Apparently, Starship Troopers has finally gone gold. I’m sure I could think of something more interesting to say about it if I hadn’t spent all evening battering rabid bears in Darkshore. Congratulations to all my ex-colleagues, anyway. I’m sure there’s been much celebration this weekend.

It doesn’t matter how desperate you are, and how much of a good idea it seems after five pints, Filippo Berio Extra Virgin Olive Oil does not make an acceptable subsititute for butter when preparing marmite on toast.

Over at the Boar’s Head Tavern they’re having a bit of fun listing bits of their favourite Evangelical jargon that isn’t found anywhere in the Bible. Highlights include:

• Accept Jesus As Your Personal Savior
• Invite Jesus into your heart
• Being in the center of God’s will
• Being on fire for the Lord
• “enter in (to worship)”. As in, “Those new CCM tunes really help me enter in”, or “I couldn’t enter in because the PowerPoint was messed up.”
• I feel God leading me…

Best of all is this post, which actually made me laugh out loud.

In between being in two bands, a looming deadline at work and World Of Warcraft, I’ve not got a huge amount of time for blogging at the moment. If anyone wants me, I’m enparm the Dark Elf Druid on Bloodhoof.

The Go! Team sound a bit like what would happen if Fatboy Slim started doing 1970s American kids TV themes, except with a full live band rather than banks of synthesizers and samplers – indeed, apart from the brass section and the occasional sampled rhythm, the whole of their set is played completely live. Which is remarkable.

But before the Go! Team, we had the joy of the support acts. First up was Kid Carpet, a Bristol-based producer (because, y’know, we don’t have enough of those already) with a big stack of toy guitars, Casio keyboards and other retro paraphernalia. And a sampler, obviously. Fortunately, despite a tiny audience and his obvious nerves at playing to such a big, empty room, he put on a great performance (when his equipment was working). Highlights of the set included a genius remix of Jump by Van Halen using sound effects from 1980s video games, and Shiny Shiny New, an anthemic rant making excellent use of the cheap plastic toy guitar solo.

Following Kid Carpet was Lady Sovereign, who was, frankly, a bit unexpected. She’s a garage MC, you see, but she performs with a live band. She’s clearly a talented young lady, and comparisons with The Streets are going to be inevitable, although she’s quite a lot more shouty and angry than the erstwhile Mr Skinner. Entertaining enough, not really my cup of tea, but the song about battering someone with a broom handle made me grin a bit.

The Go! Team were, simply, awesome. Opening fairly predictably with Air Raid Guitar, they rocked through the whole of “Thunder Lightning Strike” and a couple of “bonus” tracks in a little over an hour. Whilst the album is a largely instrumental affair, when playing live their MC, Ninja, takes centre stage for most of the set, rapping, singing and improvising over the tracks whilst the rest of the band bounce effortlessly between a huge number of different instruments (including a glockenspiel, a recorder, two drumkits and many, many guitars). Okay, not everything was perfect – one guitarrist got halfway through a song before realising his guitar was downtuned by a tone, and there were several false starts – but thankfully nothing killed the fun and energy of the evening.

Plus, the drummer was cute. The girl, that is. That’s always a bonus.

We’ve been playing Golf at work, except that we allow languages other than Perl. Today’s challenge has been simple: cause a segfault.

The only way we could think of in perl was:

kill SEGV=>$$;

Which is actually pretty compact, although it’s not a real segfault. The classic segfault in C is:

*(int*)0=0;

So the logical first try is:

main(){*(int*)0=0;}

But I figured that was a bit verbose, and got it down to:

*i=0;main(){*i=0;}

Which shaves a character off because of C’s default of typing everything as an int. You can shave a further two characters thus:

*i;main(){*i=0;}

But that’s not guaranteed – it depends on how i is initialised. Then Graham hit on a brainwave: since functions are just pointers to a place in memory in C, and all the C runtime libs do is transfer control to main, you can cause a crash very simply with:

main=0;

The C runtime tries to transfer control to 0 and crashes – this is probably technically a protection error, but it still shows up as a segfault. Therefore, using the technique from my unguaranteed code above, we get:

main;

And we think that’s as far as you can go. Any advance on that? Using -D on the command line is, of course, cheating…

The Times is reporting that the Catholic Church says the Bible isn’t totally accurate.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.
[..]
They go on to condemn fundamentalism for its “intransigent intolerance” and to warn of “significant dangers” involved in a fundamentalist approach. “Such an approach is dangerous, for example, when people of one nation or group see in the Bible a mandate for their own superiority, and even consider themselves permitted by the Bible to use violence against others.”

Wonderful. Can we have something similar from the Protestant church now, too?

PartiallyClips is very, very funny. This strip in particular made me giggle hysterically for quite some moments.

Your trial key for World of Warcraft has expired. To continue playing, please purchase a boxed retail copy of the game and enter the authorisation key in the box below.

Well, lovely, except that a traipse around Manchester on sunday afternoon revealed precisely zero shops selling it, and Amazon, Play, Gameplay et al all had leadtimes of several weeks on getting hold of it. Fortunately, a friend up in Bradford has found a copy and is sending it to me, but it does seem utterly stupid that a game that can only be played online can, in fact, only be played if you buy a copy of it in a shop.

(compare and contrast with Half Life 2, which is a single-player game that can only be played if you’ve got an internet connection; the genius of games developers never ceases to amaze me)

I’ve switched over my gallery to use Gallery2. It’s easier to manage than v1, but customising it is still an enormous pain in the arse. At some point I’ll make it look prettier, but it doesn’t look too bad as it is. Also, I got a load of comment spam and there’s no easy way to delete it all, so far as I can, so I’ve disabled comments until I can figure out the MySQL runes to sort it out.