Snickers. Or is it a marathon?
I entered myself into the ballot for the London marathon yesterday. I would have done it Monday had the site been able to deal with my traffic. But it couldn’t; so I didn’t.
If I were successful in securing a place, it would be my first marathon, unless I decide to go for New York in November. (That ain’t happening.) I’ve done a few 10km runs in my time, peaking at 42m 30s a good few years back, my most recent such outing taking 45m 40s a year ago in the driving, driving rain. And 15 years ago I did a half-marathon for fun on my own, catching the Metro to Tyneside with a couple of quid and my house keys in hand, and running back home to west Newcastle, an informal 13 miles or so.
Anyway, my name is in the tombola and come September/October, I’ll find out if I’ve got a place. Fingers crossed, I think.
Twitter: givers, takers and lovers
As far as I can tell, there are three types of Twitter account. (I purposely didn’t use the phrase Twitter user, because I reckon there are many people out there with multiple accounts.) The three types are: givers, takers, lovers.
Givers are people who use Twitter solely to tweet, but don’t read other people’s stuff. Their number of followers will generally be a similar number to the number of people they follow. A good example of a giver, as it were, is @BarackObama who, at the time of writing, was following 764,329 people, and had 972,597 followers. I would hazard a guess that the president doesn’t sit down to find out what his 764,329 friends have been up to. @StephenFry is also a proverbial giver, following over 50,000 people, but I strongly believe he has another, more personal account with which he keeps up to date with the few people he wants to keep up with.
Takers are those who read stuff, but don’t tweet so much. They will be following lots of people but won’t necessarily have lots of followers, and are unlikely to have many updates. These are largely made up of the spammers of this world, and often result in closed twitter accounts.
Then there are the lovers. They’re unselfish, giving as well as taking. They have a more discerning list of people they follow. They might have lots or few followers, but they tweet regularly and they follow a sufficiently small set of people to physically be able to follow them. @lilyroseallen is a lover, following 17 people but being followed by 165,766. I am too, following a few more than Lily, but also being followed by one or two less.
And that’s pretty much it.
I’ve often wondered how people get so many followers. I conclude that they do so either by being famous or by following others and relying on reciprocal behaviour. I’m not famous, and I don’t want to go following lots of randomers on the off chance that they’ll “follow me back”, because then I won’t be able to read the stuff that I care about from the people I want to follow. So I’m quietly contented with the 66 people following me. Hello everyone!
Embracing interoperability
I receive alerts from Google Apps. whenever they enhance their offering—for GMail, Google Docs, Calendar etc. The frequency of the updates is impressive, although each one offers what could often be deemed a trivial piece of functionality. On the Docs front, they have 15 years plus of Microsoft investment to catch up on, but their web-based applications methodology allows them to release new stuff as and when they see fit, rather than wrapping it up in the latest version of Office and hoping people upgrade.
(A recent update on Calendar was their newly introduced support for the Chinese calendar. Not something that I’ll be adopting but impressive, I’m sure. Gregorian’s working just fine for me, thanks.)
I was notified of the latest offering at 2.32am today: easier viewing of .ppt and .tiff attachments from Gmail. On the .ppt front, this reminds me of Microsoft’s acceptance of wk1 and wk3 Lotus 1-2-3 extensions, both as formats which could be read and ones which could be saved as. To this day, 24 years after its introduction, I still love the fact that hitting forward-slash in Excel prompts you with the menu bar, a hang-over from Lotus 1-2-3 which I remember so fondly, no doubt with rose-tinted glasses.
It’s the only way to go. Be open, and people will like you and embrace your offering. Ignore the world around you and your competitors, and people will ignore you, or at best get pissed off trying to find middleware with which to interoperate (is that a word?) with what they need to interoperate with.
Anyway, users of Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions of Google Apps can now view .ppt and .tiff files online, directly in their browsers. A Flash plugin is no longer required. The viewer can also zoom in and out, select text to copy and paste, and ‘print’ the presentation to a PDF document.
Who’s on first?
My recent post about my struggle to keep up with technology reminds me of a promise I made to myself in my teens that I would always ensure I knew what constituted the Top 40—the hit parade, if you will.
The top ten artists current read as follows:
1. Calvin Harris
2. La Roux
3. Lady Gaga
4. AR Rahman Ft Pussycat Dolls
5. Ciara Ft Justin Timberlake
6. Beyoncé
7. Noisettes
8. Eminem
9. Metro Station
10. Lily Allen
I couldn’t have safely confirmed any of these to be in the top ten, although I’m surprised to learn that I’ve heard of 6.0 (Calvin Harris, Lady Gaga, the Pussycat Dolls, Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé, Eminem, Lily Allen).
As such, I broke my promise. Maybe the same trend will become true of technology.
New technology overload: help needed
I’m struggling to keep up with technology. Or more to the point, websites. I want to. But trends are becoming more short-lived, my learning curve is increasing in length, and maybe I’m not the intended target market. Either way, I’m struggling.
I get Twitter; and I enjoy it. I get Facebook; and in the main, I enjoy it, although its novelty has worn off. But I was introduced today to del.icio.us and last.fm, both at my request and both of which I was previously aware of, and I switched off.
last.fm is certainly too much for me right now. I have neither the time nor the inclination at work to listen to music, and my mobile plan means that I’d pay through the nose if I were to use this even to a moderate degree via my mobile phone. So I can strike that one off easily.
As for del.icio.us, it feels like the straw that might break the camel’s back, straw being represented by websites, and the camel being poor old me.
I will investigate del.icio.us, mainly because I think it might solve the problem I referred to yesterday. But if we can hold fire for a few months before introducing anything new that I might need, that would be marvellous. OK?
Bookmarks, unsubscribed content and RAIDed SSDs. (FTW.)
I access the internet from a number of places—m BlackBerry, my home laptop and my work laptop. Content to which I subscribe I access through Google Reader, and the stuff I like I either share or I star for later reference.
My issue is twofold:
- How do I flag content that I want to access long-term from anywhere?
- How do I share content from sites to which I don’t subscribe?
For the former, I’m talking about sites that I would have traditionally bookmarked. (Wow, how archaic bookmarking sounds.) But in the multi-device world, what is its replacement?
For the latter, I increasingly use Twitter to share this stuff. But shortening URLs from my BlackBerry is by no means fun; and Twitter as a medium is very temporary, even more so than shared items on Google Reader. I certainly wouldn’t have the inclination to sort through my tweets months from now to sift out the shared stuff of interest from the futile shite.
So, advice needed. How do I manage my unsubscribed content? And how do I seamlessly jump between devices and retain my browsing world?
Anyway, thanks to @willsh, here’s the inspiration behind the frustration: a video showing what can be done when you RAID together 24 SSD drives. Geekery at its best.
If the earth’s land formed a kippah
If, instead of being distributed as it is around the globe, all of the planet’s land masses were amalgamated to form a kippah-style cap on the top of the earth, it would come down to 27° 8′ 2″N. Everything south of that would be water.
The shore would be a line a little north of the Tropic of Cancer, running through Tampa, across the Atlantic, through the Canary Islands, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, southern Pakistan, passing a smidgeon south of New Delhi, through Nepal, Bhutan, the northern tip of Burma, lots of China, even more of the Pacific, reaching landfall on Mexico’s Baja California Sur, through the northern Mexican states and the southern tip of Texas before traversing the Gulf of Mexico and heading back to Tampa.
Naturally, these countries would not actually be there, their land having been moved north to accomplish the experiment.
Not sure what prompted me to ponder this problem. But I did, and here’s the answer.
Chinese restaurants: new numbering system
In similar fashion to the proposal to limit the denominations of stamps produced by the Royal Mail, here is a proposal to revamp the numbering system adopted by Chinese restaurants.
There are two alternative proposals on offer:
- All dishes take a prime number. On ordering, you simply multiply together the numbers of the dishes of choice;
- All dishes take a power of two. On ordering, you simply add together the numbers of the dishes you desire and quote that number.
Under each scenario, a number quoted would uniquely identify the dishes being requested. It could be argued that the scenarios are somewhat unwieldy.
Let’s take the former. If a restaurant has 100 dishes, then instead of numbering them 1 to 100, it would number them 2, 3, 5, 7, … , 541. An order for dishes traditionally numbered 5, 12, 36, 37, 44 and 83, say, would now be ordered by quoting the number 802,611,888,067.
Under the latter scenario, the dishes would be numbered 1, 2, 4, 8, … , 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376. (Wider menus would be required.) And the same set of six dishes would be ordered using the numer 9,671,406,556,925,932,569,888,784.
Just a matter of time, I expect.
Three thousandths of a second
Last weekend in the Malaysian Grand Prix qualifying, practice or some such, two drivers completed the circuit in times three thousandths of a second apart. I have no idea which drivers, but apparently it was significant, and led to Eddie Jordan (I think) suggesting that it was the equivalent of the width of a matchstick.
Based on Jenson Button’s pole position time of 1m 35.181s and the circuit length of 5.543km, he covered an average of 17.5cm every 0.003 seconds. Matches are generally 50mm long by 2mm square. So that equates to a match 4.36m in length.
Maybe Eddie meant one of those huge, ornamental matches that you can hang on the wall.
Twitter to Google Docs: complete
Having done some more playing with Google Spreadsheets, I’ve got something close to a finished product: Twitter integrated with Google Spreadsheets.
Permissions in Google Spreadsheets are global. People can either view or edit the spreadsheet. You can’t specify which bits they can and can’t touch. So I made the tough decision to split the friends sheet from the feed sheet. If I’d kept them together, then by allowing people to add new friends, they would also have been able to tinker with (screw up) all the logic behind the feed.
So you add your friends here; and view your feed here. There is a small (20 seconds or so) latency between adding your friends and their tweets appearing in the feeds sheet. This is because the friends sheet publishes to a web page, from which the feed scrapes the content. Doesn’t happen in perfect realtime, for whatever reason. The good thing is that you can’t screw things up by deleting and inserting rows. Up to 20 feeds can be added.
The CONTINUE formula behaviour for IMPORTFEED and IMPORTRANGE has made this much harder than it should have been—such a stupid idea, Google. Thanks to Francis for discovering the friendly versions of the RSS URLs.
Anyway, enjoy playing. I did.
Revised stamp denominations
I propose that the Royal Mail scraps all stamp denominations that are not powers of two. So the only stamps available would be 1p, 2p, 4p, 8p, 16p etc.
You’d only ever need a maximum of one of each denomination on any letter or parcel. For a 39p first class letter, you’d affix a 32p, 4p, 2p and 1p stamp. And for a 30p second class letter, you’d go for a 16p, 8p, 4p and a 2p.
What do you think?
Possible spam
An email crept past my Google for Apps spam filter this afternoon titled:
Re: *** PROBABLY SPAM *** {pharm_france_subject_27.01_edit}
Now Google Apps doesn’t play with the subject line of its email to mark them as spam (probably because they’re sufficiently confident in their ability to successfully identify them to prevent them from making their way in front of users’ eyes), so the subject line here was created by the spammers themselves.
Nice of them to warn me, even though they weren’t quite sure.
Google Docs does Twitter
I’ve just been futzing around with Google Documents (namely Google Spreadsheets in this instance) to figure out how far one can go in creating Twitter in a Google spreadsheet. While intellectually enjoyable for me, it would also provide a way of viewing Twitter updates in places where Twitter was banned.
The investigation came courtesy of a tweet from @davebriggs and a reply from @lesteph, each in response to Elliott Kember’s Spreadtweet.
So far, I’ve only managed to replicate the publicly-available feed of a single person. For want of a better subject, I chose @stephenfry as my proverbial guinea pig. And here’s the result.
It’s simply a list of the 20 most recent tweets from the subject of choice. Put the feed URL in C1 and the 20 tweets automatically appear. The page is best viewed in list view as per the link, but go back to spreadsheet view to see the logic, if that floats your boat.
The annoying thing is that unlike your standard, public-facing URLs (e.g. http://twitter.com/stephenfry), the RSS feed URLs are rubbish (in this case http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/15439395.rss). So there’s no way that I’m aware of, apart from navigating via Twitter, of predicting a feed’s URL from the user’s name.
Also, the feed doesn’t seem to update live as new tweets come through. I’ll find out in the morning whether it’s static (and therefore nigh-on useless), or whether it is merely a little behind in picking up users’ more recent tweets.
Next step, we’ll try to aggregate a bunch of users’ tweets into a single feed to replicate what might be a user’s Twitter homepage.
Update: here’s a slightly hacked feed of four Twitterers’ last 20 posts. The way in which Google’s CONTINUE formula works sucks.The way in which an undefined number of cells relies on the value of the IMPORTFEED function makes artistic use of it difficult to say the least.
Update: the feeds don’t replicate live in Google Spreadsheets, but they do update. (Refreshing the spreadsheet at 8.30am gave me tweets up to 6.30am.) This is gonna be big! Next steps: figure out how to automatically get the RSS feed address from a twitter name; and scale to n names rather than the four currently catered for. FTW!
Ender’s game
I won’t spoil the premise behind Ender’s Game for those who haven’t read it. (BTW, if you haven’t, go and read it now. I’ll wait for your return.)
I’ve often wondered the extent to which people’s judgment is influenced by the significance of the task concerned. I was recently prompted to think about it on Friday, when my brother was relaying his recent success story in golf betting, having converted £25 into around £450.
At the time, he was checking his phone for the progress of Jeev Milkha Singh and Mike Weir. The former missed the cut at two shots over par; the latter made the cut at one under, finishing the event 46th at six over par. Maybe the £450 has gone down a little.
(As an aside, search Google UK for US Masters Result, and the first result up is BBC News’ 2000 round-up. Not what I was looking for.)
If he’d had foresight, then he should have put £25,000 in the pot and converted it into £450,000. But had he done so, would he have been so bold with his betting. Probably not. The significant amount of money would likely have changed his judgment, bringing about less of an appetite for risk.
Likewise, when Kenny Perry teed off on the 17th, he knew he was two shots clear of the field, and was favourite to become the oldest ever winner of a major. Two bogeys and a woeful display during the two play-off holes prevented that record from being broken. In his previous three rounds, he’d parred the 17th on all occasions, and taken two pars and a birdie on the 18th. In the play-off, he secured a par on the repeated 18th, but on the subsequent tenth, he hit a bogey, having hit two pars and two birdies on the regulation plays of the hole. Had he not been aware of the significance of the shots he was playing in his last two regulation holes and the two play-off holes, perhaps his game would not have deserted him.
In the latter example, it’s impossible to divorce oneself from the situation. But where betting is involved, perhaps it’s not. And the same could be true for the gambling that constitutes the stock market.
If my brother supported his bets of choice with his confidence in their being realised, then someone else could place the bets on his behalf, deciding based on the confidence how much to pledge.
Similarly, stock market traders could divorce themselves from the financials of a trade by giving similar confidence and allowing their companies to trade (or opt not to) based on this judgment. Or does the financial implication for traders make them sharper?
On a somewhat related point, I saw an episode of Million Dollar Traders some time ago. A point of advice from the “professional” that struck me as ludicrous was that the traders should always have their money working for them. You should either be banking on the stocks going up, or shorting them and banking on them going down. At all times.
Perhaps this mentality contributed towards the collapse of the financial markets at the tail-end of 2008. Ironically, the advice was being given around the time of the major banks’ stocks yo-yoing on news of bad debts and government bail-outs. Surely a more sensible strategy at the time would have been to admit that you knew not what the fuck the markets were going to throw at you, and to leave the capital unexposed until such time as the uncertainty abated. It’s just a thought.
Britain’s Got Excel Talent
So, when will this show be airing? I’m envisioning Ant and Dec hosting a programme where spreadsheet-jockeys good and bad show off their relative Excel talents in front of a hysterical, screaming audience.
Cowell will be disparaging over sloppy VBA, Holden will focus more on spreadsheet aesthetics, while Morgan will be a stalwart for formula efficiency.
Whaddya think?
Too high for Nate
Lots of sites, both professional and otherwise, seem to be using a double-hyphen when they mean to use an em dash. It’s as if they know that they need a long dash, but can’t be arsed to insert one.
The double-hyphen looks hideous, but it’s as if I should give them credit for trying. How about trying a bit harder and typing ALT+0151 (on the number keypad, not the top row). Or if you’re in WordPress (I am, don’t you know), hit the Insert Custom Character button sporting a Ω symbol, having hit the Show/Hide Kitchen Sink button). The em dash can be found on the second row, fifth symbol from the right.
Here you’ll find more on the correct use of hyphens, en dashes and em dashes.
Index cards
There are a few things in life that I don’t understand enough about, things that I should understand better.
Specifically, there’s
- Religion
- Northern Ireland
- Israel and Palestine
I’d like some index cards giving me the key facts for each of these subjects. A card for each of the main religions with further ones to describe the tensions between them; some cards detailing the facts behind Northern Ireland and the perspectives of the parties/Parties involved; and a similar set for the whole Israel–Palestine situation.
Could someone create these for me? Thanks.
(Maybe Wikipedia could be my source for the second and third, but I wouldn’t have thought a consolidated view of religion exists there.)
Time to update my contacts
Something very strange happened to me yesterday. I was given the landline number of someone I had to call for business reasons. As is usually the case, I dialled the number from my mobile. When I hit the green button to place the call, the name of an ex-colleague popped up. The number I was dialling was already stored under someone else’s name.
When the person answered the phone (actually, their voicemail kicked in), it turns out that I had indeed dialled the correct number, and the number had transitioned to the new organisation.
I even Googled the number to confirm that the number I had stored for my ex-colleague was correct—results matching her company told me that it was.
The company she works for is completely unrelated to the one I was calling. So with 954 telephone numbers in my contact list, what are the chances?
Yippee. We’ve moved
OK. So the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the blog has changed somewhat. You’ll mainly notice the look-and-feel, I guess. For those reading this in an aggregator, you may not be aware of this, but will likely have noticed that the ten most recent posts appearing as unread, even though you’ve read them. (You had read them, hadn’t you?)
The reason: last night marked the end of a rather trying migration from pLog (or LifeType) to WordPress. A move from Sydney, Australia to Jersey, of the Channel Island variety as opposed to the home of the Giants and the Jets. (A cheap jibe at my New York readers.)
The main reason for the move is flexibility. pLog was very good at processing basic blog posts. But much beyond that was a struggle. Since the PHP upgrade, I’ve been unable to implement a captcha so have had to hand-delete oodles of spam comments on an almost daily basis, sifting through the shite to avoid deleting the rather rare genuine comments.
The migration has been in the offing for over three months now. However because of some “life events” for my new hosting provider (and über-migration God), along with some bits that were more difficult than they might have been, it’s been delayed. But now I’m proud to say we’re finally done.
Three comments were made on the old blog after the move. Hope you don’t mind, but I’ve merely re-created these with a slightly fresher timestamp here on the authors’ behalves. (One of them was mine. I certainly don’t mind.) As for other issues, none of the categories came across for posts after 2006, the time at which I fought against my natural instincts and started multi-categorising posts. These have had to be hand-tagged in the new world—over 1,000 tags in total. And no outsourcing in sight.
A few posts mysteriously didn’t make it across (somewhere in the teens), so I’ve had to copy and paste these across, applying the old timestamps. And our new host had to write some nifty scripts to ensure that my list of gripes is as short as it is. Thanks so much for that.
He’s also kindly put a redirect in place for the RSS feeds, meaning that you don’t need to update your feed readers. Isn’t he kind?
WordPress will give me a much more flexible platform, allowing lots more feed-type stuff, a captcha (oh, how I’ll miss the spam) and more integration with other applications, like Flickr. It will also allow me to be more flexible in my site’s information architecture, allowing me to demote the blog to a sub-domain with a nice, more professional front window to my world. All in the course of time. Oh, and the admin. interface is simply divine.
The new look-and-feel is temporary. I’m still figuring out whether I like the three-column layout (early feedback is negative), irrespective of which I need to work on fonts and spacing. But hopefully it’s good enough for you for the moment until I get a chance to put in the CSS effort. Let me know what you think.
Finally, I’d like to thank two people. Enormous thanks to Rob for providing the resilience and technical know-how to allow this site to live and breathe for the first 1,737 days of its life. Yes he can be a pain in the arse, but I really don’t know what I’d have done without him. And thanks also to Rob for providing the technical expertise to allow me to join the Wordpress world and agreeing to host the site and put up with my crap henceforth. (He didn’t technically agree to this last point, but it comes with the territory, as the other Rob would testify.) A thousand thanks to you both.
Rotating tyres
What a ridiculous turn of phrase (no pun intended), that of rotating tyres. I understand the principle, but given that rotating is what tyres are best at (with the possible exception of supporting children as swings in playgrounds in their post-driving afterlife), surely they could have thought of something less open to confusion.