Geoff's Ramblings

Poppy at the Seaside

2008-01-11T22:45:00.001Z

Poppy at the Seaside
Originally uploaded by Geffa

Just before the new year we visited the local seaside with the latest addition to out family.

Poppy, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, is just over 5 months old now.

She was very bemused by the sea and kept cautiously paddling in the shallow pools.

More Dooberrys (or even Duberrys!)

2007-11-02T09:26:00.000Z

As a supporter of both Newcastle Utd and the generic placeholder word Dooberry (see earlier posts) I was completely bemused BBC report on the Reading v Newcastle game discussing the only Newcastle goal.

"Emre's low delivery went through a crowd of players before bouncing on to the stomach of the unfortunate Duberry and into the goal."

A classic in my mind.

Add your free link. Spread the "WebWideWord"

2007-10-04T14:15:00.000+01:00

The purpose of this blog entry is to promote my new website "WebWideWord"

The idea is to try and generate the world's largest word grid. A word grid is a series of interconnecting words in a style similar to that of a crossword, although the symetrical nature of most crosswords is not enforced in the grid nor are there any clues.

You enter your word from the "Add Word" button and associate with it the URL you would like it to link to when clicked, the colour you wish it to be displayed in when the mouse is hovered over it and the tooltip text (little pop up box) that appears when the mouse is hovered over it. Once you have entered this information you position your word in the grid so that it fits in with the other words around it. Then click and your word is saved. Subsequent visitors to the site will see your word in the grid. What's more, there is no need to give me a reciprocal link for this service although any such links or blog mentions would be more than appreciated.

If you like what you see then please tell your friends. If there's anything you don't like about the site or feel could be improved, please tell me.

Finally remember the motto - Spread the "WebWideWord"

Now a Dog Has Nine Lives?

2007-10-02T13:11:00.000+01:00

At the moment we are thinking of buying a dog as a family pet.

Being well prepared I decided to get a quote for pet insurance. I picked up a leaflet at my local Marks and Spencer store and decided to visit their website for the quote.

After entering a few details I was presented with a, quite reasonable, quote. I scanned through the terms of the quote and was very amused by the one for 'accidental death'.

See if you can see what's funny in the image below. I will point out that the quote was for a single animal.

Musical Memories Revisited

2007-10-01T22:55:00.000+01:00

I often recall my parents listening to music when I was a child some 30+ years ago. I remember the sounds of the likes of Jim Reeves, Millican & Nesbitt, Peters and Lee, Neil Reid, Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers playing on an old record player.

This sort of music held no attraction for me but I lived with a latent fear that when I reached my forties that I would wake up one morning with a desperate urge to track down Jim Reeves' Greatest Hits or something similar.

Fortunately (Sorry Jim) this has never happened. My musical tastes, whilst very varied, have not touched upon the tunes my parents enjoyed. With teenage children I have enjoyed discovering new artists and, in turn, introducing them to some of my music. I am pleased to say that they haven't (often) looked upon my music with the level of disdain that I probably used to all those years ago to my parents, although Jethro Tull almost causes it.

Imagine my surprise the other day when I heard, coming from my child's bedroom, 'Jolene' by Dolly Parton! My mind flashed back all those years to hearing my parents playing the same song.

Fortunately though, there's no sign of Jim Reeves yet!

I Found my Thingamabob on Dooberry Hill

2007-09-26T22:53:00.000+01:00

I love the way when our memory fails us when trying to remember a word that we just insert a standard placeholder word that can mean just about anything and we expect the listener to just understand what we mean.

There are number of such words in common use; Wotsit, Thingamabob, Oojimapflip and, my own personal favourite, Dooberry. My favourite use of this was describing yoghurt coated blueberry sweets to my wife as 'blueberry dooberrys'.

A quick google reveals that there are many discussions on these words. Dooberry is referenced in the urban dictionary although, as of yet, I have been unable to find the origin of the word. The Slang Dictionary covers oojamaflip and mentions that it is often used to refer to the television remote control. Oddly, this has been renamed as the 'zapper' by my family or 'Frank' by me when I'm trying to confuse them :)

But the final word must go to the wonderful threads on this forum post as it has introduced numerous more words to use when I can't remember the word I'm looking for.

The only problem now is I can't remember the wotsits to replace the thingamabobs I couldn't remember in the first place, if you get my dooberry!

I'd welcome your comments on your favourite placeholder words.

Context Insensitive Ads

2007-09-24T23:20:00.000+01:00

The number of ads on websites is ever growing as people see it as a potential way to earn a "fast buck".

The majority of these ads are supposedly context sensitive so that they are targeted at the subject matter that is being read. This, more than occasionally, goes a bit wrong.

A web page arguing against a certain topic can find itself, absurdly, carrying adverts for the very thing that it's arguing against. This can sometimes cause amusement. Such was the case on a colleagues blog at psionmark.blogspot.com where he posted an amusing rant about the incorrect use of fog lights. The ads following this article were all trying to coerce you into buying additional fog lights to fit to your car.

Sometimes the ads can, however, be almost in bad taste as is the case in this example discussed here.

Perhaps the context sensitive ads need to become a bit cleverer. They need to determine the context of the article in a more exact fashion. In the example of my colleagues website, they could have determined that the article was indeed about motoring safety and generated ads for products in this area, such as advanced driving courses.

So next time you are on a website with ads, rather than just ignoring them, take a glance and see if they really do fit into the context of the site.

In conclusion I find most amusing the ads when reading a Gmail message. They attempt to glean some context from the body of the text, sometimes with hilarious results. An email from a colleague informing me of little more than he "was on holiday and having a relaxing time" resulted in a number of holiday specific ads (fine - I can see the context there) but mixed in there was an ad for pregnancy testing kits. I still haven't quite worked out the link there ;)

Ouch! Drunken Fan's Nasty Fall!

2007-09-24T14:13:00.000+01:00

I was at the Newcastle vs West Ham game yesterday and witnessed a very nasty fall by a fan who appeared to have consumed rather too much of the wobbly juice. Given who we were playing he could have been said to be "hammered" - groan.

The fan in question arrived some 25 minutes into the game and was seen showing a season ticket to the steward asking where his seat was. The steward pointed him in the general direction of up the steps towards his seat. He left the steward and stumbled up the steps beyond my seated position and, I assume, found his seat.

Some 15-20 minutes later I caught sight out of the corner of my eye of someone falling. This was followed by a horrible thud sound as they hit the wall at the bottom of the steps. At this point, by the response of the people nearer the scene, it was clear that the person could have been badly hurt. At the stairs, some 10 yards to the side of the accident, there was no steward. The fans in the immediate vicinity started calling for a steward. However, at this point we scored our second goal. It seemed that the stewards didn't hear the call for the cacophony resulting from us scoring.

Eventually the steward arrived and summonsed the St. John's ambulance crew who came at the same time as the police. After about 5 further minutes the person was sat up into a wheelchair and covered with a blanket. It was then we could see that it was the drunken fan who had fallen. He looked in quite a battered and bruised state and had clearly lost some blood but fortunately he was at least conscious. He was wheeled off escorted by stewards and St. John's ambulance crew to the concourse area.

The half time discussion centred around the guy's fall and how there had been concern that he had been seriously hurt. He'd fallen some 10-15 concrete steps with a concrete wall at the bottom. One, particularly vociferous, fan was voicing his opinion about the lack of a steward at the nearby stairs to the stewards and the police.

At this point everyone assumed that the fan had been taken off to hospital but it turned out that this was not the case.........

....... some 15 minutes into the second half two stewards and two St John's ambulance people came up the steps with the guy. They walked along the terrace to the steps where the guy hugged one of the St John's ambulance people in thanks and then he walked back up the stairs (stumbling after one step) towards, I assume, his seat. Nobody could believe it. For the next half hour every time someone walked down the steps people were glancing to see if we were in for a repeat show.

With a short time of the game left, he came down the steps escorted, again, by two stewards and some St John's ambulance crew. They went off down the steps to the concourse and weren't seen again.

A very eventful game both on and off the pitch.

The following questions were being voiced by many of the fans: -

Should the fan have been allowed to take his seat when clearly in such a drunken state?
Why was there no steward at the nearest stairs? Many people were of the opinion that there should be a steward at every stairwell. I wasn't aware of this.
And oddly why was the fan seemingly allowed back to take his seat.

Hopefully his injuries will be short lived and he will soon be back to normal and I'm sure all fans wish him well.

Made it to Digg upcoming list :)

2007-09-21T09:09:00.001+01:00

I've made it onto the Digg Software Upcoming list. I may only have achieved 8 diggs but I'm delighted at being on this list. Please help me maintain my position by Digging the post by Clicking Here Thanks ...

Every Possible Picture Available! (Theoretically)

2007-09-21T07:45:00.000+01:00

The title of this post describes what "All Known Images" is about. Consider a catalogue of every single possible picture regardless of the reality of the actual picture. It would make the content of the likes of Flickr and Google Images insignificant.

How could this be achieved?

Well, it's theoretically possible, although admittedly far from being feasible.

In this digital camera age most people are familiar with the megapixel resolution of cameras and comfortable with such terms, so I'll just give a brief introduction to what is meant by resolution for anyone who is not familiar with the term.

A picture can be represented by a grid of coloured dots (pixels). The bigger the grid and the larger the number of colours available the better the quality of the picture. Computer monitors are commonly 1024x768 pixels. This means there are 1024 pixels across the width and 768 pixels for the height giving a total of 786432 pixels (in photographic terms 1 megapixel is 1048576 pixels).

The picture below shows a grid of 2x2 (the pixels are exploded to allow a better explanation) using only the colours red and blue. The top left image shows all pixels set as blue, the one just to its right shows the top left corner pixel as red and all the others as blue, and so on. With 2 colours on a 2x2 grid there are 16 possible pictures, although I use the term picture loosely. Non of the examples shown are likely to find their way into the finalists of a photography competition.

By extending the above to a grid larger than 2x2 (say 50x50) then we have the image size as that shown in the random picture generator. This still only uses two colours but, as can be seen from the previous post, there are a frighteningly large number of possible images of 50x50 in only two colours. Extending the concept further to a standard VGA image (640x480) in 256 colours (this is way short of photographic quality) and we start to reach extremely large numbers of possible images. I am still looking for a calculator that can perform the calculation to get an actual answer for this. The calculation is a function of both colours and pixel resolution. For N colours and a resolution of R pixels the number of possible pictures is N^R. It should now be clear why this is not feasible, but just in case, consider : -

the length of time taken to create all these images.
the disk storage required to hold all the images
the checking of the images to determine which are valid images.

When I first thought of this concept some 25 years ago it was for creating character sets on an 8x8 grid using only black and white. Subsequent blogs will discuss my revisits to the problem over the subsequent years.

Food for Thought

2007-09-20T14:12:00.000+01:00

Before I start on the "All Known Images" here's a little food for thought.

Take a look at the "Random Picture Generator" in the top right corner of this page. The small image will change every 2 seconds to display a different random picture. The picture is made up of a grid of 50x50 dots (pixels). These pixels may be either black or white. It is quite feasible that the image you see will be a black and white picture of something instantly recognisable. However, it is far more likely that it will be just a collection of dots representing noting in particular.

Watch it for a while; you may occasionally see that a part of the image looks like something recognisable.

If the image changes every 2 seconds and you watch it for 5 minutes you will have viewed 150 different images. This may seem like quite a lot but in actual fact is a tiny proportion of all the possible images that exist for a 50x50 grid in 2 colours.

Have a think on how many you think there may be. Five million? Ten million perhaps? Move your mouse over HERE and you will see below the actual number that there are.