12.28.07
Weakest puppet
OK, either I’ve managed to cook up some crack rather than the broth I thought I was making, or there’s a Weakest Link episode full of puppets. Roland Rat, Soo and many others. It’s wrong diddily wrong wrong wrong.
12.25.07
Discount shiny things
Check out the amazing amazon discount thingy. Shiny shiny for discounted money, oh yes.
12.24.07
The irony of cheap tricks
I’m a memeber of a social netowrking site which is getting much attention at the moment. It’s name rhymes with Chase Wook. The profiferation of applications you can add to it at the moment is amazing, and whilst I have no interesting in 99 percent of them, occationally they throw up the odd interesting nugget. One I “installed” a few minutes ago looked at everything in your profile, and decided which programming language most resembled your life. Normally these things should be treated with complete contempt and ignored, after all, if I was a fruit what about my life makes me more likely to be a grapefruit than an apple, but this time, it was uncannily accurare. I have no doubt that thisn purely based on the number of friends I have, or the lack of photos, or the frequency of swear words in posts, but all the same..
You are:PHP
You’ve somehow grown into one of the most popular things around, despite having little structure, consistency, or any of the things people generally associate with a programming language. The fact you’re so easy to get along with has helped a long way, but the problem is that things can get complex with you very quickly.
I could have written that, if I was a bit more honest with myself, and a little more eloquent.
12.23.07
Hardware uplinking?
Wouldn’t it be cool if my separates stereo could fire data up to last.fm? CD text and a little bit of hardware, it should be possible shouldn’t it?
12.20.07
STOP LOOSING OUR DATA!
edit: Oh look - another big data fuck up
I’m getting bored of all these government agencies losing my data and it coming out in the papers weeks later, and I’m sure you are too. As such, I urge you to sign the following petition(if you are in the UK) - I’m rebranding it the tell me you lost my data petition.
Encryption people - it’s not difficult. openSSL is free, easy to push your stuff through and not terribily easy to break, so long as you don’t marker pen the password on the disc.
Future asperations
As I got off the tube to walk to my hotel this week, I passed a couple and their children buying Twix’s before getting the tube home. I think they’d probably been to the theater. I was staggering back form the office, it was 11 at night, and I realsed what a complete mess I looked. You can almost hear the conversions….
“See Johnty and Henry, when you grow older, and after you’ve passed a handful of A-levels, a degree, a masters and some industrial certificates, you to could be just as successful as this man! Look at his sallow skin, his sunken eyes, look see, the left one is all bloodyshot from sneezing because he’s ill but still at work!
You could spend hours trying to understand something thats intractable and complex with virtually no introduction to what it is, and then be told you’ll have to work right through Christmas and New Year, and that it is vitally urgent that it happens correctly first time. Imagine all that time you could spend away from your friends and family, and the hours on the train! Look look - I think he’s even got stress related excema on the backs of his hands! Wow - imagine that! Better than being a racing driver or a fireman hey!”
Fucking hell, how depressing.
12.19.07
Quick excel help
vlookup - really helpful. Will flesh this out later but for the moment.
Has three key fields, the value we are looking up, a table with the index key and the reference value, and a method of search.
VLOOKUP(A2,D:F,3,FALSE)
A2 is the value we are using as the index key
D:F is the table with all the index keys and reference values.
3 - is the left to right offset of the index key and the reference value
False - means “only give an exact match”
12.14.07
BBC iPlayer on Linux!
BBC iPlayer is available on Linux! Sing and dance! It’s making programs available in Flash, but it should work! Yay!
12.12.07
The Smiths speak the truth!
Anoter musical moment just highlighted itself. As I work from home on some mind numing dull crap (yes - thank you Microsoft Sharepoint - you are broken my heart and soul), Frankly Mr Shankly by The Smiths came on Last.fm (station based on Pavement). It’s all about how you have to quit you solid and stable job that will get you somewhere if you want to get somewhere you truely want to be. I guess it’s the musical equivalent of Seth Godin’s The Dip (which is excellent by the way).
“Frankly, Mr. Shankly, this position I’ve held
It pays my way, and it corrodes my soul
I want to leave, you will not miss me
I want to go down in musical history
Frankly, Mr. Shankly, I’m a sickening wreck
I’ve got the 21st century breathing down my neck
I must move fast, you understand me
I want to go down in celluloid history, Mr. Shankly”
12.11.07
UNIX tool uncover Guantanamo manually changes
Edit: Completely forgot to add the link! It is here: Guantanamo Bay Manual diff’d
Two copies of the Guantanamo Bay working manuals appear to have leaked out. No idea how accurate they are, but by diffing they you can see all the changes. Interesting interesting: “MP”s changed for “guards”, “golfcarts” changed for “Gators”, many other things.
Advice for the ill
I am full of illness. Here are my top tips so for (based on experimentation):
- If you think your tonsils are swollen, don’t poke them to find out. Really - dont.
- Even if it is really sore to swallow, do not chew up paracetamol, they ming
- Doctors waiting room are full of ill people, old people and children. They’re right up there with the 3rd circle of hell
- Fruit juice is acidic. Don’t even attempt it if your throat is sore
- Turn your out of office message on, and go back to bed for a few hours. Do not attempt to werk, you’ll just be rubbish
12.07.07
The miniblog
A little while ago I started running a mini-blog. The idea was to stop me posting single liners and make me concentrate on writing bigger and better through through posts (yeah, right), and also to let me continue to have somewhere to throw things for reading later (something I used to use the blog for a bit)
Anyway, I’ve no idea who actually reads it, especially as posts to it the miniblog don’t appear on this rss feed, so you could be missing lots of goodness. Luckily you can point your RSS feed to… http://del.icio.us/rss/coldclimate/miniblog and enjoy.
12.06.07
Last.fm and Pandora
I’m a big fan of last.fm, party because I’m a data whore (it must be useful for something! Must keep all of it!) , and mostly because I can use it to draw pretty pictures. Last.fm will recommend other music to you based on the theorythat if you like Song X, and A.N.Other (and crowd) like Song X and also Song Y, you might well like Song Y. Mostly it hold true, though it can be self re-inforcing, because you listen to what it recommends, and because so many people do, it keeps recommending that combo.
Pandora is different. Each track on Pandora has been “graded” in over 40 catagories by a musical expoer, thus creating a musical genome for that track. It can then create you a custom radio station based on a track you give it. Eg. You liked Song A, and it’s drum heavy and really long and has a pixel female vocal, and so do Songs B, C and D.
I have no idea how, and no time to, start comparing the data that the two systems hold about artists relationships. I would expext that the two are roughly in sync, with people listening to lots of things that sound sort of simalar. I like The Decemberists and The Shins, and they certainly play the same sort of festivals, and sound a bit simalar, so I imagine most people who like one probably quite like the other. The interesting data would be where two tracks, or artists, are completely different, but often listened to by the same people. Do Leonard Cohen fans listen to lots of Lisa Lashes hardcore mixes? Do fans of The Boredoms love a bit of Lancashire folk music
Somebody else harvest the data and show me the answers, I’ve just not the bandwidth!
12.04.07
The benefits of software as a service
The boys over at 37signals are very clean thinkers, and it is because of this that they are so successfull I believe.
The idea of releasing their software as installables (to your companies server) is very appealing for many, and there is a lot of money to be made. It has lots of advantages too (your bandwidth bill for example) and I suspect that many big companies would have jumped on the idea (you can imagine the coversations “Yeah yeah yeah! Great! Sell copies for peoples offices AND run it online for the SME’s and home users! Yeah! Can you make it run on mobiles?”), and many would have developed it as installable software in the first place, but 37 signals have detailed the reasons they are not doing this, and the reasoning is a great example of some wonderfully clear thinking.
It heartens me to see “We’d be a different company” at the top of this list, this is important. The more technical reasons (data migration, unpredictable environments, the need for a helpdesk, etc etc) and all excellent.
FOLLOW UP: Joel On Software has an interesting article about why they offer FogBugz as an installable.
12.02.07
A bear called Muhammed
There is a world of fuss about Gillian Gibbons, a teacher who’s class of children in Sudan named a teddy bear Muhammed, and was thus accused and charged with “insulting religion”. Now, my level of patience with religious crazies, but lets look at this another way…
She visited another country, she broke the law in that country, and now she is spenting 15 days in jail as a consiquence. Whether or not you agree with why she went to jail, can we not just move on, and in two weeks, she can come home and sell her story to the Daily Mail, who will no doubt agree that it was all terrible, and life goes on.
If someone from Sadan came to the UK and broke a law here (by doing something that is not illegal back home) would we expect that they shouldn’t have to go through the same process as somebody form this country breaking the same law?
12.01.07
Genius comes in small doses
I really love indexed, teeny tiny bits of genius on index cards.
