Nope, they specifically emailed to say the online bit would continue. That's more than can be expected with the average company these days!

What the [LIFTED] [LIFTED] is the point of hiccups? They just make everybody think you're more pissed than you really are and cause discomfort. No help to anyone.

Never had hiccups when drunk...

I'd never have associated it with alcohol.

You see it on all the old films; a girl has a sip of wine and then hicups and giggles, proving she must be tipsy.

I've not noticed it in real life though...

The marketing budget for Django Unchained must be equal to the film's budget - I'm sick of hearing about the fecking thing despite having an interest in it

It's very good, even more so for me as a Tarantino western with some quite funny parts in it.

I agree there is too much advertising, but it's not a known entity like Les Mis, or a Marvel series film.

most "big" films have a marketing budget that can exceed the actual filming budget, but dont worry it will all be charged against babylon 5.

Back to my previous bugbear. There was snow this week, yes? I understand it's been In the news. The street I share with a school isn't ever gritted or cleared. So by now there's a pretty thick layer of ice on the road and pavements. Luckily, traffic motion has cut a couple of ruts that you can drive in so people are able to get along the street if they need to and yesterday me & a few others cleared & salted the pavements so pedestrians could walk safely.

The school was closed yesterday due to the weather. Today, it was apparently open. What do the teachers do? Double park half on the pavements over the bits the residents had cleared, leaving the pedestrians to walk on the icy bits and half over the ruts in the iced road, so the only way to drive out of the street is to try to creep in between their cars on sheet ice.

I'm not entirely happy a bunch of such apparent idiots are educating children, frankly.

would it be manslaughter if one slipped and died of head injury? one of my friends relative died slipping on ice cos the council didnt bother gritting or salting the area

Bloody Cisco, they seem to take pride in making their customers look incompetent!

Their Webex system was offering only a UK dial-in in Germany last year. They eventually corrected it, so that it showed the German number in September... They broke it again last week.

That means, when an invitation to the telco is sent out to German recipients, they aren't given a local German number to dial into, they are given the UK number, which means an expensive telephone bill, especially if the participant is calling from a mobile.

http://blog.ninlabs.com/2013/01/programmer-interrupted/

One of my favourite rants; that's at least the third similar article I've read. "Normal" people seem to have no idea just how much stuff you have to juggle in your head while programming. One interruption, and the entire construction comes tumbling down. You may have been on the brink of a solution, and one interruption means it might take another day to figure it out all over again.

The analogy I use is "think of a maths exam". There's a good reason they don't allow radios, 'phones and gossip in an exam hall.

Luckily I work entirely from home now, so I can manage my interruptions much better. I can do more work in a good 3 hours at home than I can in a week in the office. Why? Because in the office, I just never get a good 3 hours!

Damn that kills my idea of trying to learn to program for iOS.

Absolutely. At least the last few places I've worked understand that when we've got headphones in we're not to be interrupted unless it's worth losing the potential half hour it'll take to work out what was what again.

If you only want to try relatively simple things, then you don't need to remember so much. Phones are a lot closer to the old PCs of the 90s in terms of power, so things are very stripped down compared to with more powerful modern desktop apps.

Some tools allow an entire (simple) project to be graphically represented on the screen at once. That's fantastic for quickly putting together something really simple, but still does something useful.

I don't know what tools are available for iOS. If you had an Android device, I would suggest looking at AppInventor. It works like Lego and is designed for education, but there's no reason you can't build really useful apps with it. I used it to quickly knock up an app to graphically monitor server stats, and it only took about 20 minutes! Of course, it's all completely free. Google even give you free cloud storage for things like high score tables.

http://appinventor.mit.edu/

I don't see why you shouldn't try, although starting out with something like iOS means straight away you've got to work within a fairly large and complicated framework.

Working by yourself on small projects such as apps, organised in a way that makes sense to you it's a lot easier to keep track of things. It's when you're working on code that spans generations of developers, on large messy systems, half of which are nothing to do with you and people are constantly mangling 'your' code that things get hairy.

I'd start small by (say) learning python, initially only worrying about stdin and stdout and seeing how far you get with pen and paper. As things get more complicated you may need to start using a debugger, but see how far you can get. At least you'll produce decent docs as you'll soon work out what the important things you need to look up are!