The Blackbox

Some clever fancy remote controlled submersible owned by an oil company, has spotted and filmed a Squid…. with elbows.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081124-giant-squid-magnapinna.html

That looks way too much like the alien from the Independence Day film for my liking. Thankfully it lives at silly depths in the Gulf of Mexico, and it can stay there!

I had trouble finding any real information on this to pass on to the developers here, so I had to document it myself, to help them move on from their PHP background to understand things other than simple multi-dimensional arrays.

So here, our TreeMap structure is….

TreeMap tMap = new TreeMap();
tMap.put(1, “London”);
tMap.put(2, “New York”);
tMap.put(3, “Paris”);
tMap.put(4, “Sydney”);
tMap.put(5, “Geneva”);

Looping through this in Velocity and getting the values OR the keys is easy enough to do, and can be found through searching on Google, but pulling out both is hard to find. Presuming we’re passed the above TreeMap to the Velocity layer as$cities

// loop through the keySet of our TreeMap and assign
// the key to $cityKey
#foreach ($cityKey in $cities.keySet())

// using the current $cityKey, get the value assigned
// to that key and set it to the variable $city
#set ($city = $cities.get($cityKey))

Key: $cityKey
City: $city

#end

Very basic example, but hopefully it’s useful to someone!

I do wish people would stop spouting rubbish about AJAX. Clicking a link and making a div appear/disappear is not AJAX – how many times do I have to explain this to these people?

AJAX refers to not interfering with the display and behaviour of the existing page, whilst communicating with the server in the ‘background’. Once it’s received a response, then the page can be updated.

Yes clicking a link and making things appear/disappear might be done with Javascript, but it is not making an asynchronous call to the server for anything, which is quite a key part of the whole concept of AJAX!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7745324.stm

In Summary….

a causes b, b causes c, therefore a causes c.

Do you know what causes your bosses stress? Stupid employees. Stupid employees cause the Manager to be grumpy, which is why the employees become stressed. Therefore it is the employees fault that they are stressed. Study complete.

Let me start by saying “epic game”. The Demo was fun, but the full version is even better.

The differing types of zombies, create a fun and, if someone doens’t have their wits about them, intense and fast paced gaming experience. When you first experience someone next to you getting jumped by a Hunter and tagged by a Smoker, the adrenaline kicks in as you desperately try to save them, knowing that you are shortly going to be confronted by an insane number of zombies round the next corner. When you’re first thrown up on by a Boomer, and the rush of zombies ignoring the other players and race straight for you find it funny, as your screen blurs and you can’t actually see how many there are. The first experience of a Tank – where you think you can run, and hide from it – but it follows you everywhere, and begins picking pieces of the world up and throwing them at you.

CoD4 provided an excellent game for both fun and competitive team-based gameplay, and so does L4D…. but it’s so much more exciting. The audio complements what is happening in the game, and adds to the experience. It’s intense, but sometimes hilarious as each person is simply swamped by zombies and you all know that you are shortly going to be starting the level again.

I am going to be losing many hours of my life to this game – and it’s going to be worth every minute.

Clevers…

http://spod.cx/bnp_members_list.shtml