It’s been a great week of MMA action and the entire UFC Light-Heavyweight division has been turned on it’s head. These are the fights that need to be made coming out of this week:
Forrest Griffin vs Rampage Jackson
The interviews alone will make this fight do huge business. The fight itself is guaranteed to be exciting and either man as champion is great for the sport. Make this happen.
Chuck Liddell vs Shogun Rua
Both coming off losses gives a chance for either guy to rebuild their career. This one must end in knockout.
Wanderlei Silva vs Keith Jardine
As Silva was going to fight Chuck until Dana White jinxed it the day before, Keith Jardine can now step up and take his place. If Silva comes back strong in this one he could make a name for himself with casual UFC fans.
A quick note on the Jinx. I was pleased that Dana hadn’t confirmed his intentions to match Liddell and Silva up in December should Chuck beat Jardine. Of course he broke this rule the day before the fight and it was hammered home during the PPV that this was the plan. I knew Chuck was doomed as soon as this started as its happened so many times before. If the matches take place as above and both Liddell and Silva win the fight must happen at that point. Of course the chance of them both winning is very slim.
As for Jardine. He has a strange style, looks weird and can’t talk very well. You could apply that to Chuck but he is marketable whereas Jardine is not. The Dean of Mean needs to go down.
Where Houston Alexander fits into this is anyone’s guess.
You know you’re addicted to Google Reader when you start writing Greasemonkey scripts to make it look better!
Google Reader is far and away the best feed aggregator out there but the interface could do with some improvement. Recently added was the much needed ability to hide the side menu but in the same update they added a honking great search bar at the top, a bunch of white space and some more buttons at the bottom! So I just decided to scrap everything at the top and bottom - making it much more readable in smaller browser windows. Download here.
Before:
After:
Updated 27th September 2007:
Google added a menu that cocked it up so I have updated the script remove the menu.
It’s been coming in fast all day and I just want to say big hardy FUCK OFF to all the spammers hitting my blog.
I didn’t want to but I have introduced a temporary limitation on all comments coming in - they must be approved by me first. Once you get approval you should be set. Hopefully this won’t last too long and Akismet will finally kick in.
UPDATE: Fasthosts sent me this, from my tests it looks like no external services can be accessed from the site.
We are aware that recent changes to the network configuration of our shared hosting platform have caused a number of our customers problems, specifically in relation to connections from their websites to external providers of services such as XML interfaces and feeds. Our network team are currently preparing a fix for this problem which will be applied to the platform as soon as testing is complete. We hope that this work will be completed today.
We apologise for the inconvenience that this has caused. We advise any of our customers who have pages dependent on external services which are currently inaccessible to consider temporarily removing these dependencies.
So just waiting on these guys to fix the problem before normal service can resume.
So I tried to finish up my WPF app and I have done it up to a level where I can use it regularly. I just don’t feel like I need to put it out there right now and get inundated with bugs I have yet to find. Also got distracted by the awesome Ruby on Rails. Yes I am working with ANOTHER programming language. I personally blame Aston University for insisting we use so many languages making it hard to focus on just one. I walked out of that place with Ada95, Java, PHP, LISP, C++, SQL and some other crap I’m forgetting - it’s all on my CV anyway. So I know something good when I see it and Rails is definitely it.
Trying Rails was born of my frustration with Struts at work more than anything. Trying to find entries in colossal XML files and maintaining them is quite a chore. Add to that the database specific SQL that needs to be written at certain levels and sometimes I wonder if Struts is actually doing anything useful for me.
Rails is great because it uses conventions for filenames and actions rather than massive XML files - we stick to a naming convention, why shouldn’t the framework know what to do with the code you write? There’s also no database specifc SQL, you just write your Ruby code and it hooks into whatever database you have be it Oracle, MySQL or even Derby.
Don’t get me started on the way code can be hugely minimalised and the wonderful selection of pre-written standard procedures that can be plugged in anywhere. Rails is fantastic, it’s just such a shame that in the UK it’s only being used by a relatively (to Java) small number of developers in London only.
I can safely say a very fine weekend was had by all and I am eager to do it all over again when Zuffa comes back in to town. The new O2 arena is fantastic and was a great venue for some awesome fights. Joe Rogan was on a tear the night before on stage for several hours in front of the sold out Arts Theatre. There was a nice bonus on the way out meeting the ‘veteran voice of the octagon’ Bruce Buffer who seemed to be desperately hunting for a toilet when I asked for a photo. The man is more orange in person than on TV for those interested - must be that Las Vegas sun.
The atmosphere for the fights themselves was excellent. The Bisping reaction was more mixed than it seemed on TV. I had him losing two rounds with the third being pretty close. Rematch coming. The unification title match was hard for many people to keep track of as in some of the rounds it was hard to tell a clear winner. I scored it for Jackson 48-47 live and 49-46 after watching the tape because Rampage did more damage in the third. Oh and if anyone has a link for the fantastic fight montage with the music Baba O’Reily by The Who that is shown before the PPV starts please let me know as I can’t find it anywhere.
It seems like the next show for Europe will be either back here or in Germany but it can’t come soon enough. Thanks everyone for a great weekend!
Gordon Brown and David Cameron - leave the games industry alone unless your are going to get off your arses and support it financially like you do the film business. The latter of which has brought us such timeless classics as SAW and HOSTEL.
The British Medical Association - before you open your mouths why don’t you read ACTUAL FACTS AND STATISTICS about MMA before regurgitating the same crap the sensationalist main stream media wrote 2 years ago. The argument is so far beyond ‘human cock fighting’ now you make yourselves look redundant and obsolete.
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