Young Rewired State

I’ve spent the last two days at the Google HQ in London attending Young Rewired State [hit link for more info about event] (#youngrewiredstate), and it’s been nothing short of epic.

And of course, I’ve taken some photos.

The schedule (shamelessly copied from the site) was as follows:

Saturday 22nd August:
10:00 Start
10:30 Planning session
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Hacking starts
17:30 Dinner
18:30 Home (Hacking overnight allowed!)

Sunday 23rd August:
10:00 Back to hacking
11:30 Brunch
12:30 Back to hacking
16:00 Presentations to Judges and Press
18:30 Prizes announced

On the first day we split into groups and started thinking up ideas. At about 4pm we finally settled on our idea: to make something very similar to RentACoder, but much simpler, targetted at talented coders who need experience in order to get a proper job. Here are a couple of screenshots of the final result (click to embiggen).

We decided on a PHP/MySQL project and as luck would have it, I was the only PHP/MySQL programmer in the group! So it was fairly frantic work (solid coding from 10 till about 3 on the last day) and we ran into all sorts of problems with versioning and people overwriting each others’ work in FTP, especially as the CSS people tended to be working on the same files as I was at the same time!

IRC

As with all hack days, IRC was one of the most important methods of communication. Literally everyone had their laptops out during talks, especially during the presentations at the end and there was a fairly constant stream of chatter on the channel. @samhale123 also put up a bot on the channel to tweet things over IRC – we had several hours of fun attempting to overload the script / twitter / the server!

Immaturity with Twitterfall

Google

Google is an amazing place with by far the best decor I’ve seen in a company building. The floor is laid out like the London underground and the meeting rooms are more or less in the right place for stations (with consistent naming). There are ducks on the ceiling and random awesome other bits of furniture / decor adorning the walls / ceiling / floor.

We were also given a load of Google freebies, including Google yo-yo’s, Google cakes, Google water, Google pens, Google notebooks…

This actually was a telephone box!

Google and Youtube Cakes

People

Of course it was a floor full of geeks, which essentially means a brilliant selection of geek T-shirts (I spotted several from ThinkGeek, at least one from the xkcd store…). The mentors (helping out with coding / guiding the groups) were also working in all sorts of fantastic companies; one of our mentors is working at last.fm, one at moo, one with the BBC etc. And needless to say there was a wide array of OS’ – the large majority seemed to be using Macs, those with PCs were probably split 50/50 between linux (mostly ubuntu, one debian that I know of) and windows.

There was also a brilliant selection of judges, including people from Wired (for some reason looks very familiar; came to school to give a talk maybe?), C4, etc.

Some of the judges

The presentations were good fun – there were something like 40 people from the press / outside making the buzz all the more exciting. And we (@workforpeanuts) won the “Wish I’d thought of that” award!

Anyways, this is the first hack event that I’ve ever been to, and if this is anything to go by, I’m definitely game for another at some point. Heck, maybe DEFCON next year… *MANY* thanks to @hubmum for organising such an amazing event.

And I took other cool photos so go for it and browse!

Microsoft – Week 2

This week has gone pretty quickly and I’ve mostly been working on the text analyser / summary program. I even managed to take some photos! The week started with @dumbledad (= Tim) showing me some of the visualisation stuff he and an intern had been working on to visualise a book, some of which will appear shortly on a site somewhere… It’s all in the spirit of new and interesting data presentation in the spirit of Information Aesthetics and he sent me a link to some stuff he did on ManyEyes – word clouds (or ‘wordles’) comparing frequencies of words in narrative and speech. Some of the other ones are more difficult to describe but I’ll be sure to tweet link to them when they get published.

The idea of the summary program was that it split the book into sections then compared a histogram of word frequency densities in each section with another histogram for the entire book, then picked out the words which were most likely to be important to the section by choosing the most unusually frequently used ones. The problem with that was the program wasn’t picking out main characters because they were being mentioned all throughout the book. So I was to implement a system to split words into three categories: local to the section, local to the book (main characters) and common to the English language. The existing framework for a two-way local to section vs local to book had already been written so I was to implement the three-way split.

Factor graph showing the model

By Wednesday I’d finished the actual implementation so I started trying to invent a visualisation. My original idea was to have a ’story line’ (no pun was actually intended) along which various threads would undulate, and the further out from the story line they are, the more important they are; think of it as a radial graph – I think I was probably inspired by the RealPlayer (yuk, I know) ‘cosmic string’ visualisation. I built a really flickery version as a mockup which was approved, and since I was by then starting to shy away from WPF I ended up learning DirectX overnight to implement a final 3D non-flickery version of it. After spending a whole day stressing over the edges of the scene getting cut off and finally realising I’d set the camera’s maximum viewing distance ridiculously low, I finally got it to work, and after writing some homebrew bezier curve code it looked pretty good (if I may say so myself); Tim tells me he’ll probably add a screen video of it to the online display of visualisations so … watch this space.

Another excitement of the week was a talk from TrueKnowledge (= TK), an internet answer engine. It’s similar to the famous Wolfram Alpha (= Walfa); however in my opinion it actually has more potential. Walfa throws manpower at writing new code to scrape information from various different sources on the fly which essentially means the more information you want, the more you’re going to need to work. TK on the other hand stores information in an enormous database which has a structure suitable for storing any type of information, and although work is done to ‘crawl’ Wikipedia and other sources for knowledge, it also sources the community for information which means it can gather lots of important knowledge very quickly with minimal effort. It also has awesome features of natural language parsing (ask it ‘what colour are red cars’ for example) and it can also give you a step-by-step explanation of the logical process that leads to its final answer.

The bottom half of the screenshot shows TK's stages of logical inference

It of course differs from Walfa in that it hasn’t got a tonne of Mathematica code behind it – its strengths are in factual and inferred knowledge as opposed to evaluating integrals. It’s currently in Beta and has an API (yay!) so I strongly encourage anyone who has used Walfa to give TK a go.

On Tuesday the weekly Mexican food van appeared – until then I’d never realised quite how amazingly good burritos can be! While we were eating we started discussing presentation of text. The problem is that a conventional layout presents the reader with a formidable block of text interspersed with some images which is difficult to follow and annoying to read since one always has to alternate between studying the image and reading the text. However attempts at producing non-linear presentations of information such as embedding text into the image as tooltips or expandable areas of the image etc. have always resulted in people simply not reading very much of the text and consequently missing out important stuff. The best solution we came up with is using an old method of collapsible clauses, just like collapsible code. For example, if a relative clause which in this case is italicised and relatively long yet somehow doesn’t contribute much to the sentence thus merely adds length and unnecessary information to the text making the ultimate meaning more difficult to discern is considered superfluous to the meaning of the sentence, it could be replaced by a small button that only shows the clause if clicked – such ideas are particularly relevant to German sentences which tend to have huge diversions into clauses before the verb is revealed right at the end. This way readers can quickly get the gist of what’s going on so they may study the image in an enlightened way, then go back and expand the text to get the full meaning.

There are also a few things I noticed about MSR in general. There is a strong sense of company loyalty – all employees seem to use Bing, and everyone I’ve seen even goes as far as using IE instead of Firefox! Using only Microsoft products to perform tasks however did make me aware of the wide range of programs they do produce – they even have Virtual Machine software and an internal proprietary alternative to SVN. I guess it does help the developers of these applications a lot if they have an enormous internal test group: all the employees and interns. There’s also pretty close integration with Redmond (Outlook + Office Communicator + global WAN shares) so feedback could be quite efficiently delivered. The entire place also operates in the spirit of trust – all users have admin rights (necessary for developers anyway) – which is so much better than what is implemented at school: a highly restrictive policy which, despite recent changes for the better, still filters out most protocols (FTP included) and in fact, instead of preventing people from doing things simply makes everything so much more difficult to do. Now I have to connect through encrypted VPN to use FTP…

Anyways overall it was a great two weeks. I enjoyed it hugely, I didn’t need to touch Excel, I didn’t make anyone coffee and I didn’t do any filing (who needs paper anyway? It’s a software company!) – instead I worked on real (and rather cool) projects, learnt some useful things, and made new acquaintances.

In other news, I’m off tomorrow to Cranfield for the Aerospace Challenge Finals – I’ll get to fly (actual!) planes, take lots of photos and it should be another great experience. They’d just better have wifi, though I’m bringing my Alfa Awus (ridiculously powerful) along in case of weak signal!

Inovazone

It suddenly strikes me that I haven’t been blogging much recently. Exams finished several weeks ago but I have been somewhat busy.

In particular I’ve been working on a new site for a client, Inovazone. In the words of the site’s inventor, Alastair Darwood:

How does an invention go from a scribble on a page to a world-changing product that advances humanity? The answer is that at the heart of the invention there lies a set of distinct and crucial necessities that the invention is addressing … Until now, the only way in which necessities were discovered was through large companies carrying out expensive research, or a spark of genius from someone who suddenly sees one and thinks of a solution. Inovazone is designed to change this. The idea is that users of the site post their ‘necessities’ (short explanations of problems, ‘necessities’, they think need to be solved to benefit them (or humanity)), or rough outlines of inventions they would like to see and anyone can browse the necessities if they want to and look for interesting problems to try to solve through innovation. This could be in the form of an invention or simply a quick online response to the post on our comments system.

Interestingly enough, there doesn’t actually yet exist a site or system available to the general public that serves this particular function by providing a framework within which ideas for inventions are openly submitted and accessed, so I agreed to work on it, especially considering the core of submitting and displaying necessities is a relatively simple PHP/SQL project.

Submitting a necessity. Click to embiggen

What I found particularly compelling was that, according to Alastair, everyone with whom he’s discussed the site has expressed enormous enthusiasm for it, and even a seasoned inventor he’d talked to had described the idea as long overdue and predicted huge success. Although I originally liked the idea and somehow felt it would do pretty well owing to its novelty, I for some reason assumed one would obtain mixed reactions in discussions.

Original image at http://rockstartemplate.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/social-bookmark-icon.jpg

In terms of the hard sell, we’re employing several different methods to publicise Inovazone. We’ve created a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account – feel free to follow us (@inovazone). One.com also kindly provide adwords coupons so with some SEO we might be able to appear in ads on relevant Google searches.

The site is currently about to go into beta testing. From wiki:

Beta testing comes after alpha testing. Versions of the software, known as beta versions, are released to a limited audience outside of the programming team. The software is released to groups of people so that further testing can ensure the product has few faults or bugs. Sometimes, beta versions are made available to the open public to increase the feedback field to a maximal number of future users.

The idea of this is simply to fine-tune what we already have rather than to add more features, though both these are desirable outcomes from this round of testing; though for me personally the primary objective is to see whether the system works well with a large user base. So for that to happen we need some willing volunteers to go test out the site: anyone reading this is welcome to join the test group. Go ahead and post as many necessities as you deem reasonable, and comment on existing ones. Try out creating new subcategories and send us feedback about features that you think should be created or made better via the awesome uservoice-powered feedback utility. I’m especially interested in bugs and vulnerabilities you find; if you somehow work out how to delete posted necessities or spam the site with adverts, or if the site spews out a series of errors while you’re using it under normal circumstances, get in touch (there is a contact page). Chances are the database will be reverted to its initial (more or less empty) state before the site is released in a few weeks’ time, so disasters should be recoverable.

Before you (readers) go, I’d be interested to hear your feedback on the idea of the site – do you think it has potential? Will it be useful?

That’s all from me for now. The site will get a working and hopefully regularly-updated blog pretty soon for general status information and news so you probably won’t be hearing much more about it from me.

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The Pirate Bay Situation

It’s big (and by now fairly vintage) news in the torrenting and general technology community that a verdict has been reached for the lawsuit against The Pirate Bay’s four founders. I won’t say much about the gory details of the trials – there are plenty of articles on good websites that will give you all sorts of facts; I’m just going to state some of my opinions on the matter. In case you don’t already know, the verdict was a jail sentence and a $3.6M fine.

Firstly my thoughts on file sharing in general. BitTorrent is used for a whole host of good things – I’ve used it on multiple occasions to grab up-to-date linux distributions and it’s a fantastic way to download without limitations on server upload speeds (private trackers have exceptionally high ratios and speeds but linux and other open source stuff tends to download fast as well even on public trackers). There’s also the whole debate about whether or not piracy really does harm the economy as much as Sony would like us to think. But personally I think there’s no hope for companies trying to shut down piracy because it stems directly from the entire point of the internet: sharing information. If torrenting somehow gets shut down (an incredibly unlikely scenario), an alternative P2P system will immediately spring up to replace it, and there are a great many out there waiting to be exploited. But basically what I’m saying is that an attempt to target the infrastructure of filesharing is just a pathetic way for companies to seek some sort of revenge for probably mostly imagined and definitely largely over-hyped and bloated losses.

It is transparently obvious that the trial is much bigger than just The Pirate Bay – the verdict poses a threat to the entire community of file sharing. The Pirate Bay may have had certain special circumstances that made this verdict even vaguely plausible: something to do with Sweden possibly. But the verdict has set an incredibly dangerous precedent – if the team really end up facing significant jail time and massive fines, it would serve as a massive deterrant to anyone even considering starting up a novel platform for sharing, be it open-source software, ideas or whatever. My opinion is that the entire spirit of a collaborative internet is being broken apart piece by piece, while the pirates will still always find a method of sharing illegally obtained and distributed material. The supposedly illegal side always tends to be far more determined to keep sharing than the average supposedly law-abiding person who is probably fairly ambivalent anyway about whether or not to share those photos on Flickr.

There’s also a huge amount of wastage. I noticed Isohunt have put a notice on their front page linking to some legal material. I wouldn’t be surprised if other trackers are calling their lawyers right now, preparing for a legal assault on their communities. I’m not saying lawyers’ pay is waste, but the sheer amount of effort and time going into nit-picking against a multi-corporate legal mob in front of an unconvinced and generally non-tech-savvy jury seems to me at least a somewhat inefficient use of resources.

And to keep everything in perspective, the recording industry are fighting against a phenomenon they themselves are helping to create. The measures being adopted to prevent piracy such as music DRM make life a misery for law-abiding citizens who pay for their music; for example iTunes forced all its customers to re-download and thus re-buy all their music just to (supposedly) remove one layer of DRM from audio files. All this hassle actually makes pirated music of higher quality than purchased music, a ridiculous situation created by companies like Apple. How can anyone blame me if I decide to download a torrent of a few songs (which I’ve already paid for) just to be able to play them in something other than iTunes?

In my opinion, it will become increasingly difficult in the future to download plain DRM-free music and films, and indeed the risk of being caught doing so will probably increase, as will the penalty. The current trend is that more and more companies are getting involved – once it was just bodies such as the MPAA and RIAA who were targeting file sharers. Then more private companies joined in for the money such as MediaDefender, and now even ISPs and governments have joined the witch-hunt. If you want my take on this, I suggest that if you already download and share pirated material, do so while you can and max out on it; the window of opportunity to get hold of clean untrackable media may well be closing.

Good hunting

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A word on email hoaxes and Mediafire

I was actually surprised both my parents were taken in by this one. This PDF file was being circulated all over ‘the tubes’ via email and both my parents fell for it and advised me to spam my contact list. I have no intention of going through the whole thing pointing out at every paragraph why it’s a hoax – it seems so obvious anyway – but this website does it fairly well for a similar email hoax. However I will say one thing which I think is highly important: please please *please* for all of you out there reading this who don’t already know/do:

If you see the words:

PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG ALL YOUR CONTACTS

especially if they are in block capitals, think twice before obeying automatically and unthinkingly! It is unbelievably annoying to receive chain emails, and even if you don’t think such inbox annoyances are remotely vexatious, your friends may differ with you: you are effectively spamming them.

If you already knew that, sorry for the rant – I get rather emotional about such things. If ever in doubt, it’s probably worth checking what hoaxslayer has to say.

Meanwhile, onto Mediafire, the file sharing service I’m hosting the PDF on: it is *very* good. Before I discovered it I was using Bittorrent and Rapidshare to transfer large files which were inconvenient at best. Mediafire is, of course, free. It’s ad-supported, but that can be corrected for with a decent ad blocker like Adblock Plus. in terms of user-friendliness, the interface is beautifully animated (whether that’s good or not I’ll leave you to decide) and clear to use, and the site is extremely fast. It offers unlimited storage, unlimited up/down traffic, unlimited bandwidth, and features no annoying countdown like Rapidshare or Megauploads before free users can start downloading. The only limitations are the lack of hotlinking and 100MB file size limit for free users.

Summary for the sake of clarity:

Awesomeness
1. The interface is beautifully animated (whether that’s good or not I’ll leave you to decide) and clear to use
2. Site runs extremely fast
3. Unlimited storage
4. Unlimited up/down traffic
5. Unlimited Bandwidth
6. It features no annoying countdown like Rapidshare or Megauploads before free users can start downloading

Limitations
1. The site is ad-supported, but that can be corrected for with a decent ad blocker like Adblock Plus
2. No hotlinking
3. 100MB file size limit

That’s it folks, those are my recommendations for the day: don’t be fooled by hoaxes and use Mediafire

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Brent Roos: A Short but Amusing Story

I suppose when you create a blog you’re signing up to being exposed to the blogosphere in all its glory, including the bloggers who really don’t deserve to be heard. Unfortunately there are some of us, me included, who find some of the stuff people say irresistibly funny; I hope you share my sense of humour .

Brent's Avatar

Many of you reading this may be acquainted, at least in passing and/or by word of mouth, with the story of a certain extreme nationalist American blogger by the name of Brent Roos who has recently attempted to lay comment-waste to this blog. So I reckon he deserves a post of his own for his efforts. His online presence took the form of a curious persona who seems extremely religious (Christian), extremely right-wing (neither of the US candidates were good enough for him. Neither was my – apparently insufficient – distaste of Communism in China, for that matter) and notoriously rude. As it turns out, it all made for quite a good laugh. Perhaps I should start from the beginning…

Some time ago I wrote a blog post on global warming. I thought it would end up passing by the blogosphere with little comment. My expectations were, I thought, confirmed until fairly recently when I was in China and had just blogged about the whole experience. The first thing I noticed when I next logged on was that this apparently crazy person had written a few quite aggressive comments.

Brent on Shanghai:

So, how’s the communism there? Funny how you mention magnificent things that put you in awe, but seem to forget to ever mention the horrific human atrocities by the communists there who have killed tens of millions of people — whose only crimes were wishing freedom.
Personally, I would never step foot in China. But then again, I loathe the communist.

Brent on global warming:

Blah, blah, blah…. 2008 is the coldest year in a decade. This is nothing more than alarmism and fear-mongering. 30 years ago it was global cooling.
As far as oil is concerned, if not for the fearmongering, we would be drilling for much more oil here in the states. We are the only country on the planet which has restricted itself from it’s own natural resources to the extent that we have.
What is taking place here is not unlike many of the other institutions that the government has seized over the last several months and years. They have seized the media, the banking/mortgage industry, now the auto industry, etc. The energy industry is more global so they cannot just simply seize that. So instead, they reinvent it, claiming that the current system IS GOING TO KILL US ALL!!!!! In other words, this is a takeover…wake up! We are becoming a socialist country right before our eyes. Granted, there are many who want this, because it is far easier to let the government take responsibility for your life, than to do it yourself. If you do it yourself, the only one you can blame when you fail is yourself, however, without failure, there comes no success.
All of the fancy words are crap when you finally get to the point. Global warming/cooling/climate change/enter fearmongering buzzword here/ is total crapola. Don’t believe the hype sheeple…

I attempted to be civilised while smiling to myself:

Brent,
I, and pretty much all scientists, still think the evidence points towards a long-term upwards trend in temperatures. The point I’m trying to press though is that the solution should no longer lie in this religious instinct of humans to make themselves suffer through deprivation and force others to do likewise. As Steven E Landsberg quite aptly put in his book The Armchair Economist, eco warriors are nothing more than irrational idiots who will do all sorts of unspeakable things just to get a few energy-saving bulbs into a house while completely ignoring the fact that the production of the wretched things is (supposedly, according to their own models of carbon dioxide and warming) far more detrimental than the gases emitted in the production of the electricity required to run the average 150W bulb. Children are growing up feeding on this propaganda, learning that electricity = oil = global warming = bad. Eco warriors are literally putting words in children’s mouths from birth, preventing them from making their own informed decisions on such hugely important matters. Fundamentally, I disagree with the eco-warrior doctrine: ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. I disagree with them. But what I disagree with even more (believe it or not) is outright cynicism. I like to think of myself as a sceptic, someone who follows the doctrine that through doubt the truth may be obtained. I don’t think much truth may be obtained from simply assuming everything the media says must be false (although I would probably be surprised if I actually tested that).
Is it a safe bet that you supported McCain? I think in that case that you and I will just have to agree to disagree on a load of things. Drill baby drill is not going to cut it. However irrelevant the oil situation is to the environment, I still believe abusing it remains a bad idea (for reasons outlined in the post).

At which point Brent became even more manic:

I’m not a Republican if that’s what you have assumed, nor am I a Democrat (Republicrat/Demlican). There were other candiates (good ones who care about America and the Constitution) you know.

It’s hilarious to me that you *think* that there is a shred of difference between Clinton/Bush/McCain/Obama despite the fact that most of their policies are identical on paper and are bought and paid for by many of the same corporate lobbyists. You have been duped!

It’s also hilarious to me that you think that you are so much smarter than I. I’m above your black vs. white mentality. I see everything through a crystal clear lens, while you observe things through the clouds of emotion. I’m really glad you feel good about what you’re doing. Unfortunately, it is a bit sad that you are totally wasting your life on bunk science.

This is a takeover, and you are on board whether you know it or not. By the way, it is completely untrue to say that ALL scientists agree. It is only the ones who like working, as the honest ones are being blacklisted by the rest of the Marxists who intend to carry out the New World Order –Clinton/Bush/McCain/Obama are all involved. Wake up!

Unsure of what to do (whether to laugh out loud or feel vaguely offended) I sent the link to a friend who, rather to my surprise, posted a prompt riposte:

Heh, thats what I love about the internet, the sheer comedy of the right wing nutters who comment on blogs. Ok, lets give this a quick look through:
Blah, blah, blah[his riposte begins to shatter Bryant’s article from the first 3 words, giving an example of the incisive wit]…. 2008 is the coldest year in a decade. [not true, especially in the ice caps] This is nothing more than alarmism and fear-mongering.[what a ridiculous oversimplification, at least respect the majority of the world’s scientists enough to give their theorems serious consideration] 30 years ago it was global cooling. [what’s your point? You give no evidence to discredit cooling, it just shows that the earth’s temperature is very fragile and volatile, and that human’s can effect it]
As far as oil is concerned, if not for the fearmongering [that’s two words], we would be drilling for much more oil here in the states. [try telling that to Alaskan inhabitants who do everything they can to prevent it] We are the only country on the planet which has restricted itself from it’s own natural resources to the extent that we have. [Britain has huge coal and sizable oil reserves, but doesn’t use them because secondary and tertiary industries are more profitable and less destructive, America is well advised to do so also]
What is taking place here is not unlike many of the other institutions that the government has seized over the last several months and years.[is the earth’s climate an institution?] They have seized the media [the same media that is constantly attacking the Bush administration?], the banking/mortgage industry[you mean giving it 700 billion dollars to help it out? Would you rather they let it rot?], now the auto industry, etc. [that is collapsing on its own accord] The energy industry is more global so they cannot just simply seize that. So instead, they [is the US government the only body claiming that global warming is happening? Until recently they were one of the only major powers to deny it!] reinvent it, claiming that the current system IS GOING TO KILL US ALL!!!!! In other words, this is a takeover…wake up! [you are obviously not clouded by emotion...] We are becoming a socialist country right before our eyes. [mm, if everybody would just see sense and spend all their money on fuel until they become impoverished, Capitalism would flourish, right?] Granted, there are many who want this [ooh, nice move, lets blame the communists to deflect the focus on the fault of the average american], because it is far easier to let the government take responsibility for your life, than to do it yourself. [how did we get here from climate change?] If you do it yourself, the only one you can blame when you fail is yourself, [is the Government banning people from polluting? No! Is it trying hard to look at alternate energy sources? Yes, how is this an attack on liberalism?] however, without failure, there comes no success. [that’s nice...]
All of the fancy words [that you don’t understand] are crap when you finally get to the point. Global warming/cooling/climate change/enter fearmongering buzzword here/ is total crapola. [in your learned and well researched opinion that flies in the face of the 95% certainty by the UN’s IPCC that climate change is anthropogenic Where did you get your PhD again?] Don’t believe the hype sheeple[witty play on words mixing sheep with people?]…

After a torrent of e-hostility from Brent and the substantial mirth that brought me and my friends, a couple of us decided to actually visit his site and discovered he really was as crackpot as we thought. He supported Israel’s invasion of Palestine on the grounds of, of all things, religion. He classified Linux-users as Communists. He decided the world isn’t overpopulated and that anyone who thinks it is ought to be banished to Siberia (well, something to that effect). Anthony began posting sarcastic comments on his site under the alias “Bryant Dory”, to which Brent replied seemingly incognisant that they really were meant to be sarcastic:

It’s almost as if your comment is satirical … [insert accusation of being communist]

Unfortunately I can’t remember any of these comments and they are unavailable to me to [Ctrl+C] [Ctrl+V] as, seemingly after he realised how stupid he’s been, Brent finally locked down his site with a password.

I think his online existence was met with some hostility, as a Google search for his name yielded these two results on the first page of results:
# Who in the hell is Brent Roos
# Brent Roos Barked at Me and I Barked Back
Someone even called him an ‘arsehat’…

So in conclusion, seriously, if you’re reading this, thank you Brent for supplying us with such entertainment. It’s been a great laugh and I hope you regain enough courage to the internet at some point in the future. xx

Brent's locked down site

Routes Game Launched

Routes is launched (about 20 hours ago).

Routes Game Logo

Back in the distant past of 2008 a couple of developers came to St Paul’s to give a talk (to the Games Society) on a new game that was being created at the time. The talk was partially a pitch to hook people in, but it also functioned as a session to run ideas past a sample of the intended gamer audience the enterprise would be aimed at. They said they got some useful feedback and we got cool moo cards from Kim, a key member of the team.

From what I gathered from that talk the concept of the entire enterprise (not just the website but the way they propose to play the whole thing out) was fairly novel, and certainly one to watch over the next few months. The game, in short, is about education and genetics. Among the subsections of the game there was talk of writing a ‘breeder’ game which is some sort of DNA-based-evolution-simulating game (a lot of very interesting programming concepts and theory can come in here but … it’s late and if I start I’ll go on forever and bore everyone to death) in which players start with a ‘breeder’ character and can breed with other breeders to produce children breeders with different DNA [recurse]. They also talked about a ‘big mystery that [people] can take part in and help solve….’ and ideas for some very attractive prizes (I observe that they seem to have taken our advice on those!) Sporting the Channel 4 logo and having an association with the Wellcome Trust have their financial benefits…

I haven’t really said anything particularly profound or indeed got much intelligent to say about it, mainly because my memory of the talk is somewhat faded and besides, from some of the things we were let in on during the talk at St Paul’s, I suspect I shouldn’t be revealing too much at this early stage for fear of ruining a surprise in the future. But at the time I remember being quite excited about following the progress of this audacious enterprise. As they say, watch [that] space.

Blackle

I’ve found this slightly ridiculous site and think it’s important to point out the significance of the error the creators made.

Blackle is, in short, a black version of google.com. With the amount of traffic Google receives, the amount of energy used displaying its search results is phenomenal and according to research done by the creators of Blackle, by displaying a black instead of a white background on Google, the world could save 750 MWh/year (=86KW). So, let’s take a closer look at this idea.

The underlying assumption is that black screens use less energy than white ones. I agree fully that this may have been true in the retro days of CRT screens: fewer electrons will need to be fired at the front of the screen so less electricity will be required. Unfortunately CRTs are somewhat backward and our world is very much a flat panel place nowadays. There are two types of flat panel: LCD and plasma displays. LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display and the principle is actually really quite beautiful.

A liquid crystal can be seen as a polarising tube: when light is shone down one end it gets polarised. However this tube is composed of several layers like a lot of very flat cylinders concatenated end-to-end, each with a polarising slit. In its natural state the crystal (tube) is twisted so that each layer is slightly out of line with the adjacent ones. Imagine looking at a slinky end-on then twisting it. When light is shone on one end of this twisted liquid crystal, the first layer polarises it. The second layer then blocks some of this light because it is polarised in a slightly different orientation and allows some through, re-polarising it. This is repeated for all the layers of the crystal and eventually some light gets through. The last layer’s polarisation is orthogonal to that of the first layer.

When electricity is passed through this crystal however, it straightens out and becomes an untwisted polarising cylinder which just polarises light like a normal polarising sheet.

To construct an LCD screen, a sheet containing an array of cells made of these crystals is placed in front of a sheet of normal polarising material. A backlight is placed behind both these sheets. An electronic grid allows electricity to be passed through any cell independently of all the others. In the un-electrified state, all the liquid crystals are arranged so that the polarisation of the back face (next to the polarising sheet) is in line with that of the polarising sheet (say, vertically) and of course the crystal is twisted 90 degrees so the front is polarised horizontally. This way, light from the backlight can get through both sheets since the back of the crystal is aligned with the sheet and light can get from the back to the front of the crystal. However the front of the crystal is fixed in orientation so when the sheet is electrified and all the crystals untwist, the back of the crystals end up horizontal. Now the crystal acts like a second polarising sheet but in an orthogonal direction to the first sheet. No light gets through and the screen is black.

So, what does that mean? No electricity needs to pass through the crystal to display a white screen but every single cell (pixel) needs current passing through it to display a black screen. The assumption was false for LCD monitors, which in 2006 accounted for 80% of all computer monitors.

The other flatscreen technology is plasma displays which physically illuminate each pixel with a separate light source (some sort of LED I’d imagine). These I think do conserve energy when displaying a black screen.

So the website, at the user end of things, actually does the opposite of the stated intention for 80% of computer monitors. To make things worse, the functionality of this site is much lower than Google. Since it’s a Google custom search, the site only has the Google features available to Google affiliates and lacks things like Google cache, translator, webapps etc.

Enough about the frontend – now for the backend. The site must receive tens of thousands of hits every day, and must therefore need some quite meaty servers to deal with the traffic. Let’s say it requires a server that draws 500W (including cooling), an average power consumption for a server. According to the internet archives, Blackle has been around since the beginning of 2007. Over 2 years this server would have burnt through 8.8MWh. The site advertises it has saved a total of about 1MWh. Blackle has in fact caused the world to use an extra US household’s year’s supply of energy. Oops. In fact, even if the server drew 60W (ridiculously low), it would still have used 1.05MWh to date, and the creators would have actually increased world energy consumption by 50KWh.

So yet again someone with good intentions has done the wrong thing. Far from solving the world’s energy crisis, the creators of Blackle have created something which is inconvenient to use and actually does the opposite of what it was originally supposed to do. It is, I wholeheartedly agree, a brilliant and novel idea, but sadly one which doesn’t work at all.

Firefox Wallpapers

Just found this post – linked to from a friend:
http://usingmac.com/2008/7/1/inspiring-firefox-wallpapers

Firefox wallpapers, some of which are really awesome. Here are my picks:

Some of these are really beautifully yet subtly made, and succinctly done – congratulations and thanks to whoever made them.

Big site on my server

Now my über-powerful </sarcasm> Compaq machine is running Debian, a proper server distro of Linux. It’s very efficient and much easier to use as a server than Ubuntu, especially when combined with my new-found favourite server software, XAMPP, which sorts out all the apache / SQL / PHP headache for me, without even the need to install: the simple ‘tar xvfz’ command and the 5 minutes of reading a magazine as it ran was all it took, and was far less hassle than the hours of waiting for apache to compile and install and the head-bashing as mod_ssl refused *yet again* to work alongside apache.

Now that my Compaq has all the functionality of a proper server, I’m venturing into scripting and application territory and have taken the plunge to install WordPress. The site I’ll be hosting (temporarily at least) is my friends’ one: The Beautiful Game. The URL of my wordpress installation is: http://gedanken.we.bs/wordpress/.

The blog (originally here) gets several hundred hits per day and has over 30 writers. It is jointly managed by four of my peers, and in essence, is pretty big. The reason for my hosting it is to provide better functionality from an admin point of view, and also the possibility of displaying Google ads as a source of revenue.

The site isn’t yet finished as yet – there’s lots of work to be done on design, and the import was a bit dodgy. But once everything is fixed, this little lump of whirring metal sitting next to me will be spitting HTML into the Interweb like a real server. Watch this space…