Wikiphage

There comes a point in any project when you have the day when it all seems a bit too much, deadlines growl at you, things just... don't come together.

The only proper response is slight hysteria, and a brief burst of creative procrastination.

Here is today's.

mildlydiverting Idea - download wikipedia on to a microSD card, and EAT ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE as an art piece.

Of course, that goes to Facebook (sorry, I know republishing is crass, I just have different friends in different places).

And then I did the maths.

Kim Plowright Idea - download wikipedia on to a microSD card, and EAT ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE as an art piece.
3 hours ago via Twitter

Jen Bolton, Alison Breadon and Lee Warren Magician like this.


Brian Lok Olsen
can you fit wiki on just one microSD. Perhaps a layer cake with microSD's and cream


Kim Plowright
SO - you can get 16gb on a MicroSd.

From Wikipedia's statistics for the English version of wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

Content pages 3,040,693
Pages (All pages in the wiki, including talk pages, redirects, etc.) 18,062,483

So there are 21103176 pages, of which content makes up (we'll exclude pictures and multimedia for the sake of argument) apx 14.4%

The most recent complete compressed database dump is 2.8 Terabytes - 2867 Gb, as there are 1024 G to a T. 14.4% of that is about 412GB, requiring me to eat 16 microSD Cards. I need to do some research in to the components within an SD card: do they contain circuitboards? Would they break apart during digestion? Is there a dioxin or a mercury load involved, and would 16 cards be enough to significantly damage my health?

All of these questions remain moot.

However, that 2.8gb dump also includes all HTML, and ALL revisions on the pages. I'm only interested in eating the current state of human knowledge: I don't need pretty formatting, or edit wars about Richard Dawkins.

You can actually download a data dump (compressed) from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download that contains just current snapshots of page articles. This download is 5gb approximately....

So, we could just eat one micro SD card, with a substantial cost saving (£10.59 for 8gb rather than £34.95 for 16gb), and hopefully less long term health risks.

Next decision: how to document this process.

Right, back to steering the oil tanker with a toothpick, and herding the Schrodinger's Cats.

Rhonda Forever 2003-2009

Rhonda Forever 2003-2009

This is the most lovely 3d drawing tool. The haptics of it are just fantstic. Makes me want to actually... DO for once.

Reading Dematerials

My Library on Google Books

A few years ago I spent a good few hours scanning the barcodes of my (huge) collection of books, cds, dvds etc using a lovely little bit of software called Delicious Library. It's smart: it uses your built in webcam as a barcode reader, and grabs cover images from Amazon. It also told me interesting things - for instance, I own six books whose second hand value is currently over £100. Alas, even under current circumstances I think I could only bear to part with one of those.

The drawback of the software, however, is that it seems to be very much tied in to a desktop paradigm: something I've noticed is fairly common with Mac apps. The latest version has a 'publish to web' option which spits out rather over-designed HTML. It's a database: what I'd like is a way of syncing a list of identifiers with services that are already out there: listal, LibraryThing perhaps. Both of those sites got fed a long list of ISBNS, or a hacky XML file a while ago, and show a frozen snapshot of my library in time.

I wonder if Google Books 'My Library' might be impetus to get this sorted. Syncing a list of ISBNs shouldn't be too hard, and an API is out there already, and there are some lovely tools coming from the team that help dematerialise physical objects and spread them on the web.

I'd love an application that sat on my phone, let me add books to my local library with the phonecam, synced to my desktop application then updated the various sites where I've stored information over time. As more books go online within the Google Books site, suddenly I have a way of searching across the big, physical knowledge backup system I've been carting around and building upon since I was 5.

I don't think I could ever get to a point where I'm able to box up my books and leave them in storage: I'm too in love with them as physical objects; they're too totemic. But as physical authentication tokens for locked online data stores, they're also pretty interesting. If you could access a digital version of a text only through holding the physical object up for recognition... Hmn.

Untethered

Ugly and neglected fragments (Phil Gyford’s website)

Just skim reading this post on the vernacular by Phil.

I was thinking, on the bus, the other day, about the history of the move from telephones being that of addressing a space, to addressing a person. A land line number connects you with a house or building, in which space the person you want to address may or may not be coincident. Mobiles untethered the phonenumber from a place, and associated it with an individual. You call someone's number, someone's phone, with no overlay of serendipity beyond can they hoik it out of their handbag in time.

I found myself wondering - will the history of the homepage be like this, too? A move from an addressable piece of web real-estate, that may contain the recent activity of an individual; towards a model where a person leaves data trails, a stream, that isn't bound to a certain digital location, or instatiation, but is remade wherever the reader happens to aggregate it. Will the layout of a homepage be superseded by a bunch of feeds - from twitter, flickr... wherever. Are we just a sum of activity rather than publishers?

Anyway, it was a half formed thought. I suspect I may just be talking about 'everyware'.

Lost?

Lost?
Originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting

Things that are exciting

1314-libreta3
Originally uploaded by Mikeyj_cox

I've been working on a really quite bonkers project - Routes for about 8 months now. We're slap in the middle of our live run, and the most amazing thing has just happened: one of our players has mostly figured out a code based on DNA codons within a couple of hours of the pictures going up on a 'police' website.

It's kind of magic to watch.

The best thing: he's posted a really lovely explaination of the science behind the code - and even used some of the same sites that helped us formulate the idea for the puzzle originally.

One Of The Reasons I Have Been Quiet

I have been working really quite hard.

The little Breeder widget above is just one part of the huge bloody game I've been working on:

http://www.routesgame.com/

It's about genetics, and stuff. It's quite good. Try it out.

As serious as your life

Morris Dancing is rad and awesome and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

(I also rather like the fact that this places Four Tet firmly in the tradition of English Folk Whimsy, running straight up from the Victorians via The Wicker Man. It's exactly the thing in his music I like so much. Yes.)

Life Drawing

Life Drawing
Originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting

I finally have something to post about.

I went to a life class - my first for a good ten years.

I can still draw.

This is a very very happy thing.

Interesting storm in an internet marketing teacup

kung fu grippe - The Loopt SMS Mess

I mean, it's another one of those 'web service behaves like a jerk, all of the right thinking folk on the internet get in a tizz and write blogposts ticking them off' kind of things. See also plaxo, back in the mists of time, and the more recent flickr/myxer brouhaha. It reminded me, however, of a little fauxpas I encountered on Facebook recently.

A friend of mine does various bits of ad-hoc PA work for individuals around the place; she's a virtual PA, and very good at what she does.

One of her clients is obviously setting up a new small business, and is offering free events to drum up business. All good so far, and perfectly sound marketing practice.

So, my friend let a group of us know, via facebook, that there was an opportunity to attend a free event. It wasn't my thing, so I didn't respond. Fair enough - this was contact between two friends.

The point it became problematic for me was the third group message that came in to my email, via facebook. Now, I obviously have an opt in relationship with Facebook, so the email is to be expected. And I have a friendly relationship with the person initiating the messages on facebook, which wouldn't be conventionally governed by direct marketing guidelines.

What happens, in short, when my friend starts using a personal distribution list, through a third-party service, to promote a commercial venture belonging to a client she is contracted to?

There are a few problems caused by this scenario. Firstly, it places strain on my friendship with the individual; it's only a minor social faux pas, of course, we've all made them, but nonetheless there is some social harm done there. Secondly, whilst the first message has a positive effect on the brand being (sincerely, I should add) promoted, the third message does enough damage to send the brand in to a kind of negative marketing equity. There's the damage this situation does to Facebook, too; it becomes 'that place that's full of poorly targeted but well meaning marketing messages sent out by people who don't know any better'. And finally, there are potential legal implications around Facebook's Terms and Conditions, Direct Marketing rules, and data protection issues. Yes, I can opt in to recieving info and messages from my friends, but what happens when those friends become amateur direct marketers?

Social marketing is about to enter a messy, painful adolesence.

Gizmodo v. the Truth

Science: NASA Scientists Make Magnetic Fields Visible, Beautiful

This is an appalling write up from Gizmodo.

The film in question was made by an experimental art / animation duo on the ACE International Fellowship for Art and Space Science at UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab in June, 2005. Not, as Gizmodo says, by NASA scientists.

Here's the site of the animation duo, who are pretty fantastic. http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/.

The film - 'Magnetic Movie' - was co-commissioned by Channel 4 and the Arts Council, under the 'Animate! Projects' banner, that's consistently produced some of the most interesting animation in the UK over the last 15 years or so.


Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.


They work, from what I understand, using the open source visualisation language, Processing, and have contributed to Casey Reas' book on Processing. Not bad, for artists, really. It's not all paint and gitaines, these days.

I'm most depressed by the peanut gallery in the comments who are distressed that it's 'fake'. Well, yes, but no more so than any other diagram or visualisation in any science text book, frankly. It's a way of making the invisible visible.

See more of Semiconductor's excellent work on their site.

Roots of Breakdance (Run DMC - It's Like That)

(Edit - hmn, YouTube doesn't seem to be passing the notes around that blog post)

I've been rooting around on YouTube looking at dances, inspired by Tom's marvellous post about Belgian Jump Style. If he doesn't bash a talk together about the cultural hand-me-down chains in dance culture, I may have to.

It's something about everything old being new again, or maybe everything new being old again. It's satisfying, anyway.

Plenty more little gems on my YouTube playlist. Sadly a lot of stuff seems to have vanished. Must remember to download and preserve!

A Note About Email Validation

Lurpak are running a compo to win a breadmaker. Whoop de do. Anyway, being the person who opened the new butter at work, I thought I'd enter the code on the site for a giggle.

Now, I like to be able to sort my email - I like to treat newsletters, lists and personal mail differently. It's a necessity when you get around a hundred emails a day. A really smart way of doing this is with labels in gmail - by using your.name+label@blah.com you can 'presort' mail in to the relevant label.

The format of that email address is absolutely in line with the RFC standards for email - see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696, for instance.

It's surprising how very few sites accept the + sign as a valid character, however. I'd estimate 1 in 20 on a good day, with the wind behind me.

I wouldn't mind so much, but it's useful to work out if company X has sold on your email address. If, when signing up for a service, you format your email address as your.name+servicename@blah.com. All mail sent to that address ends up in your main inbox, but premarked and filed as from sevicename Then, should spam start appearing addressed to that specific address, you can be fairly sure that servicename is the culprit.

Anway, I wish more people were aware of this tip, and that more developers implemented validation properly. That's all.

Reminder - Book your tickets for Open Tech 2008 - 5th July in London.

Open Tech 2008 - 5th July in London.

I'm going to be talking about Rembrandt, P0rn and Robot Monkeys. I will also be shaking like a leaf with terror. Come and support me, or come and laugh at the comedy fat girl, it's all good.

Here's the detail:


Open Tech 2008
sponsored by BT Osmosoft

Saturday July 5th - ULU, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HY
http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/

Open Tech 2008, from UKUUG and friends, is an informal
one-day conference about technology, society and low-
carbon living, featuring Open Source ways of working and
technologies that anyone can have a go at.

You can pre-register your ticket now at
www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/registration
to allow you to jump the queue and pay your fiver on the door.
The last two times we did this, we sold out in advance, so you
are strongly advised to pre-register.

With 3 concurrent sessions, The line-up features:
* Open Rights Group - 2 years, 344 days on
* mySociety - WhatDoTheyKnow.com launch, and other goodies
* Overthrowing Government on a Budget, Keeping Track of
the CIA's Rendition Flights, Tracking Arms Dealers
with Python and Bits of String
* Ben Laurie and friends on network security
* Danny O'Brien's Living on the Edge
* AMEE, and Open Source Solar Heating
* Saving money and reducing carbon through Green IT
* Getting people involved with online media


Totalling 60 talks across 3 sessions covering 9 hours, there's
plenty in the programme for everyone including Rembrandt, Pr0n and
Robot Monkeys, and all that's just in one session!

The full schedule is at
www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/schedule

You can pre-register your ticket now at
www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/registration
to allow you to jump the queue and pay your fiver on the door.
The last two times we did this, we sold out in advance, so you
are strongly advised to pre-register.


* Further information *

Sign up for your tickets online, and tick the box to hear from us, or
just send an email to join uf
opentech-info-subscribe@lists.ukuug.org

(your address will only be used to contact you about OpenTech and
will not be passed onto third parties).

- or you can email opentech@ukuug.org if you've any other questions.


We're also looking for volunteers to help out on the day.
In return for free early entry and our eternal gratitude,
we're in need of a few people to show up a bit earlier
and help us set the venue up. If you're interested, or
have random other questions, email us on opentech@ukuug.org


Open Tech 2008

Saturday July 5th - ULU, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HY
http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/

Final programme may be subject to alteration. Thanks for reading!

Cheers
Ben, Etienne, Emily and Sam
your friendly OpenTech 2008 organisers

In which Orange need to get their acceptable use policy sorted.

So earlier on today I sent round a glowing email about the World's first internet balloon race. I'm looking at widgets for my company at the moment, and I'm really interested in games that use the whole internet as a canvas. Here's (roughly) the text of the email I sent to my co-workers

Subject: Possibly the best use of widgets I've seen

It's an internet balloon race
http://www.playballoonacy.com/

Things that are good:

I found it because a site I visited had a tiny balloon bobbing in the bottom corner - the experience design is really delightful.

The 'add the widgets to your site' is seamless, and allows you to add to a huge number of sites without leaving the main area. It looks like they've outsourced some of that to a company that specialize in distribution and measurement of widgets: http://www.gigya.com/

The widget acts as a way for you to track your participation - so it's your interface to the game, but also displays your participation to others.

There are two parts to the participation element - so you can race a balloon, and add it to your blog etc, but you can also sign up your site to 'host' balloons for the race. I'm imagining this involves nice flash overlays of floating balloons like the one that led me to the site

So the widgets connect each player to their balloon, which could be anywhere across loads of signed up sites - driving traffic across partner sites. It's fun for the players, useful for the hosts, and spreads the message for orange.

This is only the third thing I've seen (other than MOO's Treasure Hunt) that uses the 'whole web as a canvas' - the other is PMOG http://pmog.com/ , which requires the download of browser plugins.

Also, balloons! on the internet! Brilliant!

Bad things - the whole of the sign up site is build in flash. Why? Why?

And now I have another bad thing to add to my list. Here's an email from Orange:

Hi Kim,

We've taken a look at your balloon and we're sorry but we can't let it take part in the race.

It may be because the name or message contains some naughtiness.

To win a luxury holiday for you and your mates in Ibiza you can create another balloon at http://www.playballoonacy.com/

The wording on my balloon that they have rejected is this:

"Hello, I'm Antonin. I might be a corporate shill for a dull mobile phone behemoth, but look, I am also a balloon. A Balloon. On the Internet. That's great!"

This is a fairly close representation of how I feel about the site. It's advertising, and I'm not a huge fan of advertising. It's potentially a little intrusive if you suddenly find your regular spots on the internet are being 'flash mobbed' by balloons. But, the thing is, it's such a good and original idea that I actually signed up, and embedded a widget over yonder, and on my Facebook page. I add very very few applications on facebook, so this should be a major triumph for their marketing department - they've involved a hard-to-reach demographic right off.

So.


The instructions about naming the balloon say

'Write a nice message to get spectators to cheer you on'.

And then underneath the text field, they say 'We'll need to check your message before we put it up on the site, so nothing rude.'

There aren't any terms in the Ts&Cs that I can see which refer to what Orange may consider to be acceptable content, other than 'All Entry instructions form part of the terms and conditions' There's isn't anything to say 'Orange may reject your entry, and you won't be able to re-enter.' It's just 'we need to check it'.

And there's no definition of rude. My message certainly isn't obscene. It's possibly a little cheeky, but really, is pointing out that the balloon is advertising for a brand that offensive?

At the very least, they need to clarify their community/acceptable use guidelines, and include some wording along the lines of 'messages that we feel might in any way damage our brand will be rejected. And if we do reject them, there will be NO obvious way to go back and edit the offending message, so you've blown your chance to enter.'

I think Orange may need to have a think about their approach to user involvement with their brand. If you give your brand to people in a game situation, they will play with it. They will sometimes play with it in ways that don't quite tally with your expectations. You need to allow them to do this, or you will loose the good will they build up through play.

For reference - my previous relationship with the brand: I was with Orange for around 9 years, and gave them up last year because they had no decent roaming data plans, and I'd won an N95.

This is what you want, not what you'll get.

AA Driving School: Learn to drive - Get prices and book lessons - The AA

I've just stumbled across the most comical piece of usability fail on the AA site. They have a question on their 'get a quote' page that's designed, obviously, to measure the success of their various forms of advertising. The idea is simple - joe-learner-driver comes along, selects where they heard about the AA from, and the marketing department get some useful metrics.

Except, the marketing department has supplied a list of their internal categories of advertising, broken down to a minutely detailed level. It's the information they want out of the form, of course, but it's not a list that makes sense to have on the site.

It's very very long indeed, and really, how am I as a customer meant to know about whether I saw their 'Latest Mailer', or their 'October 07 Mailer' - version one, or the second version, labeled exactly the same way two pops lower down the list?

I can't imagine that they're getting any useful information out of this form at all. I suggest their client side coders go round to their marketing team, and point and laugh.

Here, for posterities sake, is the list. I wonder what a 'DIT advert NE' is?

How did you hear about the AA?
NovADIad
BOGOF offer
AA Member
AA Staff
Adi News
Self sourced pupil
Internet - www.AAdrivingschool.co.uk site
Affinity Partner
Internet - www.AA-Attitude.co.uk
Seen car
Saw car in the area
Complaint
Driving Instructor Magazine
Driving Magazine
Email campaign
Friends and family
Franchise Sales
Internet Advert
IAM Magazine
IGI Scheme
Intuition
Leaflet
Papers/magazines
Magazine Advert
Direct Mail
Latest Mailer
MSA Magazine
Newspaper Advert
Student offer
Other
Poster/flyer
Returning Franchise
Recommendation
ADI recommendation
Recommended (Not IGI)
Roadshow
Roadshow lead
School/College Uni visit
Search engine
Voucher
Recruitment website
Internet Enquiry
Yellow Pages.
Signature Leads
Preregistration Outbound
Daily Mirror Jun 07
Franchise Sales Jun 06
Franchise Sales Jun 06
September 07 Mailer
AAdvance Leads
Outbound Directory
September 07 Mailer
October 07 Mailer
Freshers Fair
October 07 Mailer
DIT advert BEP
DIT advert NEP
DIT advert LM
DIT advert CEN
DIT advert YEP
DIT advert SE
DIT advert BT
DIT advert NE
DIT advert SE
DIR advert ES
DIT advert SWE
DIT advert EDP
DIT advert METRO
DIT advert POLICE
DIT advert EEN
DIT advert MET
LMR VOU
TIC 08

TLA Variants

Chat Slang and Acronyms used in chat rooms, IM, and email

Public Service Announcement to three of my email contacts (one of whom is my Mother):

LOL does not stand for 'Lots of Love'. It stands for 'Laughing Out Loud'.

It looks really strange when you sign off your emails with LOL (name). Why are you laughing? Are you not taking the email seriously? Do you find me funny, like a clown?

Understand that you may inadvertently upset someone by using the acronym to stand for Lots of Love; they may not read it in the same way you do.

Sidenote: I wonder if this is a common change in usage for people who are relative newcomers to the internet? eg, if you're a pre-2000 denizen, it will always be Laugh, but post 2000, Love is the more common interpretation.

In which a lifetime of License Fees are accounted for in 30 minutes

ArtWorks Scotland - Alison Watt: A Painter's Eye

I'm sold on the iPlayer, to the point of having tears in my eyes.

Clicking around (and what a terrible interface it is for browsing) I noticed an arts programme destined for broadcast only in Scotland. Except, there it was on iPlayer, too - 30 minutes of television about my absolute favourite painter, Alison Watt.

I saw her work for the first time when I found a catalogue to one of her early shows in a second hand book-shop. She's a figurative painter, mostly, although tending towards abstraction of a kind these days. The work I fell for was portraits of women; drawn from art history, a little Ingres, really; very still, very beautiful, chalky and calm. I still love them, and would give anything to own one, to be able to look at it every day as the light changed, to live with it as it unfolded.

And here, here is 30 minutes of Proper Arts Television; just long, still shots of the paintings, and then the artist herself - her, there, talking - I'd never seen her before. She's so engaged with her work, she talks passionately about painting, about how it involves you, how you fall for images. The pacing reminds me of the old Modern Times documentaries; there's breathing space for the viewer to take in the pictures here.

I'm so happy to have found this; to have been reminded why I love images, and why I love television, and why I love the internet; to be reminded of why my career has travelled the odd direction it has.

Thank you, BBC Scotland, and thank you Alison Watt. There is so much happiness and beauty here.

My Other First Conference

russell davies: an incomplete list of interesting speakers

As Russell points out, I'm not giving my Art / Robots / HCI /Porn and stuff talk at Interesting. Instead, at the moment (and it may change if I have a little panic about the subject) I am going to be delivering the following little chat:

"This Talk May Suck: The Cultural History of the Vacuum Cleaner"

It is more interesting than it appears.

Statistically Comparative Fight Club

How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight?

In my case, 28. The same number as Alice.

Tom can only take 18. Cherie managed 26.

Now, taking children as a baseline, theoretically, what we thus have is a measure of likelihood of each of us beating the other in a fight. Alice and I are an even match, obviously - her high kicks would be countered by my naturally low centre of gravity, I presume.

Tom and I would be closer to a foregone conclusion. What would the maths be? If we fought 28+18 rounds, would I win 28 and he 18? That would mean I'd have a 28/(28+18)*100 percent chance of winning - or 60.869%. 3:2 odds, isn't that? My ability to use small children as a weapon would be an advantage here, I think.

I'd have a very slim advantage over Cherie - 51.852% - fairly even odds, I think. I'm not sure about that, actually, as I think she'd kick my 'ass' - permissable due to her being American. Only an Englishman would kick my arse, of course.

Back to the drawing board on the calculations, then.