_{Jamie Balfour's}Personal blog

Nintendo never cease to amaze me (a bit like Apple, in some way) with the release of new games and it's no different with Super Smash Bros for Wii U and Super Smash Bros for 3DS.

I've got the game for the 3DS and I must say it works well and I was very pleasantly surprised by how well it works. It's also highly addictive and very good fun. But I'm still even further intrigued by the Wii U version which is to be released in late November.

Nintendo released a hugely shocking revelation today that caught me buy surprise - the release of a new character, coming to Wii U. To find out who this character is, watch the Nintendo Direct tomorrow (although I'll probably post about it here anyway).

Here's a snapshot of what to expect at the event:

It's finally happened and of course I was at the opening of it!

I'm just uploading a couple of images here.

It was also a lovely morning, a bit of a nice breeze but it was far from being cold (although just in case I was wearing my warm fuzzy hat). I've also been in several photos on Twitter.

Panorama taken on my iPhone of the Apple Store

Waiting outside wasn't too bad - the weather was really good, but I came prepared incase it wasn't.

We got free t-shirts as I hoped! :)

A photo taken on one of the Macs in store and emailed home.

And we didn't finish without finally updating my mum's iPad to an iPad Air! (as they are now cheaper than before as well)

It was finally time for my mum to get a new iPad.

Well of course the Apple Special Event tonight has excited me very much because Apple have satisfied my hopes for a new Mac mini!

Not only that, they have really gone out on it and updated it with the new Haswell CPUs, given it Thunderbolt 2 and removed FireWire 800 and replaced it with another Thunderbolt port and kept the RJ-45. They've given it 802.11ac (almost Gigabit WiFi, similar to my MacBook Pro, although I will not be using WiFi as I prefer to use Gigabit Ethernet so that I'm on my wired switch first and foremost).

One thing to note as well by the way is that there appear to only be dual-core versions of the new Mac mini, which may make it a lower performer than the previous models, but we will have to see what Apple does with these.

Of course they also released the iPad Air 2, the iPad mini 3 and the iMac with Retina display as well. They've really gone all out and that's what they should have done on the 30th Anniversary of the Mac.

I'm so happy to see the new Mac mini, but will Apple have gone for a closed system and stopped users changing the RAM as they have with all other Macs?

Tonight at 6pm Apple will live stream information about their latest releases including (probably) a release date for Yosemite, perhaps a new iPad Air and iPad mini, (perhaps) a new Mac Mini, a new Apple TV and more.

Will you be watching it? What excites you most about it?

As I did last year with my website, I have decided to theme my site based on events like Halloween. This year the site is totally different from last year with a special font for the top and the headers. The site will still work as before, only some parts will look different.

Enjoy.

Here is some very simple BlackRabbit Script code that is used to perform multiple tasks. Can you figure out from the simple commands what it does at each point?

//Copyright JBALFOURDTP
//13/10/2014
//BlackRabbit Script version: 2.2.2.467 
function main()
    //Main method goes here
    //Case insensitive welcome
    hey -> Welcome to my application
    name -> Jamie
    Name -> Balfour
    
    echo ("Hello")

    get_yes_no("hey name "Name". Press Yes to continue the program.")

    %result -> bb.*return

    get_yes_no("Result is "'%result')

    if(%result == "Yes")
        output("That is the desired result")
    else
        output("That is incorrect")
    endif
    
    $i = 0
    $y = $i
    
    output($y)
    
    while($i < 5)
        $i++
        call (message)
    endwhile

endfunction

function message()
    output("i is" $i "and y is" $y)
    $y = add($y, 5)
    $z = multiply($y, $i)
endfunction

Saturday the 18th of October 2014 is the date set for the Apple Store's opening in Edinburgh. The Princes Street store has been long awaited and is set to be a wonderful addition to all the Apple Stores across the world. I cannot wait myself!

It's not new news that Apple is having it's next major product event on the 16th this month. I along with others am very excited and cannot wait to see what gets released.

For starters, the iPad will probably receive an update. Some believe that the way Apple will amalgamate the MacBook and iPad is by releasing an 'iPad Pro' - a larger and more powerful iPad. Others believe it also may run on a combination of Mac OS X and perhaps iOS as well.

Another major announcement could be the final release of Mac OS X Yosemite (for those who do not know, this is pronounced yo-sem-it-ee) which is currently in it's 5th beta release. 

Another possible release is the iMac with Retina display. This has been a long awaited upgrade for the iMacs which are falling behind their mobile counterparts because of this. A Retina display would up the resolution on the 21 inch model to about 3840 by 2160 and the resolution on the 27 inch to about 5120 by 2880 if they doubled pixel density again.

A final possiblity is the release of a new Mac Mini. Apple's affordable bring your own keyboard, mouse and display Mac for all has not been updated since 2012. It's a shame for me because I really wanted a small Mac desktop that I can use particularly for storing data safely. If the Mac Mini is re-designed, it will likely look like a small version of the (in my opinion) ugly Mac Pro, which will likely mean that all ways of expanding the system will be completely removed - which would be sad.

Until then, we'll just have to wait, only three days to go!

For the last few days, until today, my website has been suffering from some troubles due to server problems. I would like to say that the server is running fine now and my website displays correctly. 

I have not been adding a lot of content to my site because of the fact that I have resumed university, but I would like to point out that the Python tutorials are coming along now.

Within the next year or so I intend to extend my tutorials further by adding 10 new tutorials in the following:

• Apache webservers
• BlackRabbit Script
• C#
• CodeIgniter
• CSS
• Java
• JavaScript
• Java Server Pages
• Latex
• Python (I'm learning more about this day by day)