nik newark

This. Fucking. Election.

This. Fucking. Election.

Back to the 80s

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.

One of these things is not like the other

Which one of these is the odd one out?

The best birthday cake in the world...ever!

Another day, another apple festival

New MacBooks made out of milk!

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.

Imagine the scene

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?

Apple day at Burwash Manor Barns

It's nice here. Very happy!

Stuck in traffic

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

minaturisation....

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.

The SI unit for goodness

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!

Centre Of Trap

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.

Continue reading "Centre Of Trap"

Google Insights for Search

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!

Shake & Share

And my award for innovative user interface for 2008 goes to the concept of Shake & Share, as illustrated by Zeptopad and Friendbook apps for the iPhone. Both solve the problem of sharing info (e.g. transferring a contact from one iPhone to another), by holding the iPhones together and shaking them.

I'm not sure how this works, but I can think of two possibilities: either the app uses a central server somewhere in the cloud, which acts as a broker for the sharing, or the devices initiate a bluetooth connection between each other. In either case, the accelerometer in the iPhone is used to generate a shared secret - if the iPhones are shaken together, they end up with the same shared secret.

Video below. Shakey Sharey bit towards the end.

More Gordon Dioxide

I've written about Gordon Dioxide before, together with his range of wonderful bedtime stories. His stories are now available as a proper book, and one has been adapted for YouTube. Enjoy!

How to win an election in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is not a great place to be right now. Just about everyone aside from Robert Mugabe and his henchman believe that the upcoming elections have been compromised for two reasons:-
(a) Morgan Tsvangirai was unable to do any proper campaigning, as Robert Mugabe would kill him, and
(b) Morgan Tsvangirai's supporters were unable to express their support for him, again, as Robert Mugabe would kill them. This has led Morgan Tsvangirai to withdraw from the election campaign, exposing it for the mockery that it is.

However, it needn't have played out that way. Here are three easy ways that Robert Mugabe could have called a legitimate election and won, without threatening anyone.

1/ Rather than asking people to tick boxes next to names, ask them instead to write the name of the candidate they want to vote for. Morgan Tsvangirai is very difficult to spell, and most people won't manage it. Robert Mugabe is far easier, and let's face it, most people are more likely to write something that they can spell, rather than experiencing the social humiliation of spelling someone's name wrongly (even if that means you end up voting for a corrupt dictator who wants to kill you).

2/ Robert Mugabe could get all of his henchmen to stand in the elections, but using names very similar to Morgan Tsvangirai. So, we could have Morgan Tsvangarai, Morgan Tsvengirai, Morgan Svengali, Morgan Spurlock, and Kenneth Tsvangirai. The resulting confusion would see Morgan Tsvangirai's vote split 6 ways, leading to a surefire Mugabe victory.

3/ Robert Mugabe could change his name to Morgan Tsvangirai, so the voting form would contain two identically named candidates, and no-one would know who was the real Morgan Tsvangirai, and which one was the imposter. OK, Mugabe would only have a 50/50 chance of winning here, but I think it still significantly increases his chances (without using threatening ASBO behaviour).

I wonder how much I could earn as campaign adviser to Mr Mugabe?

Toys that make worlds

I first heard of Will Wright's Spore project around a year ago on a TED talk , where he presented a multi phase evolutionary world simulator, starting from a single celled creature, through evolution, establishment of tribes, culture, and ultimately expanding into space. The vision was very compelling, and the demo was very impressive - the software, even in its unfinished form, seemed to make something as complex as building your own creature very intuitive and simple.
Fast forward to mid 2008, and there is currently a lot of buzz about Spore, due to be released in September. In order to drum up excitement, EA have done two very clever things:-
(1) The creature creator part of Spore has been released early for £5 (which is redeemable against the full product when it arrives). For those of us to tight to pay even this sum can download a cut down creature creator (still very capable, but with a smaller selection of eyes, legs etc to choose from).
(2) Once you've designed your creature, the creature creator allows you to create your own movies, and automatically upload to YouTube. So, YouTube has become swamped with Spore creatures. As all of these uploaded creatures look very cool indeed, this is the best free marketing you could hope for. In the not too distant future, I suspect that many other software companies might start to do something similar.

Needless to say, I've created my own creature, Sandra Pl'tangue. Hope you like her.

Drummer Boy

When Digi was first born, I figured that I wouldn't be playing with my drum kit too often due to the extreme noise, so I dismantled it, and stashed it away in the garage (and transferred my affections to an electric kit instead). Obviously, this wasn't a very acceptable state of affairs, so we put it back up at the weekend, and the three year old Digi has rather taken to it.

I'm quite proud!

You know its time to get out when...

…Richard Branson moves in.

It is one of those odd mysteries of the modern world how the Virgin empire actually manages to turn a profit, given that it has a talent for starting new business in industries which shortly afterwards dive into a sudden and terminal decline.

It's really quite spooky how Richard B manages to identify industries which are about to have all life squeezed out of them. Or, maybe, just maybe, it is Virgin moving into a new market which causes the collapse, like a bloodsucking vampiric leech slurping on highly competitive markets until they turn inside out?

Let's take a closer look!
Record Labels - not doing so well at the moment are they? Richard entered the record label business in the early 1970s, when recorded music was quite a healthy and profitable industry to be in (albeit a corrupt and nasty one). Within 15 years, the record industry was in trouble, and had to start inventing a stream of new formats (CD, DAT, DCC, MiniDisc, HDCD, DVD-Audio, SACD) and endless reissued / remastered deluxe editions in order to stay afloat. To be fair to Branson, he got out of the business in 1992, selling Virgin Records to Thorn EMI. But then came Britpop, and the industry looked healthy for about three nanoseconds, and Branson insanely started a new label “V2”. He's since sold that too.
Record Shops Where have they all gone, eh? Branson has eaten them all, that's what.
Airlines and Other Transport Squeezed by the budget carriers on one side, increasing oil prices on another, concerns about environmental damage, concerns over terrorist attack, and concerns about the entire world becoming increasingly homogenized, virtualized, globalizationified (new word there, borrowed from GWB, prob'ly), you'd have to be mad to get into the airline business. Now, trains are another matter, but given that the track record (oops, a pun) of British railway operators over the past 50 years has been pretty shoddy, it is statistically unlikely that Branson can do any better. Especially as his heart isn't really in it - he far prefers balloons, and
Spaceships Obviously a real money spinner this one. Virgin Galactic plan to take people to the edge of space. And then back. Assuming that he can foot the enormous insurance bill he will be faced with, and he can get hold of some inexpensive tax-free rocket fuel, and assuming that when it all actually works enough people still think it is cool enough to do, Branson might break even on this one. But the only way he is likely to make a profit is if he opens a Little Shop in the Exosphere selling overpriced postcards, T-shirts and trinkets. Mind you, I did quite enjoy the Virgle thing.
Broadband operators So, they've had it OK for a while haven't they? Leasing stuff from BT, owning a switch or two in some dusty building in Canary Wharf, making up their own fictional connection speeds, billing people as they see fit, and spinning off their helpdesk function into a profitable business in its own right. But they've been wingeing of late about iplayer and other easy-to-use video streaming services which turn their revenue model upside down a bit (all those pesky customers, unreasonably actually using the bandwidth they've bought…). So diminished profits and enormous competition here too I think.
Mobile operators See broadband operators, only more so. Historically have wanted to make their money by trying to be the sole provider of content to their users, rather than letting their users download stuff from anywhere. Now only seem to make money from ringtones, whose sole market seems to be made up of 7-14 year olds with too much pocket money. They'll all grow up shortly, and the new young generation will have wised up, and think that ringtones are like “totally rinsed”.

The only thing I know is that when Branson enters the market, it is time for everyone else to get out. So, given that Branson now runs the VFestival, it is probably time for Michael and Emily Eavis to close up Glastonbury and go home.

Actually, I read somewhere (Wikipedia maybe) that Richard Branson's sole income comes from being a successful knitwear model, and all proceeds are used to prop up the rest of the Virgin empire.

With that in mind, a musical tribute to the great man himself, an offcut from the latest Chrysanthemum Fiends Long Player (forthcoming, probably) entitled Richard Branson.

Salvaged Wood Guitar

Found on Etsy.com (a site for buyers and sellers of all things handmade), an eco-friendly guitar made out of salvaged wood.
The ascendancy of chain store culture and global manufacturing has left us dressing, furnishing, and decorating alike. We are encouraged to be consumers, not producers, of our own culture. Our ties to the local and human sources of our goods have been lost. Buying handmade helps us reconnect.

I challenge you not to spend a happy hour browsing Etsy. You can even search for sellers local to you. Clearly this is the future!

Posted by nikn on June 07, 2008 | Comments (1)

Keynote for the web

If you're a Mac user, you may have seen Apple's Keynote application, essentially an elegant alternative to Powerpoint. If you haven't seen it, and would like to, you have several options to fill this gaping void in your life, namely:-
a) buy it
b) steal it
c) hover around Mac users in crowded coffee bars, especially if it looks like they are writing a presentation
d) search a popular YouTube style site on the Interweb
e) smoke illegal herbs, and have vivid dreams about it (possibly not very accurate ones)

These are likely to meet varying degrees of failure. But! You now have a viable alternative, as some crazy fools at 280 North have developed a language called Objective-J (a mapping of Objective-C to JavaScript) which makes use of a variety of browser rendering engines (e.g. Flash) to provide a rich user experience. They've then used this to produce a very Keynote-esque presentation app for the web.

Have a play at http://280north.com/Editor/