readme

Wow

2008-08-29T23:26:00.001Z

If the wind changes...

2008-08-24T13:36:00.001Z

...you'll stick like it.

And maybe then you'd need help smiling without all that straining, gagging, wretching (sic, double gag - no triple!) and whatnot.

I didn't actually click this ad in gmail. Reality was sure to be less fun than what I imagined.

Flickr Photo Download: smile

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Colouring Books

2008-08-24T13:30:00.001Z

I've only just realised how much fun colouring books can be for an adult. Whole volumes of completely random imagery to flick through. Fish wearing hats. People with manic grins standing on toadstools. An apple. Some of it seems a little inappropriate or suggestive, though.

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Someone's patented scrolling

2008-08-11T08:57:00.002Z

"Graphical information having a full extent not displayable at once on a low-resolution display of a hand-held electronic device is displayed over a limited extent thereof at a variable resolution less than or equal to the highest resolution inherently available within the graphical information. The varying portion of the full image to be displayed is selected by a user windowing signal actuated by a user input device such as a button, roller, joystick or by simply moving the hand-held electronic device in space and having that movement sensed by a sensor such as an accelerometer."

From: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/EP1255186.html

Surely most websites (for example) are not visible on most screens. Does low-resolution mean anything lower than a very expensive monitor? And even if we only look at portable devices, my phone and PDA both allow me to scroll around images. It's the obvious thing to do.

garfield minus garfield

2008-08-09T11:32:00.001Z

"Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb."

garfield minus garfield

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LIghtning

2008-08-08T22:38:00.001Z

http://www.todaysbigthing.com/2008/08/07

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New camera

2008-08-03T23:44:00.001Z

I've only just had a chance to play with the new camera (Fuji Finepix f50) and although it's annoyingly noisy in bad light unless you play with the settings, it does take some very nice outdoor shots. This is of the railing on one of the piers in Weymouth.

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Music: Dogenzaka

2008-05-24T14:30:00.003Z

It's been a while. This is one of a few tracks that have been lying on my HD, getting attention only occasionally, for something like a year. I'll try and find the energy and time to finish some more. I've been playing "The World Ends With You" on the train, so this track is named after, Dogenzaka, a district in Shibuya, Japan.

Download: [ogg|mp3]

Putting a name to things

2008-05-05T21:32:00.002Z

I saw an interesting comment on slashdot where the author argues that the behaviour of entities like the RIAA, who manage to have the law bent around them, is leaning towards fascism.

It reminded me of an article I read a while ago (and now can't find - anyone?) that talked about names and labels and how they can be used to sway people's opinion of things. Un-american, communist, flip-flop, and so on. Names that, once they stick, are lethal.

When I saw the fascism post, my first thought was that it would be great to have this stick. Now I'm just wondering if wrapping up everything within the label, no matter how useful, is still just a dirty trick. Shouldn't we argue about specifics instead? Or do we need to simplify? I'd like to think that everyone can listen to the argument and make an informed decision, but is that just wishful thinking? I can't count the amount of times I've been stumped in arguments about the ID card issue because someone just spouts "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear". Not because I can't point out that this just isn't true, but because I don't have anything pithy enough or slogan-like to trump it with.

So, it comes down to a choice between assuming people are stupid or getting nowhere because nobody wants to know the details.

Robots get scarier

2008-04-20T16:36:00.002Z

Here's another robot that you can't kick to the ground. This is not looking good. Sci-fi has lead me to believe we would always have robots with a major flaw that could be exploited should they rise up against us. This one looks pretty hard to stop already.

I'm going to start having dreams like those I had as a kid and Tripods was on the telly - running and hiding from malevolent machines, never being safe.

Bessies

2008-03-20T23:51:00.001Z

The people on 313CR, 348CS and M04CR know about my love of razor adverts.

http://www.frederiksamuel.com/blog/2008/03/the-bessies-awards.html

Earthquake

2008-02-27T07:53:00.000Z

There was an earthquake last night. I was able to report it, see a map and watch other reports come in straight away here.

Favourite Lyrics #2

2008-02-17T11:53:00.002Z

I'm batch-posting blog posts today because I'm avoiding doing the work I really should be doing.

Plus, I really wanted to post the next lyric. It's from Push The Button, by the Sugababes, a track that will not die and leave room on the radio for something more deserving. My favourite lyric is just two lines:

My sexy ass has got him in a new dimension

I'm ready to do something to relieve this mission

Brilliant! Trans-dimensional asses! Followed by utter gibberish! Lovely.

Attached: an artist's impression of the ass in question, as seen in the middle of a jump between dimensions.

Favourite Lyrics #1

2008-02-17T11:42:00.003Z

There are lots of song lyrics I really like for all the wrong reasons. I'm going to post them as I remember/hear them. Partly because I think more people should appreciate them and partly so I don't forget how hilariously bad some of the pop music lyrics are before they disappear into our embarrassing musical history.

My first lyrical post is quite new to the radio: When the Sun Goes Down by the Arctic Monkeys. The Arctic Monkeys are one of those bands that annoy me. I really wanted them to be good because I liked the way the buzz built up and I did like the first track into the charts (possibly because I like dancing to electro-pop, like a robot from 1984), but after listening to a whole album of the same track, I'm just not getting it. I feel like they owe me. So does Amy Winehouse. I won't start on Amy Winehouse and how she ruins some pretty nice tracks by opening her trap, or how she really ought to be better at the artist half of "tortured artist".

But back to the lyric:

Look, here comes a Ford Mondeo

Isn't he Mr. Inconspicuous

And he doesn't even have to say owt

She's in the stance ready to get picked up

Why do I like it so much? Rhyming "mondeo" with "say nothing". Amazing.

Lasers

2008-02-17T11:31:00.003Z

If, like me, you've been put off having laser eye surgery because you just aren't sure that the laser might not be powerful enough, a new laser built by UMI might be enough to tempt you.

The image, and the great AdSense item, are snipped from this Physorg article.

Please note that at no point in this post have I used the word "frickin'".

Good, better, betterer

2008-01-14T08:25:00.000Z

This:

Is better than this:

Even if it hasn't got so many tributes, like these.

Games under fire

2007-12-11T15:52:00.000Z

I've been hearing a lot on the news over the past two days about "abuse" in on-line console games. The investigation by reporters highlighted the kind of verbal abuse possible with on-line games, especially those that allow voice communication.

Interviews with gamers give more specific examples of the abuse. One person tells us that he has heard people talking about his family, other people's families and "the N word".

When asked about it, Sony say that they have no way of stopping such behaviour in their games and much was made by the reporters about the games and consoles using the Internet, facilitating and enabling such abuse and also that it could be directed at children.

My own research has found even more worrying evidence of such abuse. Using an even more prevalent medium than the internet, some games [1,2] have no control at all. Many games rely on the common method of air compression and rarification to allow communication between players, offering absolutely no control over content. I have even experienced such "abuse" not only about my family, but often by my family.

More worrying still are games that reward such abuse. One game in particular [3] awards 8 points for using "the N word", while giving a player only 7 points for the word "love" and a measly 5 points for "God".

Even worse, this game and many others are regularly sold to children. This Christmas, many parents will be giving these games as gifts to their children, unaware of the total lack of control exercised by the creators when it comes to player-to-player communication.

I think it's clear that we need much more rigorous regulation of such communications. If the games companies admit to having no control, have no desire to implement it and wilfully allow this kind of abuse to be directed at the public and it's children, the government should step in to enforce it. If the government won't step in and control what we say, who will? Who's responsible?

Please, won't somebody think of the children?

References:

Possibly the best thing that's ever been or ever could be

2007-11-22T23:07:00.000Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By-cF0W2JLw.

It's not embeddable, unfortunately.

Black Magic in video games programming

2007-11-21T00:41:00.000Z

This is a nice, short, easily understood article about Carmack's voodo sqrt function in the Q3 engine.

Worth a read even if it's just to pinch the magic number.

Context-aware image resizing

2007-10-22T22:43:00.001Z

We looked briefly at the context-aware image resizing video today and a few students wondered if there was an application or plugin around that implemented the algorithm.

I found a few, but only one complete one that includes the object removal and protection facilities. Have a go. It's written in Java and needs the 1.6 java run-time.

A very nice resizing trick

2007-08-22T10:56:00.001Z

This is a great video. It explains the algorithm clearly and shows it in action.

Blimps

2007-08-20T23:29:00.001Z

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=2943767&postcount=1

The killer app

2007-06-06T16:56:00.000Z

This is what computers, image analysis and the internet are for. We can stop now, the killer app has been found.

Something Quite Interesting

2007-05-28T22:13:00.000Z

I was watching QI, one of my favourite TV programmes, a few days ago using my shiny new Virgin media plus box doodah.

There was a great piece about a letter from Charles Babbage to Alfred Tennyson. Here's the bit of interest...

"In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads,

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.

... If this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest [that the next edition of your poem should read]:"

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one and one sixteenth is born.

Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

Googling brings up a slightly different version:

"Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born;" I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: "Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born." I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.

I'm not sure which is correct. Maybe both, if Babbage was trying to fill two blogs and decided to re-use a post he found quite funny.

This is clever

2007-05-24T09:43:00.000Z

A Google Maps mashup that shows you a panoramic view from a given point. The really clever part is the way it uses the terrain height to occlude things that you would be unable to see. It's hard to explain, so play with it and see.