I saw this outside Earls Court, opposite the West Brompton tube entrance. Several others have been seen in London- do a search for cultural blackspot on Flickr.com.
So is it a viral campaign for a new band, part of adbusters blackspot campaign or a comment on the area? No one knows, but its interesting!
This blog has been a bit lean as I’m concentrating on developing the Home Parking website (not yet live) and the New Amazing Stuff which has just had it’s 50th blog entry since August 9th.
Just out of curiosity I did a google search for “new and amazing stuff” (without quotes) and found portent in 4th place out of 117 million. Google pointed out that the and was superfluous so I searched for “new amazing stuff” again without quotes. Portent was now down to 26th place and the other results were different as well.
So my conclusion. And does make a difference, and you are best to avoid having it in any phrases that you are optimising for.
So there I am on Friday afternoon, on the bus home. Bloke in red tie is sat where he is in the photo. He has a small bag on the seat next to him which is otherwise empty. Girl in pink top moves toward seat intending to sit down. Bloke sees her, picks up the bag and with an almost perceptible snarl throws it on the floor in front of his feet. Girl sits down, looks over at me and I smile and give a “Can you believe that” wave of the head.
I guess he’d had a bad day! So I whipped out the phone and took this photo.
I’m a great believer in the Wisdom of Crowds (Great book by James Suriewicki BTW) and today launched portent.org a collaborative blog about new and interesting things on the web. Not unlike Boingboing.net. They have 5 high profile journalists and writers. I’d like 25 bloggers. As an encouragement, 90% of gross revenues from any advertising will be paid to portent’s bloggers. The details are here.
With 32 million websites and new ones appearing every hour, theres so much new stuff waiting to be found and highlighted. Let’s get started. If you want to sign up, visit the link above.
At work I’ve been experimenting with Visual Build Pro. Our existing build system is well let’s say very backwardly compatible … as far back as Dos so a new version control system and a new Build Manager.
The Build Manager I’ve been looking at is Visual Build Pro (VBP) by Kinook Software and it’s very nice and at £200, very reasonably priced. I got up to speed with it very quickly and it’s clear that the designers have probably used it on their own projects as everyting is well thought out. Integration with Subversion is very good.
The big work project is a mixture of Delphi and Visual C++ with a fair bit of C. Automating the Delphi bit was ok but the Visual C++ stuff has been ‘fun’. Our project uses Make files, all 115 of them. VBP uses DSPs, the Visual Studio Project file. So I’ve had a one off manual conversion task. I did consider automating it and possibly still could but it’s the old classic connundrum- can you do it manually in the time it would take do to it in code?
I’ve had this domain for many years, intending to do something with it and recently noticed that it was picking up a fair bit of traffic. I searched on google for dark games and it’s 7th or 8th out of nearly 200 million. Blimey. So I’ve started putting it to some use and will be moving all my game stuff onto the site.
A few years back I had an idea for a card game and the prototype fitted on the backs of two decks of playing cards. Thus was born Odds On. It’s in alpha stage of development, needs testing and balancing but the idea is that as one of a number of bookies you take odds on horses (random combinations of horse + jockey) from other players.
The main game play is playing your odds cards. When all horses in a race have odds the race begins. If the horse with your odds on wins then you gain points. After a number of matches, lowest points wins. There are a few random cards etc to make it more interesting.
My brother in law has gone through hell over the last 7 months, since December 2005. He’s a taxidriver in Blackpool and was accused by a female passenger of touching her legs and breasts in the course of a 3 minute drive (while going round a curvy route- and with his right hand!). This happened just before Christmas and he lost nearly two weeks of work at a busy time of year. And he has had this hanging over him since then with possible loss of freedom, job (self employed), and house. He’s married with a 9 year old daughter and no criminal record.
The woman was heavily intoxicated- her friends had to hold her up to get her in the car. She described my brother in law as 25-30 with brown hair. He’s 40 with grey hair! She said in her statement that her boyfriend (at the destination) was waiting with door open when she arrived and witnessed her breasts being fondled. Her boyfriend said that he was in the back of the house and the first he knew she was back was when she put her key in the lock.
Result- 12 Jurors took 20 minutes to all decide Not Guilty. Why on earth did this come to court in the first place? Are the Crown Prosecution Service on some politically correct, ‘Try them in court no matter what the evidence’ waste the taxpayer’s money kick? The Judge said it shouldn’t have come to court. But at least it was a fair result.
Last night Walthamstow Council voted 31 to 22 in favour of becoming affiliated with Mo2ID. The against votes were purely along party lines- Tories and Lib-Dems in favour of affiliation, Labour against.
As the Leyton rep (we’re a very small group) I went along to snap snaps, hand out badges and leaflets etc. Plus I met and chatted with one or two councillors and watched Democracy in Action. Phew, pontificating and political! I’d never appreciated how much the major parties have on local Govt. But it was interesting to see all of the maneuvering and discussions. Not exactly my idea of a fun time though!
My job dictates that I have to use Windows, and I also use a properly licensed copy at home. Nevertheless I think Microsdoft is getting increasingly over reaching with the information they suck out of your PC. I read the EULA for the latest Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA- We Get it ALL?) update and section 6 says this.
“6. Computer Information. This supplement uses Internet protocols to send to Microsoft computer information, such as your Windows XP product key, hard drive serial number, PC manufacturer, operating system version, Windows XP product ID, PC BIOS information, user locale setting, language version of Windows XP, validation result and whether the installation of this supplement was successful. Certain information derived from your IP address, which cannot be used to identify you, is retained in association with this computer information. “
Now I really object to some of this one several grounds.
– What business is it of Microsoft to know this?
Why do they need this?
– That’s commercially sensitive information!
I do wonder if they read the CPUID or network card MAC Address.
They also say in section 7. We may also share the aggregate data with others, such as hardware and software vendors and volume licensees to help protect their license keys. WTF? Since when is it Microsoft’s job to police on behalf of licensees? Do they police GPL? I bet not!
As a developer I appreciate Microsoft when they do things like provide the free Express Editions of compilers. But this stuff just builds up resentment. So I have declined the update. We’ll see what happens. I encourage you to decline the update as well. If enough people do it, Microsoft will start noticing.
Another thought. Some of the information they collect is commercially useful. If you want it, you buy it from me. Savvy?
Casus Belli was an old Play By Mail (PBM) game I wrote in 1986. It had 1,500 players at game launch (1986) thanks to a feature in Computer & Video Games magazine. I designed Warlord at KJC Games in 1989 and that was basically Casus Belli Mk II. It is still run now. (Older than the Web!)
I always wanted to program it as a desktop game and then maybe on mobile, and the web (Flash) so to start the ball rolling, I’ve been writing it up on my website. The Delphi version will be given away, warts and all to open source. The C++ and C# versions will appear on the Cplus.About.com website when I have finished preparing it. (I’ve been accepted as the new guide!)
You can see the first three articles on the new Casus Belli at the bottom of this page on my website. Have fun.