_{Jamie Balfour's}Personal blog

I'm maybe going to have to make a category dedicated to tributes to people on my blog as this is now the second tribute in the last month.

By Avda (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Anyway, Christopher Lee passed away on the 7th June 2015 at the age of 93. Whilst I'm obviously upset about this, Christopher Lee being my favourite actor of all time (as many of you will know), I'm not as upset as would be with someone younger. Christopher Lee was a happy man, who lived a long life and starred in some of the most icon films of the last century. He made his mark and had a good long life.

He starred in some amazing films including, James Bond: The Man with the Golden Gun, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Dracula, Sleepy Hollow (albeit brief) and so much more.

A rather interesting fact about Christopher Lee's family is that his mother married James Bond writer Ian Fleming's uncle making them 'step-cousins'. This is a nice little link between Lee and James Bond in which he starred in.

Interestingly, one of my mother's friends accommodated him whilst he was golfing at Muirfield in Gullane, Scotland.

I have known this day would come sooner or later as Lee had not been in good health several times over the past few years and it lead me to expect it at some point.

I would like to pay my respects to Christopher Lee as being one of the world's best actors (and one of my favourite of all time, if not my favourite, and will likely remain that way indefinitely).

Two's Complement is one of those tricky little things that you can easily mess up, but what if there was an easier way of doing it than the traditional methods?

Well indeed there is.

Let's do it.

Example 1

For this example, we're going try and calculate -64. This should be easy.

The first step is to figure out how many bits we are going to need. For this we will need 8 bits. As a result our first place holder will be 128.

But wait a moment, the next thing we do, and we do this before putting down the placeholders, is we want to calculate a negative for the first place holder.

So what do we do? Well here's my way of doing it, and I don't know of anyone else who does it this way but:

0 - (128 - 64) = -64

Now write that as the first place holder instead. We always have a 1 for a negative number (the sign bit) so put a 1 underneath it.

The next step is to keep adding until you get to 0.

Easy peasy.

-64 + 64 = 0

Example 2

Now for -34

0 - (128 - 34)

-94 + 64 + 16 + 8 + 4 + 2 = 0

Like I say, I don't know anyone else who uses this, though I do know of a technique similar to it. If you're teaching this to students or pupils, I don't recommend using this to teach, just to check that they got the correct answer.

If you visit my gallery a lot, you may notice that the photos are often slow to load and slow the page loading down. Well not anymore!

Thanks to a new script I produced for it, images load asynchronously with the main page and no longer slow down the download speed.

As a result, images take a few seconds more to load fully, but the page will load completely around them.

In the next few weeks, I will be likely dropping BlackBook, Data Project, Record Checker, Slide Away, SmartSocial and Wonderword from my website and from production after years of work. BlackRabbit Script has also since been replaced by ZenLang and the Zenith Parsing Engine (ZPE).

The decision has come after I looked at the lack of competitive features they have. All of them are still included in the BBCL library that will still receive updates (I do realise it has now been downloaded some 800+ times since I put it up two years ago and that people are actually using some of its functionalities). 

The core focus of my software portfolio will now be on Cobweb Internet Browser, Painter Pro, core plugins for the software and my ZPE. However, I may decide in the future that I may stop working on Cobweb and Painter Pro eventually, and I can see that happening as development has slowed quite a lot.

I may also choose to drop the name Elements from the software. All older software will be found under Software > More. 

I will be looking into the new C# to attempt to make the BBCL multi-platform.

On the topic of ZPE, it has now made it to version 1.3.4 which brings a lot of new features including nested functions, standard errors, when statements (equivalent to switch/case statements), for loops and more. Please check it out! Please note as it is already receiving a lot of attention it may take a few days for me to reply to emails about it!

In my personal opinion Charles Kennedy was one of the most honest, hard working and "for the people" politicians in British politics throughout my life. 

For me personally, Charles Kennedy was the reason I took an interest in politics and lead me to the path of the Liberal Democrats when I was around about 14. I became a liberal from around about 2005, just before Charles stood down as leader of the Liberal Democrats. I have always considered myself to a rather liberal person and a lot of that has come from what Charles  Kennedy stood for.

I personally shed a tear when I heard the news this morning.

I was personally not in favour of the Iraq war and I personally disliked both the Labour Party and Conservative Party. I still am a liberal at heart and a strong supporter of what they have done for this country not only in the past but what people like Charles Kennedy did for this country - a strong and firm leader that the Liberal Democrats needed.

Charles Kennedy is notable in my books for his friendly, optimistic attitude to politics - he was a far more people's person than most and would have made an excellent PM for the country. He also achieved the best result for the Liberal Democrats that has been achieved to date, obtaining 63 seats. This kind of result has not been achieved since before the First World War and David Lloyd George before the decline of the Liberal Party to the Labour Party in 1920 odds.

I will personally miss the wonderful nature of Charles Kennedy - an honest, amazing politician who was an outstanding Liberal Democrat! 

Scotland made its voice very clear last night. The Exit poll was nearly 100% accurate with it's predictions and almost every seat in Scotland now belongs to the SNP.

The prediction was that Liberal Democrat Alistair Carmichael would retain his seat and the Conservative David Mundell would retain his.

What we saw though was not an overnight change rather a change that has been coming along for sometime.

The following graph shows how massive the swing was:

Across Scotland, several notable figures were outsted from their seats:

Douglas Alexander

Michael Moore

Jo Swinson

Ed Davey

Danny Alexander

Jim Murphy

Charles Kennedy

Images from OGL and CC license.

In the list Jo Swinson and Charles Kennedy were two that I did not expect to have as much trouble retaining their seats as Jim Murphy and Douglas Alexander.

Last night the SNP saw swings of up to 39% - something we've not seen like this before.

However, the UK as a whole voted for another Conservative government. This is the result of punishing the Liberal Democrats by not voting for them down south (which is how democracy works anyway, which is a good thing). What I'm saying is, the Conservatives only have a majority of 13 seats, so if a few Liberal Democrats kept their seats we may have had another hung parliament which could have lead to a Labour-SNP coalition.

Anyway, I'm not massively bothered as amazed at the turnout and swing in Scotland.

Apple are now my favourite company. This is contrary to what I believed some four years ago, where I was only considering a MacBook Pro because of it's beautiful design and ability to run Windows (which I intended to do).

Furthermore, for the first few years - from when my family got our first Mac in 2009, we ran Windows 7 as the primary operating system. I even had an argument with my mother that there was no point in running OS X because half the stuff you want to do isn't available. This went even further when I got my MacBook Pro in 2011 - I bought it for the design and having OS X as a background OS.

It wasn't until about mid-2013 that I really started to use Mac OS X for my every day activities, in February 2014 I actually started to use Mac OS X as my main operating system and have barely used Windows at all since then and in November 2014 I ditched Windows on my Mac. Not only is OS X a more secure operating system, it has features like the Bash (Bourne Again SHell), iMessage and much more just built into the operating system. Things have changed so drastically since Snow Leopard but that's not saying that Snow Leopard wasn't good, because now that I look back at when I made the change to Mac with Snow Leopard I never had any problems at all. 

Macs are actually getting more and more popular, with the decline in the PC industry pushing the Mac sales up (do not forget: computer sales actually come from businesses too, and businesses are more likely to be buying PCs - although probably not much longer as hardware advancements push users to use the abomination of Windows 8 which was clearly designed for nothing but tablets and 'touch-screen desktops').

Here are a summary of the best things about Apple's products:

• Great quality hardware
• Everything integrates well between iOS and Mac OS X
• Mac OS X
• Innovations throughout the operating system

When I first started to use Mac OS X, Finder's Spotlight was quite a simple piece of technology - search your system for what you need when you need it. I used to also very much dislike the iOS Spotlight until iOS 7 which made it easy to use and now I use it to run any app on my iPhone or iPad.

I got very used to the idea of using Spotlight for starting apps and now I do it to open anything on my system because it's just so fast. There's even a shortcut that will let you open it and type in what you need in a flash (which is ⌘ + SPACE).

But there is so much more to Spotlight now. 

Here I've demonstrated my favourite use - a calculator:

Using it as a calculator means you can write out the expression very quickly and it supports a range of different mathematical features including the following keywords:

• sin, cos, tan, sqrt
• ^ - power
• % - modulo
• Brackets

This is just a few of the useful calculator operations you can do from your Spotlight search on your Mac.

In this post I have decided to look through the archives of Apple's website.

The site is a good indicator of how technology has changed.

Since I got my Mac mini in November I've been having problems with my Logitech G500 being very 'laggy'. I don't know if this is down to the fact that it is across 5m worth of USB powered hubs and so on or if it is a problem with OS X. It does work fine when I plug it straight in to the USB 3.0 port on the back of the mini but even when it is across the hubs it works fine on Windows 7. 

So I found a fabulous solution called Smooth Mouse. If you experience lag on your mouse you can download it here:

http://smoothmouse.com