Microsoft are now offering free versions off some of their Visual Studio products. And although they are slightly limited compared to the complete version they seem to allow commercial use (from the FAQ: “Create fun and interesting applications for their personal enjoyment or to share with their friends, or even commercially distribute your programs. “)

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/

They won’t stay completely free though. Once the products leave beta they will supposedly be available for $49 each. Which is still affordable for us students though :)

Why is it so hard to get people to pay for things over the internet and so easy to get them to pay for things on their phone?

Well the two aren’t really related I suppose. Most of the people who buy stuff over the internet are under 18 and don’t havea credit card so they don’t really have a way to pay for stuff over the internet. So I’ll rephrase:

Why do people pay for stuff on their phones when the same stuff is free on the internet?

I was looking in a magazine (a TV guide) and you could do a numerology love test for £1. Just text your name and your (possibly) beloved’s name and get a percentage back. There are hundreds, possibly more, of those on the internet completely free so why would you ever pay a quid for it?

The other thing that got me was the advert had most popular ringtones. Why would you want one of the most popular ringtones? I thought the whole point of a custom ringtone was so your phone didn’t sound like everyone elses (although a train completely full of crazy frogs would have a certain humour about it).

Maybe people between 16 and 18 are just more prone to idiocy…

Or maybe this is the evidence that mobile phones cause brain damage…

George Galloway is the member of parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow, the constituency I happen to live. Now I personally find him very annoying. He’s part of a new political party called “Respect” that is aimed at unhappy Labour supporters.

Despite this, his appearance in front of a committee of senators in America was hilarious:

Washington Post

I think the best part was the accusation that he’s met with Saddam Hussein several times. As he points out he has met Saddam the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld . Unlike Donald he wan’t there to sell him weapons though… Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld, Labour, George Galloway, election, Saddam Hussein, America, senate

The following produces an error:

function hex2rgb($hex)
{
    for($i=0; $i<3; $i++)
    {
        $temp = substr($hex,2*$i,2);
        $rgb[$i] = 16 * hexdec(substr($temp,0,1)) + hexdec(substr($temp,1,1));
    }
    return $rgb;
}

function hex2rgb($hex)
{
    for($i=0; $i<3; $i++)
    {
        $temp = substr($hex,2*$i,2);
        $rgb[$i] = 16 * hexdec(substr($temp,0,1)) + hexdec(substr($temp,1,1));
    }
    return $rgb;
}

But not the error you might expect. PHP doesn’t even get to complain about redeclaring a function with the same name since the second function is full of parse errors.

I have a vague idea what the problem is but I’m not sure. Any takers? :P

Sorry about the dodgy display…

For a long time I hated JavaScript. I think I’m beginning to like it now. The following works perfectly in Firefox and works slightly less well in IE6. http://brownab1.miniserver.com/reborn/demo.php.

To use just click and drag. Or in IE6 press the button, drag then press again.

Well it’s been a while since I made a person post so here goes. Julia is coming over on Thursday. In fact she’s bringing her sister Jaz too. In fact it would be more accurate to say Jaz is bringing Julia since Jaz is coming over to meet a guy (something they apparently have in common is a thing for British guys).

This will lead to a few interesting situations: Firstly they’ll be both be staying in my room on at least one night (two I think). This isn’t actually that interesting inherently (from my point of view it will make Julia’s stay less interesting) but it may look odd to anyone who notices us enter my room.

We’re meeting Piia, one of their friends who lives near London on Friday - the day I have my dance class which they’ve decided they’ll apparently watch. So I turn up to a dance class with an entourage. One that will no doubt be speaking Finnish. Finally there are people around the campus I probably won’t be able to hide them from. It’s not that I’m trying to hide them from these people as such, it’s just I try to avoid these people myself (not for any good reason I just don’t want to talk to them).

I’ve noticed a few odd things about certain sites while I’ve been developing XHTML Friends. I think this is the site with the longest title:

http://www.xhtmlfriends.net/xfn/page/http://www.vikingkarwur.com

http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/hReview

A clever idea for distributed reviews of things. Well I think the reviews at SiteReviews.org (on the main HTML pages) follow the standard. Bits of it confused me though.

Either way it meant I finally made the site XHTML compliant. Although considering how much user-contributed stuff there is on there (like most of it) various pages will undoubtedly fail…

XHTML Friends (or so it seems) now correctly reads “me” links and associates sites by author. It will take a while for it to crawl all the extra info it needs to get this properly up to date though.

Be my guest and have a look though :)

I’ve added the second chapter of my story, Reactions.

The story by the way is my attempt to write a time travel short story with no paradoxes (or should that be paradocies?) in it.

I’ve also added some info about Galaxia Reborn. I must remember, whenever I lose the urge to write Galaxia, just go look at Planetarion and think “I could so do better”.