My employer, Conchango, may have been recently acquired by EMC, but we're still hiring, in fact even more so due to new opportunities resulting from this deal.

We do a lot of .Net consultancy, but there's also Java, Oracle, SQL Server, backend Data analysis to frontend UI design. We also want people who can do business analysis, agilists etc. We work in finance, retail and energy sectors, and other assorted projects in London and other locations in the UK (yes, the energy sector stuff means Aberdeen) and possibly abroad (EMC is global).

If this interests you, or if you know anyone who would be interested, please send me CV or leave a comment here.

The schedule for Opentech 2008 looks great – the FOAF stuff is an interest of mine. I'll be signing up if I can.

Is anyone else going?

Hey, Doctor Who crew.

You should know by now that legal threats to your most active fans is not a good idea. Even if you win, you lose.

I'm on course this week, learning the basics of programming SharePoint. The course is in West London, in the Hammersmith/Olympia area.

Currently I'm reading on the tube: Clay Shirkey's "Here comes everybody". This is the kind of non-fiction book that I like to read. Full of insight without challenging my existing prejudices in favour of the internets. Loads of pithy comments and techno-optimism. Recommended reading if you're interested in social networks and what they are good for, or mind-expanding geek books. My next book will be volume 2 of Charles Stross's "Family trade" pulp fantasy pot-boiler. That page's writer seems to share my view of Stross: he somehow manages to make unapealing-seeming premises wickedly good.

Then back to Les Miserables (unabridged). I have bashed through the first six or ten chapters of Les Mis, all about a bishop who seems to be a minor character at best, before my attention wandered to HCE. By the time that I get going on that, I'll be back in Aberdeen. Next week is the last week of that adventure, according to plan.

In Open source, I'm fixing some of my Delphi code formatter code so that it can be used on the Free Pascal compiler. The request comes from a guy in Siberia. Those Russians and their communistic free software ;) I've had that project up for almost ten years, which is scary in a way but also pleasing that it has active users who submit bug reports and code. Now more so than when Delphi/Pascal was actually relevant.

I'm also occasionally working on some c# code to work with rdf:foaf data. Social networking again. I might post more on that later, when something is viable. The code for both of these are on SourceForge if you want it.

I haven't been posting on LJ much lately. I haven't even had time to play Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii. Mort if far ahead. But I have been on the Wii fit – it's easier than graphing your own weight with an excel spreadsheet.

We saw Iron Man last night, I dragged mort along as well. It was more deft than your average Marvel Superhero movie - it hit the right notes without seeming cheesy, which seems a common pitfall of movies that put comic-book action and drama on the screen.

I could write a small essay on how it's a story of masculinity, or at least the myths of it: Tony Stark, whataman – he has loads of money, loads of talent, wit, power, fast cars and other big toys, hot chicks falling over him, and no parents to answer to. He does what he wants when he wants. He's blunt and sarcastic, he doesn't have to please anyone. He drinks far too much, sleeps around and lets people down, not out of malice but because he doesn't care about anybody. Himself included. I'd call him misogynistic, only he doesn't treat his male friends so well either. In short, he's a grown-up boy writ large.

So what happens? He goes away, come back changed (standard hero story), gets a heart (literally) and conscience, becomes a hard man (again literally, it's a comic), shoots few vilains dead and rights some of the wrongs that he is responsible for. Finally he defeats his older alpha male rival, who has become corrupt and bigger and stronger but more brutish than him; by using his cunning and the power of his new heart (close enough to literally). And commits to a woman who has been loyal to him despite his behaviour.

So, who's at the pub (The Constitution, 42 St Pancras Way, NW1 0QT) on Thursday night?

Stuck in a clean, spacious but temporary and antiseptic flat in Aberdeen last night. I was going to Code and Stuff, but then I started to read Little Brother. Finished around 11, in time for bed.

I might write some code while waiting in the Airport lounge this afternoon. It's either that or start reading Les Miserables, a book (by Victor Hugo) about the size, shape and weight of a brick. I'm more likely to read it on the flight.

The Great British Electorate have their quirks.

Consider the fate of Tony Blair - He followed G W Bush into a war under false pretences, bombed and otherwise contributed to the deaths and misery of millions of Iraqis, punished the BBC for questioning him and calling a dossier that turned out in the end to be dodgy a dodgy dossier, and he gets a pasting in the polls in 2006 - remember that? Yeah, the press called it pasting, but politicians would line up to take that pasting, because when the dusts settled, he still got a majority. He failed to lose the election.

And Gordon Brown - good old competent, "no flash just Gordon" Brown. The economy undergoes a downward part of the cycle - which it's inevitably going to do going to do from time to time, this time mainly due to external factors from the US; he fails to be as glib and smarmy as Tony; and now his poll number are below the water line.

So, those are the priorities then.

I personally can't believe that it's due to the growing political stature of the conservatives under David "baggy trousers" Cameron. In other words, I feel (unscientifically) that people voted against Labour rather than for Conservative.

This post is an expansion to the train of thought first expressed (in shorter, more slurred form) on Saturday night.

Well, goodbye to Ken, who has become increasingly arrogant and maybe even corrupt.

Say hello to Mayor BoJo.

Um.

Well, politicians are like nappies: they need to be changed regularly, for much the same reason.

I have some reasons why my new camera (Nikon Coolpix P5100, 12 Megapixels) isn't as good as the old one (Nikon Coolpix 5200, 5 Megapixels) bought around 3 years ago.

Pictures are not that much larger. 12 Megapixels is surely much larger than 5? Maybe not.. 5 million pixels on a square sensor is a square 2236 pixels on a side. With 12 Million pixels it’s 3464 pixels a side. 3464 over 2236 is about 1.55. The picture sides are only 1.55 times as long in pixels. So it's one and half times as large in pixels.

The image sensor inside the camera is probably about the same size as before, so the pixels are actually smaller sensors that now work off less light falling on them. This means more guesswork. Which would you rather have for a particular part of the image – 10 pixels with clean colour values, or 15 noisy ones? It's not clear any more that the new camera is an improvement.

It doesn't autofocus as well. Often things are out of focus, or I take longer finding the focus. Macro mode is not quite as good.

( Read more... )

I started playing Super Mario Galaxy on the wii on the weekend. It is interesting and odd at times adapting to the differences in genre between this and the games that I have more experience in playing.

It’s the cuteness, to be precise. I’ve played a lot of the doom/quake/half-life lineage of games, which typically start with something like grizzled marines entering an gloomy, abandoned research facility. On Mars. With flesh-rending zombies. From an alternate dimension ... called Hell. Where everything is in shades of red, brown and grey, and gameplay is punctuated by blood-curdling yells from the darkness, shotgun blasts, bullet-pockmarks and blood-slpatters.

The cute levels are cranked way up in SMG, and it's full of bright plastic flowers and bunnies and friendly, curved surfaces. I won't call it better or worse, harder or easier just because you shoot brightly coloured gems rather than RPGs.

SMG is bright, fun, mind-bendingly 3-dimensional (in space ... there's always an up and down, it just changes direction a lot), has an orchestral score and is constantly inventive. It is inventive in ways that PC shooters just aren't. New game mechanics and gimmicks are added in a steady stream. I can't call that worse or better yet, but it's certainly different. It must have made the game engine coders' lives a lot harder.

---

update: I have been pointed to this quotation, which seems to fit Super Mario Galaxy:

very brightly coloured, very irridescent...deep sheens and very highly reflective surfaces. Everything is machine-like and polished, and throbbing with energy - but that is not what immediately arrests my attention. What arrests my attention, is the fact that this space is ... inhabited.
- Terence McKenna

Now that you mention it, yes, on our Virgin internet connection, our router does occasionally drop off the net for no reason.

And we knew already that you get slowed down when using bit torrent. But net neutrality is not bollocks. If I write a web app or set up a blog, I don't want to be in the "bus lane"

And if they signed up for phorm, can we find out if we were snooped on? If so, should we be doing anything?

Virgin really don't deserve our repeat business. Or yours.

Wi-fi access points seen by my pc: 3
Wi-fi access points seen by mort's pc: 4
Wi-fi access points seen by the wii (in the "search for Access Point" screen): 0. None. Zip. Nada.

I checked the basics for out access point: Our linksys 54G wifi router is in mixed mode (B & G), and Wireless SSID Broadcast is enabled.

The access point and wii are about 4 meters apart, the router on top of a wardrobe, the wii in the TV cabinet under the TV.

So why can't the wii see the internets?

Picture by short_mort. Caption by meh.

It's a slow day in the office today. I'm waiting for a server to be fixed so I can code against it.

I'm coming back to London tonight. I have a long to-do list this weekend. The large suitcase came up empty, is going back full, with the roomba and other stuff from the slowly-emptying flat coming with me.

The last two nights I've had 8 hours sleep, but I still feel tired. I have even woken up before the alarm, but that may be due to the early light and the daylight savings timeshift.

I'll go to Gym again this afternoon. The weights and rowing have a good effect on my upper body. last week in SA (and no gym for almost 2 weeks) wasn't too bad as far as weight gain went.

A quickie: pay attention to The Power of positive speaking, because complaining is just annoying. So is this article correct, or is it just an anecdote?

We're safely back in London.

The wedding went off well.


The Virgin flight back was not as pleasant as the flight out: it was 1.5 hours late off the ground, it was full, and we were in the very last row, with talkative idiots in front of us, and nattering staff behind us, who got snotty when I said "we're trying to sleep". Saying "I'm doing my job" is true only if your job actually does consist of sitting around talking loudly about who's on maternity leave.

Food had some nice side-dishes, but the main was mac and cheese again. Not as dire as BA's version of this culinary non-event (Virgin's version actually had specks of tomato-based sauce on it), but not inspiring at all.

"Your long-haul flight is a few hours late, and ... hand luggage only". I'd be enraged if I was travelling to a wedding and was told that. I'm angry just thinking about it.

Not to mention the fingerprinting at T5. I give it six months before the scope creeps and that juicy biometric data is used for other purposes. I give it twelve months before it's stolen or accidentally lost.

Data is supposedly "flushed after 48 hours". really? Good luck making me confident that that no-one has copied it, burned it to a dvd when no-one is looking and walked out with it. It is impossible to stop readable bits being copied. Good luck proving that no TLA has already got their hooks into it. The system is insecure until proven otherwise.

BA have been rubbish the last few times I travelled with them.

Seriously, do we need BA? For anything?

I left London last night, it being the first official day of spring after a mild minter, the day was naturally blessed with hail, rain and snowflakes.

Virgin Atlantic is good. It helped that the plane was only half full. But aside from that, the food, service and in-flight entertainment were just a bit better than BA/SAA. I watched Atonement (it has excellent moments, but somehow I was expecting more – when it suddenly started to wrap up I was "huh? Last act already? What happened to act 3 and 4? I thought this was a substantial, five-act film, not a little three-act piece?". Then I saw Eastern Promises, which was quite good. I didn't have expectations of it. Cronenberg continues to mellow into more realistic films, yet remain unsettlingly fleshy. It had Viggo Mortensen, naked except for his tattoos, and more creepy than heroic. And it has twists and character changes.

So, Cape Town in late March: summer is not quite over yet- the plane trees have only started to lose leaves, but the brown grass signals that the dry is not over yet. And it's 25C. Mosquitoes are still about.

Today I helped mac1235 move stuff. Then swam in a pool. I'm still feeling pretty much stunned, it's not so much jet-lag (only 2 hours off) but season lag and lack of sleep. Internet access is limited here, and I have not yet organised a car.

In many ways this is more of a Family Business trip than a holiday. But it's still cool, or will be when I've caught up on sleep, which assumes that the anti-mozzie spray still works.

I'm, off to Cape Town again for the wedding of mac1235 and tngr_spacecadet
See you on the other side.


It must be spring here, suddenly it's snowing.