You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

I’ve still got it.

Neither won.

The python ate the gator, then the gator blew the python up from the inside, though I doubt it used dynamite.

I hate alligators and crocodiles. And snakes, though I like python ;)

Paintball
Andrew, Niko, myself and a bunch of Andrew’s (ex)workmates went paintballing last weekend. It was, without a doubt, the most fun I’ve had shooting people. There was a group of nine people in total, and we were joined with a few other groups to make teams of about 12. Half of “our” group was on our team, and half was on the opposition, which mant you were working with your friends, and shooting at your friends. Andrew was with me, and we worked as a team for some of the missions, and Niko was on the opposition so we tried to shoot him :)

The day itself was split into 5 seperate missions, and we got to play each scenario from both perspectives. This meant we had ten games of paintball throughout the morning. The missions were:

• Elimination: kill the opposition in a pine forrest
• Capture the flag: race to the centre and retrieve the flag; get it back to your end
• Generals: protect your general; get them to the opposition’s base; kill the opposing general
• Capture the flag (alternate): protect your flag; retrieve the opposition’s flag and return it to your base
• Bomb the bus: lob a “grenade” through a window or onto the top deck of a bus, or prevent that from happening

Each mission was distinctivly different, and I liked the bus mission the best. The generals game was good too because I was a bodyguard to our general, who was a sub-five-foot female. Each game was great to play and the order we played them was perfect. By the bus mission we were ready to blast our remaining paint, which was perfect.

The day was quite expensive, costing my just under $200, and this was with free entry (normally costs $20). NFD, I’ll be there again. Winter time would be good, with light rain or drizzle to mix up the environment a bit. Anyone else interested?

Andrew and Niko have left
Andrew got a promotion at work which saw him move to Melbourne with Niko. He’s now the Food and Beverage Manager at the Holiday Inn in Melbourne. It’s just near the casino so say hi if you’re in the area. I’m sure both he and Niko will be fine, as they have some friends there already (including Rob and Kristy).

I got to meet the first of Niko’s family - his brother Rodney was at the airport. Trivia: Rodney’s married to our old high school phys-ed teacher, Ms. Raven.

Breezy install
Adam and I spent this afternoon installing the latest release of Ubuntu v5.10 “Breezy Badger”. So far everything’s working well, except Firefox is having some problems with embeded video. I’m sure that’ll get fixed in the coming security releases.

There’s something geeky about the feel of a newly installed machine. I chose not to dist-upgrade because my machine isn’t normally that heavily configured. I use a terminal, a web browser (and lately a database and web server for local development) and email. I want to develop more in Python, simply because all the other cool kids seem to be doing that. My book is fantastic and I can’t wait to get past the intoductory sections. I’m thinking already of rebuilding Aurora in Python as a learning exercise… but I’m digressing.

VMWare
It seems the cool-cats at VMWare have released a free player for VMWare images. With any luck this will make its way into Ubuntu’s universe/multiverse.

Million dollar idea
In a time when it’s hard to find new things online, this site made me giggle. Full marks for effort.

I have a while loop that calls a recursive function to generate a multi-level menu for our new CMS product, Aurora. The recursive call was outside a bracket and messed up the execution dramatically.

I had to go back to first year Comp Sci skills:

printf(”FUCK FUCK FUCK”);

Problem solved.

Ubuntu’s third release, 5.10 codenamed “Breezy Badger”, has been released to the public. The release information contains details of mirror sites (3FL are yet to pick it up).

Looks like I’ve found what I’ll be doing this weekend/tonight ;)

Seriously, the leaps and bounds these guys are making, with this only their third release, is amazing. For a long time I wondered what would happen if a crazy-rich dude decided to get behind a massive open source project, and this is the answer to that question.