The special one...

Evidently, we seemingly still miss Jose Mourinho and his wit that Setanta have brought him for "I'm on Setanta Sports". It's funny as hell. The following video is the special one's debut...



More can videos can be seen from this youtube profile

Weekly Wrap (11/1/2008)

Music Dept.
So the X-Factor winner, Leon Jackson's version of 'When you believe' holds on to the UK topspot. It really does pale in comparison with the version that Whitney and Mariah did originally. Soulja Boy Tellem moves up to #2 whilst the best selling single of 2007 and ex X-Factor winner Leona Lewis is #3 with 'bleeding love'. The chart has a christmas hangover feel about it with a number of songs re-entrying the top 40. It's funny that a number of artists have more than one song in the top 40. Amy Winehouse has 2 (valerie, back to black). Kate Nash has 2 (pumpkin song, foundations). Mika has 2 (relax take it easy, grace kelly). Scouting for girls have 2 (elvis ain't dead, she's so lovely). Sugababes have 2 (about you now, change). Take That have 2 (rule the world, shine). Timbaland has 2 (apologize, the way i are). Whilst Rihanna is the greediest of them all with 3 (shut up and drive, umbrella, hate that i love you). Come on guys, give us struggling acts a chance to chart in the UK. ;)
New songs that could be in the charts real soon include: Ringo Starr's song, 'Liverpool 8' that commerates Liverpool as the european city of culture for 2008. Also Bodyrox and Luciana are back again with "What planet you on" and Queen's "Say its not true".

Football Dept.
Big Sam Allardyce has been axed from the toon and the favourite to take over is Harry Redknapp. Really desperate times up in Newcastle. Well, it kind of serves them right for going through managers like Elizabeth Taylor went through husbands. Big Sam should have never left Bolton in the first place. He was building a useful outfit there. Bolton haven't been the same neither and now Nicolas Anelka has joined Chelsea. The first thing I thought of was the next Arsenal/Chelsea is going to be even more spicy, remember the acrimonious way he left the Arse? Meanwhile at 'ex-charlton united', more injuries to worry about Scott Parker is out until February with a knee injury. Interestingly, I read that Alan Curbishley describes him as a trojan. What is Curbs trying to say? When used, he unloads a number of commands without the manager's consent? Or even worse, Parker is not getting enough action at home... yes m'lady!
Got to love the cup competitions. In the FA Cup, Havant & Waterlooville are the only non-league side still in it and could face Liverpool in the 4th round of the cup. It's probably unlikely though as Havant have to get pass Swansea, whilst the mighty Liverpool have to negogiate Luton. Mind you, both Liverpool and Havant are at home for their 3rd round replays. This weekend sees the Scottish version. Good luck to the non-league sides, Cove Rangers, Huntly and Linlithgow. Cove Rangers probably have the best chance. The big two, Celtic and Rangers play the two Stirling sides. Celtic take on bottom of Scottish first division, Stirling Albion whilst Rangers take on perennial Scottish third division strugglers, East Stirling. They always used to finish at the bottom of the lowest division in the Scottish leagues.
Not much worth betting on here. Liverpool really need to start winning badly and should get the win (8/11) at Middlesborough. Charlton have got to start winning at home soon if they want automatic promotion and against Blackpool that's not going to be easy. The last time they played each other it was in the cup and Charlton were lucky to win 2-1 that day. But odds of 5/6 for the home win does look generous. Arbroath (11/10) should get the better of bottom of Scottish third division side Forfar.

Racing Dept.
The weather has been bad in the UK. It's been raining and windy too. Saturday's main race is the Lanzarote handicap hurdle at Kempton. You probably want to be lower in the handicap (i.e. carrying little weight here) and Panjo Bere ought to win, considering the horses it beat in the last outing have gone on to win subsequently. One horse that could be interesting for a place (about 22/1) is La Dame Brune who won a couple of hurdle races last year but has really not had the opportunity to shine so far this year (fell early in one race). A plus is she is carrying little weight in this race.

NFL Dept.
Getting close to the superbowl. Down to 8 teams in what the Americans call the AFC/NFC divisional play-offs (why not call it quarter-finals like normal people;) Statistically, New England Patriots should win it easily, after all they did go the entire season undefeated. Mind you, you have to remember that each team do not play every other team in the NFL. So New England may play a team that have not played before in the play-offs and could be vulnerable. New England and Indianapolis should get through to the AFC final and the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers should get through to the NFC final.

Tennis Dept
With the Australian Open not far away, there's a warning of a russian mafia threat trying to bribe tennis players into dropping matches. But the ATP are taking steps to try stop corruption. This was highlighted when Nikolay Davydenko lost controversially to Martin Vassallo Arguello. There are clues as to when a match maybe fixed. Irregular betting patterns is usual way of noting something might be up. In that event, the market and all bets concerned are voided. Sometimes, this may not happen in it. I am waiting for the day, that a game is called off/delayed due to irregular betting patterns. Any sport can be affected. Horse racing and football to be a name couple.
Meanwhile, Andy Murray looks in good nick for the Austrlian Open after winning the Qatar Open last week. Will he win a grand slam this year?

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?