From the Orient

LugRadio 11 is out, get it whilst you can still smell it. When are you guys gonna get permalinks for each episode?

My “CNPS”:http://www.richardherring.com/cnps.php addiction has reached an important milestone. I’ve got to 100 in just under a year. Only another 9 years to go.

And finally, there is a war on between Portugal and Brazil in “The Adventures of Christiano Ronaldo’s Wannabe Girlfriends”:http://www.dellah.com/orient/2004/03/19/ronaldo. There is a lot of Portuguese swearing going on - “Suas mal iducadas de merda” (You’re full of shit, I think)

My favourite quote is “get off d website den if ur just here 2 slag him off. bitch!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Should I intervene? “I am the God of this Website and though shalt not use txt”

Bill Bailey was fantastic. I won’t go into any details or attempt to pass his comedy over to you as it would fail to give any real insight into his performance. At one point I was in a lot of pain as I couldn’t breathe from laughing so much. There was a real mix in the audience which was nice to see.

What wasn’t so good was the self created problems I caused myself before the show. We had to leave quite early, so Maggie the baby sitter turned up before the kids had gone to bed. This, of course, meant Kid A had to stay up with the baby sitter, and then got quite upset when we left. As a result we left without any money. As luck would have it, Gina had her cash point card with her as we had lost the tickets to the gig and had to show what we had paid with. I had to run across town to a cash point machine, run back and grab some bottled water (the girl serving was giving out a lot of bottled water and each time she went to the back and had to explain it wasn’t chilled. There was an empty fridge just behind her, you work it out) and race into the theatre.

We were further delayed because instead of real tickets we had a written piece of paper with out seat numbers on which the usherette couldn’t read. I had to run out and find out what the girl at the ticket desk had written. It wasn’t doing my foot much good.

Afterward, I found out that in my haste I’d stuff the car park ticket into a back pocket and bent it in half. Of course, when we came to leave the machine wouldn’t take it, causing another run over to the car park ticket office. Still, when we got home, France had been knocked out so everything was right with the world.

I’m rather depressed today for obvious reasons. What luck and forward planning then that I should be seeing Bill Bailey tonight.

In other news, “Rooney has a broken foot”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/england/3837995.stm so we didn’t stand a great chance of winning the tornament anyway, but I haven’t broken my foot. It “still hurts from a month ago”:http://www.dellah.com/orient/2004/05/27/rebelpixel-productions-wpu2013recentu2013links and I can barely walk in the morning as it gets so stiff (pnaar! pnaar!) but I mearly have an inflammed joint which takes 4-6 weeks to recover. Seen as I played football last week and made it worse, it won’t be fixed for another 4-6 weeks. The doctor gave me one of those “you stupid boy” looks when I explained I had to play because it was an important work tornament. (Hey, we got knocked out in the semis by which point our best player and myself had succumbed to injuries; And I scored a penalty, but it blooming hurt kicking the ball)

One of the projects that has been on my Someday/Maybe list for a while has been to learn about “Unit Testing”:http://diveintopython.org/unit_testing/index.html and “test driven development”:http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2004/06/14/development950408240368.

Most of the little utilities I use at work to make my life easier were written a few years ago in Java. This year I’ve started to convert some of them into “Python”:http://www.python.org as an aide to learning it. Last month I converted a small program that automatically downloads customer’s testcases from an FTP site onto my harddrive. When the service request is closed, it automatically archives the testcase (aside: the manual process to do this is very tedious and slow. The people I work don’t seen to write any code to automate their jobs in any way. Is this something you do? Or do you never have the time to write hacks that will make you job easier?)

When I rewrote this in Python, I thought it would be a good exercise to learn unit testing, however the ease of Python meant I just dived straight in and had written 95% percent of it before I’d even remembered about unit testing. I finished the code off and made a note to read the unit testing chapters and then add unit testing to the code afterwards.

I’m reading through the chapters now and come to “these basic points about unit testing”:http://diveintopython.org/refactoring/summary.html :-

bq.:http://diveintopython.org/refactoring/summary.html There are unit testing frameworks for many languages, all of which require you to understand the same basic concepts:

* Designing test cases that are specific, automated, and independent
* *Writing test cases before the code they are testing*
* Writing tests that test good input and check for proper results
* Writing tests that test bad input and check for proper failures
* Writing and updating test cases to illustrate bugs or reflect new requirements
* Refactoring mercilessly to improve performance, scalability, readability, maintainability, or whatever other -ility you’re lacking

I think I’ll start again.

Oh for fuck sake, not penalties again. We invented the game, couldn’t we at least invent a way of deciding games that didn’t involve penalty shoot outs. Of course, if you build your penalty spots on sand.

Let me get the bad things out of the way first. That was the worst I’ve seen England play so far. We were outplayed by a Portugal team that was distinctly average. Our entire midfield were absolutely rubbish. We defended far too deep, let Portugal have far too much of the ball and never looked like we could put two passes together, let alone score.

That said, and really we are our own worst enemy, we lost our best player early on (and as a portent of things to come, the ref thought Rooney fouled the defender when the defender stood on his foot). We really won the game because there was nothing wrong with Sol Campbell’s goal, and the Suiss referree was a fuckwit of the first order. I know goalkeepers get too much protection, and if you go near them a freekick is awarded, but this time John Terry stands still and the goalkeeper goes towards Terry. Bah! We looked so tired. Despite defending so deep, Portugal didn’t really look like scoring until they brought on fresh legs.

Let me praise Ashley Cole and Sol Campbell; our best players. Outstanding, particularly Cole who didn’t let Ronaldo in the game at all.

Where was Beckham? Falling over at the penalty spot once is unlucky, twice is just careless even if you were the first to go.

I’m so happy, I’ve got my very own “home of the moron”:http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2004/06/05/billiondollar and it’s about the dancing feet of Christiano Ronaldo. Seems to be mainly marriage proposals. How come my Phil Neville page gets no comments?

What I don’t understand is why Wordpress has not told me about any of the 90 odd comments?