Simple flash ad killer in IE

I’ve been using IE at work since my company merged with another in January; before then I had been using Firefox, but because we had to unify our IT policies this option was taken away from me.  The main things I like about Firefox are the context menu google search (select text, right click, choose ”Search web…” and away you go), and the extension AdBlock, which allows wildcard-based filtering of elements on websites.  The former behaviour can be partially compensated for in IE by using bookmarklets, but the latter is a definite loss: my web had been advert-free for so long!  However, I’ve now found a solution.  I switched to IE7 still during the beta phase, mainly out of interest; tabbed browsing isn’t something I’d consciously missed from Firefox, but I found something about IE7 slightly more usable than IE6.  IE7 has a handy feed-reader built in, and one of the feeds you get automatically is IEBlog, where the developers get slated by a bunch of Firefox zealots.  One of the articles talked about how wonderful the extensions were going to be in the new IE.  You can read the comments for the reality of the situation, however one of the exensions described, Mouse Gestures, piqued my interest when one of the MS guys commented that:

For instance, when I double-right-click, all of the Flash objects and third-party images are removed from the page (handy for reading online newspapers).

Now that sounds like a good compensator for AdBlock!  A quick rummage around on GreaseMonkey userscripts found this, a JavaScript that alters the behaviour of flash elements.  I pared it back to this:
(function () {
var objects = document.getElementsByTagName("object");
for(i=0;i<objects .length;i++)
{
var flash = objects[i];
if(flash.innerHTML.match(/.swf|shockwave|flash/))
{
flash.on = false;
flash.style.display = 'none';
}
}
})();
With this saved as a .js file, I then associated it with double-right-click in mouse gestures, and BANG!  The flash ads were gone.  Of course, it doesn’t work all the time, for example the Guardian website serves its adverts in an iframe using JavaScript, which is resistant to this method.  Also, the old favourite of animated gif banner ads aren’t affected.  If I feel arsed enough I could write some more JavaScript to take care of these exceptions, but for the moment I’m happy.

Cambridge Jazz Co-Op Workshops

Blimey, how do these things hide from me for so long?  There’s a jazz workshop every saturday at the  Man On The Moon.  Maybe I’ll pop down and work on my trad stylings.

Slap It!

My bass playing has been going all Seinfeld recently with the help of Slap It!, a slap bass resource by Tony Oppenheim that exists both as a book and as an online subscription site.  I checked out the examples, and to me exercise 150 is the motherlode of funk (it also reminds me of an old Mica Paris tune from her album So Good — I’d love to hate you, perhaps?)  I might buy the book, but I think I’ll finish off working through the Liebman book first.  The site only came to my attention because of a thread on the bassworld.co.uk site in which some oik suggests that you can download the book via eMule, whereupon lots of people try and convince him that this is stealing.  The oik replies that the author probably doesn’t mind, at which point Tony appears to say that actually he does.  On the internet, everyone can hear you make a cock of yourself.

This is my friend Tavish

With facial hair like this, how can anything he do fail?

Ow

The weekend before last was my stag do, the main event of which was spending a day paintballing. I’ve got a fairly even covering of bruises, resulting in me looking like I’ve been attacked by an amorous octopus.  This photo was taken a week later; I decided to wait and let the colour of the bruises mature  Paintballing taught me a few things:
1. Being good at first person shooter games is not a skill that transfers to the battlefield
2. I would be shit at real war; even just the pain of impacting paintballs quickly caused a change in my tactics from gung-ho assault to careful cover-and-snipe, so if there was a high likelihood of death I’d be shooting myself in the foot and back to blighty quicker than you could blink.
3. Those scenes in action movies where Arnie/Bruce Willis/$HERO run past a few people firing automatic weapons at them and reach cover without being hit are bollocks.

Annual A-level-bashing event

The Guardian is running the usual Record passes revive calls for review of exam system article that appears at this time of year.  I always read these with interest, because I know the “quality” of A-levels is heading downward; I was told this ten years ago by my physics director of studies: “Simon, your knowledge of maths isn’t up to the level required by the physics course because you only did a single maths A-level.  These days [1994] a further maths A-level is required.  You’d better work hard to bridge the gap.”  (I’ll keep my actual response to this to myself; needless to say, a shift to biology followed soon after.)  In fact, I only made it into Cambridge because my A-level physics teacher smacked his meter rule down on the bench one day and said, “Now, this isn’t in the curriculum any more but I think everyone should know it!”  He taught us Archimedes principle (the upwards force on an immersed object is equal to the weight of the displaced suspending medium).  I was asked in my interview, “If I was stood on a scale in an enclosed room with my air being supplied by a tube and all the air in the room was evacuated, what would happen to the reading on the scale?”  I knew what idea to apply: the reading goes up, because the bouyant force of the displaced air is removed.  There then followed a funpainful ten minutes where I worked out by exactly how much the reading changed.

Anyway, perhaps saying that the quality of A-level is reducing isn’t really correct; my stories above seem to imply that the curriculum is becoming smaller, which is something that I can’t prove either way without access to the curriculums and the motivation to check.  Mainly I wanted to have a think about the way the grades achieved have risen over the years.  What is the purpose of grading?  So employers and universities can work out what kind of person they’re taking in, and also to give the examinee a feel for how good they are at a particular subject.  Are grades supposed to be comparable across years, or are they supposed to fractionate the population into bright, less bright, etc, hence grading by the curve of percentage result vs. number of people achieving that result?  If the former, there has to be an exact amount of knowledge that achieving a particular grade in a particular subject requires, so better teaching will increase the fraction of people achieving top grades.  If the latter, then employers will need an index of years: “Ah, a B grade from 2006, that’s actually better than an A grade from 2004!”  However, surely the population size is big enough that there won’t be sufficient variation in “intelligence” between years to make grading by the curve a bad idea, thus we could keep the fraction of As, Bs, etc constant.  I still don’t see why we don’t go for this latter option, that way if you hire an A grade student, you get someone who is in the top whatever percent of the population.

guitarGAS

Derek pointed out a nice little blog called guitarGAS covering… well, guitary stuff and the ever present battle against the GAS fairy.  Actually the main reason Derek sent it over was because I’d emailed him to tell him that I’d “accidentally” bought a new guitar; hopefully within the next few days I’ll be taking delivery of a Patrick Eggle Berlin Plus.  Oops.

Cambridge in May Week via Google

I was idly browsing around Google Maps (as you do), and noticed that the satellite photography for Cambridge was taken on early on (I’d estimate) the Saturday before the May Week balls began, probably at about 8 or 9 AM.  If you check the link you can see three tents and one blue thing with orange bits in the main court of Clare college, and the skeleton of a marquee on the master’s lawn in Trinity Hall.  Scrolling North along the river you find a tent in Trinity College, then a bit further along four red rectangles of flooring laid out in St. John’s College.

This post has no actual point to it, it’s merely a vaguely interesting diversion!

HONK

I went punting on Saturday as part of the celebrations for a friend’s 30t birthday party. At one point we were passed by a flock of geese, who were honking at each other as loudly as they could and occasionally doing forward rolls, waving their feet in the air as they spun in the water.  It looked like nothing so much as a goose stag do: the lads out on the town causing a rucus.

Unusual.

Low quality Casa

Casa played a gig for a wedding in Pembroke College last Saturday, which I thought I’d record, mainly for my own personal interest.  The personnel for the gig was a bit of a change around: one of the singers couldn’t make it, and neither could the keys player, so Tom shifted from trombone to keys for the evening.  Recording set-up was basic: a single line from the PA taking the horns, keys and vocals, guitar and bass DIed and a single mic pointed at the drums.  I remember rushing around all day doing various tasks, so arrived at the gig in a bit of a fluster, so after making it through the first dance (the karaoke classic Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You) for which I’d had the music infront of me, I went to begin the bassline to our regular first set opener and live soundchecker, Bring Down The Birds.

It was at that point that my brain core dumped and I forgot how to play.

After noodling around in Bb for a couple of bars, I was rescued by Mark joining in on guitar.  Once past this block things settled down a bit, apart from the fact that, as has been previously noted, large college halls aren’t really designed for amplified music, so we had really weird fold-back throughout the gig.  Anyway, if you’re bored, you can listen to some of the tunes here.  The only thing of note for me (apart from the fact that under no circumstances should I be allowed to solo until I can guarantee that all the notes will be in time) is that during the percussion break in Ritmo Rico I meant to turn my bass off, but instead turned the pickup mix knob from 50:50 to 100% bridge pickup.  When I started playing again I found my bass tone was much closer to the sound I actually want, much more top end “bark”.  I can’t believe it took a mid-gig mistake to find this out.  I was so pleased I left the bass in pretty much that setting (well, actually about 25:75 neck:bridge, because I love to fiddle) for the rest of the gig.  This might put paid to any vague ideas I had about buying a Warwick or, more realistically, a Fender Jazz.