Walk in Kent

Haven't posted anything on here for ages.  So... just to prove how heathy we're being, here's the walk we just got back from.  We walked from Snodland to Sole Street in Kent, all 8 miles of it.


For all the real geeks, here's the track for Google Earth.  Finally found a use for my old GPS.

Woo, New Car

Check out my new car. I went for a Honda Civic Type S GT in the end. I got around the non-convertible problem by getting a nice glass roof. It's not the same as having the top down but it's pretty cool.

Zoom zoom, bang!

Something terrible and unthinkable has happened. Last weekend I went to the Mazda garage to look at the shiny new MX-5 only to find it's designed for midgets. That's people who are shorter than 6'4". Whichever way I adjusted the seat I just didn't fit.

I've wanted an MX-5 for years, they're sporty, convertible, not too expensive and there's no room for babies, everything I need in a car. It's a hair dressers car I hear you cry, well, what can I say, I'm a man and I drive a Smart Cabrio, I really don't care what I look like.

So now I need some help deciding what to get instead.

Smart ForTwo Cabrio - I could keep my Smart when the lease ends in December. It's good for the city, it's cheap and it's pretty reliable. There are two main problems. Firstly it's rubbish on the motorway and secondly Mercedes Benz provide some of the worst customer service I've ever come across and then charge you a fortune for it.

Smart Roadster - I don't fit in this either.

Honda S2000 - Now these are really cool. I was thinking about going and trying one of these out, then I saw how fast it was (0-60mph in 5.6 seconds), then I saw the insurance group (20), then I changed my mind. I'd be a dead man with really expensive insurance bill about 5 minutes after driving it away.

Porsche Boxter - Cathy wont let me have one and they're insurance group 20 too.

Beetle Cabriolet - This one is top of my list at the moment. They're not sporty but they are pretty cool. The reviews say that the drive it a bit "mushy" but hey, they say my Smart is rubbish to drive too and I think it's fine.

Honda Civic (type S) - This is the only non-convertible on my list. It's the craziest normal car I could find, and it has triangular exhausts. Main problem, the roof doesn't come off.

Can't think of any others, can you?

Eclispe Dictionary

Warning Geek Post!

Eclipse (the Java IDE) has a spell checker for your comments and text files. Good eh, especially if like me and loads of other coders you can't spell. You can find the settings under: General > Editors > Text Editors > Spelling.

One problem - there's no dictionary! ...and the Eclipse help files don't tell you where to find one. This has annoyed me so much that I've broken my cardinal blog rule and posted something that's a bit (well, very) work'y.

So all you need to do is:

1. Download a word list like the one published by Kevin Atkinson. I downloaded the 12 Dicts package and pulled out 2of12inf.txt
2. Point Ecplise at the file

Weh hey, your spell checker now works.

All this fun at work got me musing about spell checkers on the way home. What can I say, tube tunnels and sad looking silent people aren't very interesting. Figured you could do it with a big hash set structure, would be quite quick but really memory hungry... or you could build a big tree thingy with each world represented by a path through the tree. The second one is much more interesting so I'd do it that way.

Question of the day: How do you code a spell checker?

Ok, I've bored myself now, bye...

New Floor

Last week dad came over a laid this excellent new floor (with a bit of help from me).

It's Kahrs 7mm engineered wood, in other words it's proper oak on top but slots together like laminate. We bought it from 1926 Wood Flooring. They were nice and cheap and the service was better than you usually get from an on-line company.

So, the "exciting" bits are:

• My speaker cables for the back speakers are now tucked tidily under the floor
• Nice matching skirting board to hide the gaps
• The Roomba works even better on the new floor
• We had to take the stairs down to lay the floor underneath, they're really heavy
• Check out my new rug, made from real sheep

Now I'm off to Maplin to find a way to attach speaker terminals to the top of the skirting.