It had to happen one day… I’m pleased to say that I’ve been offered a job which I applied for a while back and yesterday accepted! From September (after I graduate [hopefully!]) I will be working for an IT consultancy firm based in London (with offices around the world) as a “Technology Associate” which is basically a consultant/developer. It’s all pretty exciting and I’m looking forward to new challenges ahead! Hopefully things shouldn’t change much around here but something tells me I won’t have so much time to update.
…the student days are nearly over!
It was good to see an article today in The Times (page 14-15, T2) which echoed my previous comments on Hollywood’s vandalisation of Japanese cinema through remakes. Although I cannot stand to watch them, apparently they have actually helped boost DVD sales of the origionals which is no bad thing but I still can’t help wishing this had never began. I just hope the slow-rot doesn’t spread back to Japan and ruin what’s left there of a unique culture.
Also of interest:
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There seems to be a bit of silent revolution sweeping the Internet right now being that of information association - web portals are springing up which allow you to upload various content and categorise it according to keyword tags as well as others which allow you to carry out visual query’s on data scraped together from a variety of different sources. It’s all very cool until you realise just how much information there actually is out there now - more than it’s worth thinking about! Recently I’ve noticed a growing number of small online visualisation tools which allow you to carry out dynamic queries on this data - some of it’s purely for fun, while others have serious objectives. Below I’ve gathered together and listed some of my favourites:
Flickr Spell
Flickr Spell is a cool little web app that allows you to spell out words using images from Flickr (surprise surprise!). Kind of like the old style blackmail notes using cut out letters from a newspaper but brought up to date in a more 21st century style!
Flickr Graph
Flickr Graph is an interactive flash animation that explores the social relationships inside Flickr. It uses the classic attraction-repulsion algorithm for generating graphs showing links between users. I especially like the way you can view a users pictures associated with their information, very slick!
Newsmap
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. It employs a treemap visualisation algorithm to condence all the information into recognisable coloured bands for each category of news. Neat!
extisp.icio.us
Extisp.icio.us takes the tags of any given del.icio.us (a social bookmarks manager) user and visualises them based on the number of entries per tag. Outputs a sort of ‘brain map’ using CSS similar to what Technorati does. Apparently the placing of the tags is entirely random!
TouchGraph GoogleBrowser
GoogleBrowser builds up a graph of related pages to the URL you enter by retrieving similar-page results from Google. Interesting (and sometimes worrying!) to see what Google things is a similar page to your own! A bit memory/cpu intensive but give it time and it eventually settles down.
LivePlasma
Uses info from Amazon to map associations between music and movies. It can help you find stuff you might like based on your current tastes, as well as showing just how narrow (or wide) your tastes actually are! Pretty clever, good for market trend analysis I would imagine.
If you know of any more of these cool tools please let me know so I can add them to the list!
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It’s been a year now since the controversial Passion of the Christ hit our screens - love it or hate it there’s no denying its impact worldwide. While Mel cashes in again, this time with a watered down cut version of the film (about 5 minutes less torture), others in various places take it one step further and actually get themselves pseudo-crucified. Is this true dedication or just sick stupidity? I don’t know but it certainly makes you think!
Take a look at the Lenten Rituals in Cutud, Pampanga here [Graphic Content].
Thought I might pass comment on a fad which has emerged over the past week that just about everybody seems to be trying - ‘transparent’ screen backgrounds. Basically you take a photo of the scene behind your screen and set it as your background wallpaper, giving the illusion of a see-through screen. Some look pretty cool:
Tricky to get it the perspective right probably but with a tripod it can’t be too difficult. Not being one for fads myself (!) I haven’t tried to make my own yet but it’s ever-so tempting! Take a look at some more on Flickr.
All that’s left to say is Happy Easter, don’t overdo the chocolate!
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Somehow Easter is almost upon us again, I’m sure as you get older time goes faster! Today we (me & my family) went for a walk at Sheringham Park near the Nofolk coast. Although the weather was pretty grotty it was nice to have a stretch of the legs after being a bit sedentary over the past week. I took my camera along but didn’t capture anything of note really. The picture below is all I felt like posting:
Purple Tree (Large)
Linux user will be pleased to hear that Adobe has finally up the aging Acrobat reader (v5) to the latest version (v7). The good news is that it’s a big improvement, especially in the speed department. You can get it here.
More soon when I’m awake!
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I’ve been running an alpha build of Dropline Gnome 2.10 for the last couple of days and must say I’m impressed. Everything seems a bit snappier & there have been some nice UI enhancements. My desktop looks even better now!
I was pointed in the direction of a cool little visualisation applet today which graphically represents the hyperlinks for any given web address in a literal tree. While this is nothing really new it’s neat to play with and see the tree’s growing on screen. My own site looks particularly brocolie-like to me!
Have a go yourself with the texone::tree here.
I was intrigued today by an article about a new maglev train which has just recently opened to the public in Shanghai. With speeds of up to 220mph (around 450 kilometres per hour, 60% faster than Japanese ‘Bullet Trains’), the Shanghai Transrapid maglev line is the world’s first high-speed commercial commuter system using state-of-the-art electromagnetic levitation technology.
In maglev trains, high powered magnets perform the functions of wheels and rails. Lift magnets under the body of the vehicle cause the train to float on a guideway, while other magnets maintain the vehicle’s lateral alignment. Gap sensors check the distance between train and guideway 100,000 times per second! Once the vehicle levitates and the guideway is switched on, an electromagnetic travelling field accelerates the train. The speed is regulated by the field’s frequency. For a more in-depth look at how it works see here.
As trains go, this looks seriously cool. Considering the environmental benefits to this sort of technology I can see it catching on if the enormous price-tag can be reduced (the Shanghai project cost around $1.2 billion!). More detail can be found here and here. You can see a video of the line in action here (35mb), don’t let the German dialog put you off!
Elsewhere… I’ve got some exciting news (for me at any rate!) lined up for some time next week but will hold off on it until everything in question is confirmed. Big things are afoot! 
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