Monthly Archives: June 2006

Musketeer Formation

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Today is crunch day for England in the world cup
It’s their match in the last 16 against Ecuador at 4pm.
While the team can take heart at winning the group, things have not gone well in the tournament.
They looked ordinary in the opening match, beating Paraguay 1-0 with an own goal from their defenders
Lacklustre against Trinidad & Tobago until the last 10 minutes when it seemed to dawn on them that they needed to win
Drawing against Sweden was a real downer, but not nearly as bad as losing Michael Owen in the first 3 minutes with a knee injury. He hadn’t looked fit in the previous two matches either.

England coach Sven Goran Eriksson’s decision to bring 4 strikers (two of which were injured to start with) is now beginning to look foolish, to the extent that he is going to have to change the team’s formation from it’s usual 4-4-2 formation (4 defenders, 4 midfielders and 2 strikers) to a rather odd one: 4-1-4-1 which doesn’t really have a name, as it is a variation on the 4-5-1 but with one of the midfielders dropping back. And as the title suggests, the best name i’ve heard given to it is the “Musketeer Formation”. Why? Because it’s

One Four All and All Four One

I’ve tried to find a photo of the 4-1-4-1 but have failed and my scanner is throwing a strop
So, you’ll have to settle for 4-4-2:
4-4-2 formation
and 4-5-1:

To get 4-1-4-1 you need to drop the defensive midfielder further back into a position inbetween the midfield and the defenders. You would also push the centre midfielders up, allowing a flat 4 midfield in front of the 4-1 at the back, and then the lone striker

4-4-2 has become a bit of a standard formation in modern football, and 4-5-1 is what was used by the Brazillian champions of the 2002 world cup

Michael Carrick is expected to play in the defending “midfield” role and Wayne Rooney will play as the lone striker. He will get support from Beckham, Lampard Gerrard and Joe Cole who will be the line of 4 attacking midfielders who will provide the balls through.

The best attacks are expected to come down the left wing from Ashley Cole who will play on the left of the line of 4 defenders (the other three likely to be Owen Hargreaves on the right and John Terry & Rio Ferdinand in the middle). The two coles (who are not related) have provided the best through balls and it was Joe Cole who produced the 2nd goal against England.

It is a huge gamble by Sven, but he doesn’t have too many other options.
He has Peter Crouch, but he will need to keep someone in reserve in case Rooney gets injured as Rooney himself isn’t 100% after recovering from his Broken Metatarsal injury

There is one other striker who is fit, but he is more of a right winger and has never played a full international match (other than the England B fixture against Hungary which i don’t think counts). I am of course referring to 17 year old Theo Walcott. Players cannot be added to the squad mid-tournament so it is hard to see where to go from here if they overpower Ecuador – who are a strong team and have had no real problems reaching the last 16.

If it is looking good 3/4 of the way through the match and England have a 2-0 lead, Sven may consider bringing Walcott on to see how he can use him, but in reality he’s unlikely to play any real part in the competition.

I don’t want to be too pessimistic, but I don’t like the look of this formation, but if it comes off it could potentially win them the tournament

Completely unrelated, I’ve disabled the views plugin until i can figure out why it randomly stopped working as it was beginning to annoy me

Nokia and Siemens Merge

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There was big news this week in the telecoms markets as Finnish mobile phone company Nokia and German Telecoms (incl mobiles) & technology monster Siemens merged to create one of the largest network firms.
Read the full story on BBC News here

Nokia and Siemens are to merge their mobile and fixed-line phone network equipment businesses to create one of the world’s biggest network firms

It follows the recent merge of France’s Alcatel and US company Lucent Technologies
But it reminds me most of when Sony and Ericsson merged their mobile phone divisions to start making Sony-Ericsson phones which had a huge impact on the market about 5 years ago.

Nokia are already the most common phones that I come across – I’m onto my 3rd or 4th one and my next phone will probably be a Nokia. Their intuitive menu system and reliability makes them a good choice of manufacturer. I’ve also had a couple of Siemens mobiles too and found them to be good value for money (they were very cheap) and it was only after i’d thrashed them for about 1 1/2 years that things started to go wrong. They also have very funky blue backlights, though this deal seems to be more related to the carrier network as opposed to the phones themselves

Beware of the Cat

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beware of the cat
This article appeared in the paper last week and features some incredible pictures of what cats are capable of including one where a ginger cat called Jack forced a black bear to seek refuge up a tree in New Jersey.
Unfortunately while the article is available online they don’t put the photos with it, so i’ve had to google it up, so here’s the link to an article on BBC news with picture
It says it’s a tabby, but Jack looks more like a ginger tom to me!

there’s another photo on this link where you can see some close ups

The picture in the article also had a couple of other photos of cats with mice, birds and rabbits looking very smug about their catches

I am a huge cat fan but i think this particular cat, Jack, has taken things a bit far. Remember, Black Bear:
american black bear
1.5m tall
~ 500lbs
Big claws that can rip through flesh
Big Teeth
Loud growl
Bounds around the forest looking scary

Ginger Cat:
~ 10lbs
Sleeps 16 hours a day: catnap
Likes being stroked
Lives in human houses
Has small claws that would feel like a massage compared to bear claws: claws
and while their teeth are designed for flesh it would be difficult for a it to cause damage to an animal bear-sized: yawning cat

That must’ve been one terrified bear

On a sidenote, it has been pointed out by MHC that my views plugin isn’t working properly. Haven’t had a chance this week to look into fixing it, so i may end up disabling it at some point if it doesn’t work for this post

My G4 and why I still haven’t changed it!

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I’ve been saying for about the past 3 years that I need to replace my Mac (and before anyone gets excited no I still have the same Mac).

It’s now 5 and a half years old – the longest i’ve ever kept the same computer going and been through more upgrades than any other. In that time there has not been a single mac that I have wanted to buy to replace it. Apple’s systems with PPC processors are also not as easy (or cheap) to upgrade processors and even then the motherboard would hold it back.

I really wanted to replace it this summer, especially since I’m going to be going to Boston in September for my cousin’s wedding and could get a good deal if i “smuggle” it in with my luggage. However, the intel mac mini was a horrific disappointment with it’s low spec graphics and SATA laptop hard drive. Wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole as it has waste of money written all over it. Am kinda hoping there’ll be a mini tower when apple upgrade the Powermac G5s to Intels in the next couple of months as that might actually tempt me.

If not, you never know with macs being so similar to wintels i might finally give in to my threats that i’ve been saying the past few years that i’d buy a wintel box and install linux on it! Having said that the other thing i’ve also been saying is the only thing that’s kept me a mac user is the OS, so maybe not!

Anyways, let me tell you a little bit about my current mac

Bought it, a 1st generation G4 Powermac 450MHz in September 2000. I actually got the 400MHz version a month previously not knowing that I couldn’t fit an internal CD burner despite being told I could do by the useless sales rep at PC World
I had it for one day all set up and took it back the next day on the premise that they could fit the second optical drive only to be told that not only was it not possible, but the sales rep who sold it to me wasn’t there that day (how convenient!).

At that point I’d had enough and returned the whole thing. A mate told me i should’ve locked out the DVD drive by putting in a region 1 and 2 disc repeatedly till it hardware locked the thing just to annoy them before returning it!
A month later I bought the next one up from a different shop (450MHz) knowing what I was getting into and it came with a zip drive which i thought might be useful and AGP which would be a huge benefit later.

Realising I had no way to copy files from my old mac to this one and also not having a floppy drive, I bought an external CD burner which used USB 1.1 and discovered a way to use the serial connectors through two modems to transfer files at 1k/s between the two macs. Neither were particularly good. In the end i bought an ethernet card for the old mac (much better) and the 2x/4x cd burner wasn’t brilliant.

I kept the original setup for a few years until i needed to buy OSX 10.2 which came with Quartz Extreme for which the ATI Rage Pro wasn’t supported. Living in my student house with windows users I realised there was a money saving way to upgrade the graphics card. I did my research and with this knowledge went to a computer fair and paid a very cheap £20 for a OEM Geforce 2 graphics card which was just good enough. We flashed the bios on a windows machine and it worked first time in OSX.

The next upgrade was the CaseMod which turned the machine into basically what it is now. It gave me what i wanted in the first place and relegated the external cd burner to the closet – anyone want a 4x matsushita cd burner which has been sat in a box for 3 years? Works perfectly well, it’s just very slow and worthless these days!

However, it now has two 120Gb internal hard drives and all the other good stuff. The zip drive it originally came with is sat on a shelf somewhere since no one else uses zip disks (esp 100Mb ones).

And if anyone’s after any replacement bits for their G4 case i’ve got one sat in the cupboard – i broke the logic board tray so i can’t use that but the rest is in perfectly good nick and not doing anything. Keep meaning to sell it off on ebay, but these days i can’t stand the place!

Well, there’s my rambling, I hope there’s good news at this summer’s WWDC August 7th-11th. And it will mean that I will be able to replace my long serving mac with something more modern, as it’s got to the point where I cannot upgrade the parts that I want to anymore as I found out when I tried to upgrade the graphics card. The conclusion I came to was that if I wanted to ebay was the only way to proceed.

Posted in Mac

Last Couple of weeks

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I haven’t posted anything new on here for a couple of weeks cos it’s been a little bit hectic both socially and workwise. It was a long weekend two weekends ago and I ended up doing four days drinking in 10 pubs with a few mates.
Then the next weekend was the first day this summer where it’s actually been nice so I took advantage of it with a trip to see a bloody shakespeare play Titus Andronicus at the London Globe Theatre – it’s an almost exact replica of the original from Shakespeare’s time in nearly the same location

Afterwards I ended up in a party till 4am full of Greeks, Spanish, French and Dutch

Which reminds me a blog update: I’ve installed another wordpress plugin a while back but thought i’d mention it, to keep the spam out. It’s called Spam Karma 2 and seems to be doing a good job.

Monday afternoon saw Sri Lanka win the second test against England levelling the 3 match test series 1-1 where the first match was a draw. This will give the Sri Lankans huge confidence as England are currently number 2 in the test rankings. England on the other hand have a tough few months with the one day series coming up where they have not done so well and a test series against Pakistan.

Monday night was the first gig for French Car and the Bulimic Wizards who have been around in some shape or form for 10 years but have never played live. They have now made 4 albums as an unsigned band. It was a good gig with a strange combination of people there

I heard this morning that Mars Chocolate bars sold in the UK are going to be renamed “Believe” for the duration of the world cup to encourage fans to believe that England can win the 2006 Football World Cup which starts next week. In other world cup related news, I drew Ukraine in our office world cup sweepstake – somehow i don’t think i’m going to win the grand prize of £100 (Ukraine are 40-1 outsiders!)

And finally, I’ve been receiving a lot of invitations this week for people on myspace wanting to be my friend. Of the 10-15 who have invited me, I have known only one