radiac.net

Yes, it's that time of the year that you've all been looking forward to for the past 340 days of the year - it's midnight on the first of December, and at radiac.net that means the decorations go up.

And this year it is Christmas Spectacularrrr. I've put up the decorations, but it's not over yet. Oh no! There are 25 days until Christmas, and there'll be something exciting happening on every day.

In case you missed it on the way in, I have an Advent Calendar this year. Every day I will be unlocking new and exciting content for you to fiddle with. There will be simple puzzles and games for you to fiddle with, and then there will be some super-spectacularrr days, which I will indicate on the calendar with coloured trees. To give you some warning, I'm planning to roll the special ones out every 5 days, but there will be some extras dotted around, and there will be something new every day, so keep an eye on the website!

At some point in the next few days, I'll be decorating the tree up there in the corner, and with all this snow lying around I might roll myself a snowman. Maybe it will snow again! And I'm sure that Santa and his elves will make an appearance at some point. With 25 days left to go, who knows what else might happen - you'll just have to check back to see...

And as usual, I'm running the TCMI watch again this year - let me know if you use it, and I'll link to you! Like Shewolf :)

Time to put up the decorations in real life. Leela will be in for a surprise tomorrow morning.

In fact it started snowing yesterday. At the top of the page that is, not in Cornwall - it's just raining a lot, and the roof is leaking. Oh well.

Hello if you haven't been here before - lots of people seem to be linking in, and there have been a lot of visitors in the past few days as the comments on the last entry suggest - thanks to everyone who has said they like it!

The advent calendar is proceeding well and I hope everyone's enjoying it, at least just a little bit ;) Not quite why I thought it would be a good idea to have a graphical advent calendar when I can't draw to save my life though. I think Drew has the right idea - get someone else to do the content for you :)

Today's game is Elf Painting By Numbers. Some people didn't notice the 'paint free' button - you can click that to turn off painting by numbers and colour how you want, but if you do that you can no longer win! I wasn't going to worry about instructions for the simple games, but if anyone thinks it's not very clear, do leave a comment

The subject of prizes has come up more than once. This year, I'm afraid that there are no prizes - I just don't have the time to come up with the extra content. But next year some of the days may well make a re-appearance, so that might give me more time to do scoring systems and prizes for completing things. But you'll have to wait till next year for that.

So far I have only spotted two sites running the TCMI; SheWolf and now Ben. Well at least some people are in the festive spirit. Incidentally, the TCMI is now 4 years old! How time flies.

And last but definitely not least, I have found all of my Christmas music. I thought it was all still on CDs packed away in boxes in storage in Kent, but a couple of years ago I ripped them onto a server hard drive I had forgotten about. Ahh, how good the world was without over-zealous DRM, I can listen to my music without a 12 hour drive to retrieve the originals. Good times.

Well I'm keeping on top of the advent calendar - just. I'd hoped to be about 5 or so days ahead before I started, but unfortunately work has meant I've been a little bit pushed to get them done on time - and as some people have noticed, I've slipped over by a few minutes a couple of times ;) Hopefully I'll get ahead a bit over the next few days.

Some people have asked me what the stars on the advent calendar trees mean. Well, when deciding what I was going to do each day, I decided to have some fillers (join the dots, paint by numbers etc), broken up with gold days (every 5 days) and silver days (sprinkled around randomly). These days are indicated by the colour of the star at the top of the tree. Please do feel free to leave any other comments about the advent calendar.

Hope everyone has decided what they're getting me for christmas!

I've had to fill out several web forms over the past few days, and it's as if nobody developing them has ever heard of usability. It was mostly the usual problems - one form required a card number with no spaces, but didn't say - how hard is a regular expression anyway? Another demanded a ridiculously constrained password of 8-10 characters long, using a severe mixture of letters and numbers - at least they didn't force me to use symbols too.

But the one that has made least sense so far was one where it asked me for a username, and a screen name. Ok, that makes sense, you can change your screen name independently of your username. But what I don't get is why don't they let you use the same name for both? For security reasons, apparently - security through username obscurity? Why not use the e-mail address you asked me to type in twice, like all the other sites that use the separate screen name system? I can't, because a username apparently can't contain symbols. So now not only do I have to forget passwords because I'm made to change them every 4 weeks to a password I have never used before, but I have to come up with two names for my account. It's hardly like it's some back-room effort either, it's Nintendo. That's pretty special.

But the best bit had to be when I'd finally finished that form, was then asked for my postal address, and only then told it was only for residents of the USA or Canada.

Or maybe it was when I eventually managed it and found out that all I had for my troubles was some crappy wallpaper for my PC. I thought they would do something with the wifi on the DS to let me download new content or something - they could have even let me link my DS to a credit card and sold me stuff. Seems a wasted opportunity to me.

I have also been getting lots of comment spam linking to random big websites. Anyone know what the point of it is? I thought it might be some kind of URL masquerading, but they all look fine.

Hello there. Just noticed that the advent calendar activity for today had a couple of bugs/lacking features, but have fixed it now.

In other news, on Tuesday I was stopped for shoplifting.

I'd been doing my Christmas shopping, and had been into many shops. And you know how when you walk around a shop and the alarms keep going off when other people walk through - well, that kept happening to me. Most shops I went into, but not all, which led me to believe it was just an extraordinary coincidence that it was everyone walking past me at the same time. Turns out I was wrong.

The last shop I went into, I beeped on the way in. The security guard took no notice. I walked round, bought my things, walked out, beeped again. Then the security guard comes running up to me and says "Excuse me sir, but I think you may have something in your bag which set off the alarm. Would you please come back inside?" Jokes.

The security guard took me to one side, and said in a please-dont-sue-me-if-I'm-wrong tone "I see you have lots of other bags - it's probably just something in one of those". He proceeded to stand at the door going through my many bags, waving each item through the alarms one at a time, while the hundreds of shoppers were all thinking "Hooligan shoplifter! Cut off his hands!" as they filed past.

"Qapla', as the klingons say", said the security guard when he found the offending item. At this point I no longer minded being stopped - this guy was a bona fide god-damned klingon-speaking trekkie, and as so deserved my utmost respect. "Success indeed!" I thought to myself, and informed him that I understood him - I do have the dictionary, said I. "Ahh, I have the survival guide," said he. "I thought I was the only one in this town." We nodded knowingly.

Turns out the problem item was the first thing I bought. They had forgotten to take out their little tag, and after that I'd blazed a trail of security alerts all round town. I would give you the long list of shops in Truro who don't care if you're shoplifting, but that would give away the secret sources of presents to anyone reading. That, and that you probably don't live in Truro anyway.

It's a gold star tree today - very exciting! It's pelmanism (go play), and in case you are wondering, yes the characters are hidden behind trees randomly, so clicking the restart button will give you a slightly different game. And I know it doesnt make too much sense to have two Santas, but then I guess you've never been to a shopping centre at Christmas - proof that he actually can bend space/time to be in several shops at the same time. How else could he deliver all those presents anyway?

Anyway, I have just come across this Christmas-themed winamp skin that I made 7 years ago to the day (10/12/1998), and has been sitting in my web folder ever since. Originally it accompanied some of my first Christmas decorations on one of my earlier sites that have been lost deep in the sands of time. Thankfully - they weren't pretty. But if you run winamp and fancy decorating your desktop with something hideously tacky, then this is for you:


In other news, the front page of the advent calendar has been loaded 762 times, and the most popular day so far is day 5, which has been loaded a total of 112 times, 52 times on the 5th itself. Apparently far more succesful than I had expected! And thank you everyone for your comments - glad to know you're all enjoying it!

It was Leela's work Christmas party yesterday evening, and I tagged along. We had a good meal - I had turkey and christmas pudding - although it was a little on the small side. No, seriously, I didn't get enough pudding to fill an empty kinder egg. Still, I made up for it with mince pies. There was then a water fight followed by dancing and talking, where I met all of the people Leela works with. Having seen the level of professionalism displayed by the pharmacy department of the hospital, I have no worries or concerns about my upcoming maxillo-facial operation. Oh, no, none at all... ;)

We made it home at about 1.30am, and I then went to bed forgetting to do the advent calendar until this morning. Sorry about that!

Wikipedia is a success.

It has a massive following, with hundreds of thousands of entries. However, it is it's success that is it's biggest problem. In the past few months, Wikipedia has been getting a lot of bad publicity, most recently over an entry about John Seigenthaler, a former Robert Kennedy aide who was libelled on Wikipedia - the entry said that he was implicated in the assassination of JFK. The Register has a story about it here.

This is a problem that just won't go away for Wikipedia. By definition, the entries lack authority.

I don't think that anybody is saying that the idea of Wikipedia is a bad one - the idea that the people of the internet can combine their knowledge in one place is fantastic. However, the way it is done leaves it wide open to abuse.

Some of you know I run the website for a large UK school, and the Wikipedia page about them comes up second on a google search for their name. That in itself isn't a problem, and is proof of Wikipedia's success. However, because it is such a prominent page in search results, we have to make sure it is correct, even though we didn't create it in the first place.

Firstly, most of the information on the page has been copy-and-pasted from our site. We're ok with that, but it does mean that when we update our site, I have to go over to Wikipedia and check that it is still correct. I am more than tempted to delete the information on the page and replace it with links into the school site - that's the point of hyperlinks, after all - but I am sure that that would be unpopular with the other page 'contributors', so haven't tried.

Secondly, the fact that anybody can write anything means that some people will. Over the past few months the Wikipedia page has been repeatedly defaced - usually very subtly, and it is made to sound realistic, but it is totally untrue and if read by potential parents or pupils, very damaging to the image of the organisation.

The problems with the John Seigenthaler entry show that we're not alone. This is probably just the tip of the iceburg, but Wikipedia just doesn't seem to care. People argue that if I don't like it I can change the page myself, but that doesn't sit well with me. Anyone is free to anonymously libel me or my client, and the success of Wikipedia means that people will take it to be the truth. This is not like someone putting up a page on their website bad-mouthing us, readers would take that with a pinch of salt - but if Wikipedia are as good as they say, this is more akin to rewriting a page on the encyclopedia on my bookshelf. There is clearly something wrong here.

I don't see why I should have to go to this page every day to see if something has changed - Wikipedia are wasting my time. I can't check automatically - they don't seem to have an e-mail notifier, and they block my cron-jobbed perl script. What's even worse is that when I make these changes to correct the page, people on Wikipedia come along behind me, think that I am the one defacing it, and revert it to the incorrect version, even when I provide official URLs citing my changes!

The biggest problem with Wikipedia is that they have no way to tell who is an authoritative source of information. All the time that there is no editorial process between edit and view, it will be a toy that is open to abuse. If they can come up with a way to say "This person is an authority on this subject", and make sure that any changes have to go through them, then and only then can Wikipedia start to gain credibility and acceptance by its critics.

Well, I've managed to keep the advent calendar going for 15 days now. We've made it to the third golden tree, day 15, although I'm afraid it was a few minutes late, again. Although it is still awesome, this one's not quite as good as I'd originally planned - maybe I'll have another go at it next year. The problem is that I've been trying to get through my real work during the day, and trying to do the calendar after tea (on my laptop while watching television). So, I apologise that some of these have been so late - if it happens again please bear with me, I'll be working on it!

Hopefully no more delays - after throwing caution and work to the wind, I'm now 3 days ahead! Not only was the 16th on time, but the 17th, 18th and 19th are ready and waiting. So if I keep this up for another couple of days, we'll be sorted.

In other news, I want some of Rick Stein's cheese. It looks good.

It will be Christmas in five days - just enough time left to get me a present. Quite a few of you have been asking what to get me - well, this year I think I'd quite like a new car or two - just please remember to pop the receipt in the glove box, so I can return duplicated gifts.

I forgot to put the gold star on the top of todays tree on the advent calendar. Day 20 is the last gold day before Christmas day itself, and as such it was going to be the biggest and best game. However, I have decided to save that for the 24th, and today is the slot machine. I just won 1020 presents - did I make it too easy? Beat my score. The logs say the weekend's always quieter than the week, so it might be a mistake to have moved the big one to the 24th - but do come back, it should be worth it!

I'm going back to Kent for this weekend, so Leela and I had Christmas a week early, last Sunday. I cooked a turkey, sausages wrapped in bacon, roast potatoes and parsnips, green bits and some of the other things you'd expect at Christmas. It all tasted very good. We also had a Christmas pudding and a large chocolate yule log, as well as mince pies and various other chocolates. It was good. We also opened some presents, including two DVDs which we watched that evening - The Grudge (not so scary the second time, at least not with the lights on) and Napoleon Dynamite (awesome).

I have sent 6 Christmas cards so far this year. Better than last year, but still, not really a great start - I'm kinda banking on going round to give them to people by hand, but who wants to bet that won't happen. Oh well, we'll see. If you don't get a card from me this Christmas: I did send you one, but it must have got lost in the post. Or something.

Hiya everybody! I've been a bit quiet recently because I'm now back home for the next few days, and have been running round delivering presents and cards and other jolly jolly things. I am back to dial-up internet access for my work, at least in theory, but because I can't find my modem cable, it's actually over my mobile phone.

I'm currently sitting in a nice office with broadband, but unfortunately I cannot stay here, because my laptop with Flash is a 20 minute drive away. Being busy running around means that I haven't had a chance to work on the advent calendar at all - eek! Only 6 hours left until the supposedly biggest and best of all, and I've barely started it. I'll try my best, but its chances of being on time are not looking good - if it's the 24th when you're reading this, and it's still not done, I'll be working on it! Check back in a bit :)

In other news, I have just finished equipping my new kitchen. For those of you in any doubt, moving into a house two days before Christmas is a very bad idea. Shops are very busy, and drivers don't like you parking in the middle of the high street to load your car. However, I bought the biggest toaster I could find, and it is very shiny and therefore very good. A good toaster is very important, because it makes good toast, which is the most important thing in a house. That reminds me, I really must do something with bread-dynamics.com. Damn you, Tristan!

Well, hopefully by the new year I'll be working on my CMS full time, and then I'll be able to build my empire of utterly awesome websites. And then I'll be flying to the moon on the back of a pig, while singing the lyrics of 'Come Sail Away' in ancient Greek.

Well, I knew before I started today's advent calendar game that it was going to be an ambitious one. Then I didn't start it until 11, then I fell asleep at my laptop for a couple of hours. Still, it's up now, and better late than never, but I didn't have time to implement an inventory or objects or tools, or even all of the characters, so I couldn't have the story or functions that I had planned. Shame. Still, leaves room for improvement next year!

Oh, and a 9600bps connection sucks.

Well, it's now Christmas Day, and the last day of the advent calendar. A big thank you to everybody who has left comments over the past 25 days, I hope you've all enjoyed it! If you did, or even if you didn't, come back next year when I'll have some new fancy bits and bobs, and I'll have finished the things that I didn't have time to do this year!

All that's left to say is that I wish everybody a very happy Christmas and a healthy and prosperous new year.

Hi there. I'm still here. Haven't been run over by a tractor or eaten by an eagle - I have been sitting quietly, recovering from the excessive feasting and chocolate consumption, and have been doing a bit of work. I've been a bit quiet because I haven't used the internet much, due to being on an expensive mobile connection.

Being on the top of one of the highest hills in the area, we've been hit by the recent snow a bit. Not as bad as east Kent, but still, it's been up to a couple of inches, which melted a bit earlier in the week and then turned to ice, making it tricky to drive in. Still, the rain has come now and apparently the slightly warmer weather will prevail for a bit, which should mean that I'll be able to drive back to Cornwall soon. That of course means that I'll be returning to broadband, and the decorations will be coming down, so things will start to return to normal.

Hope everyone has been having a good time over the past week, and I hope you've all got something fun planned for new years eve!