Month: March 2006

A few linkbloggery things I couldn’t resist passing on: Somebody’s finally worked out what to do with the Nintendo DS’s touch screen, with the forthcoming Trauma Center: Under the Knife (already out in the US). Meanwhile, I briefly feared for James on reading this post on Boing Boing, linking to this Reuters article about the discovery of a new species of shark. Luckily it’s not James’ shark, which remains stubbornly unknown to science. The vaudeville can go on.

Given the ‘deluge’ posting rate from Boing Boing of late, I can’t imagine how crushing it would be to launch a new website without being linked from them. Robert Scoble, however, remains a little more circumspect, or at least less profligate. He has, however, finally linked to Gia. Isn’t that the definition of ‘A-list,’ or something?

Next up, an American company selling home installations of secret passageways behind fireplaces and bookshelves, activated by moving books or turning candlesticks. Which would be genius, only… watch the video called ‘Bookshelf,’ and tell me that doesn’t look suspiciously like an ordinary door with a bookshelf glued to the front.

Finally – cowabduction.com, which should finally put to rest that absurd notion about Americans not having a sense of humour. Watch the video. Go on, it’s priceless. And, apparently, a production of the California Milk Processor Board.

So, decisions have been made on sessions for the BIG Event this year. Muggins here has somehow roped himself into convening an hour’s panel discussion (or somesuch) on project management, which is either going to be fun or (more likely) a bit of a nightmare. But at least I didn’t go down on my own – I took poor Ben with me. He’s been volunteered (by me, mostly) to run a meet/greet/pub trick session. The idea is a combination of a show & tell and speed dating. Or something like that.

The trouble is, there are likely to be a sizable number of people present, and we’d like everyone to meet everyone else. Precisely once. In groups.

As a result, we’ve both spent hours failing to spot the pattern. I think you can do it for a population P and group size G which satisfies P = nG(G-1), where n is the number of meetings. Then you just need to permute n sets of G identifiers (red/orange/yellow/… , triangle/square/pentagon/… , biped/quadroped/arthropod/… etc), print out those sets as cards, and hand them over to people. The rounds of meetings are thus ‘colours,’ ‘Number of sides,’ ‘number of legs,’ and so on. Job done. Unfortunately, my brain dribbled out of my ears just as I formulated this hypothesis. These days I can write, but I’m very, very rusty at this sort of stuff. Pathetic, really.

However, one of the fundamental aspects of my training as a physicist that I do recall, was to utilise tools appropriate to the circumstances. In this case: a mathematician. Conor, you’re up. I expect a neatly-argued and useful solution in the comments forthwith. Sadly, no LaTeX markup allowed.

Bonus marks to anyone who submits perl/ruby/PHP/python etc to generate the identifier patterns for me, and for alternative solutions. Particularly if they actually work, which mine probably doesn’t.

[update 3rd March: In an entirely expected development, Conor has written code in a language of which nobody else has heard. Meanwhile, a bit of gentle Googling has revealed this page, which suggests that what we’re looking at here is a form of Whist tournament. Which seems promising, until one stumbles over this page, which remarks on a failed brute force search for an 80-person solution.]

Malcolm Gladwell has a blog. Subscribed.

For the last few months, I’ve been writing a column for a newsletter called Planet Science, covering activities and demonstrations and the like. Yet another way of milking the old Big Bang and How2 back catalogue, basically.

This morning I was contacted, via Planet Science, by a production company in London. Now, I’m not terribly well connected, and such things don’t happen very often, so I was mildly surprised that they’d track me down via that route. All became clearer, however, when they asked how much experience I had of live television. ‘Not much,’ I replied. ‘Some of the Christmas Lectures were live, but by that time I was asleep under my desk in the production office, so to be honest I’ve no idea how they went.’

There was a pause.

‘No,’ said the terribly polite but now rapidly back-tracking AP, ‘I meant… on the other side of the camera.’

Realisation dawned at both ends of the phone. Mis-reading ‘producer’ as ‘presenter’ is something we’ve all done, typically when one is trying to find the latter and can only find the former. Now, I’ve stumbled in front of the lens a few times, and not all of those hit the cutting-room floor. But really, I’m no presenter. And I’m certainly not up to the job of co-anchoring a live (NB. live) show based around a zero-anaesthetic operation. Not unless they’re really desperate. Or mad.

Tee-hee.

My brother-in-law is staying with me for a couple of nights this week, as he’s doing a part-time Masters course at Glasgow Uni. He’s been up a couple of times before, and it’s good to see him, but I’m starting to worry that I’m a poor host.

See, I don’t really have a spare bedroom, since it’s an office. And while I did recently tidy up considerably, there’s still not quite enough room to put down the futon. So poor Matty has to sleep in the lounge, with its draughty bay window.

Then there’s the futon itself. Which is… well, it’s old. And somewhat compacted. It has, in fact, been compared to foldable concrete, though the ‘foldable’ part is moot.

It’s so notorious that my dear brother-in-law last night confessed that he’s booked a session with the osteopath for the day he returns to Leeds.

in the interests of fair and reasonable balance, after my little snigger the other day, this article from ExtremeTech detailing why Windows Vista won’t suck. And you know, Mac fan-boy as I am, I’m inclined to agree with them. There’s lots of stuff in Vista that we’ve had in OS X for years, but that doesn’t make it any less welcome in Windows. And there is stuff in Vista that I could see myself using and appreciating.

Sure, there’s other stuff that’s a hideous mess (that blurring-translucent overlay thing for window titlebars? Neat trick, chaps, but there’s a reason OS X toned down most of its original translucency effects – it’s just plain hard to read). Also, we really don’t know what’s going to be in Mac OS X 10.5, which should appear around the same time. But still, Vista could and should be a significant improvement over XP. And hey, my crash-prone PC just about meets the minimum specs.

So, the delightful little Mac mini has gone to Intel processors, with the following changes:

• It’s a whole lot less anemic and should actually be able to encode video overnight, rather than over-the-weekend. I still haven’t seen good benchmarks for MPEG4 compression performance with the Core Solo/Duo processors, however; my G4s absolutely thrash my AMD box for this.
• Gigabit ethernet is long, long overdue – finally you can move video on and off it at sensible speeds. Albeit with a slow hard drive
• Wirelessy stuff is no longer optional. Hurrah!
• The video chipset is integrated (boo!), but supposedly pretty good at hardware video scaling and H264 decoding (yay!).
• Stuffing it to the gills with RAM now means 2Gb, not 1. This is a Good Thing.
• It’s more expensive to start with.

See, it’s that last point that’s rather the fly in the ointment. By the time you add a keyboard and mouse, you’ve not got a huge chunk of change sloshing around for a monitor before you might as well buy an iMac. Which is significantly quicker, if only in hard drive and video performance. Don’t get me wrong, I think the mini is now a cracking little box (whereas previously it always struck me as a bit marginal, performance-wise), but it’s mildly surprising to see just how much more Apple must be paying for the Intel processors over the G4.

However, if anyone’s really pessimistic about Apple, just go back and read Thread 500 – fanboys’ initial reaction to the iPod, all those years ago. The mini is still a decent little box… but the old stripped-out base model was really really cheap.