nik newark

This new template is far too purple, so I've moved to niknewark.wordpress.com

I've just upgraded niknewark.com to Movable Type 4.2. Needless to say, not everything quite works properly. Namely comments are broken, so I've turned them off. You didn't have anything to say anyway, did you?

This. Fucking. Election.

A friend recently asked to raid my iTunes collection in search of some 80s choice cuts to play at a party. I discovered to my horror that:-

• I didn't own Mind Bomb by The The
• I owned nothing at all by Level 42
• Nor do I own anything by Swing Out Sister

I'm sure that at one stage I have owned Mind Bomb. I'm very familiar with it. I'm thinking that it might have been stolen by a thief. Listening to it recently, I'm struck by how it isn't quite as good as I remembered. Certainly not as good as Dusk, the follow-up.

Level 42 on the other hand is something that I returned to with some trepidation. I remember liking them in the mid 80s, around the time of True Colours. I also remember finding them increasingly irritating as they released nauseous albums like Running In The Family. Eventually, they released a single callled Tracie, and I vowed never to listen to them again. Which might account for my never buying any Level 42 in the digital age.

So, I bought True Colours and World Machine. True Colours is probably the better of the two albums, but I don't think I'll be returning to them for, oh, maybe another 20 years. When I'm 57! One curiosity is the demo tracks at the end of True Colours, which appear to be the final recordings, aside from the vocal tracks. Instead of the proper vocal tracks, Mark King (and his gerbil-voiced sidekick Mike Lindup) sing a strange esperanto guide vocal of dum-de-dum-nah-naaahnaaa-de-doobie-doo gibberish. But, it is all very professionally recorded gibberish, nicely doubletracked with harmony backing vocals (also singing absolute gibberish). I was quite amused that they went to such lengths to avoid writing the lyrics. I think that their habit was to get the guitarist to write the lyrics, and he was either very lazy, or perhaps he enjoyed King and Lindup humiliaring themselves singing dum-de-dum vocals. Anyway, if you want a giggle, go and listen to track 13 of the re-issued True Colours, which is called "De De Derrr numma numma vuddyjaaahba".

On a more reliable 80s note, two long-deleted, highly underrated classic albums have recently been re-released:-
* The Circle and The Square by Red Box
* Sue by Frazier Chorus

I still do not own anything by Swing Out Sister.

Which one of these is the odd one out?

Steve Jobs has confirmed that the radical manufacturing process for the new MacBook actually involves moulding blocks of aluminium using high velocity streams of milk squeezed from the teat of a Jersey cow.

A 1980s party. Me dressed up as Robert Smith the lead singer of The Cure.

Towards the end of the evening, I am approached by a strange lady. A conversation ensues:-

Strange Lady: I've been wondering all night who you are.

Me: Robert Smith

Strange Lady: Pleased to meet you Robert. And who have you come as?

It's nice here. Very happy!

Seems like there are no good routes to Cambridge station today which don't invoke accidents and roadworks...

50 years ago, computers were the size of rooms. 100 years ago, cameras were also pretty big (and in the days of the camera obscura, were also room sized).
Encyclopaedias took up entire w
alls of the drawing room, telephones were made of hulking great chunks of Bakelite (with rooms full of women armed with headsets and patch cords), maps were huge things that were invariably out of date, the Tv was a piece of enormous furniture with a tiny screen, and we made our own entertainment. That were fotty year ago, that were.
Anuway, the point is, is that all of these things can now be done on a tiny iPhone, smaller than my hand. So, I confidently predict that due to continuing minaturisation, phones in 50 years time will include a Large Hadron Collider. I mentioned this theory to the attendant in the gym, who looked at me blankly. "why would anyone want to do that?" he asked. Because we can, because we can. Besides, it'd be pretty cool to create black holes in your pocket...

Incidentally, I am using an iPhone to write this blog, courtesy of a piece of software called iBlog. Rubbish name, but seems to do the trick quite nicely.

And the photo illustrates what a great idea fish and chips in rolled up newspaper is for littleys. Ee! It were just like fotty year ago.

From an email discussion this week...

From: Nik Newark
Sent: 08 September 2008 13:55
To: #A bunch of engineers
Subject: FW: ReSharper v4.1: Better performance and wider integration with Visual Studio

FYI - if you currently are using ReSharper (with the central license server), you should be able to take advantage of the v4.1 release without any additional changes.

-----Original Message-----
From: Sharma Hardeep
Sent: 09 September 2008 09:48
To: Nik Newark
Subject: RE: ReSharper v4.1: Better performance and wider integration with Visual Studio

Hi Nik,

Who uses this tool?
Do you know how good it is?

Cheers
Pop!

-----Original Message-----
From: Nik Newark
Sent: 09 September 2008 09:48
To: Sharma Hardeep
Subject: RE: ReSharper v4.1: Better performance and wider integration with Visual Studio

It is used by a collection of developers. Those who use it rate it highly.

It is 82% good.

-- Nik

-----Original Message-----
From: Sharma Hardeep
Sent: 09 September 2008 09:50
To: Nik Newark
Subject: RE: ReSharper v4.1: Better performance and wider integration with Visual Studio

Percent, you say?
Hmmm.

-----Original Message-----
From: Nik Newark
Sent: 09 September 2008 09:59
To: Sharma Hardeep
Subject: RE: ReSharper v4.1: Better performance and wider integration with Visual Studio

I was struggling to find a more accurate way of measuring how good it is. What is the SI unit for goodness.

Ah yes.

It is 2.2 Mother Theresas.

-- Nik

-----Original Message-----
From: Sharma Hardeep
Sent: 09 September 2008 14:33
To: Nik Newark
Subject: SI Units and goodness - WAS: RE: ReSharper v4.1: Better performance and wider integration with Visual Studio
Importance: Low

The SI unit for goodness is Yums (Y).

The national standards laboratories in Brussels are home to the Standard Yum, a digital recording of a small boy being offered a bowl of home-made ice-cream, with real chocolate sauce, without needing to finish his dinner first.

The practical measure of a Yum is equal to the goodness presumed to be in the aforementioned standard offer of desert as an expression of the outcome of acceptable behavior from the small boy.

One thousand Yums are known as Mmm (mm)
One million Yums are known as a Yum-Yum, not a mega-Yum as is commonly mistaken.
One millionth of a Yum is known as a Yuk (y), not a micro-Yum " " ".
One thousandth of a Yum is an Urrr (u)

A common measure that is used to express goodness for many items in the world is "Yummy" which translates to approximately

Y - Yum, Ooh yes that looks really, really good - Good enough to eat in fact
u - Urr, That's not what I expected it to be, this is going to take getting used to
mm - Mmm, it's not as good or as bad as I expected, but it'll probably do just fine
y - Yuk, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth when you're done, but it got the job done

I hope this helps.

Cheers
Pop!

-----Original Message-----
From: Nik Newark
Sent: 09 September 2008 15:47
To: Sharma Hardeep
Subject: RE: SI Units and goodness - WAS: RE: ReSharper v4.1: Better performance and wider integration with Visual Studio

Thank you for that. I'll make sure it gets included in the Global Engineering Ops Handbook.

Is there an SI unit for "amount of free time in a day to involve in frivolity"?

-- Nik

-----Original Message-----
From: Sharma Hardeep
Sent: 10 September 2008 11:33
To: Nik Newark
Subject: SI Units and goodness - WAS: RE: ReSharper v4.1: Better performance and wider integration with Visual Studio
Importance: Low

You mean the TWaT. Total Wasted Time, measured as

Considerably Less Important Tasks /day -------------------------------------------
Completely Useful Needed Tasks / day

As you can see the ideal TWaT rate to aspire to is between 0 and 1.

Typically values for the software sector are in the range of 100 to 1K TWaTs.

Important to note is that it is impossible for system under measurement (person, team, organization) to have no purpose, as this would require the Completely Useful Needed Tasks to = 0, resulting in infinite TWaTs.

So in summary, within in any organizational grouping, though it is possible to have no Considerably Less Important Tasks, there will always be at some Completely Useful Needed Task, which inevitably means there will always be a possibility of there being TWaTs

HTH
Pop!

Pick any musician, and the chances are that when they started out, they were extremely prolific, and then slowed down with age. The classic example is Kate Bush, who released her first album, "The Kick Inside" in 1978, and the follow-up "Lionheart" later that same year. The third album, "Never Forever" was released in 1980, and the fourth "The Dreaming" in 1982. There was then a bit of a hiatus of 3 years until "Hounds of Love was released in 1985. Another three years until "The Sensual World" in 1988 (the record company being forced to release a best-of in 1986 to fill in time). And then a massive 5 years until "The Red Shoes" in 1993. Then, a gap of 12 years until the most recent album, "Aerial" was released. Kate Bush is not alone - the same is true of Peter Gabriel, String, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan, Kraftwerk... the list goes on. So, what happens? So far as I can see, two things happen:- (1) They become perfectionist. Where once upon a time, anything was fresh, new and acceptable, they now feel compelled to push into new areas, and do things better than previously. Coupled with vast amounts of record company cash, they retreat into the studio for years at a time. (2) Life gets in the way. They have a family. They do other things outside of music. So where am I going with this ramble? Ah yes. Children. For all of the pleasure and life-enrichment that children bring, they certainly limit the amount of time available for music making. During the day, the little cherubs are running around monopolizing mummy and daddy, and then during the evening, they are asleep, and cannot be woken up by loud recording of rock music. 2004, the year the last Chrysanthemum Fiends CD was finished, also saw the release of Alpaca Guessed and RH- Impressions. Since then, there's been nothing (aside from a few children's songs about dancing zebras and suchlike). During this time, my Mac in the studio forgot what the date was, the piano grew cobwebby appendages, and all of my guitar strings rusted. In late October 2007, Mrs Kittenhead and the kidlets went to visit the grandparents in Houston, leaving me alone in the studio for a week of intensive writing and recording, which became the new CD Centre Of Trap*. Whilst recording was very quick, the mixing and mastering process has taken from November 07 until now to get right. I'll explain how this worked another day.

Google have this week unveiled, Google Insights for Search is a pretty nifty tool which lets you look at search patterns across time, geographic regions, and by category. So for example, let's take a look at searches for the word "NASCAR". You can see a pretty interesting pattern here - interest in NASCAR peaks at the beginning of the year, and then falls towards the end of the year. I don't know why this is, but I guess that there might be some sort of NASCAR season. To be honest, I've got no idea what a NASCAR is, but I can tell that Americans seem to like it, as, using the same tool, I can discover that only Americans search for NASCAR:- Well, that's almost true. As you can see from the list above, lots of people in Iraq also search for NASCAR! And according to a search volume (filtered to only show Iraq), NASCAR only became popular in Iraq in 2006:- . What can it all mean? There are other things you'd expect to have some sort of seasonal variance, such as an umbrella. However, the stats don't bear this out. They do however show that people started being very interested in umbrellas in mid 2007! Or perhaps this coincided with the release of "Umbrella" by the popstrel Rihanna. Other things which you wouldn't expect to show any seasonal variance, in fact show a surprising seasonal effect. This is for "Mongoose" I couldn't find any other animals which showed a seasonal variation like this. Cat, Elephant, Giraffe, and Hamster are all flat (though there is a sinister uptick in hamster searches throughout 2008, mostly from Great Britain). Other exciting searches include:- "Maddie" - Portugal very excited "Cup of tea" (Go UK!) "Hot Teens" (Yemen, Pakistan and Syria interestingly topping the charts on this one...) "Cliff Richard" (UK again, though note the interest in Cliff seems to peak around Christmas each year) "Global Warming" (has captured the interest of lots of Island nations. Funny that...) "Britney Spears" (clearly popping out babies, getting married, divorcing, getting married, divorcing, shaving her hair off, not wearing panties, and going a bit rubbish were just a cunning rouse to counter her declining Google popularity. Except in Madagascar, where she has always been massive.) I think that's about enough for now. Go see what you can discover, and let me know!