K! The blog of Karl Bunyan

If Facebook was real life...

2008-05-01T13:42:00.001Z

Floyd inflatable pig goes missing

2008-04-30T10:07:00.001Z

A reward has been offered for a giant inflatable pig which floated into the Californian desert during a concert by Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters.

This isn't one of Roger Waters's best quotes: "Waters said 'that's my pig' as it drifted away during Sunday's gig."

Floyd inflatable pig goes missing

Multiple monitor utility

2008-04-16T14:43:00.002Z

I've just installed a really useful tool to help me deal with my array of monitors called Ultramon. The big benefit is: having a taskbar for each monitor, that only displays the applications open on that monitor. Having four screens worth of apps open is one thing, but switching between them in the taskbar was getting to be a pain.

Ultramon

Word popularity on Facebook

2008-04-16T08:06:00.002Z

Facebook have posted a link to a tool they've built to track the popularity of different words and phrases within wall posts. It's available here as the Facebook Lexicon. Basically, type in one word to see its popularity, and then type in another after a comma to compare. I compared Olympics and Tibet and it's rather interesting.

It's quite a fun tool, and not without some commercial value to Facebook should they get it right: Yahoo have been able to track that kind of trend information for years, and it's highly valuable to some industries. (How many people are talking about a new Madonna album/film/whatever? etc) That kind of large-scale anonymised data collection is one of the big ways I see social networking sites being monetised, and I'm sure it's also the reason behind AOL's acquisition of Bebo. If they integrate chat and Bebo they'll be gathering a huge amount of information as to what the "youth of today" are talking about, as they're talking about it.

South Park's take on viral videos

2008-04-09T10:21:00.001Z

I'm not sure I've seen all the references:

Garfield without Garfield

2008-04-04T09:05:00.002Z

I don't know why, but Garfield cartoons are much funnier without Garfield being in them: Garfield without Garfield.

Trip to Girona

2008-03-16T12:27:00.004Z

Okay, I went to Girona last December, and it's taken me over three months to put the photos up, but stop complaining... Anyway, there was me, Paul J White, Neelesh Sonaware and Deborah Causton (are you reading this Google?).

Paul, pretending to be Borg, or Dalek, or something... Shot glasses stuck to his head, anyway:

I don't remember this bit much, but I took the photo so I must have been there. It was on the way out of the bar:

This jogged a memory when I saw the photo, and I'm glad the motorbike didn't have an alarm on it. (It wasn't ours, by the way.)

The Girona skyline was quite impressive with the cathedral lit up at the top of the hill:

The next day we went for a wander. This is the abbey:

More of the abbey:

Ruins of the castle on top of the hill, although how all that stone got up there I have no idea. I thought things usually fell down, not up, but maybe it's different in Spain.

A scenic courtyard:

The same courtyard:

The cathedral, from the top of the hill:

The town wall is quite immense and there's a surprising amount intact that you can walk along:

Looking down on the town wall from one of the towers:

Girona cathedral and the landscape beyond:

Neelesh inspecing the wall for, err, some reason:

The side of the cathedral:

Another church near the bottom of the cathedral:

Some gates. Girona was great for just wandering around and finding interesting bits and pieces:

What the town wall looks like from the bottom:

Some very intriguing steps halfway up the town wall. Not quite out of reach of the ground, but not exactly useful either:

A most excellent sign:

The place was a bit of a maze and created some amazingly rich residual spaces:

A view out from inside the old city wall:

Paul's wildlife photography. I think the cat can probably see him:

A Spanish cat:

The cathedral doorway:

The cathedral itself. Although not a great piece of architecture its sheer volume was quite impressive. It sits like a stone cube on top of the hill:

This road obviously isn't a main arterial route. Ho ho ho:

It wouldn't be a foreign visit if I didn't see a church covered in scaffolding:

Paul attempting to have a face-off with a tree. As far as I know, they're still at it:

Like many continental parks, the one in Girona consisted mostly of trees and dust. The avenue makes a nice photo, but there really isn't a great deal there if you're not really into gravel:

The view back from the park to the cathedral and churches was worth it, though:

Just what you like to see on holiday: festering bones:

Their idea of christmas lights was slightly strange. They seem to have covered barbecue grills in fairy lights, and that's about it:

Our apartment was at the end of a timewarp:

Neelesh and Paul, travelling through time:

Trip to Washington DC

2008-03-15T10:18:00.002Z

While I was in Washington last week (as one often just happens to be, obviously), I had a few hours in the morning to wander around. Assisted by being still on UK time which meant I could get up very early and not think much of it, of course. But here are the photos:

The Washington Monument. If you can see this, it's impossible to get lost. Strangely, for its size, you can't actually see it from that many places.

The same monument from near the Jefferson Memorial:

The Jefferson Memorial is, like a lot of the monuments around Washington, quite interesting as a grand gesture to be seen from a distance. It doesn't really stand up to close scrutiny in terms of detail.

The statue of Thomas Jefferson:

The same status from one of the entrances to the memorial. The light was good at that time of the morning as it was only about an hour after the sun had come up.

The Lincoln Memorial, from a distance. As grand landscape gestures go, this run from the memorial to Capitol Hill is as big as they get. It was far too far to even think about walking to it.

Capitol Hill, again from a distance (due to laziness):

The back of The Whitehouse (which is the interesting-looking side):

The front of The Whitehouse, which looks rather ordinary, it has to be said. Strangely, after years of living in London I don't think I've ever seen a major politician anywhere, but as I was on my way back the taxi was stopped for Dick Cheney's cavalcade to go past.

New feed publication methods in Facebook

2008-03-12T10:55:00.001Z

The new feed forms available to Facebook applications look like they could be interesting, although I'm wary of any documentation that contains text like "Now when the user submits the form, a little magic happens."

Plane touches wings to runway on landing

2008-03-04T15:28:00.002Z

I may have gone off air travel after watching this plane attempting to land in Hamburg today and scraping its wings along the runway:

A glass half full attitude

2008-02-28T12:52:00.003Z

Apparently, depression can be good for you, or so says this BBC article. But this quote is the best bit:

Everybody's life is full of occasional misery and we are going to suffer. All life ends in grief, unless you are lucky and you and your loved ones all die simultaneously in some plane crash.

That's certainly a different definition of "lucky" to one I'm familiar with.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Is depression good for you?

Facebook traffic down a bit

2008-02-23T13:35:00.002Z

US visitors to Facebook tailed off slightly in January, with 33.9 million unique visitors , down 2 percent from 34.7 million in December 2007. Looking at the graph it's too early to tell if it's a blip or a trend.

Thirsty people and blood donors to pay more to drive

2008-02-23T11:03:00.001Z

"A new generation of road camera which can deduce how many people are in a car is to be tested for the first time."

"The new camera developed at Loughborough University can see how many people are in a car by detecting water and blood content."

BBC NEWS | UK | Car-sharing cameras to be tested:

Brain control headset for gamers

2008-02-20T15:30:00.002Z

This story about a headset that will allow you to control computer games is fairly interesting, but I do hope that whoever's writing the games has a better imagination than the spokesperson for the company: "If you laughed or felt happy after killing a character in a game then your virtual buddy could admonish you for being callous." Just what you want: a computer character telling you off based on facial expression.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Brain control headset for gamers

Avram Grant is Larry Grayson

2008-02-11T11:59:00.000Z

I should have noticed it before:

Sleeveface

2008-01-23T14:14:00.000Z

"one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion"

Sleeveface

Breaking news: the back side of Mercury is just as boring as the front

2008-01-16T19:15:00.000Z

I'm sure it's "revolutionary" (or not, because otherwise they wouldn't have had to fly past it...) that we now know what the back side of Mercury looks like, but it doesn't seem to be too attractive or different from any other photo of a grayscale pancake that I've seen.

I am, however, impressed by the fact they're transferring 700GB of data from the probe. I bet they wish they'd installed a removable hard drive and booked a courier now.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Mercury's unseen side is revealed

Sun buying MySQL

2008-01-16T16:37:00.000Z

I've no idea what this is going to mean for the future of MySQL.

Sun to buy MySQL

Bebo platform opens to developers

2008-01-11T14:43:00.001Z

Bebo today opened their platform to the general development community. It's based on Facebook's own FBML and API documentation which is supposed to make porting apps very easy... I'm expecting a land grab of app clones over the next few days, but it's fun times at least! I think it's time to hang around on Bebo for a while and see how it works.

Bebo developers

Dog eats all the pies

2007-12-13T15:32:00.000Z

A greedy dog was entered in an eating championship despite nearly ruining the contest by wolfing down 20 competition pies in one sitting.

Charlie, a bichon frise, raided the fridge of 1995 champion Dave Williams while his owner was distracted by a pigeon flying up his chimney.

BBC NEWS | England | Manchester | Dog jeopardises pie championships

Facebook still in beta

2007-12-12T09:13:00.000Z

The Facebook API may be great in many ways, but for stability there's still a lot to be desired. There seems to be a slightly "gung ho" attitude to code deployment at Facebook which, although I feel some empathy with, isn't particularly suited to a site with 50 million users. Take this recent developer update as an example:

Requests inadvertantly deleted Dec 11, 2007 10:27am It looks like all outstanding requests/invites from platform applications may have been inadvertently deleted last night. We are exploring various recovery options and will post here when we have more information.

So the last few days weren't a great time to release an application, it seems, and that explains why growth (and ad revenues) have been down on my half a dozen or so.

LinkedIn to get a newsfeed

2007-12-10T10:35:00.000Z

It looks like LinkedIn has been looking at which Facebook features it can steal. LinkedIn's newsfeed does appear to actually be news rather than friend activities, however, and tries to work out what the user might be interested in. It's only in beta at the moment but it'll be interesting to see if it does work. Personally: I'm not convinced, because I read all kinds of disparate rubbish and I don't see how any newsbot can work that out.

Alongside that it seems that the API is starting to make an appearance too, at least to some partners. How OpenSocial it will be is hard to tell at the moment.

LinkedIn newsfeeds in Beta
LinkedIn 's new homepage and API

Facebook: "It's okay to spam your friends"

2007-11-27T10:48:00.000Z

"It's okay to spam your friends" may not be the company's official strapline, but it certainly seems to be a key part of Facebook that spamming your friends with everything you're doing is the way to stay "in touch".

It's a fine line to tread, however, and the recent additions to the newsfeed seem to be taking the site into a dangerous zone. On the one hand, the newsfeed does allow people to see what their friends are doing without having to put much effort in, and allows for all kinds of serendipitous discoveries. ("What an interesting group, I think I'll join!" and "I didn't realise you were interested in...")

On the other hand, it can easily turn people off if the relevancy drops off and the volume becomes overwhelming. "5 of your friends received Funwall posts" is of no interest to me and although I can "vote down" the relevancy, I'm sure there'll be some new fad next month that five of my friends will all happen to do at the same time and I'll have to vote it down again.

The encouragement to spam is no more active than with application design. In fact: the viral nature of application growth, almost by definition, encourages spamming of friends as a way of surviving and spreading. "Invite 10 friends to unlock new gifts" and the like are usually enough encouragement, and somehow the "ethos" of Facebook means most of us have little compunction in at least spamming those closer friends. After all: they can always click on the "ignore" button.

We've experimented with the principle ourslves. Applications such as Which Dessert Are You? give the user a very basic reward for inviting their friends and that, in itself, seems to be enough to spread the application. The content, and usefulness, are both close to non-existent, yet the app is spreading at the rate of thousands per day.

It's a simple equation: if each person manages to spread your application to more than one person it will grow. If it's less than one, it won't. On the plus side (from a commercial point of view) it's a great environment to spread brand awareness by capitalising on the currently acceptable face of spam, but on the other it's a challenge for Facebook to keep these invites and newsfeed messages enough on the side of useful (compared to annoying) for us to put up with it.

How to find Firefox easily in Task Manager

2007-11-07T20:58:00.000Z

Often I need to kill firefox.exe so I've identified this simple way of finding it without having to sort alphabetically and scroll all the way down through reams of pointless, resource-sapping Windows processes (which are no doubt running "just in case" to shave 1 microsecond off an app I use every once 3 years... acrotray.exe, you know who you are). Anyway, here it is:

Open task manager
Sort by memory usage
It's the stupid bloated fat memory leaking process at the top (but double-check it's not photoshop.exe)
Kill kill kill

Hopefully this will be useful to someone else who also has their system ground to a halt just because they've left their browser on the same 40k static page for more than an hour.

Facebookster spam

2007-11-07T13:35:00.000Z

Self-proclaimed Facebook development specialists Facebookster have been spamming blogs with a huge number of comments, including this one.

It really isn't a good sign for a company to be reduced to barely ethical means of marketing, especially when the Facebookster spam messages aren't even relevant to the posts. It's just blatant commercial spam.

We need a stop Facebookster spamming us button on Blogger.