I don't have any money so am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead

Too busy to actually write content, so here's some from elsewhere on the Internet.

I don't have any money so am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead

Highly recommended.

Xx

Facebook 'lost' my data

I recently received the following email:

'Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We're sorry for the inconvenience.

To reset your email notification settings, go to:

http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

Thanks,
The Facebook Team'

Interested to see what the Internet had to say about such a well executed hoax, I visited some search engines to take a look, and discovered it...wasn't.

Yes, seriously, someone with that many data servers (and presumably a whole ton of backups and archives) managed to lose a whole load of data. The O'Reilly blog post about the whole debacle is quite amusing, and I must admit I'm tempted to agree with their overall recommendation:

'It's time to fire the entire engineering staff.

And then go out and find software engineers who understand what the phrases "data redundancy", "system and data backup", and "system failover" actually mean.'

Amazing.

Swansea's only export

Just as I was about to walk into a (cancelled...but that's another story) lecture today, I got a phone call from 01792 761030. Not recognising the dialling code (Swansea) I assumed that it must surely be someone calling to offer a job and asking whether £15k would be enough for the Golden Hello.

Having looked it up recently though, it appears to be someone randomly calling as many mobile numbers as they can. Quite what they do when they get through appears to be a subject of debate on the Internet. Either they hang up as soon as you answer, offer a new phone contract, or keep ringing and use a combination of the two approaches.

Bizarre. Maybe I'll ring them and offer them a new phone contract.

MTV African Music Awards

I really can't do much better with this one than to just copy/paste and highlight:

From: MTV holds its first African music awards - Associated Press

Two Nigerian singers won top awards Saturday as MTV held its first-ever music award program for Africa, with acts from across the world's poorest continent being nominated for prizes.

Winners were selected by fans sending text messages, said Alison Reid, a spokeswoman for MTV Networks Africa.

And yet, after all that, it's still more credible than Eurovision.

I love mass production

Take a look at this video from the BBC:

Inside a frozen pizza factory

When I first saw the link I was expecting some Panorama style hidden camera tour of immigrants working in amazingly unhygienic conditions - as with the ready meals for supermarkets a while ago. Instead, we're at the other end of the spectrum of journalistic integrity, with a straight-up presentation from a product development manager for the factory.

I prefer fresh food, though I'll happily eat frozen stuff like this. What I really love though, is seeing these mass-production factories in operation. There's something incredible about the precision and efficiency and ingenuity that's gone into every tiny part of the system...I almost wish I'd taken up engineering rather than compsci.

When I worked there, I was always really impressed by the level of detail that went into the efficiency of processes in a McDonald's restaurant. I still am, to some degree, but it's all too often ruined by the human element - which leads me to wonder why on earth such establishments are not more automated. The quality would be better, the waiting times lower and the food safer.

Plus, it'd kill off a bunch of low paying jobs and ensure that graduates weren't just ending up on the dole. Seems to be win-win for the economy. Get to work folks.

On responses to email

I really do quite like it when I see people and organisations acting professionally. I also get quite annoyed when I see them not bothering to do so. Being a geek, I see a lot of this through the Web, and often get in touch with a short (generally fairly friendly) note to let people know if they could do with improving their service (or indeed, if they're already providing a great one).

I have, however, noticed quite a disparity in the replies I get. I'd have thought that the ones I send positive feedback to would just nod and get on with their work. The ones I send negative feedback to would immediately look into the problem, take some positive action and get back to me with an apology and a listing of how they intend to improve.

As you might have guessed, that's not always what happens. Here's some key culprits:

People failing with mailing lists
Here's an example - today I got an email which was sent to all undergraduates in the school of engineering and applied science at Aston. There's a perfectly good seas_ug mailing list which would hide all of the addresses the message was sent to. Alternatively, there's always the 'bcc' field. However, this mailer chose to put all ~2000 email addresses into the 'to' field, for any enterprising student to harvest and sell/abuse.

I sent a link to the Data Protection Act to the offender, and some kindly advice about how to use mailing lists and email in general. Based on past experience of sending similar emails, I'm near certain I won't get a response.

Edit: What're the odds? They replied a couple of hours later. This is literally the first time someone's replied to such an email. Their excuse of 'incompetence' wasn't really too reassuring though, especially as the damage has already been done. They seem a nice enough person though.

Recruitment agencies/departments
I've been applying for some jobs recently. Some of the companies have unbelievably awful processes - I actually decided not to go for one particular job because their recruitment process is that bad. If they don't care enough about quality to at least glance at what they're putting live, I don't think I want to work there. I won't name names, as the agency which put up that tat is also processing some of my other applications at the moment.

For the companies that have been particularly awful (or particularly good) I've sent some communication outlining this, and suggesting simple methods for improvement. The good feedback has gotten me a 100% response, whereas the negative has gotten me a 0% response. Presumably if they're so unprofessional they put that kind of application process live, they're also unprofessional enough not to care.

People putting information online in proprietary formats
Hint: Not everyone has a copy of Microsoft Office installed. Yes, I'm aware there are sub-par tools I can use to get a rough idea of the content of your .docx, but if you put one up online you can expect an email asking for an open document type.

Feedback (and a document anyone can read) is about 50% from people I email with this one. Although, that's dropping since I started mailing recruitment agencies that are (shudder) using .dot templates to, presumably, automatically extract data into their Access databases. Classy. Remember that these are technology companies that I'm applying to.

--

Right, enough bitching. Time to go back to coursework..

Depressing

A while back, ZDNet reported that:

"IT graduates have the highest unemployment rate across all degree subjects at almost double the average for students leaving UK university courses...IT graduates have higher unemployment rates than students in performing arts (6.6 percent), media studies (8.6 percent), history (6.8 percent) and art and design (10.2 percent)."

Today, I'm guessing that Icelandic Studies and Finance graduates are probably a bit worse off, but it's still rather difficult to find a job.

So, who's up for a PhD then? :)

0.62% of a degree!

Final year's a bit more exciting than other years, even when it comes to just the little one hour practicals. Unless I found the subject interesting, it was hard to summon up the enthusiasm to do background reading and prep work for assessed lab classes in second year - given that they counted towards about 0.06% of my total degree mark.

This year I did put the effort in, and it's rather nice to have two 100% marks behind me (for quizzes that took all of 15 minutes), and 0.62% of a degree to add to the 18.75% (out of a possible 25%) I got from last year.

Now then, time to sell my soul and go and answer the coursework questions as set, rather than interpretations of them I find interesting, or digressing into long (albeit well reasoned) discourses about why the underlying principles behind the coursework question are at fault.

Alex Harmon

Whenever I go along to open mic nights, there's often a performer or two I really quite like, but for some reason as I walk out of the door, it never quite sticks. I don't look them up again, don't recommend them to others...it's just a part of the night.

I always mean to change that attitude and, in that spirit, here's a chap that was playing at Einstein's this Tuesday.

Alex Harmon

Only three songs up there, but I do like them. Not entirely sure about the recorded versions though, I think he might have been a bit better off just putting a tape recorded in front of a microphone at one of his gigs. Still, have a listen.

The Celluloid Orphanage

In yet another testament to the power of viral marketing (oh and, by the way marketing graduates, please stop going to large corporations and trying to 'force' viral marketing campaigns to work by throwing money at them, it's just annoying)..

where was I?

Oh right, The Celluloid Orphanage ostensibly started out with someone throwing all the photos on their computer with no classification into a folder, and putting that up in a Facebook group. There's now a couple of thousand members, and an absolutely bizarre collection of photos. Don't you just love things that don't really seem to have any purpose at all, but still manage to make people smile?


<sub>Even more amusing is the comments thread accompanying this photo






Another glorious moment for those aforementioned marketing graduates</sub>

Find me some more good ones people.

Videos of Tie-Dye Quartet at The Yardbird

As promised, courtesy of YouTube, here's some videos from parts of our second set:

Chameleon


Spanish Guitar Jam


Fever


Ina's Jam


Wade In The Water


Silver Rain


The tracks are also up for free download on Last.fm. Or, at least, they will be shortly. Try back tomorrow if you can't find them now.

Sokobina

I wrote a game!

You can download it here. You'll need Java installed in order to play it. If you don't know if you have Java, visit Sun's Do I have Java? page, and install it if necessary.

There shouldn't be any bugs left, but leave me a comment if there are. Also, please get in touch if you've made any cool custom levels, and send them across. You can find the levels you've made in the 'customlevels' folder that appears when you extract the game. Make sure you extract everything from the zip file before trying to play :)

There's a prize for the first person to beat every level. And yes, I do have a way of checking. If any of you CompSci folks manage to circumvent that then I suppose you deserve a prize anyway.


_{A screenshot from level 20}

Before you get too excited, I should point out that Sokobina is just another version of Sokoban (also known in English speaking countries as BoxWorld). I wasn't aware this genre was quite so popular though, when I started up I only had vague memories of a really cool Amiga game (this particular one had cavemen pushing rocks into holes, I believe).

I wrote it up myself for three reasons - to relive the fun of the game; to give some challenges to some friends I know like to solve puzzles and to work on my AI skills.

Only later did I find out that Sokoban, as a genre, is NP-HARD, and comparable to chess in the depth of the search trees you need to solve it with AI. In fact, Sokoban solvers have already been the subject of quite a bit of research, and for some harder levels, there are still no solvers that can do a decent job. I even found someone who wrote a solver for his Final Year Project - why didn't I think of that?!

I'm still working on an AI, which can then be used to find out if levels made via the creator are feasible or not. For now, there's just very trivial checking, so I'd recommend you play through your custom levels yourself (you can start a new game while the level editor is still open) to see if they're solvable before you email them to me or your friends :)

Let me know if anyone fancies dipping into the code and lending a hand, it's not too messy :)

--

Thanks for Forx for lending a hand with the graphics :)

Tie-Dye Quartet at The Yardbird

Last night was our exciting (and nicely paid, wink wink) gig at The Yardbird jazz club in Birmingham city centre - and it went pretty well if I do say so myself. The place wasn't packed, being bonfire night, but there was still a respectable audience and we played two 50 minute sets or so, with an encore when some folks started shouting.

Pics below, videos to follow once they're done uploading to YouTube.







Excuse the quality, our usual photographer was on a date :)

Gigs In November

It's a good month for music. Early in the month you can find Manu Delago playing various gigs in London - and I'm off to see him at The Rainbow in Birmingham on the 8th. See his site for show dates.

On the 20th I'm finally going to see my favourite musician of all time, Herbie Hancock, playing at Symphony Hall in Birmingham, with a brilliant line-up at his side. Tickets for that one are sold out now I'm afraid.

Tie-Dye Quartet have a very nice gig at The Yardbird in Birmingham on the 5th - I expect you all to be there. Free entry, 8 'till late. We're also playing a Ball in a lovely hotel and possibly the odd show in some nice restaurants.

Alas, the month isn't perfect though. McFly at the NEC on the 13th has sold out :(