PhD supervisor, 0; Me, 1

I have had the most unproductive two weeks of my life. Faced with a fairly simple problem, I’ve fairly well sat here like a total muppet, staring at a screen, achieving nothing. It wasn’t even particularly complicated. Take some code that I wrote about a year ago, that didn’t work, and fix it, so it did work. Simple enough – the code was all there, it was all running, it just wasn’t doing what it should have been. All I had to do was work through the various functions and bits of theory in there and figure out what was wrong. And there’s not even that much code, maybe 1000 lines, split up across 5 or 6 functions.

After a week, I was still staring at results that weren’t right. Little tweaks here and there had optimised my last year’s quite immature approach to C++, and so I was seeing speed increases, but speed is irrelevant when the results you’re getting are a pile of shit. Heck, I even got the thing running on one of the distributed computing services (an 8 box Linux cluster) and I was seeing improvements all round. Just no good results.

Finally, I gave in, and approached my supervisor for help. I told him I was sure the code was technically sound, and that it was the theory behind it that was wrong and needed changing. No, he said, it must be the code, try a few things here and there and let me know. I wonder if it’s because he was in part responsible for the theory?

I went away, made the changes, tried his suggestions. No joy. A week and a half after I’d started on this, and I was no closer to a solution. Determined, I started tweaking the theory. Minor changes here and there. One fairly important change here. One that was, essentially, the opposite of what he had told me to do in the first instance.

And the result? Perfect results that exactly matched our expectations. After all his insinuations about my crappy coding, and it wasn’t me at fault.

Well. It’s not about blaming anyone. But put it this way; I’m looking forward to our meeting on Monday morning when he asks me how I got on.

Chavtastic jokes

Q: What do you call a chav in a box?
A: Innit.

(Popbitch).

Q: What do you call a chav in a box with a sled attached to him?
A: Innit mush.

Q: What do you two chavs in a box with a sled attached to them?
A: Fuckin’ innit mush.

(Me!).

It’s a product?

Something feels wrong with the way this is written.

Mr Reid said: “We believe this represents a value-for-money monarchy.

“We’re not looking to provide the cheapest monarchy. We’re looking at one of good value and good quality.”

Talking about the monarchy as though it’s an object, as though it’s a service or a product… it’s just weird. They’re people for crying out loud. Speaking about them like that makes them sound like Buckingham Palace is some kind of zoo, and the various Royals are the monkeys and apes trapped inside.

I guess the primate description actually isn’t too far from the truth.

Australia hahahahaha

It just gets better – 4 losing runs on the trot. They really have the runs. Or the trots. Hahaha. They even lost to Bangladesh. I mean, Somerset was bad enough, but to Bangladesh as well. Giggle. You can’t help wondering if it’ll make them come back stronger and harder though. Still, couldn’t get much worse for them though. Or could it? Still, I’m sure this will help. Will be an interesting few weeks.

Shhh… don’t tell anyone.

If this this anything to go by, no-one will be “vacationing” here either.

I’ll drop it now.

You have to laugh

Paypal. Idiots. I suppose, they’re at least trying to get a grip on the phishing and spoofing problems. But they really fell at the first hurdle with this one. Thanks Geeks.

Well that was fun!

We finally made the Aussies look very very silly at sport. We gave them a thorough asskicking in the first International Twenty20. Go boys. I’m sure next time it won’t be so one-sided, but to give us our dues, we did bat and bowl very well, and deserved it. Let’s hope we can carry the form into the Ashes series.