Blogs

Latest Blogs

Hover mouse over article to stop it moving to the next article. Click the tabs to manually advance articles. Click the article to jump to blogs of that category.

RIP Luke

I've done a few memorial posts for folks I've met along the path of life or for those that have had an impact on my life like rock stars, but this is the first for a best friend that I've known for a lot of my life - just over 36 years by my reckoning. I first met Luke at Melton College while doing my BTech course (that he was also on). We shared several courses, including the Information Processing II course that had all but three of us on it and yet we were still lectured to by Neville. We became friends and would go out drinking together, usually on a Wednesday night that would result in an odd game of crutch tossing at the main junction in Melton after eating chips from the chip shop. It's one of those things where you had to be there to understand. Probably one of the most memorable drinking days was the college trip to London. I can't remember why were there - I know it was to listen to some lectures, but I've no idea for what purpose given that nobody actually went to the lectures and everyone just took the opportunity to go round London. We elected to use the Tube as a means of getting from one pub to another. There were certain landmarks we wanted to see and I remember that there was a comic store that Luke wanted to visit which I'm sure would have been great, but we were pretty pissed by the time we got there. The journey back to Melton on the train was interrupted by a pit stop in Leicester that allowed for another pint. Owen and I had decided that Luke and Adam (Parker) were going to start throwing up and had ditched them, quite wisely as they did. When the train pulled into Melton, they were in a carriage that wasn't on the platform and essentially fell off the back of the train. Although it sound like they had the rough end of the deal, I ended up having to sleep in my car at the train station that night as my girlfriend at the time kicked me out for not spending time with her in London, but that's another story.

We also went on several holidays together - Spain with just the two of us, Menorca with Adam Parker, Dominican Republic with James (a friend of Luke's) and also Crete with Adam Lane. Crete offering the best memory of Luke demonstrating his charm. We were in a bar and this girl had started talking to him. I think maybe he had a T-shirt on that caught her eye (she was wearing a Nirvana one). Anyway, Adam and I had moved away to give him some space to chat to her and some how, some way, after about 10 minutes, she'd locked herself in the toilet and was threatening to kill herself. Her friends had come over and shouted at us and we left - to the best of my knowledge, she didn't. Menorca was mostly spent spraying Parker with insect repellent, that insects seemed to ignore, but there was the night we got blind drunk and went to the kids park only to be evicted by the local law enforcement. Honestly, we were probably lucky they were so chill. At the time they came in, Luke and I were racing each other on two small spring things that didn't move. Did we really get asked if we had fire while playing connect four? The Dominican Republic was essentially spent in the toilet with diarrhea (all of us, not just me). Spain was fun, I got Luke to drag about a ton of water up a hill in a suitcase and we built a funeral pyre for a cricket.

I then moved over the pond to America, but stayed in touch with Luke. He visited several times. When I lived in San Francisco he came over with Owen, Paul and Louisa and we took a trip around Napa Valley where, for no apparent reason, Luke decided to see if he could pull the seatbelt across in the back of the hire car and managed to get stuck. He managed to free himself, but not until I'd unbolted most of the car trying to get him out.

The picture above is from when Luke visited me at my house in Orinda. This, after his American road trip where he got his hire car stuck on the salt flats and had to be towed out. The picture above is him helping me with one of my anti squirrel bird feeders that I had setup. After that we went out in Lafayette to the Round Up Saloon. And let's not forget the endless gaming hours with Paul and shouting at each with Luke complaining of how shit he was. I mean, who is Paul going to alert to the location of all the Mozambiques now?

The sad details are that he suffered a pulmonary embolism. He appears to have managed to call an ambulance, but was non responsive when they turned up. It seems his heart had stopped and, although they got it going, significant brain damage had occurred. The crazy thing is that I've had two pulmonary embolisms (one in 1986 and the other in 2008). Clearly mine were minor and his wasn't. I hadn't actually realized there were different levels until now. That said, let's be honest, if you were betting on a dead pool between the folks I've mentioned, your money would be on me and not Luke so this is a big shock. The initial event happened on Adam's birthday and Paul had been joking in our group chat that there was a party and Luke hadn't been invited. Paul had mentioned he was bringing a trifle. I didn't see the messages until later, but responded that I had the cheesecake and was on my way. This was pretty much at the time it happened and I do wonder if that's one of the last things Luke saw and though I'm dying and he's still going on about that bloody cheesecake. I hope whatever his last thoughts were, they were of something nice - hopefully his nieces as he loved them more than anything else.

My thoughts are with his sister Rachel and his nieces.
Luke, you will be missed.
RIP

2026 F1 Race Game is here!

A new Formula 1 season is upon us and the race game is setup for all to play. There are quite a few changes this year with a lot of new drivers entering the paddock? Let's see how good you are at predicting the top ten each race. The game is really simple, you need to pick 10 drivers that you think will finish in the top 10 positions of each race. In order to play, you must be registered with EastBayRag. You then need to logon (when you try to access the page or any other page that requires logon, you will be taken to the logon screen).

There are literally only two steps to play the game:

1. Go to 2025 F1 Game registration and register.

2. Go to selections for the first race to make your initial selections.

You can leave it there. Your selections will copy over to all the races so you will score points each week. You can update your selections for any race up until the race is locked (set to be two hours prior to the official race start time). You will be able to see practice and qualifying before you make changes to allow you to make any updates for drivers performing above or below what you expect for any given race.

The points system is pretty simple - you start with 150 points. You lose a point for each position each of your predictions finishes away from where you predicted them to finish (e.g. if you predict Lewis Hamilton to finish third and he wins, you lose two points. If he finished seventh, you would lose 4 points). You gain 10 bonus points for every correct prediction making 250 points the maximum that can be scored each week if you guess all 10 positions correctly.

Any updates can be made from your race game account by selecting the appropriate competition.

Good luck!

Now with added emoji 🤠

If you've read the website blog on smack talk you will know that I've just “enabled” emoji's on the website. Stupidly, I thought this would be an easy task as I figured it's just a matter of getting the database (MariaDB) to accept the code for each emoji. It kind of is that simple, but a cascading sequence of events happened that dramatically increased the amount of work needed to get there. I've already done a blog title “I knew an old woman that swallowed a fly” otherwise I'd have used that here.

OK, so what you need to do is have the database and each table allow unicode which I'm 100% sure I'd already done. It's quite possible that I did, but emoji's have become a thing since then and they require a specific unicode. In this case UTF8MB4. Not a big deal, just write a SQL script to change the database encoding then iterate through all the tables changing them.

It failed on about the third or fourth table. I've significantly cut down the number of tables post the LEMP conversion, but there are still 51 left. The reason it failed is that the primary key was too big. Apparently the max size of the key is 767 which is 768 bytes. This is not something Neville told me #blameneville. Obviously converting from the latin character set to UTF-8 means that each letter takes up more storage space. I'm guessing 4x the amount given utf8mb4 is a 4 byte UTF-8 encoding. I have some tables that have a 255 character varchar field as the key - apparently this is a bad thing to do anyway as it creates a huge index which I totally get, but didn't .... #blameneville. These 255 character fields are too big to be keys with the new encoding.

Right, so I could have cut the corner here and just converted tables that were going to store emojis rather than all the tables. But if a job's worth doing ... you really should get someone else to do it for you. Next step then, figure out which tables had inappropriate keys. Some of them were pretty easy - I could just assign an auto number as they key and move on. Unfortunately the biggest issue was the email field that I used as a key for the folks that are registered and to link to the race game and playlists (the latter now hidden, but still exists as I moved RagBox to personal use only).

Sidetrack for a minute. I made the email field 255 characters long because an email can be that long. Actually, I think it can be longer. Can you imagine though if your email address was 255 characters long and having to type it in every time you wanted to register or logon with something.

Let's get back on track - data conversion. The fix is to assign each person a unique ID, then to add that field to each of the tables that was linked via the email address. Iterate through the table and populate that new field with the ID associated with each email. Then make that field required and part of the key (as it would have other bits that make up the key such as the competition number). Then delete the email field as it's no longer needed in the referencing tables.

The structure's now in place and we can accept emojis. Only we can't because every page that puts data into the tables is trying to put an email address in an email field that no longer exists and is not populating a required ID field. This is for things like registering with the race game, changing registration, making selections, editing selections, becoming a member, changing your membership, password resets blah, blah, blah. It's more than you think.

Right, so just change those pages and we're up and running. Err, no. The whole logon process that I created recently uses email addresses as the ID and I changed it to the new ID (which has logged everybody out). This bit is actually quite funny. I knew I'd be logged out, but when I tried to log back in, I was locked out because it couldn't validate me for some of the back end stuff that I need to do to run the scripts to make the changes. So I had to un-code the logon, to push the changes, to then re-enable the logon so I could log back in.

We're done now though and the changes are in. I 💗 data conversion. There's something about just figuring out data structures and what needs to be done that I find really calming. I think it's the sense of putting order to something. Parts of the back end are still broken. I need to fix some stuff with the music, but it shouldn't be too difficult. I just need to finish the mobile friendly responsive pages for the front end first. The joy of hobbies.

Cheap Flights

A great video.

Balls Deep

Balls to the US and DeepSeek to China. It's been well over a year since I've posted to this blog, but we've had a rather staggering change this week with the release of DeepSeek an AI from China. It's being likened to the Sputnik moment when the US realized they were not as far ahead of Russia in the space race, this is China's moment to catch America with its pants down, only in the development of AI versus space travel.

I have to laugh if you read the article I posted 18 months ago (either scroll down to the title “David(s) and Goliath(s)” or click here) where I talked about the key to success being able to train models cheaply and focus on dspecifc areas. I will admit that it may not always be beneficial to train a model on limited data as it's been proven that the ubiquitous models like ChatGPT or Gemini perform better on specific topics than models trained on specific data, however, that may change.

So what is special about DeepSeek? Nothing if you were to just compare it to the models of the major players. It performs pretty similarly. The shock, if true, is that the model was trained for just $6m instead of the $bns that its cost the major players. Additionally, it was done using out of date technology as the US has banned the export of the latest chips to China (ironically to prevent against them getting a leg up in the AI development race). I guess they never heard the saying “necessity is the mother of invention.”

So this model is cheap, lightweight and portable with pretty much the same performance as its much more expensive competitors. (Reminds me of a car nicknamed Godzilla, but that's a whole other story). At a bear minimum it raises a lot of questions and hopefully opens the door to more competition. This may just see the start of a lot of advancement which may, in turn, result in more blog posts as it's definitely piqued my interest.

Blog Topics

The blogs have been grouped with some kind of logic. The recent blogs show the last ten posts for each topic. The history of all the blogs can be found in the archives.

Stuff blogs are articles or comments about things I've come across that I found of interest and decided to share. Mostly, this is where I get to point out silly things that I've heard. I guess you would class these as general interest.

Website blogs are little snippets of information about something that has been developed or is in the process of being developed for this website.

Build Your Own Blog (BYOB) is the pièce de résistance of the EastBayRag blogs. Being even more sad than people give me credit for, I've documented how this website is created and how some of the components work. To be honest, more so that I don't forget and have somewhere to come back and refer to, but if you're thinking of doing something similar this may be of interest to you.

Open Forum is an open place for anyone to post an ariticle. Ever wanted the ability to create your own article without having to create multiple entries. Well, now you have that ability and there's even the option to add a picture to your article if you want to spruce it up. Note, however, these open forums are open so anyone can submit an article. Hopefully this will work and it won't get abused, but we will wait and see. (We are tracking access by IP, so we can find you!!!)