Dominic Finn

Quite scary really but I think I have come up with the perfect feeder algorithm! Girls - never trust a man who asks if you love him whilst he is holding cake. Haha!

Wicked!!! I have won a competition on Facebook for this? http://www.blitzsport.com/Samurai-Sword-Umbrella .? Blitz asked the question.. ? 'In your life, who is the one person you? admire, that stands out from all others and why?' The general response was typically wet with answers like "my mum", "my 99 year old nan", "my blind?narcoleptic uncle". This is an example...? " Well, its has to be my mum, for always being there for me especially during my fight against cancer as a teenager, she never left my side. Through my A-levels she helped me reach my potential and even now through medical school, the reason I've got this far is because of my mother. : )" Very touching but we don't want something so depressing. My answer was simply.... "Arnold Schwarzenegger for always being rock hard, producing great films with classic lines that would sound useless without his voice, for trying to kill Sarah Connor and then saving Sarah Con

Gah, I have been trying to resist for 13hrs now but it's soooo painful. I just need Black Ops. It's like a magical?elixir. I am certain it will cure any ailment. I need it to fill the hole in my life before Beeston turns into one giant sinkhole.? I don't profess to be an engineer but I am sure if it had come out earlier it could have filled the hole in Mexico too. If only they could have released it earlier or that hole happened later. Time eh? No one can control it (except a timelord perhaps).?

I had a dream last night. Old Picard turned up and demanded I get an ebook reader. I will do as he says. Ah it will be great, sitting at my desk reading my ebooks, listening to?Ride of the Valkyries and someone knocks on my study door. "Come" I say. Of course it's Riker and he's been up to his old tricks, he wants me know if we can leave the planet quickly as he got into some trouble. "Make it so" I say.? Ah it's gonna be amazingzzzz. NEED.

There's only one way to find out... FIGHT!!!

I came across 20 tips for developing a social media strategy (via Nottingham EChampions  http://www.echampions.co.uk ). They stay fairly unspecific. I don't think they have attempted to put them in any sort of order.   It's interesting that I don't find it hard to actually create the connections and give the ability to share via social media. I think the hardest part is actually creating useful content and providing value . I have seen a lot of business start a twitter account up for example. They have been told that this is now essential for them. However once they get on there, they have nothing to say and no value to offer.   Fill My Belly is a great web site that allows you to order your take-aways online and then review the meal you have had. It's a great site and I use it too much. The reviews work as well. I complained about a meal I had and the restaurant contacted me and offered me a free meal, and asked me to change my review if I was happy with it. They have

I made this mistake of reading some internet comments recently. After a couple of minutes on YouTube and my eyes set on fire. I love to hear people blow the trumpets on the fact that people can "participate" now by commenting. It's a complete farce. 98% of the time the comments are just ill-informed smart arse comments either correcting the grammar or spelling of something, or in some other way disputing it with some laughable argument.  Looking at programming blogs for example reveals a great number of cretins either trying to correct the original blogger with some hastily written code or an "outsourced" developer asking for help but really not even having the first clue of how to program in the first place with a comment along the lines of "how i make software do with your codez?" It depresses me. 

Instructions Roll your estimating dice and observe the results.? Find a previous similar job, divide it by 7. Times the result by the total sum of the dice. Note: If no previous job exists roll the dice twice and sum the two results.

http://kn.theiet.org/news/oct10/warwick-cyborgs.cfm

Been having problems with setting up of the above. Very upsetting. Well, the problem is more because we need it to use secure transport. We have set the WCF service up on our test server, and switched https on and made (what I think are) the correct changes to the config. I then created a test certificate and private key. These were a cer file and a pvk file which I had to perform some magic on to turn into a pfk file. We then put this on as the certificate on the website and also put the certificate on the handheld (which just in itself was a pain in the buttocks as it only wanted to accept the cer file). Anyway after a lot of messing about we still get denied. The error I get is something along the lines of ?? Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel with authority Most annoying. I have a feeling that this is because the test certificate we have is not a trusted certificate and when the handheld tries to make the connection it checks for this and falls o

Being driven crazy by administrators in our building at the moment. They seem to incessantly send out memos about topics that either have nothing to do with us or are so ludicrously petty that I can not believe they seriously put fingers to keyboard and typed it out.? My favourite recent example is a memo about the toilet. It basically amounted to the news that the toilets have been refitted and that it is a short flush for number 1's and a longer one for the other.? [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfJwWW0w5BQ?wmode=transparent] Brilliant.? **Rant Over**

The news of crazy GM salmon has me a little scared. I'm not quite sure we know enough about the sea to go introducing crazy new fish into the world. How do we know what will happen? Personally I do not want the Salmon King as my liege.  News [ http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100920/ap_on_bi_ge/us_modified_salmon ]

This probably explains why we don't have a moon base yet.?

We are going to be painting the office so are doing a bit of a move around in preparation. I assume the painters are just going to paint straight over what is already there. Its funny as that is what has happened since these buildings existed. You can see from the places where the paint has come off the different colours it has been starting from green (most likely when it was a factory during the war) and then going into a variety of different hues.

I am sick of waiting. I need, nay I demand telepathy. I don't understand why it takes so long. I'm no scientist but I am pretty sure the brain gives off some type of energy. Like a brain wave. At some point we should be able to measure the usage of the brain to a point that we can decipher our language. From then we could just have a small implant that then sends that message to implants in other peoples brains. I think my first telepathic message would be "can someone please make me a cup of tea". Even better would be if you then hack the implant so you could control people "you knave! make me tea now!".? Ah the future seems to take forever to arrive! grrr!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCVc5TaPpe8?wmode=transparent] Almost forgot about this pure gem of a clip from Last Action Hero hahahaha

Please place all completed work into the Continuous amendment machine.?

Marvin the Orc.?

I never hear any mention of this and it isn't even recorded on James T Kirks wikipedia page! In one of the very early episodes of Star Trek, his middle name was not Tiberius! I don't know what it was but his middle name began with R! I would hazard a guess at Rudolf perhaps?

I had looked a little bit at F# about a year ago but that was mainly just being confused at what a colleague had done in it. I like this presentation by Luca Bolognese. It gives a really good example of doing something useful in F#. I think one of the big barriers I had with it was not really knowing what you were supposed to do with, just knowing it was new (and therefore shiny). The presentation / video is definitely worth a look and the guy himself is also quite funny which makes it easier to watch / listen to. An Introduction into Microsoft F#

I was looking on the Nokia development website at this? http://www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/Qt/Tools/ I tried to click on what I thought were videos under the heading? Efficient cross-platform development To my dismay they were just empty words... the video that is actually on there is a complete joke! I really don't know who they are trying to appeal to, if they want developers on board they really should have spent some time showing how easy their development platform is (and it's not by the way), with actual footage. This video just boasts about features that anyone programming these days would expect anyway! http://nds2.fds.nokia.com/fdp/gdinterface/forum_nokia_str/flash/SDK_video_3_mins.swf We have been trying mess around developing with Nokia phones with my friend Jon. I don't really like C++ but he is die hard symbian fan and I like messing around with new things.?

I noticed some more pictures have been added to this photostream...

I don't think I can let this idea go. I think this may be the start of many more foolish pictures to come over the next few days providing I have some time of course.?

Taken a couple of years ago. Great day.?

We cycled out to Elvaston castle today. Good ride! Saw this strange Moorish temple on the grounds which they are planning on restoring. Thought it was a very strange thing to see... reminded me of something out of an Elder Scrolls game.

I was at a bit of a house party last night. There was a nice view from the apartment.

I'm taking another look at Posterous again. I'm not really sure why as I haven't written a proper blog for a while but this seems an easy way to share between all my other tings...

I'm taking another look at Posterous again. I'm not really sure why as I haven't written a proper blog for a while but this seems an easy way to share between all my other tings...

This is just a quick test post from Bloggeroid. A blog app on Android. It seems to be nice, simple and lightweight..

enough said....

Now I am all for users. In fact I am a user myself. However every now and again you come across one or ten of those fiendish knaves that just completely refuse to play the game. I won't go into an exact story because there is no need. We all have faced them. Those ill favoured folk that call you and make outrageous claims that they can not see an "ok" button on the screen they are looking at. Ugh, obviously you must be patient with such types. But my biggest problem is the infectious foolery they cause. When one person says they can not get something working or it is going "slow". The other demented parrots start shouting the same and demanding to know what is wrong. It seems to be a culture thing where people feel good about not understanding how to use a computer. This has gone on for a good while now but computers are so engrained now, to take this attitude is utterly ludicrous. What I find even worse are those beastly folk that purport to be IT professionals

Ugh been trying to get the VPN Working through the firewalls this afternoon again. Liquid pain. DLink surely stands for Direct link to Satan. I find it unbelievable how many interfaces DLink seem to have been through with their products. It's insane. Surely a company like this would have one central office creating the interfaces. IT'S SUCH AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE PRODUCT. They are kind enough to give you a taster of their interface hell by offering a massive variety of simulators on their support page . Brilliant. Anyway I leave you with this as a final thought for the day..

Just read this article on the BBC website and it made me smile... Robot-inflicted injuries studied I can't imagine that household robots with dangerous items will be introduced until AI is in such a state that it can clearly tell the difference between normal people, pigs and perps. Then again, ED209 was supposed to be a clever cat and looked what happened to him! Execs dead and it can't even get up and down the stairs. Then again, a useless executive killer is probably what we need right now after the banking crisis.

Just a quick follow on from the home automation stuff. I just saw this person put an iPad in their kitchen cupboard door. Looks pretty cool. Although I wonder whether just a case and a stand somewhere in the kitchen would be more useful... Anyway they have done it now and it's still a pretty cool idea (especially if there was some kind of easy release mechanism at the back of the door). If you coupled this with the x10 app I saw for the iPhone on one of the commercials then you could have yourself a pretty cool control system.

Over the past couple of months I have had some enquiries into a taxi firm management program I wrote called CabControl . The program itself was just for a project and whilst I tried to write it in a nice way, it is still in Winforms and also uses Linq to Sql (which I have started to feel is just a little too slow). I've decided to reinvest some time into it though and asp.net mvc it up. I think if it was web based then I could make it a lot more scaleable and possibly offer a basic free version with the add ons such as reporting features and account management as paid for extras. Anyway I'm going to give it a good go. I haven't done any decent program for a while because of the teaching and the plethora of red herrings I have to look into most days. I haven't done much jquery and so I think doing a rich interface without using asp.net controls will test me as well. I look forward to doing some good unit testing as well.

A tramp walks into a bar and demands a drink. He is refused because he clearly can't pay. The tramp then pulls a hamster from his pocket and says, "In return for the drink, I'll show you something you've never seen before" He takes the hamster over to the old piano in the corner where it proceeds to play Gershwin tunes beautifully. The barman is impressed and pours out a scotch for the same tramp, who knocks it back and demands another. "No way" says the barman. "Show me another miracle and you can have another. Otherwise get out." From another pocket the tramp produces a frog which starts to sing beautifully. Another customer is so impressed that he immediately offers the tramp £500 for the frog, which he accepts gratefully. The barman is amazed, "You're mad," he tells the tramp, "That frog must have been worth millions." The tramp smiles and orders another scotch. "Not a bit of it," he says, "The hamst

I went to the Nott Tuesday event last night. There were some interesting points raised about who owns data about you and how it is used. It's a difficult subject for me because I find it a little tiring. In fact I find it very hard to write about, so I will make it brief. The presentation was about the "man" coming down on you and taking all the data they record about you and using it for purposes that you may not want / agree to. Ah ok, I don't like the sound of that. Mmm ok so there is a problem there but surely the best way to sort it is to just firm up the Data Protection act and legislate in favour of the people whose digital information is stored. In addition to this, if you are collecting certain data they could insist that you sign up with a register (list of companies) that do collect data, or it could be a voluntary thing but people would lean towards sites and services that are members of DatSecure (my new name for it). Once we had this then these companie

Just thought I would try this out! I was recommended by @Documentally at a talk by him last night!?