Sir Norris's New Writeups

November 16, 2006 (person)

2006-11-16T10:01:35Z

Norris the Gnome

Norris was indeed a gnome. He was a small gnome, about a foot tall. He had a white beard, a red conical hat and wore a red coat. He also carried a lantern (which didn't work).

He arrived on what I think was probably my 15th birthday — give or take a couple of years — for some forgotten, presumably humorous reason. Bought, I found out later, from Torquay market for 99 pence, he took up residence on a shelf in my bedroom for a few years until I left home to go to University.

As a young student, living away from home for the first time, I spent my time doing what most young students do: getting drunk, smoking, doing stupid things and thinking I was cool. On the particular floor of the sixteen storey building that I lived in, a common occupation, for the first few weeks, was to sit outside the lift entrance — constantly stopping it — waiting to see who was there when the doors open.

One day,…

June 27, 2006 (place)

2006-06-27T00:09:40Z

1991

When I was at school, I spent a lot of my time in the school library. This is something, I'm sure, I share with many other noders. Much of this time, I spent sitting at the table nearest the Encyclopædia Britannica. I'd have some topic in my mind — something I'd heard of but didn't really understand — and I'd look it up. The addictiveness of the encyclopedia was devious, however; it always gave you not-quite-enough information to satisfy whilst throwing out new terms and ideas which needed looking-up. An hour later I'd still be there with five different volumes open at different pages and many of my fingers holding different places as I spun outwards across the web of interconnected information.

1996

University libraries are, of course, much bigger than school libraries. I realised I could find books to a much greater depth on pretty much any subject I wanted. I would often end up there after dragging my hung-over self towards the campus too…

World Cup: Germany 2006 (thing)

2006-06-14T15:06:05Z

It's time, once again for the biggest tournament in world sport. That's right: The FIFA World Cup. And where better to get your up-to the minute news on the fixtures and scores as the event progresses that at this very node? Well, you could try the official FIFA site or the BBC for a start; but if you're too scared to leave the confines of the thrilling yet comfortable mix of poetry, prose, fact, fiction, inane jabber and utter crap that is our E2 then here you are.

Right. Enough of the the seemingly-pointless intro cleverly crafted to make this node look more than just a cut and paste writeup. Oh, and before I start: the times are in local time!

The group stages

The 32 teams participating in the cup are organised into eight groups of four. Each team in each group will play each other once in a mini-league. At the end,…

April 4, 2006 (place)

2006-04-04T20:26:14Z

Well, whilst brevity is the order of the day on E2, I thought I'd share some of my own. My personal favorite instances of brevity are tiny scripts which make my computer do usefull things for me without my intervention — or that stop me getting things wrong...

I like The News Quiz on Radio 4. It's a comedy panel quiz where they answer questions on current affairs in a humorous manner — like Have I Got News For You except without the pictures. Unfortunately, I never catch it on. I'm always busy when it'on on so I miss it.

Now, I'm sure that most of you have used the BBC's Listen Again page, where you can stream programmes you've missed and, indeed, this is how I usually listened to this particular program.

Recently, however, the BBC have started doing podcasts — or MP3 downloads on an RSS feed as we called them in my day — of selected programmes. This is…

Inheritance in relational databases (idea)

2006-04-02T14:32:58Z

Inheritance in relational databases

Everybody loves Object-Oriented Programming, right? Well, maybe not necessarily, but it's a good solid proven way of writing code — especialy for large-scale production — and it's something that your technically challenged boss will feel comfortable with. Everybody also loves relational databases. SQL is great and used everywhere so, chances are, you'll have to use it too. And you'll be using it for giving your objects some persitance.

What, of course, is odd here, is that the two things don't line up well. Relational databases are not object oriented and so you're going to have to do some mapping between the two; especially when your using that lovely object-oriented technique: inheritance.

Relational databases don't do inheritance. If you have a table storing instance data for one class, and another table storing the instance data for the child class, then you're gonna have to do something to make the…

February 26, 2006 (place)

2006-02-26T22:19:21Z

A good mood, life-update daylog.

I've said before, and I'll say again, that daylogs are one of my favorite parts of E2. There's no better way to start the day than to read about the last 24 hours of several noders' lives. I love the random nature of daylogs; the fact that they contain the things that don't fit, or may not be accepted anywhere else within the nodegel. But I particularly like the ones that simply tell you the truth about a noder's life. Yes, it's a bit like reading someone's personal weblog... but so much better.

With this in mind, I'm gonna do a "life update" daylog...

It has been over four months since I last daylogged (when I ended my pitiful attempt to stop smoking) and I've been through a particularly large amount of changes since then. I've finished at university, got a proper job and moved house.

That's right; I now have a proper job. This is probably the main reason why my…