicemail name I shouted MONGATRON. We thought it was funny as it’s only heard by her when she calls her voicemail, not played to anyone else. Never considered that her voicemail might break. And the tech might have to leave test messages and check them.

Last 20 minutes has been spent giggling like school girls every-time the tech called Becky’s (MONGATRON) voicemail on speaker phone.

I suck at picking fonts. I wish there was a site which could recommend fonts based upon some input. I don’t mean the usual serif/sans/slab type choices, more like:

headline, straight serifs, thin, classy, professional, timeless

and it would spit out the perfect headline font which matches all my requirements, as well as recommending complimentary fonts for other common text (body copy, block-quotes, secondary headlines, etc). Ideally it would create your complete CSS stack with sane substitutes for non-websafe fonts and integrate with Typekit or similar.

At present I am having to make do with:

• Awesome fontstacks
• Typekit love
• and browsing Typekit by Tag

Rugby, scuffles & general rambunctiousness growing up means I’ve broken, fractured, staved or sprained every finger, some fingers all four. Most were fixed by taping it to its nearest neighbour for a couple of days.

The last few days the joints in my right hand have been aching and I’ve been finding it hard to grip things tightly. I wonder if there is a connection…

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”

— from xkcd

We’ve been testing it in work, and so far it’s played out just as described. Starting at everything from ‘Chicken’ to ‘Star Wars’, with enough clicks you will end up on Philosophy (often via Mathematics). You can mix your degrees of separation games by starting on Kevin Bacon

Take the Bible run it through a Markov chain generator and, well, it actually makes about the same amount of sense….

Then said Jesus unto them, nor serve them, and he brought out the Canaanites to tribute, and did all the evil spirit was to be built no more: and the grove that [is] with him pursued them unto the king, and said, What have they seen in thine house divers measures, both of the God of Israel;

So that he may eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt break his yoke from off the earth. He saith unto them, Why repair ye not to Jeroboam any that knoweth how to rule the day, behold, two blind men sitting by him,) For how can I endure to see the earth.

After the success of my little snippet I thought perhaps the world was ready for a new gospel, so I decided to generate a brand new Bible. First I stripped everything prior to Genesis and did my best to remove verse(?) numbers

s/\n\d /\n

Once that completed (it took a while) I ran it through a quick script to create a new guide for the spiritual world.

Take it, go forth, spread the gospel. Damn the unbelievers!

• Download .txt (4.2MB)
• Download .gz (1.5MB)

While reading through the Jelly.io examples and trying to decide if it offered anything not already covered by the Test client or Selinium, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the example code looked untidy.

Took me a while to figure out why. The braces. After so long avoiding Python, and fighting against it, purely as I couldn’t see myself using a language without braces, now I find reading languages with braces difficult. Python has ruined me for other languages.