Excellent comparison of 3 phones I’m trying to decide on…….!

Stephen Fry » Blog Archive » Device and Desires

Thanks to Raj for pointing me to Stephen Fry’s blog. He’s written a great article on 3 phones I’m looking into getting. Well, trying to decide which to get. I’ve already decided against the iPhone, and was trying to decide between the Sony Ericcson p1i (I’ve currently got the previous model, the m600i), and the Nokia e90 (not had a Nokia since the 3650). His article may make me reasses, and decide between the iPhone and the E90. I did thing for the form factor that the P1i would be a killer. Perhaps not.

How to merge surveys with phpESP

While struggling with phpmyadmin to merge a few surveys I’d created with phpESP, i noticed that a grep for MERGE in the source code came up with lots of functions.

Cool so I tried:

http://HOSTNAME/phpESP/admin/manage.php?where=merge

It works! A dead easy to use merge function.

ModBlog – Betrayal

ModBlog – Betrayal – Body modification and ritual blog sponsored by BMEzine.com

Modblog, along with his non-bodmod related blog Zentastic are blogs written by Shannon Larratt. His posts vary from baring his soul, to humourous, to a bit “hide your face in your eyes, and make sure you’re not eating”. Always an interesting read. He seems to be having some major issues with some ex-colleagues. Without my comments on something I know little about here’s the original text from his blog:

Betrayal
Thursday September 27th, 2007 @ 9:25 AM
Filed under: News, Body Modification

Over the last month or two Rachel and Jon have taken control of key aspects of BME without my consent in what seems to be a hostile takeover attempt. Last night false charges were filed against me and I just got out of prison, upon which I discovered that I had been locked out of administrative sections of all the servers as well as being totally locked out of BME. I don’t know how long this account will remain before it is deleted or locked out as well, because attempts were made to lock me out of IAM also. I do not have control over zentastic.com or any of my other servers either so I am unable to fully post this update. Please pass it on because it may be deleted.

I can be reached at snowrail@gmail.com.

If my access here is cut off or they deactivate the site I will post updates to bodytwo.com and elsewhere.

I hope that a reasonable resolution to this can be found, but never in my life have I felt so betrayed or had such underhanded, despicable, and deceptive attacks launched at me. If a claim is made that this situation has been resolved and it is not co-posted to at least bodytwo.com, do not assume it is me making the post.

Posted by Shannon Larratt | Permalink | Comments

I wish him all the best, and hope this gets sorted as amicably as possible (sounds a tad unlikely).

Apple Store in Cambridge

Cambridge Grand Arcade | Confirmed Retailers

So in truth despite hating most malls, and preferring smaller, more interesting shops, I am quite pleased that Apple will have a store in the new Cambridge Mall.

Obviously the novelty will wear off pretty quickly.  I like visiting the store in Regent street, but I doubt this one is going to be anything like that. Plus there’s already a decent Apple outlet in Cambridge, Cancom.

At least there’ll be free wireless in the city centre 🙂

Sometimes the simplest solution is the easiest

I had a long NA sequence in the middle of a much larger text file. Unfortunately this sequence had been corrupted and had a non-sequence character in it. The textfile was not in a regular sequence file format, and I could not use one of many utilities to reformat the file into an acceptable and correct file format. Furthermore since the sequence was in the middle of much more non-sequence text then I could not easily use any of the more traditional UNIX text utilities to find the erroneous character. Finally since the sequence text is all on a single line Grep just returns the entire line. Not too useful. Of course I could just simple read the line, but hey, who’s not lazy enough to ignore this possibility. I also quickly ignored the possibility of copy and pasting the line into a new file, as if I could not do this from the CLI then it would be cheating (well not cheating, but I’d spent enough minutes thinking about this to regard it as a ‘small’ challenge)..

As I’m currently (once again) in the middle of a “must learn Perl’ studying stint, I started to write a script to look for the start of the sequence data, then use a regex to find the naughty character.
Then I remembered that VI has great regex matching functionality. So I opened up the file, moved the cursor to the start of the sequence data and used /[^ACGT], which found the wrong character immediately.
Funky!

EDIT I should also add that I was sat on a beach on the Messinian gulf at the time, and the post came vie email!