A few months back, arguably the best rock band in the UK, Biffy Clyro, announced that they would play an unprecedented four nights in a row at King Tuts in Glasgow. On the first three nights they said they would play one of their three albums per night, whole and in-order. On the final night, they would play their unrecorded fourth album for the first time. Despite tickets selling out entirely on pre-sales, I managed to get several tickets to each night. So loud band, small venue, absolutely packed.

The first night was the Blackened Sky show. Being their most straightforward and most loved album among the ardent fanbase, this was always going to be a good night.

The support act was… unusual. A clown came onstage and made a balloon animal. Then, while Christmas carols were sung by all, he made his way around the crowd making more balloon animals for the prettiest girls he could see; smart clown.

Then the band took to the stage and slammed through the first album in its entirety. That the crowd knew every word to every song meant that Simon could go easy on the vocals, barely having to sing a note. 57, Just Boy and 27 were stand out classics, but the high point for many was the encore which consisted of old B-side, Hope For An Angel.

An excellent start.

For a while now, I had thought that the disappearance of the Degrassi (great band from Edinburgh) website was a temporary glitch. It was a fairly terrible looking website, and perhaps they were changing it. Sadly, that’s not the case: the band have apparently split. To keep things clear in my head, and for the benefit of future generations of the musically inclined, here’s a quick potted history of what happened surrounding that group of musicians.

First, there was Idlewild; another Edinburgh-based indie-rock band who have become progressively more mainstream as the albums have come out. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the change seemed fairly natural, but by some accounts it is why Bob Fairfoull, the original bassist, left. The actual departure involved punching someone in the face, but details are somewhat sketchy on that front.

Separately, Degrassi had recently finished their excellent “Terminal Ocean” EP and begun touring the local music scene. I’m not 100% sure what happened, but their bassist at the time left the band and in stepped Bob. The band went onto record “The Form” EP, several pretty decent demos and, earlier this year, released a first single, “Tell Charles I’m On My Way”.

Filling the bass position in Idlewild was former Turn bassist, Gavin Fox, who, along with additional guitarist, Allan Stewart, helped provide a much mellower and folky sound to the traditionally sharp and jagged noise that Roddy and company were putting out.

Jump forward to September this year (as best I can tell) and everything went sour in Degrassi land. A bust-up of unknown reason has caused the band to go their separate ways. Bob and Degrassi singer, Michael Branagh, have formed a new band who have been playing recently (though I missed the show) under the name of Womb. If anyone knows the website (if there is one), do tell. I don’t imagine that name will stick for long since Womb were a band who were around 3-4 years ago, at least, but it’s what we know for now.

To finish, it seems that Gavin Fox has rejoined Turn for their upcoming Irish tour (and possibly new recordings), but will continue with Idlewild at the same time.

Earlier, I was looking at my GMail account, clearing out my junk mail folder. After I got rid of the first few messages, I happened to glance at the adverts along the top of the main content area when I saw this:

Amusing ad placement, or someone at Google with a sense of humour? You decide.

After several years of very little comment spam, I’ve started getting a reasonable amount, particularly on old posts. Going in and manually deleting it is getting to be a bit annoying so I’ve decided to experiment with filtering.

I’m going to start with a very simple solution and make it more and more complex as each level fails (I can see a Bayesian filter in my future).

Right now, all you have to do to comment is type in a generated number which is so ludicrously simple as to nearly not be there. It’s essentially the numerical values for the year, month and day added together; a very low pass filter, I think. Let’s see how that works.

As a bonus for those commenting near midnight, it has a leniency of +1 on the value. If you take longer than a full day to comment, then… well… tough. You can just damn well go back and get a new number.

Someone was asking me not too long ago about the best way to approach an assignment in Computing Science. Well, I’ll tell you, and the same approach works for most decent specification documents for any project in which you’re going to build something. I believe we call this process “engineering” or “design”, but let’s not get hung up on that.

First, get a hard copy of the spec, something you can readily annotate, because the first step is to do exactly that. Comb through the document, word by word, and underline every noun and do a dashed underline of all the verbs connected to those nouns (in a well written spec, this will cover pretty much every verb). Why have we just done this? Well, now you have the basis of the model you’re building. All those nouns represent the things you’re going to need to build, and all the verbs represent all the actions that they perform; in OO-programming, those are your Objects and methods.

For step two, find yourself a pen and some paper. Now draw a circle for all of those nouns and connect them with lines which represent the verbs. Think carefully about this! Which objects should be interacting with each other? What are your verbs actually saying? You should now have a pretty good rough design for a system.

Now, take note, this is only a rough design. We’ve only designed the architecture as a whole, so care still needs to be taken over the implementation of each object and verb (data structures and algorithms). It should, however, give you a decent platform to start from.