This is a big pile of crap.. My new facebook profile picture is now:
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stuck on a train…I am stuck. I am stuck 3 or 4 stories above ground level. I am stuck 3 or 4 stories above ground level, on a train somewhere in the region of Burntisland. On the plus side I can read Wine Library. So not all is bad. |
Dear the internet,please, please, please stop writing blog entries comparing everything to the MacBook Air. I’m bored now. |
out of exam land (for a while)So, I’m now out of exam land for a little while. I’m now free (in some sense) for the next three weeks, which is nice. Over Christmas I read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow, I really recommend reading it (and buying it!) I’ve accumulated a large amount of links over the time, mainly through reading a lot of BoingBoing. First of all some awesome [citation needed] stickers and some video from the CCC’s winter conference (which I have all of thanks to my sweet JANET connection.) Jaanix is a nicely designed link blog that has some really interesting programming/geekery related things including 10 programming tips not to follow and real life XCKD moments. Finally, I was pretty surprised this week when Sun bought MySQL AP and I still don’t really know what to make of it. Equally mystifying is why the story has barely been covered… |
Train blogging…So, I’m writing this from the 0920 GNER from Leuchars to London Kings Cross. Fortunately due to the excellent Google Gears, I can read my RSS feeds and catch up with the 60ish unread items I currently have sitting in my Google Reader. I’ve recently subscribed to two new feeds, both of which I find excellent. The first of these is 43Folders, which is written for GTD addicts (like Merlin Mann, the author of the blog) and wannabes (like me.) I’d been aware of 43folders for a while, but not really paid it any attention. However I recently watched a Google Tech Talk from Merlin Mann about “Inbox Zero” which is a GTD technique to minimize the amount of time one spends in their mail reader. Having had this problem for some time, I found his tips really useful, although his comparison of the Blackberry to a spontaneously combusting cat a little tenuous (watch it, you’ll understand.) My other recent feed acquisition is Coding Horror, which has some neat tips and tricks for those doing webdev. I found it while looking for a good explanation of SQL JOINs (which I found.) So, a few items in, I’ve stumbled across Dave Gorman’s latest entry. He offers an an excellent solution to both the current “phone in scandal” problem and the postal strikes. From Kernel Trap an excellent initiative by the Linux kernel team to have a list of projects available for (CS) students. This is a great idea, no more lame “I’m going to build an online shopping system” or “the world really needs another CMS”-type projects. Students can feel like they are doing something useful and the kernel team get some of the work done for them. Andrew Gelman received an e-mail about bad analysis, that didn’t really concern me, but the last two lines are absolutely true. He also has a nice article about the difference between an article and a web page in academic research. I like the idea of publishing your research as a web page and getting it out to as wide an audience as possible. This seems like what research should really be about. Not just getting your paper into JASA or Biomerika, but actually getting the guy on the street to understand what scientists do all day.This does of course mean more work for the authors, but why be a researcher if you are not trying to tell people something they didn’t know about the world. Stephan Fry’s latst blog entry is on fame. It is, as usual, lengthy but ultimately satisfying. My favorite paragraph being: Is it fun? Or, as student journalists always ask, what’s it like? ‘What’s it like working with Natalie Portman, what’s it like doing QI, what’s it like being famous?’ I don’t know what it is like. What is being English like? What is wearing a hat like? What’s eating Thai red curry like? I don’t believe that I can answer any question formulated that way. So, student journalists, tyro profilers and rooky reporters out there, seriously, quite seriously never ask a ‘what’s it like’ question, it instantly reveals your crapness. I used to try getting surreal when asked the question and say things like ‘being famous is like wearing blue pyjamas at the opera. It’s like kissing Neil Young, but only on Wednesdays. It’s like a silver disc gummed to the ear of a wolverine. It’s like licking crumbs from the belly of a waitress called Eileen. It’s like lemon polenta cake but slightly wider. It’s like moonrise on the planet Posker.’ I mean honestly. What’s it like?? Stop it at once. Finally, a quick word about what else I’ve been up to. Mostly this week I’ve been attempting to do some work on my dissertation. This has been pretty tough, all in all. I really enjoy reading papers and trying to work out what’s going on, but sometimes it’s extremely frustrating when you reach an impasse and work stops for half a day until you figure out how you were being stupid this time. While I’ve been working, I’ve been listening to a few new albums I’ve acquired over the past week or so. My dad sent me Amy Winehouse’s album, “Back to Black” which I realise I should probably slate but I have to say it’s great. A really good pop record, not much more than that, but really great at what it does. He also sent me a Freestylers double CD, “Different Story, Vol. 1″ which is a whole lot of drum’n'bass. It’s great to code to. Finally, I also downloaded the new Radiohead album. A lot has been said online about it and about how it is going to change the business model for online music. I’m not going to echo all of these comments here, I’ll just say it’s an excellent record. Maybe not as good as Thom Yorke’s “Eraser” from last year, but still excellent. At this point the train pulls into Edinburgh Waverley, the train fills with the smell of brewery and I think I should probably do some real work. |
Software lawsThere is an excellent piece over at Coding Horror about how software spoils. My favorite extract: Letts’ Law: All programs evolve until they can send email. |
Exciting news!I’ve not blogged in a while, and this is not going to be a proper update. I just wanted to share the exciting news that there is going to be an Archers podcast. |
What I’m up to and some links…So, I’ve been working on some top secret programming at the moment. As a teaser I’ll let you know that it involves Python, a tube map and problems in P. On the links front: a nice user script to take Facebook events and import them into Google Calendar, a nice story about the St Andrews philosophy football match (see the section The Metaphysical Philosophers) and finally a cool app to use your GMail account as a filesystem in Mac OS. More to come on the project at a later date. |
facebook hackingI’m in Oxford at the moment and I’m currently sitting in the Green Cafe on St Giles enjoying free wifi, which is very nice! I’ve also just edited Ali Karbassi’s excellent Greasemonkey script to get rid of applications to also get rid of application invitations. You can download it here and it requires Greasemonkey for Firefox. In other news, I have spent the past week debugging web pages in Joomla!, Plone and Django, I’ve found that although I used to use the web developer extension for Firefox (and there is no doubt it’s a great extension) , Firebug is actually better. It has some really nice highlighting and DOM inspection features that make life a lot easier. It also doesn’t take up as much screen real estate when you’re not using it. Neat. |
Standards?I’ve been working on some webdev stuff over the past few days and I’d forgotten how much XHTML tables suck. I think this forum posting I found exemplifies the problem… |
Useful webdev tool: MeasureItJust 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. |
back in St AndrewsI’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… |
another odd mapI 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… |
Recovering…It’s been a tiring few days. I arrived in London on Friday, whereupon I was catapulted into a party of one of Elle’s friends. To cut a long story short, this resulted in me waking up on a bus somewhere in the vicinity of Holborn/Aldwych at 5 am on Saturday morning, unable to ascertain how long I had been on the bus. So, the rest of the weekend has been spent packing up Elle’s room in hall, which involved driving around South London in a massive mini bus for quite a portion of Saturday and Sunday. On the subject of me not posting enough, the Oddhead Blog has an interesting article (see particularly footnote 1.) In linkage: Greenpeace trying to get Apple to have “greener” products, Dr Strangeblix a game where you play Hans Blix (thanks to Lucy), Al Gore’s cool but messy office setup, a nice science vs faith diagram and Tyler Cowen has some advice for those like me who forget people’s names. Finally, a really cool map of the states of the US labeled with countries of equivalent GDP. |
