wade womersley leeds based web developer

Every time I see the Oasis of the Seas, I am always in awe of it. More and more I want to be on it now, but alas, I have to wait.

This video is a short clip about the new Royal Promenade, just take a look at the sheer size of it and remember you’re on a ship when you see this.

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Yesterday, we went to Leeds to do some shopping in preparation of our upcoming big day (yes, getting married soon!) At lunch time we decided to go get some food and a drink, we wanted to go to Starbucks but both the Border’s Starbucks and the actual Starbucks shop on the street were packed (20+ queues.) So we decided on Costa Coffee, 93-97 Albion Street (near Harvey Nichols) for our mid-day drink and snack…I wish we had queued for Starbucks.

It got to my time to order, so I ordered us a Gingerbread Latte, Hazelnut (or some nut) Latte, 2 mince tarts and 2 panini’s that needed heating up. The woman on the counter put the order in the till, took payment and then…no drinks…no one told the guy doing the drinks for about 5 minutes, so while other people got served, I was just standing there. Eventually they realised he needed to make the drinks and so they begun.

That day, their dishwasher was broke as well, so all orders came in their cardboard cups, this was out of their control in all fairness, but it would have been nice to see someone there working on it, it was busy, something like a cup is pretty important at a coffee shop, especially when the customer level is going up.

Someone who placed their order while I was stood waiting asked for a slight alteration to the standard drink (missed the actual item ordered, but caught the part where he said “but can you…” – two women responded saying, we’re awfully busy so we can’t do that for you now because (and I quote) “if we do that for you, everyone will want it” – a line I have a personal grievance about – it also shows a lack of any care for customers.

Then another conversation unfolded, I missed the start of it, but the ending was superb (note, the manager was working on the floor too):
Manager: “This is the first time this has happened, sorry.”
Customer: “Well that’s not true, I was in here a few days ago and got the same excuse, so it’s certainly not the first time.”
Manager: “Well it’s not happened while I’ve been here, I’m the new manager.”
I found this particularly offensive to a customer – just lie to their face why don’t you?

Finally, and this is what made me want to post this. The toilets…oh my god. For a start, there is one toilet for both males and females. A small room that has the toilet and the sink – so if you’re done with the toilet, you can’t let someone else use it while you wash your hands. That’s nothing though, compared to the urine all over the floor, the used tissue on the floor and, best of all, the toilet brush on the floor covered in shit, yes, shit. It was truly disgusting in there, yes it’s a toilet used by customers so it’s going to get messy every now and then, but leaving urine on the floor and a shit covered toilet brush is beyond acceptable. The picture shows the cleanliness pretty well, just click to enlarge.

Incidentally, the coffees looked like regular coffee’s, no extra finishing touches or anything, very bland.

I love the Muppets, always have, always will. So I was delighted to find this on Youtube. It’s Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody re-imagined by the muppets. Not sure if it’s actually new, but the 1080p quality certainly is new and it is pretty stunning to watch it stream.

Enjoy!

I watched 9 last night and while it certainly was emotional, I was left feeling somewhat let down and confused at the end of it. I’m going to talk about specifics in the film here so if you’ve not seen it yet and intend to, don’t ready anymore.

It starts off with a guy creating a small doll (that is to be 9) and bringing it to life. 9 soon meets others who are like him who explain what happened to the world – the film is set in a post apocalyptic future where man has been wiped out. So immediately you’re in a very bleak film here, this, on top of the dead people they show right from the start is a subtle hint as to the direction of the film!

The first doll 9 meets gets kidnapped by a beast just before he meets the rest of the dolls. 9, being the hero of the film, wants to mount a rescue mission and persuades one of the dolls to go along with him. The result of this rescue attempt is the death of the first doll he met and the re-birth of an “evil” machine created by man which creates more evil machines and kills more dolls. The machine incidentally is an artificially intelligent machine – as usual, humans first and last attempt before it went crazy on its creators and killed them all.

By the end of the film, of the 9 dolls you meet, 5 die, 4 survive – considering these are the last 9 “living” things on earth, that’s a pretty bad ratio of life to death. The ending does suggest future hope – the spirits of the 5 who died rise to the clouds causing it to rain, each rain drop appears to contain the souls of the 5 who died in the form of amoeba suggesting life will be reborn. However, given the bleak view the entire film portrays excellently, the loneliness of the final 4 and the unpleasant creations the machine makes, the film left me feeling rather down, I wanted more, this was one of those films I actually wanted a happier ending – I love screwed up endings in films but this was not a film that warranted one. I got emotionally attached to the film and it left me filled with emotions it should have cleared up for me.

Saying all that, I would recommend watching it if you haven’t, it is a visually stunning film and is guaranteed to get you worked up into an emotional state, just be prepared for an ending that could have been nicer.

A few months ago at work we realised the need for lots of “nodes” (servers) in the UK and in the US initially. We have a lot of data processing that we need to do and we worked out it would be faster and cheaper if we could distribute the work over lots of servers rather than a few beefy servers. Dan started looking around and found VPS.net, they looked good so we thought we’d give them a go. Of course we didn’t want to “put all our eggs in one basket” so we took out some VPS servers with different companies too. A few months later, the only servers we’ve been continuously happy with are the VPS.net servers.

There pricing is one of their best features, you can get a “single node” VPS with some basic specs of 400Mhz processor, 256MB RAM, 10GB storage and 250GB bandwidth (what this site is running on currently) for £15 a month. £15 may seem a little steep to some people to start with but when you realise this is for your own root access Virtual Server (i.e. you can pretty much do anything you want with it like it was at home) it isn’t that bad at all! What makes it better though is, as you buy more nodes, the price comes down for each additional node, so the first node may be £15, but the second is only £14 and so on all the way down to £9 per node.

VPS.net’s idea of nodes is also very cool. You can buy up to 16 nodes that work as one VPS, and you can change this at any time. Lets say you were me with one node and suddenly you got a surge of visitors and it just couldn’t handle the load anymore, not a problem, simply buy an extra node, attach it to the VPS and you’ll immediately get the benefit of it, no need to re-install your VPS or anything!

They also have automated full node backups for £4 a month too, they take a daily, weekly and monthly backup that you can restore from at any time, so if you totally screw up your server, just hit yesterday’s backup and voila! Back to normal again. Not only that, if the actual server your VPS is on decides it’s time to die, they’ll boot your VPS up on another server within minutes, that doesn’t cost and is part of the service.

If your demands are for a webserver, they have free DNS management tools as well so you don’t have to use an external service, just point your domain at their nameservers.

So in summary, if you’re looking for a reliable, fast, cheap place to host a website or host nodes to perform data analysis, I’d certainly give VPS.net a go.

Review ends

I was just Googling trying to find out if anyone had wrote an application that wraps PuTTY enabling it to support stored sessions in its taskbar icon right click menu when I came across this extremely useful program instead: PuTTY Connection Manager. It’s a very simple application for Windows that sits over PuTTY but provides 2 extremely useful features.

The first feature is a list of all saved sessions so you can just double click and it opens a new PuTTY session inside the application.

The second feature (and this one is great if you’re like us at work and manage lots of nodes) is a simultaneous command function – run the same command across as many PuTTY sessions as you want at once. Yes, type it in once and watch as it’s done on all the PuTTY sessions you specify – marvellous!

For anyone who uses PuTTY, I highly recommend trying this out.

As I’m currently lacking in things to post, here’s a cat doing the robot…

Hopefully I’ll actually come up with something slightly more substantial in a day or two!

It seems the large hadron collider has had no end of problems, which led some people to believe it was due to something in the future time travelling into the past to prevent its launch. But now it seems that it’s almost there as initial tests have finally succeeded.

CERN, the Swiss facility where the enormous underground experiment is located, has announced that test beams in the LHC have zoomed around most parts of the accelerator without incident:

Particles are smoothly making their way around the 27 km circumference of the LHC. Last weekend (7-8 November), the first bunches of injection energy protons completed their journey (anti-clockwise) through three octants of the LHC’s circumference and were dumped in a collimator just before entering the CMS cavern. The particles produced by the impact of the protons on the tertiary collimators (used to stop the beam) left their tracks in the calorimeters and the muon chambers of the experiment.

One of the coolest parts about accelerators is that when the microscopic particles smash into the walls, they are moving so fast that they leave long tracks in their wakes. (Researchers can gain information from examining these tracks.)

If everything keeps moving smoothly, we could see some particle-on-particle smashage as early as two weeks from now. As long as the world doesn’t end, we’re going to get some long-awaited answers to our questions about our universe.

Original article at io9

Square Enix have put up a new video with interviews and a few unseen sections of FFXIII on the site which you can view here. But most importantly, they’ve announced the US/Europe release date as the 9th March 2010, not that far away really! It is now also available for pre-order at Amazon, be sure to grab your copy now!

Final Fantasy XIII (PS3) – Preorder now
Final Fantasy XIII (Xbox 360) – Preorder now

What can only be described as a human function, this thermal image at first glance looks like something from space, captured by a telescope….then you realise it’s just a man’s butt while farting and your world comes crumbling down.