The culprit that made me write this post was a real corker. Whenever anyone checks in code changes all of the tests are run automatically so everyone can see if the changes broke anything. If a test fails after you’ve changed something then you generally know that you’ve done something wrong. I say generally because today I checked in some changes and was faced with a failing test in a completely unrelated project. It’s a horrible feeling seeing your name next to a bright red test failure.

So I went to investigate the test. It didn’t look like it used anything I changed but you never know. The test was checking some date validation. A date is valid if it’s between 90 days old and 90 days in the future. The test expected the result to be valid however it was using a hard coded date as input. The input date was valid yesterday but today was over 90 days on. This meant that the test would fail at least every 180 days unless someone changed the hardcoded date. It also meant that the sap who happened to check in code the day the test date was suddenly invalid was blamed for the test failure!

I did what any self respecting programmer would and fixed the test to use the current date as a seed and then wrote more tests to check 90 days before and after the seed date as well as the other boundary values.

So today I learnt that wild code is very different from textbook code.

The standout book of the year is probably Ready Player One. I didn’t really know what to expect beyond the geek and 80s references everyone talks about so the engaging story and likeable characters were a nice surprise.

Next year I want to start reading a bit more horror. I love horror movies but I’m not very knowledgeable on horror novels at all so I think I’ll try and change that. I’ve just finished The Rats so that’s a start.

1. Slapstick (or Lonesome No More) by Kurt Vonnegut
2. Batman Year One by Frank Miller
3. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
4. Neuromancer by William Gibson
5. God Bless You Mr Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
6. Mass Effect Revelation by Drew Karpysyhn
7. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
8. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
9. Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke
10. Foundation by Issac Asimov
11. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
12. Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
13. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
14. The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett
15. A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
16. Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut
17. Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
18.  M is for Magic by Neil Gaiman
19. Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut
20. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
21. Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut
22. The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
23. Death by Black Hole by Neil Degrasse Tyson
24. Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
25. The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
26. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
27. The Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke
28. The Rats by James Herbert

Our flight out ended up being delayed by two hours (yay Easyjet!). We had already arrived at the airport nerdishly early so we ended up with a four hour wait. We then missed the train into Rome by a minute due to a weird ticket machine so the journey ended up feeling a lot longer than it should have been.

The morning of the first day was spent looking around the Colosseum, Forum and Palentine Hill. We were given a great tip for buying tickets to the Colosseum. If you walk 200 metres up the road and you can buy a combined ticket for all three sights at the entrance to Palentine Hill. You can then straight into the Colosseum skipping the massive queue.

I won’t list everything we saw that day otherwise we would be here all day. That evening we found a small family run restaurant for dinner called La. Vecchia. Conca . It ended up being some of the best Italian food I’ve ever had. Even the simple bruschetta starter was amazing.

The next day was mainly spent trudging around the Vatican Museums. I’m sure they would have been very beautiful and quite interesting if we were able to actually stand and look at anything. We were swept along in a huge group of tourists until we got to the Sistine Chapel where everyone stood around taking photos and talking loudly (two things explicitly forbidden).

We ended the day by finding a small pizzeria in town and having some decent (although not fantastic) pizza. We walked back to the hotel past the Forum and Colosseum all lit up as the sun had gone down which was a rather breath taking sight.

Our flight home wasn’t until the afternoon of the next day but we didn’t really do anything productive.

Rome is a stunning city and I would definitely recommend that everyone visit. You can’t quite believe the amount of Ancient Roman stuff they still have lying around everywhere.

This is a worrying direction in which we are heading. Freedom of speech should be protected at all costs. I decided I would write to my MP expressing my worry and asking if this subject could be raised. I think you should do the same. If I get a response I will update this post or make a new one.

Dear Iain Stewart,

I hope this e-mail finds you well.

I am writing in response to the recent spate of heavy handed sentencing in regards to statements and jokes made on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

I hoped that the overturning of Paul Chambers’ conviction in the ‘Twitter Joke Trial’ would set a precedent in regards to to this subject but instead it seems that judges are continuing to hand out sentences that are grossly out of proportion with the supposed crime as a knee jerk reaction. Sentencing should not be affected by ‘public outrage’.

For example, I refer you to the recent case of Matthew Woods whereby a tasteless and insensitive joke has landed the 19 year old a custodial sentence. This sets a dangerous precedent. Should we really be legislating against bad taste humour? Who decides when the line has has been overstepped?

I also refer you to the recent sentencing of Azhar Ahmed. A young man who expressed an unpopular opinion regarding several dead British soldiers on Facebook. A comment on a website has got him a fine, 240 hours community service and a criminal record. Would the sentence be as tough had the soldiers been foreign nationals and the defendant white?

I can quote several other similar cases from the past year if required.

I am not defending the view points of these people. I am, however, defending the right to express a view that others may dislike or be offended by. Surely you agree that free speech should be a basic right of any British citizen? On a related point, is this seriously an appropriate use of police time in this era of austerity?

As my member of parliament I would greatly appreciate it if you could discuss this subject with fellow MPs and raise the debate in the house of commons.

Thank you for taking the time to read this e-mail.

Yours sincerely,

Louis Houghton

It’s so good that I’ve actually decided to sell the Revo and use the Raspberry Pi as my main XBMC machine. OK the Pi isn’t powerful enough to emulate old consoles like the Revo did but I never really played them anyway. I don’t even get enough time to play my PS3 and XBox nowadays.

Where the Pi really succeeds is video playback. 1080p videos play smoothly due to hardware decoding of the h.264 video codec. Old non-HD avi files play well too. That tends to sum up my entire video library so it works for me. 5.1 audio decoding works out of the box. I had the Revo for two years and I still had problems getting surround sound (or in fact any sound through HDMI) whenever I installed a new version of XBMC or Ubuntu back when I was using Boxee. Whilst fiddling to get something working can be fun sometimes, I don’t particularly want to be fixing something when I actually want to watch a film.

Thanks to the newly released HDMI CEC functionality I can even control XBMC with my TV’s remote control so I don’t have to buy a separate remote. You can of course use the iOS or Android remote apps which are great in some ways but awful for navigating menus as you have to look down to see where your finger is on the touch screen.

Whilst being able to use my TV remote is great some of the buttons were mapped to strange functions. I had accepted this as one of the very few drawbacks. What I didn’t realise was that you can map the buttons to whatever the hell you want. All you need to do is edit the remote.xml file. The command below creates one in your home directory from the default XBMC one.

cp /opt/xbmc-bcm/xbmc-bin/share/xbmc/system/keymaps/remote.xml /home/pi/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps/remote.xml

I then opened the newly created remote.xml in my home directory and added these lines to the <FullScreenVideo> section.

<red>Pause</red>
<green>Stop</green>
<yellow>ShowSubtitles</yellow>

<select>OSD</select>

The 3 are fairly easy to work out. The <select> section means you can now click the select button to bring up the video controls rather than changing the aspect ratio like it does by default.

YOu can find all the commands on the XBMC wiki.

I’ve recorded a video to show using my Philips TV remote and what to expect from the Pi. The Inception video at the start is 1080p although it doesn’t really look like it on camera. The TED video app is a bit slow to list content and start videos but performance is fine once playing the video.

I downloaded and cloned the Raspbian image to the SD card. After hooking everything up I booted into Raspbian and manually started an X session to see how it performs on the Raspberry Pi’s modest hardware. I must say that I’m pretty impressed. Performance is pretty snappy even when web browsing… well, snappy for 700MHz ARM processor coupled with 256MB RAM.

However I’m not really interested in using the Pi as an every day computer. I’ve got a fairly beefy laptop for that. Instead I’m interested in seeing what it can do and what pieces of hardware I can replace with it.

Due to the Pi’s size and low power usage it would make a really good Airplay receiver. I’ve written about Airplay before. Personally I think it’s Apple’s killer feature that is one of the main advantages of keeping an all Apple setup. I used this blog post to quickly install Shairport (an Open Source implementation of Airplay) on to the Pi. The connection seems pretty solid but audio quality from the headphone jack is pretty awful. I have a spare HDMI port on my surround sound receiver so hopefully bypassing the Pi’s DA convertor will help.

I’ve also installed a VPN server on it. When I’m out of the house I can connect and get access to my network and browse the web through an encrypted link which is nice for unsecured wifi. My iPhone doesn’t seem to want to connect but my Macbook Pro and work Windows 7 PC seem happy to connect.

Another project I’ve got my eye on is raspbmc - the XBMC media software ported to the Pi. Apparently performance is pretty nice when watching h.264 encoded video.

So far it’s a pretty impressive bit of kit. The fact it costs £30 is quite amazing.

I couldn’t help feeling slightly depressed once I had finished the book. Of the predicted advancements covered in the book we have achieved very few (the International Space Station being the main exception). We are no closer to visiting asteroids or Mars than in 1994. In fact it could be argued that we’re further away considering the US doesn’t even have the means to put a man into space now that the shuttle has been retired.

What is really shocking about reading the book is how little we’ve come on politically and environmentally. Sagan described how in the future (in terms of 1994) global stability would help us work together as one planet to achieve goals such as settling Mars. 20 years on however and we’re still spending vast amounts of money blowing up people in the middle east instead of funding space programs.

We also still seem set on destroying our clement climate through pollution. Promises made in Kyoto are being broken and politicians continue to ignore the impending doom that awaits us on this path in favour of short term gains in popularity. People complain about wind farms (both on and offshore), tidal power and nuclear power when these are the only hopes we have. In the nearly 20 years since Sagan wrote Pale Blue Dot and discussed the impact we are having on the Earth we’ve only gotten worse.

Sagan describes how we must eventually become space faring to survive as a species. Human colonies on other worlds are insulated against extinctions on Earth. It seems to me though that we are working ourselves into a corner. Governments seem intent on destroying the planet but refuse to fund our only escape route – space exploration.

In preparation for the exam I bought a couple of past exam papers from the OU online shop. I did this last year and I found it really useful. However I have come to discover that the module I did the exam for last year (M263) was an anomaly in that it supplies answers for the exam papers. Most other OU modules do not. Now this is a bit strange. Why take a mock exam if you can’t grade yourself afterwards? You might be really confident about an answer but actually you’re completely wrong.

Now the OU party line is that you can get answers to questions by asking in the module forum or reading back through the literature. The problem is that whenever someone posts in the forum they get a load of conflicting answers just like you see on a popular Stack Exchange question. The difference is that Stack Exchange has a voting system so crap answers are down voted and the best answers are (in theory) voted to the top. And reading back through the unit text sounds good in theory but sometimes you can spend ages looking for a single sentence to answer a one mark question. It’s not really a good use of time when you’re studying part time and trying to fit everything else in. Googling can sometimes be quicker but you can sometimes be marked down for not using the approved method so it’s better to go with the module texts.

So I haven’t done as many mock exams to prep for tomorrow’s exam. I’m fairly confident anyway. It’s nice because a lot of the material is relevant and just sinks in when you’re writing a lot of Java. In the mock exams that I have done I’ve answered everything without too much trouble… although I suppose whether I actually had the right answers is anyone’s guess.

So this leaves me with the choice between the other lefty parties – Labour and the Greens. I reckon I probably will vote Labour when the next general election rolls round because it’ll be the only way to oust the Tories but in the local elections I feel I have a bit more choice.

I’m seriously thinking about voting Green. I support a lot of what the Green party stands for in regards to the environment but I’ve never voted for them before. Partly because it was always seen as a wasted vote but also because I fundamentally disagree with their stance on subjects concerning science. Today I saw this Reddit post in which someone with exactly my thoughts voted Green but then e-mailed the party to explain their stance. In the e-mail they write that whilst they agree with many of the Green’s policies, the party’s stance on nuclear power and GM crops for example is ‘naive and dangerous’.

This sums up my thoughts exactly and I’m leaning towards doing the same thing.

On a side note I thought I better add how disappointed I am with the amount of information available on the people we’re voting for here in Milton Keynes. All we get on the council website is a list of names next to the parties. I have no idea what these people stand for. I tweeted the @MKCouncil twitter account to find out if any of the candidates blogged or used Twitter but 5 hours later I’ve not heard anything. Googling their names doesn’t bring up anything interesting either.

It just means that people end up voting based on their ideological views of each party as opposed to proper policies. For all I know the Green candidate is opposed to a load of stuff I support. Maybe the Tory candidate and I have very similar views (I doubt it somehow). There’s no way to tell because there seems to be nothing about these people online.

Anyway, hopefully the rain will hold off long enough to walk down to the polling station.

The main reason to go was to find out more about the E-Car (PDF warning) pilot that Wolverton is in the running for. It’s an car club that’s designed to help people get rid of their second car. You pay a yearly membership fee (at the moment it’s planned to be £50) and then you can book the car and pay an hourly charge (currently planned to be £5.95). The most interesting thing about this one is that all the cars are fully electric. Jordan is possibly going to be looking for a job in London once she’s finished her masters so possibly won’t need a car for commuting. If we could get rid of one car and use the E-Car for the few times when we both need a car at the same time it would save a fair amount of money and the environmental benefit would be a bonus.

They’re planning to run the pilot in four or five areas this year from a shortlist of eight so hopefully it’ll come to Wolverton. Apparently interest has been better than the average so that’s promising.

I also signed up for information from a local veg box thing called Growing People (warning. The website is absolutely horrible). Last year we gave Able and Cole a go. They’re one of the biggest veg box companies in the country so we thought they’d be good. We cancelled after a few weeks because the produce was really bad quality and in some cases was already over ripe. They also imported a load of stuff. The reason I like the idea of getting a veg box is to reduce my food miles. This one in Wolverton is all grown locally. You can have it delivered or pick it up and the place you pick it up from is less than a minute walk from our house so that’s a plus.

There was also a good bit of information on solar panels. They’re still maybe a little too expensive for me to justify but I reckon once they get below £2000 for 6 (currently around £3500) they become very interesting. I have quite  bit of technology so being able to partly power it all with green energy would help my conscious a lot.