Do we really care who wins the #1 spot this year? … No not really but at least this year its a bit more exciting than last year. The campaign to get Rage Against The Machine to #1 has gone a little bit insane, perhaps a little too insane, but on the plus side they are raising a shed load of money for Shelter (excuse the pun). So far they’ve raised £38,525. A tidy sum, so at the very least some people who wouldn’t otherwise of had a good Christmas now will.

I do feel a little sorry for Joe, who has done nothing to deserve this and is actually quite talented. I can’t believe I have just said that, quick soap in mouth, pah. With normality restored I do think the powers that be chose the wrong song for him though, far too wishy washy and didn’t show off his ability (In my very non expert opinion). Come on, a Miley Cyrus song? … who is she anyway! … I’m clearly not very in tune with popular culture.

As I am a self proclaimed music snob I am of course fully supporting RATM, not because its the best song in the world, its not. More because Christmas number 1’s are nearly always rubbish, and I include every X-Factor song in that along with Mr Blobby and god knows what else. But I refuse to buy anymore copies, two is enough for any man and to counter all bad said of X-Factor it does discover some very talented people and is watched/loved/liked by the gazillion. Just more guitars next year would be nice.

An email I sent yesterday to Tesco customer service department:

Hello,

I bought a couple of pizzas on your 2 for 4 quid deal. Both were supposed to be Ham & Pineapple. One of them was, I ate that yesterday. I came to eat the second one today (yes two pizza’s in two days isn’t the healthiest of diets but hell its been a mad week) and after some seconds of study I noticed something was not quite right with the pizza. In short it was missing pineapple.

I was too hungry to bother with posting it to you, and given our countries delightful postal system it would have probably been eaten on route anyway. Either that or it would have arrived in a catacomb of mould. I did though take the time to photograph my fruit deficient pizza, more for amusement value than anything, see attached image.

Such is life, things get forgotten… that said any chance of a voucher for a tin of pineapple?

Cheers,

David

[UPDATE: 17/12/09] And they replied…

Dear Mr Madelin,

I’m sorry for the delay in responding to your complaint about your Ham & “Pineapple” Pizza and for any further inconvenience this has caused you.

Please let me assure you that we will always try to respond to our customers’ queries in a timely manner and I am sorry that this has not happened on this occasion.

I’m sorry to hear that there was no pineapple on one of the pizzas you purchased. I can understand how disappointing this must have been for you.

We take the quality of our products extremely seriously and we have specific quality controls with all our suppliers. We also follow up with regular visits to ensure that everything is up to the high standard which our customers expect from us.

It is clear from the details that you have sent that there has been a problem with this particular item and I do apologise for the inconvenience caused. Customer feedback is very important as it helps to identify where we can improve our products.

As you will understand, we do sell a large range of pizzas and without the packaging we are unable to identify the exact one you purchased and the correct supplier. However, please be assured that I have passed your comments about the missing pineapple to our Product Team. I know they will want to check for similar complaints.

I appreciate that you may have already thrown away the product and packaging but I would like to arrange to send you a Tesco Moneycard to reimburse you for the pizza. So I can do this, please can you forward your address details to me.

Thank you once again for taking the time to let us know about this. I hope that you will continue to shop with us in the future.

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact us at customer.service@tesco.co.uk quoting TESXXXXXXX.

Kind Regards

Ruth Orchardson
Customer Service Manager
Tesco Customer Service

Have been playing around with getting mp3 streams to play in flash. It turns out icecast streams are very easy to play but shoutcast ones aren’t so obviously easy, but when you know how they are. It turned out that simply appending ‘;stream.nsv&type=mp3′ to the end a shoutcast url would make it playable. Quite why I am not entirely sure but it works.

Anyway my first attempt at a somewhat basic radio player can be found here:

http://davidmadelin.com/radio.html

The flash playing bit is hidden in the background and javascript is used to communicate with it telling it what to play.

I put all the feeds in an xml file which is loaded in javascript and dumped to the screen as a clickable list.

The flash widget has api functions to change the volume and stop play etc but I’ve yet to implement on screen buttons for them.

I struggled with this concept for a while so thought I would write a little post about it.

Is it possible to create a multi-threaded application in Visual C++ Express, which lacks ATL and MFC library support.

The answer is yes, you use the CreateThread API call and here’s how:

Make sure these headers are included:


#include <windows.h>
#include <stdio.h>


Now create your thread function, this function is what gets executed by the CreateThread API call. In my example I want to pass an object to the thread and then do something with it. In my case I am invoking my objects load function.

DWORD WINAPI LoadObject(LPVOID lpParameter)
{
MyObjectType* f;
f = (MyObjectType *) lpParameter;
f->load();
return 0;
}


Now we’re ready to create our thread from within our main code…


DWORD dwThreadId;

// That's it, obviously a very simple example and you will want to be creating multiple threads simultaniously etc.


As always, planned things never go to plan. It’s a rule that I now have come to accept, it doesn’t apply to everyone, but certainly does to me. So Saturday morning my sister and I were due to get up reasonably early and head off to Farnham to visit our Grandad who had just got out of hospital. Sounds quite simple. Had planned to catch a train from Waterloo around 10am, which means leaving Dalston about 9am to give time to get tickets etc. Wake up roughly around 9:30am, completely forgot to set any alarm what so ever. Slight panic… oh well catch the next train. Get ready, check have everything, erm… where’s my Network Card?!? … erm sure I had it the other day (also contains the Oyster for the bus). No not in any of the usual places (various points on the floor), half an hour later and my room in near ruin, nope definately not here. Hmmm, it’s got to be at work then. Arse, so I get on the bike and cycle down to work, get to the office door, shit, forgotten the combination code to get in. Embarrased call to colleague, I’m in. Found pass quite quickly, left work, bugger I forgot to leave the bike locked in the office, unlock fort knox, relock, leave. Would you adam and eve it there are no bloody buses. Eventually one turns up and we make it to Waterloo several hours later than planned. Turn up in Farnham some time after lunch and end up having a very nice afternoon with Gran and Grandad.

The rest of the weekend (un planned) went ok. Caught the Dad-Taxi back to Southampton to catch up with some friends at local BBQ. Not a huge turn out but it was nice evening and spent most of today (Sunday) enjoying the sun. Rigged up some speakers in the garden and listened to woxy on the itouch. Feeling a bit rosey so suspect mild burning, always get caught out by the first lot of decent sun. On the train now back to London.

I was watching the news this morning and this bloke from HMV came on to give his view on who was going to be number one at Christmas. Now aparently for the last few years since its evil inception the X-Factor singles have on average got sales in the region of 100’s of thousands over the Christmas period whiles the nearest competitor would be in the region of 10’s of thousands.  What shocked me the most was that the Pogues - Fairytale Of New York has never got a number one. Its probably the best Christmas song of all time so I’m hoping I can convince you to buy it and hence knock the X-Factor winner off the number one spot.