I’m off to London this morning (nothing unusual there) on my way to Russia and Germany (something unusual there.) I’ll be checking e-mail semi-regularly for the next 4(-ish) weeks if you need to get in contact with me (Blackberry is seriously expensive.) I should be back in the UK around 12 August having visited Moscow, St Petersburg and Berlin. Not sure whether I’ll get to update my blog, but hopefully there will be photos on my gallery page.

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geek-end (gēk’ĕnd’)
n.
Spending the end of the week, especially the period from Friday evening through Sunday evening, partaking in geek persuits.

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Just a quick post, I’ve just started using the Firefox extension MeasureIt. It allows you to draw out arbitrarily-sized rectangles on a page and it will tell you their size in pixels. Useful.

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I’m in St Andrews for most of this week working for CREEM, mainly finishing the coding that needs to be working in order to release Distance version 6. This constitutes debugging and testing the mrds engine (specifically my jobs involves the optimisation part of the code) which is written in R.

In other St Andrews-based news, my next-door neighbour from hall, Fearghas will be on University Challenge on BBC2 on 30th July at 8pm.

In other news I have become a YouGov pollster. YouGov are the people behind the stats that you might see in the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times, The Economist and Sky News (amongst others.) They have a nice incentive of somewhere between 50p and £2 per survey you complete and also prize surveys (which vary.) If you fancy it then you could click here to join YouGov then you can say that I referred you and I get some credit.

Via Robert Scoble’s blog, scripting.com has an interesting take on how much Facebook is worth. Winer makes the observation that Facebook will soon be in the position that Google and Yahoo! are now in: to buy other companies. From there they need to make sure that what they do buy is inter-operable in an easy manner (he refers to Postel’s law) and stop people from having to put together their social network over and over. This reminded me that I used to use Orkut, so what made Facebook succeed where Orkut did not? I really don’t understand.

There are direct analogies between different segments of Facebook and Orkut. You create a profile, add friends and join groups/communities. Those groups/communities have message boards and users may write “testimonials” which are roughly equivalent to the “wall” of Facebook. This leads me to believe that it was less features and more timing and promotion that lead Facebook to be way ahead of Orkut. Before they were bought up by Google, Orkut was inviation only (I got my invitation as a trade for a gmail invite.) This lead to an online community where everyone knew each other since invitations were given by other members. The neat side-effect of this was you could trace a path of people between you and any other member. This was cute but meant that the membership was made up of friends-of-friends-of engineers who worked for Orkut. Maybe this was the root of the problem. Maybe it was the purple colour scheme…

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I quite like this odd map of the USA, however I worry that it is mainly because it makes the US look more like it does in Risk…

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