UK Top 40 Singles of 2007

pos artist - title [copies sold]
1 Leona Lewis - Bleeding love [787652]
2 Rihanna feat Jay Z - Umbrella [512730]
3 Mika - Grace Kelly [492500]
4 Leon Jackson - When you believe [395669]
5 Take That - Rule the world [357325]
6 Sugababes - About you now [346420]
7 Timbaland feat D.O.E. and Keri Hilson - The way I are [336740]
8 Proclaimers ft Brian Potter and Andy Pipkin - (I'm gonna be) 500 miles [333750]
9 Mark Ronson feat Amy Winehouse - Valerie [329490]
10 Kaiser Chiefs - Ruby [313765]

11 The Fray - How to save a life [313700]
12 Beyonce & Shakira - Beautiful liar [296900]
13 Gwen Stefani/Akon - Sweet escape [285500]
14 Plain White T's - Hey there Delilah [281820]
15 Sean Kingston - Beautiful girls [277000]
16 Timbaland feat One Republic - Apologize [275290]
17 Kate Nash - Foundations [272805]
18 Take That - Shine [272745]
19 Kanye West - Stronger [266280]
20 Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend [248900]

21 Fergie - Big girls don't cry [240490]
22 Timbaland ft Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake - Give it to me [238240]
23 Just Jack - Starz in their eyez [220000]
24 Robyn with Kleerup - With every heartbeat [213025]
25 50 Cent ft Justin Timberlake & Timbaland - Ayo technology [212070]
26 Enrique Iglesias - Do you know (The ping pong song) [200840]
27 Gym Class Heroes - Cupid's chokehold [191250]
28 Justin Timberlake - What goes around, comes around [187650]
29 Nelly Furtado - Say it right [183850]
30 Take That - Patience [179500]

31 Hoosiers - Worried about Ray [178250]
32 Rihanna - Shut up and drive [165000]
33 Fergie - Glamorous [163250]
34 Snow Patrol - Chasing cars [163000]
35 Fall Out Boy - This aint a scene, it's an arms race [162750]
36 Akon ft Snoop Dogg - I wanna love you [162500]
37 T2 feat Jodie Aysha - Heartbroken [151145]
38 Mark Ronson feat Daniel Merriweather - Stop me [149000]
39 Alex Gaudino ft Crystal Waters - Destination Calabria [145000]
40 Akon - Don't matter [144350]

Every day is fry day for chips addict

I have always loved chips but I am trying to eliminate it as it's not healthy. This only serves to highlight why you should step away from the fryer! (taken from a local newspaper).

"A teenager has eaten almost nothing but chips for the past ten years because she fears other foods will make her ill. Faye Campbell has refused anything else since she was five. Her parents, Mark and Carolyn Campbell, say they have been driven mad by the 15 year old's one-in-a-million diet.
Mrs Campbell, 37, said: 'Faye just drank milk until she was four or five. For some reason, at that age she tried a chip and after that she did not eat anything else.'
Mr and Mrs Campbell tried all sorts of things to make Faye eat other foods and took her to the doctor repeatedly - all without success. But two years ago she was diagnosed with gastro-oesophageal reflux, in which stomach acids travel up into the gullet. In Faye's case, they even enter her mouth. The diagnosis came from Dr Nigel Meadows, of Bart's and the London NHS Trust in the capital.
After specialist medicine and work with a child psychologist, Faye is now trying plain burgers plain noodles from a Chinese takeaway and potato waffles. But her diet still consists almost totally of chips from a local chippie.
The family, of Stowmarket, Suffolk, say the diagnosis has given them hope as they now have a reason for her crazy diet. They hope that by the age of 20 she will be able to go to a restaurant and eat anything on the menu."

Encapsulating javascript objects (xmlhttprequest)

As much as I loathe Javascript objects, using them gives the developer control and limit the opportunity of overriding existing Javascript. What I really wanted to do is encapsulate the xmlhttprequest into a nice class. Unfortunately, xmlhttprequest itself uses a caller function, onreadystatechange. This proves a huge challenge. Essentially, you want to include a function/method to handle the call. But believe me, this is a headscratcher. One interesting technique is to take a copy of the class instance before running the onreadystatechange function. You then have scope to the global instance and as well as the current instance as demonstrated at mike chambers. Unfortunately, it looks like firefox and ie handle things a little different. I tried to set a text attribute for my class within the caller function, to my surprise, Internet Explorer sets it but for some reason Firefox has it undefined and only used my text attribute in a local scope. Another solution is provided hunlock. This looks to be a useful module indeed, exactly what I am looking for. But once again, firefox doesn't appear to like it.

Javascript Objects

I remember a long time ago in a job interview, saying that there was no such thing as javascript objects. This was when the notion of javascript objects was introduced on very hoky browsers like Netscape and IE. It certainly wasn't cross-browser friendly then and it looks like not a lot has changed there. I still think Javascript objects and classes are immature. Looking at articles on Javascript objects, there are number of different notations that could give average developer a nightmare. For instance this oop javascript guide gives a thorough overview how to construct a javascript class properly. However, I do not like the idea of having to explicitly utilise such functions as makeConstructor, defineMethod, defineType, instantialize, getClassName. That said, the article is spot on its assessment of Javascript OOP...

"What you may say is 'Hey, the syntax is too complicated! Writing those syntaxes will frustrate me ...'
Actually, JavaScript is not an Object Oriented Programming language. But we create context so we can do OOP. And once the syntax is too complicated, we can simplify them. But I consider borrowing the existed mature Java language would be a better choice. That is, we can write in the style of Java, which is sure an OOP style language, and then we converts the Java codes into JavaScript codes, which is somewhat syntactic complicated. And then we have a great thing."

Fortunately, there are more simpler articles that demonstrates ways of creating Javascript objects, howtocreate, mozilla and mckoss still use the newly created class' prototype object. The only benefit I see, it gives you a chance to define functions and attributes for later and also can separate functions and attributes leaving the main class constructor. However, if you are comparing against natural OOP language like Java, C++ and C#, you usually do not have to define these functions and objects explicitly and you can incorporate methods and attributes into your classes (that you would normally see in naural OOP languages) as demonstrated in these even simpler articles from daaq and asp-ajax.

Also stumbled some interesting article on using JSON objects from hunlock and some useful javascript inheritance techniques in prototypejs.

It costs one quid..

As you may know in the UK, the cost of petrol is now over one pound per litre. Another bone of contention is the price of eggs. The price of a normal box of half dozen eggs used to be 65 to 70p but to my horror I discovered they were now selling at 99p! I've noticed the similar excessive increase in price for mixed grapes and salmon at my local supermarket.
The egg price has been picked up in the digital spy forums and could this be the reason for the price increase?

London Perl Workshop

Yesterday, I attended the London Perl Workshop just to see what stuff is the out there in the Perl world. There was some interesting stuff discussed. I should look into more of these details. I badly need a new (used) desktop with Linux. I'm still of the opinion things are better that way for Perl development. I bumped into a couple of acquaintances as well! One of the funny things that happened was someone brought in a cowbell and played it at the end of the workshop and made reference to more cowbell in a Saturday Night Live sketch, which I started playing the video loudly.

I also bought a couple of books Intermediate Perl and Mastering Perl for work.
But I will have a look at it first. ;)

Wooshy Changes

I've decided to change this blog a bit. I am going to make this a more general tidbits blog rather than a technical only. So anything can and will go here. I'll just say what I see. I've been thinking what that might entail.

• Coding (Perl, Java...)
• Security (Issues, vulnerabilities)
• Social Networking (Facebook)
• Computing (anything not mentioned above)
• Sport/Gaming
• Entertainment
• Music
  
• News
• Travel/Food & Drink
• Misc stuff

I've started to post a fair bit on a friend's techno blog at michaeldaw.org