Month: November 2004

When you constrain user input, for example by using a dropdown box instead of a text field, it’s important to allow for every possible valid input. Taking this vital rule to heart, British Airways have made the most complete online registration page I’ve ever seen. No longer will His Majesty the King of Spain or His Holiness the Pope have to endure the embarassment of entering their titles as Mr when travelling to Britain. It’s still missing Field Marshal The Most Noble… etc.

I spent the weekend in Tralee at the juggling festival, which largely involved gaping in awe at some very talented performers and generally not sleeping. I got tantalisingly close to qualifying a five-ball juggle (ie. getting ten catches of five balls) on Saturday, which I hadn’t expected to happen this side of Christmas. I’m beginning to feel that juggling is quite like programming in one important respect: you need about two hours to catch up with where you were last time before you can start to do something worthwhile.

The weekend peaked on Saturday night at the Renegade show. For those who haven’t been to a juggling convention before (which I take to be all of my readers), Renegade is an opportunity for the people who think they’re great to get on stage and prove it. For the most part they did prove it. Given my preference for technical tricks over crowd-pleasing visuals I prefered Renegade to the more family-oriented public show earlier in the day.

I’m proud to say that Cecily and I won the Diabolo-tennis doubles, beating Paul—the hat man—and Ruben—apparently some sort of mutant juggling-child owned by the circus—to the top prize of a cookie and a lollipop.

No doubt we’ll have some photos, and maybe some videos, at the DIT JugSoc site at some point, but since that site is in the very preliminary stages of development it may be a few weeks. On a related note, I’m designing the site for DIT’s JugSoc so if you have any comments about it I’d like to hear them. You know how to comment.

There’s some hubbub around Mozilla.org as Thunderbird 0.9 and Firefox 1.0 RC 2 were both released today. The current prediction, and I can’t see how it could be innacurate so late in the day so I assume it’s right, is that Firefox 1.0 will be out next Tuesday 9^th November.

I made the greivous error of telling my classmates about this site, so I have to quickly scramble to put something here that’ll be of interest to them… Ah screw it. Just go read the archives; link is to your left. Clicking on the little speech bubble with a plus beneath any entry will give you a comment form, with which you can abuse and/or praise me. Be gentle. Comments are enabled on most entries.

Given that Ireland’s presidency wasn’t contested this year (leaving us with an unelected foreigner as our figurehead-of-state) I’ve been paying more attention to the US campaign. The first votes were cast a few hours ago, so this is the time for me to finally lay out my prediction, sans any semblance of justification. I think Kerry is going to win. Time will tell. II promise not to remove this prediction if I’m wrong, though I can’t promise I won’t complain loudly.

Update (3 November, 12:30): I think I can now safely say: Bah! You maniacs. I’m with Dunstan on this one.