Belshazzar's Facebook

Dear Facebook, what have you done with my wall?  I know I complained Facebook was liked a classroom of preschool children all shouting out at once, but your rushed out computer AI attempt to work out what I really want to read and label it 'Top Story' is a mess!!!  You've also given me fifteen billion ways to tailor this and make it more complicated as well as making writing a new wall post require a PhD in IT.

Belshazzar, King of the Babylonians would have no chance reading anything on his wall if you lot were in charge in the 6th century BC (read Daniel 6 for the full story).

Fawlty Tevez Episode 1: The Germans

Only in Premier League football could you refuse to play and still be paid a quarter of a million pounds a week!  I don't normally draw what people suggest but Oli suggested I do something about Carlos Tevez refusal come off the bench during the Champions League match with Bayern Munich.  Or was it a misunderstanding?  Was Carlos sitting there at the match wondering what he was doing in those comfy padded seats so close to the match?  Also was he confused why he was wearing a Man City strip with a number on his back and he might be asked to do something for his quarter mil a week.  Then again if he can't speak English (allegedly) what about those around him what were they doing.

The comedy of Fawlty Towers stands up well after several decades.  Some may think the exchanges between Basil Fawlty and Manuel are no longer-PC but is the classic comedy of misunderstanding - a bit like what happened at the Bayern Munich Stadium

Happily Ever After

My daughter thinks Disneyland is a real country.

Markets and Satellites

After a week of stock market gloom, the only good news was an obsolete piece of space junk didn't fall on anyone's head.  The UAR satellite had a 1 in 3200 change of hitting someone but decided instead it seemed to break up mainly over Canada/the Pacific.

I drew this cartoon for this week's caption compedition thinking it was brilliantly topical only to find that two other (so far) cartoonists had come up with satellite gags as well.  You can view them for yourselves through the link below and decide whose is the best

http://www.ccgb.org.uk/q_and_a_forum/simpleforum_pro.cgi?fid=09&topic_id=1316517217

In the meantime News 24 is currently telling me that lots more junk will be raining on my head in the near future but it's okay because experts say lots of other bad things are more likely to affect you.  Hope that doesn't spook the markets

Dinosaur TV

BBC's new dinosaur series Planet Dinosaur was launched this week with the tale of the Spinosaurus a carnivorous dinosaur maybe even bigger than the king of the lizards the Tyrnnosaurus Rex.

Like Wikipedia I qualify it with maybe because the world of Paleontology is a puzzle where you have to reproduce never seen before creatures from incomplete skeletons using what we know about modern creature's anatomy as a guide (the BBC did a piece on their website about how you do it here).  The Spinosaurus remains were uncovered in Egypt in 1912 but destroyed when the British bombed Munich in 1944.  However based on drawings and descriptions of this specimen along with several others finds in 2005/2007 estimates were published claiming it was indeed bigger than T-Rex.

I don't know who I feel more sorry for the T-Rex or all the other dinosaurs who didn't get to headline this new series because they were not big enough or too ordinary.  Scientists are all too willing to discard popular terms in the name of scientific purity such as kicking Pluto out to be just a dwarf, and dumping the catchier Brontosaurus in favour of Apatosaurus but surely we can't demote T-Rex a pillar of popular culture.  T-Rex is everywhere from Rex in Toy Story to plastic giants in our local crazy golf.

Perhaps the documentary writers would have preferred T-Rex and Spinosaurus to face off in a death match for the title of King Of The Lizards but instead they had Spinosaurus fight a Carcharodontosaurus (thats easy to say).  

None of which explains the cartoon except to say I like the marketing term 'Gigantasaurus' for a big dinosaur and wonder if real Dinosaurs ever watched Planet Dinosaur would they be able to recognise themselves.

iPhone 5 launch

iPhone 5 coming to you sometime mid-October to be followed by iPhone 6, 7, 8, 9...

For every iProduct n there is an iProduct n+1 which you will want more.

CSS Miami

At work we were discussing TV programs that could be made for programmers and I thought of examples like X Re-Factor, Cache in the Attic, Day Breakpoint before I seized on the only one that was funny CSS Miami.

For non-programmers CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets which is used to style most of the websites you look at.  For programmers CSI Miami is a comedy show set in a South Florida forensics lab led by Horatio Cane who wears glasses.  Every week they solve difficult crimes very easily while looking beautiful and making pithy remarks.

Join them together and you get a cartoon that will appeal to literally a couple of people.  Indeed so worried was I that someone else may have stolen my hilarious programmer TV idea that I Googled it and found out that programmers have only used the pun potential to write sites about CSS so my cartoon is safe.

Back to the Programmer TV listings here is my rough schedule for a typical day.

6am  - 8:30am Day Breakpoint
Alex and Adrian discuss the server alert logs and kernel panics from the previous night's computing.


8:30am - 8:45am Bob The MsBuilder 


8:45am - 9am OpenRasta Mouse


9am - 10am Place By The C
Celine tries to persuade pale anemic programmers to relocate to warm exotic locations.


10am - 10:30am Cache In The Attic
Our experts uncover strange secrets in people's browser caches.


10:30am - 11am Judge Ruby
Ruby based AI deliberates over various domestic matters.  This week Alex accuses his neighbours of stealing his Wi-Fi WEP key.


11am - 12pm The Tom Kyte show
Controversial Tom Kyle discusses the big issues of the day relating to Oracle databases


1pm - 2pm deBuggerac
Jersey based detective investigates another problem step by step.


2pm - 2:30pm Weakest Link
Anne Robertson puts down shoddy deployment practices including a ill formed C make file and some missing DLLs


3pm - 4pm Grand Designs
Software architect Kevin and his heavily pregnant wife attempt to complete an eco-friendly service architecture before Christmas.


5.30pm  - 6pm Home and Array
Heath discovers Charlie has been playing out of bounds (repeat)


7pm - 8:30pm X Refactor


8:30pm - 9pm Vi
Steven Fry hosts a quiz show that attempts to guess command sequences for the Unix editor.


9pm - 10pm CSS Miami
South Florida crime lab investigates another broken website


10pm - 10.30pm Mock The Geek
What is says


10.30pm - 11pm Embarassing Bodies
HTML programmers reveals their worst website layouts to a panel of experts


11pm - 1am - Friday the 13th part II
JSON is back.


1am - 6am MVC Shopping
Our shopping channel brings you everything from mail-order brides to iPad covers in a well organised and testable way.

Strictly Come Dancing

This week's compedition has the theme 'Autumn' and what better way to celebrate Autumn with a new series of Strictly Come Dancing (UK only - it's Dancing with the Stars in the US).

Gingerbread Man

The Gingerbread man is another favourite tale of my children but the tale of home baking, cows and foxes seems like other children's tales slightly outdated now (see traditional version).

If I were to update it for today's audience it would go something like this:

Once upon a time there was a little old man and a little old lady who lived in a tower block.

One day they were very hungry for biscuits but they couldn't afford the gas to use their cooker

so they hobbled onto a bus and wobbled down to the supermarket.

There in the artificial in-store bakery were rows and rows of identical Gingerbread men

with fondant for eyes and Smarties for buttons.

As soon as they lifted a gingerbread man off the shelf he burst out the

over-engineered packaging and ran down the Bread aisle shouting 'Don't Eat Me'.

The little old woman and the little old man staggered after him.

'Stop! Stop!' they croaked.

The gingerbread man taunted them saying

'Run, run as fast as you can!

You can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man'


Down the aisle he sped when he came to a toddler.
'Stop! Stop! I wanna eat you," yelled the toddler.
The toddler was strapped into his pram and the
gingerbread man sprinted past singing
"Run, run as fast as you can. You can't catch me
I'm the gingerbread man!"


Past the checkout he met a security guard.
"Stop! Stop! wee man," called the hungry guard,
"I want to eat you."  Again the gingerbread man
was too agile and he slipped through the doors
yelling "Run, run as fast as you can.  You can't catch
me I'm the gingerbread man."


The security guard began to chase the gingerbread man through the car park together with the toddler in a pram and the little old woman but the gingerbread man was fast.


The gingerbread man came to dog tied to some railings. 
'Stop, stop!' said the talking dog.  'I want to eat you.'
But the gingerbread man just ran on saying
'Run, run as fast as you can you can't catch me
I'm the gingerbread man.'


The dog broke free and joined in the chase.  The gingerbread man laughed and laughed until he came to a busy dual carriageway.  'Oh crumbs. They'll catch me now or I'll be
road kill.'


A sly women came from behind a lamp-post. 
'I can hide you in this building,' she said. 
'Follow the signs and you'll be safe.'
'You won't want to eat me will you?'
asked the gingerbread man.
'Of course not,' smiled the women.
'We're here to help you.'


The gingerbread man followed the signs, through the
gate, down the path until he reached the door.
Tired and weary he went inside the 
Weight Watchers meeting...


AND THAT WAS THE END OF THE GINGERBREAD MAN.

Angelina Stormtrooper

For this week's CCGB compedition perhaps the strangest cartoon I have ever drawn inspired by Angelina Ballerina and her wonderful illustrator Helen Craig.  We have original Angelina books at home that feature her work and they are still much better than the CGI generated Next Steps series.