h4x   The useless ramblings of a web developer.

I noticed something odd this morning; no, actually I noticed it a while ago but I’ve just decided to share it. People that read bit-tech don’t seem to use their browsers print button. Instead they really like using the ‘Print’ link we’ve put on the page from AddThis.com.

AddThis email me statistics periodically and every time the ‘Print’ link is the most popular, by a huge margin, and it’s not even the first option on the page. I wonder what people did before we added the print link on article pages!

I was catching up on a developer blog this morning when I came across a post about probability of girls and boys. The problem that was asked is:

Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, you met someone who told you they had two children, and one of them is a girl. What are the odds that person has a boy and a girl?

The correct answer is 2/3 but initially I fell into the trap of thinking it was 1/2. I want to clarify why this is the case in an attempt to convince my own brain why it was wrong.

The explanation and comments over on Coding Horror say a lot of things but what I’m going to do is explain how I convinced myself of the correct answer.

—–

Let’s start some basic probability.

The probability of a mother giving birth to a girl is 1/2, and the probability of a boy is 1/2.

The probability of a mother giving birth to a girl and then a girl is 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/4.

The probability of a mother having two children of the same sex is 1/4 (two girls) + 1/4 (two boys) = 1/2.

—–

Now let’s think about the question.

The mother can give birth to two children in 4 different ways, BB, BG, GB, GG (B = Boy, G = Girl).

We’ve been given the information that one of the children is a girl. Three of the states where at least one of the children is a girl and two of those also contain a boy. Hence we can say the probability of the other child being a boy is 2/3.

At least that’s how I understand it.

It’s the end of an era really.

Since I can remember I’ve been a core part of bit-tech. I joined the website when Koolvin, Moose, RTT and myself looked after the site featuring Koolvins mods and a few guides and reviews. The team behind the site has evolved from the core and the site formed a company in 2005. I developed the current site and CMS over a year ago and it’s been evolving ever since.

bit-tech moved into new premises in April this year and now the company has been sold to Dennis Publishing. I am no longer a shareholder and at some point in the future we shall be moving to the Dennis headquaters in London

I will be integrating with the Dennis development team over the next six months and hopefully the site will see some positive moves forward.

I’ve just completed a move to new hosting on www.bit-tech.net. The site was previously hosted in Texas, USA but since we all work in the UK we’ve moved the site to servers just down the road from the office. The powerful quad core servers are also structured slightly differently than the previous setup. Instead of having separate apache/php web servers for the forums and site we now have one powerful apache/php server running the site, forums and shopping with a separate lighttpd server for images. The hope is that dynamic pages will still load promptly whilst we’re getting dugg or slashdotted as previously the apache connections were being blocked up with image downloads.

I’ve also moved my blog and hosting for h4x.co.uk to the same UK hosting company and I’ve just updated my wordpress install to the latest version which is very fancy.

Not only that but we’ve also moved offices. Since TrustedReviews was acquired by IPC media bit-tech has found new offices and we moved in on Monday 1st April 2008. You will find images and words on the topic here.

That’s all for now!

Download Hiren’s BootCD to fix your computer.

I’ve decided to make a list of all the things I don’t like about Leopard or features that I feel are missing.

1. You can’t stack or grid a saved search if you put it in the dock.
2. You can’t drag items from the sidebar to the dock.
3. Resizing finder windows when in coverflow view expands coverflow and not the dir listing

The BBC have written an article about video game driving simulators and realism. Now this would be fine had they actually featured a game that was slightly realistic rather than PGR4 which never claims to be realistic. They don’t even mention Forza Motorsport 2 (I’ll give them a point for getting GT5 in there though).

Terrible journalism.

OMG THERE IS NOT A BUG!!

The FOV is the same on widescreen for a reason!

It was only Monday that I was saying how angry I was that we weren’t going to see Haze on the xbox 360. Ubisoft had initially decided it was to be a Playstation 3 title but now it has been announced on the PC and xbox 360 and to be released only a week later! This adds to the already amazing xbxo 360 lineup set for later this year, including Assassins Creed, Bioshock and Halo 3.

UPDATE

I’ve just read that the release schedule was incorrect and the 360 release might not actually be happening. Oh well.

A story on bit-tech.net today reveals that Manhunt 2 has been provisionally banned from sale in the UK.

Now I didn’t play the first Manhunt and I don’t really want to play the second but this is a matter of principle we’re talking about here. More and more the regulatory and governmental bodies in the UK are slowly trying to wrap it’s public in a thick layer of bubble-wrap. Even speed limits are being lowered all over the country because some people forgot how to drive safely.

I think my main point is that soon no stupid people will be able to kill themselves and those that have anger issues will no longer be able to vent there frustrations in a video game, their only escape will be to go out into the street and release upon some poor soul (and I’m not talking about water sports).