wheresrhys

About a year and a half ago I discovered a very addictive game Google were running called Image Labeler. You, and a randomly chosen other person playing the game simultaneously, were paired up and shown a series of images. for each image you had to keep typing in words to describe the image until one of yours matched your opponent’s, in which case you received some points; the more unusual/longer/less visual the word then in general you would get more points. I say opponent because although it’s the act of agreeing with them is what got you points, the game did generally involve a lot of mental castigation of your partner, e.g. “It’s a hat for chrissakes. Why on earth can’t you see it’s a hat. Just type in the word – H. A. T. What kind of a moron are you?!”… that sort of thing.

This surprisingly fun game had a purpose – to enable Google Images to tag images for searching, and the game is an ingenious way of doing so in my opinion (Google have long been known for genius programming, but devising Image Labeler took some impressive lateral thinking on their part).

I started writing this post as I presumed the game had finally borne visible fruit. It’s possible it’s been around for a while, but yesterday was the first time I noticed that Google Images now has options to filter by colour, by size and by a handful of key phrases (such as ‘photo’, ‘line drawing’).

On reflection, this may be almost wholly unrelated to the Image Labeler game – image size information has nothing to do with the game, and I reckon they probably have some colour detecting software to work out the prevalent colour in an image automatically.

But the game was, and still is, much fun.

As I was saying, iTunes is a mixed blessing. On the one hand it is way out in front of the media player competition (even more so with the new addition of iTunes Genius), but on the other it’s cursed with Apple’s megalomania.

Today the subject of my ire is that only iPods sync with iTunes’ completely non-standard way of handling playlists and the like. While the new iPod shuffle is pretty cool (though for the size of the thing you’d expect it to have more storage), I’ve never been a fan of the iTunes design – the scroll-wheel is over sensitive in my humble opinion. Also I don’t think I’ve heard anyone applaud the amazing battery life or good value for money iPods offer. And finally, if the battery runs out which – if the iPod is designed as well as everyone likes to think it is – should be well before the thing breaks, you have to send it back to Apple to get the new battery fitted.

Ridiculous.

So I have always stayed clear of iPods, favouring cheaper and more flexible mp3 players instead. First of all I went for the on the face of it iPod clone, but in fact much clunkier, Sandisk Sansa, which broke after little more than a year. At the time I also synced using a bit of free software I can’t remember the name of, and which wasn’t very good anyway.

In its second iteration my iPod abstention has fared better. The mp3 player I have is none other than a sony walkman. Annoyingly, like most mp3 players these days it has the ability to play videos, which I and surely many others don’t want. But minor gripes aside, the simultaneous discovery of Musicbridge, a handy piece of software which takes all your playlists etc. from iTunes and copies them over to windows media player (which, in keeping with windows tradition, is a piece of software which gives you the freedom to choose what hardware you use with it), has led to a golden age of having my iCake with some Sony-icing on top.

Jack Futers is also an upcoming fascist, who is determined rid the world of an unknown Harry Parsonage.

The web brings a whole new dimension to flippantly calling someone a Nazi.

A freelancing website I’ve just signed up to offers you a choice of adding yourself as a Native English speaker, English as a second language, or both.
Which makes me think of Geordies.

I’m not the world’s biggest Apple fan. I’ve written a couple of times of the annoying usability glitches in the so-called design gurus’ software, but by and large their software is very good, so it’s not this that inspires my dislike of the company.

My number one gripe has always been the control freakery; how their all-encompassing design ethic means that they seem hell-bent on making you choose 100% Apple or 100% competitor. A great example of this is that the Apple USB extension cable my friend got that had a little dimple in it, meaning it could only be used on Apple products (though this could be fixed with a pair of pliers).

But this attitude continues into their software. The only Apple software I use is iTunes, quite simply because it’s brilliant. This brilliance has just gone up a notch with the introduction of iTunes Genius, which is excellent at building a playlist of songs to go with any song you select. It’s better than Last.fm’s similar functionality, and it’s better than a number of iTunes plug-ins I’ve tried over the years. And I love it when computers/the internet manage to predict your preferences (Amazon’s recommendations is still the best ‘web2.0′ idea on the web I reckon).

For instance, I’ve just set up a genius playlist based on Rodeo Town by The Kills, who have a female singer. Probably about 75% of the songs in the genius playlist also have female vocalists. I’m not saying this is necessarily desirable in a playlist (though it’s sounding pretty good so far), but being able to identify features such as that in order to get similar tracks is quite a useful feat. I look forward to the day when you can tweak options before generating the playlist.

But I digress – I was supposed to be dissing Apple!

My gripe with the new genius feature is that you have to sign in to iTunes store – giving up your credit card details – before using it. This effectively puts it out of reach of anyone without a credit card. And all because Apple want to make as many users’ purchase of music as quick and one-clicky as possible. Yes, they provide an excellent piece of free software, but any service demanding your credit card details when not absolutely necessary is taking a liberty I feel. iTunes store should offer to save your credit card details if you want to, but they shouldn’t force you to. Coupled with the fact that Genius has a built in ability to recommend music from the iTunes store, and is therefore a surefire money spinner anyway, it just makes Apple seem like controlling, money-grabbing ghouls.

Nice new feature though.

For just a moment
This construction tunnel was
Moby Dick’s ribcage

It’s always a battle trying to eat enough pizza when it’s being shared between friends. It’s believed, in fact, to be the cause of the Crimean war.

But is there an optimal strategy to make sure you get the most pizza you can?

To date I have always followed a “take the biggest piece that’s left” strategy, but ruminating on this has led me to the following conclusion: taking the biggest piece still on the plate isn’t necessarily the best way to maximize the amount of pizza you eat.

Suppose a pizza, P, is sliced into n Slices, s₁, …,  s_n, ordered such that their areas a₁, …, a_n form a decreasing sequence.  Also assume that the time taken to eat a slice is proportional to its area, i.e. t_n = ca_n. Further assume that everyone eats at the same speed and that there is a set polite interval – T – between one person taking a slice and the next person taking theirs.

We will concentrate on the smallest remaining slice and the largest.

Assume you take slice k (the largest remaining). Then the person who took a slice before you (presumably the largest available slice, if they play the traditional pizza game) has time t_k + T = ca_k + T to finish his slice in order to guarantee he finishes before you, and therefore get to pick a bigger slice than you next time. The time it takes them to eat their slice is t_k-1 = ca_k-1. So for him to get a bigger next slice than you:

ca_k-1 <ca_k + T
a_k-1 -a_k < T/c

However, if you take the smallest slice available instead of the largest this changes to

a_k-1 -a_n < T/c

which, if the difference in size between slices is great,  is considerably less likely. Therefore you would be considerably more likely to get to choose before your predecessor next time, and thus securing a bigger slice should you show wish. Now you would have eaten slice an and picked another slice before he’s finished his first.

This strategy won’t always pay off though, and it’s difficult to judge when it would be effective. For instance, say there are very few slices available; If all slices are taken before you finish slice a_n then you lose out but, on the other hand, if you are the only person quick enough to finish their first slice in time to grab the one remaining slice after the first round, then you win.

It may be worth trying to write a computer model of.

A word of warning for anyone not remotely interested in programming, the rest of this post will be a long, hard, meaningless slog, though not without some comic payoff.

Object oriented programming (OOP) is a major concept to grasp if you want to go places as a programmer. My problem for the last year or so is that I have got to grips with the concept pretty well, but was still no closer to being able to do it.

OOP is a bit like set theory and group theory, which I’m more than familiar with as I studied maths for a good many years, and I could easily come to grips with the 4 basic tenets of OOP, but despite this I was still mystified as to how all these web-pages (in my case, though OOP reigns supreme in any big software project) know what to do with all these classes you’ve set up; how it knows where to find their definitions in particular was the bit that mystified me.

I know have the answer. After posting a question on a forum I discovered it’s not actually part of OOP theory at all, it’s just that programming languages that support OOP tend to have some way of enabling you to very concisely specify where the classes are to be found. The obvious answer I suppose.

Using the new search term “autoinclude” I was able to find a decent how-to tutorial. The tutorial is very well put together, save for some pretty on the cheap editing. Someone at a late stage before its publication must’ve thought it could do with coming across as more personable. A quick find and replace later, and all the “we”’s have gone, replaced by “I”’s. Which has left such beautiful turns of phrase as:

I have shot ourselves n the foot

I are using two external constants

I have a million products in my database, and I are not going to tell you about any of them!

Drowning your sorrows,
Leaving an etched eulogy
on a pub table