Archive for April, 2009
Firefox 3.1
I’ve been using Firefox 3.1 beta 3 now for about a week and it seems to be quite good. I haven’t noticed any major problems with it. The installation was the same as normal. It did install to a different directory but copied over all my extensions and bookmarks etc. They all worked straight away.
There are only 2 changes that I have seen, the rest appear to be ‘under the hood’. There is Private Browsing, this works the same as in Chrome. It doesn’t save any history, temp files etc. of your session. Unlike Chrome though, rather than open a new window, it will hide all of your existing tabs and open a blank one. Any browsing is then private. Exiting private mode will restore all your original tabs. It doesn’t appear that your saved passwords are accessible in private mode and it won’t save any as well.
The only other change I’ve noticed is that the X on tabs to close them doesn’t appear if you only have one tab open. I use Foxmarks (or Xmarks now) and it didn’t seem to like me syncing my bookmarks between 3.0 and 3.1 but I updated my laptop to 3.1 as well and then it worked no problem.
I have only had a couple of crashes while I’ve using it, and they were while I was closing it down. So not really too bothered about that. Overall it seems to be a good update. Don’t know how long it’s going to be in beta for though but I can’t think that it will be too much longer.
Back in Stafford
I’ve been back in Stafford for the weekend and now my assignments are all done. We have to demo it at some point but that will probably be next week. I’ve still got exams but other than that I am all done for the year. I don’t really know what to do with myself. I thought about playing some games but there isn’t really anything that I want to play. There is still a few games that I haven’t completed but I don’t really feel like playing them. I don’t think there are any games coming out soon either that I would want. I haven’t looked in a while but nothing comes to mind.
I still haven’t heard anything new about my placement yet, I might need to find out about that soon. I don’t really have an exact start date or anything yet. I would like to book flights etc. and work out how I am going to get my things over there such as my PC.
It’s a very sunny day outside, probably one of the warmest that we have had this year. I wouldn’t mind sitting outside and doing nothing but everyone else seems to be busy.
Still home for easter
I’m still at home and still planing on going back on Friday. I spent 4 days over the bank holiday weekend working in the garden. We were preparing for tomorrow when we are going to be getting some big machines and a massive pile of soil. We have also been trying to control the weed problem. It has gotten a little out of hand over the last couple of years so we need to make up for it.
The fruit cage has been hacked back so next year we might be able to get in there to get the fruit. We may still pull out some of the gooseberry bushes as there is just too many. We have also been tackling the Japanese garden as that has become overgrown. There is a lot of work to be done but we are getting through it slowly.
I’m not sure on my feelings about tomorrow. While it will be good to get it done, and it shouldn’t be too much hard work as the machines are the ones that are working. I’m just a driver. It is still about 150 tonnes of soil and we have to do it all in one day.
As for my assignment, it is nearly done now. I think that the programming is basically finished. Maybe just a couple of hours work to tidy it up which I was going to try and get done this afternoon. Then there is just the report to go. I’m not worried about getting it finished on time, I just have lost all motivation to work on it as I have done all interesting bits and now it is just the boring bits left. Once it is handed in then there is just the exams to go. It seems stupid that we start the 3rd term next Monday but we have finished for the year 3 weeks tomorrow after our final exam.
I think I will probably have to come home again after that because they will want my help with something else but we will have to wait and see.
Home for easter
I’ve just come home today for Easter. I was planning on going back to Stafford next Tuesday but it seems like it might be Friday now. I was roped into helping with some landscaping in the garden on what I thought was going to be this Friday, although now it seems that it isn’t going to be until next Thursday.
I have an assignment still to do so I will probably have to get much of that work done while I am here as it is due on the 20th. This will mean development on my laptop, I’m not really a fan of that but I suppose I will have to. It is quite slow, even now as I am typing the letters appearing is struggling to keep up with me. The hard drive is quite slow which means that Visual Studio is quite slow. I have thought about getting a new laptop but I don’t really use this one enough to justify it. I might next year while I am working.
Project Euler
I have recently been working through some of the problems on Project Euler. The site has a series of mathematical problems to solve. Each can be solved by writing a program to calculate the answer. An answer of one of the simpler problems is “Find the difference between the sum of the squares of the first one hundred natural numbers and the square of the sum.” and the solution is quite simple shown here in Python.
squareTotal=0
sumTotal=0
for num in range (1,101):
sumTotal += num
squareTotal += num*num
sumSquare = sumTotal*sumTotal
print sumSquare-squareTotal
Some of the problems are much more difficult however, they have a rule that all of the problems should be solvable on a modest PC in under a minute of computation. There are some that I have written where my first attempt would have taken several months to run but I have refined it down to about 10 minutes. There is a forum that you get access to once you have solved each problem. There are posts with other peoples’ solutions in a vast array of languages which can be quite interesting. That particular problem had a solution that ran in under 10 seconds.
There is well over 200 problems and rising so it should be enough to keep anyone busy for a while. I will post any interesting solutions as I come across them.
New theme
You may have noticed I changed the site’s theme. I had another look through them on the WordPress site earlier and decided I liked this one better. I had to change quite a few things to get it how I wanted but I think I have everything now. I might tweak a few things at some point though.