FofR

A timely electronics rant

2008-02-05T21:35:00.001Z

It's been a short while since my last blog entry; I have been hurriedly coding my monstrous hunk of a new website, Auction Earners. In between frantic key bashing I have also partaken in Christmas festivities, settled in at work (carefully omitting keywords to prevent this being flagged in a Google Alert), turned 23 and grown a little overweight. Who'd have thought that typing was not sufficient daily exercise to keep one healthy? When it gets a little warmer those calories will be burnt off as I take to a regime of sun tanning and cycling.

Now, in taking a break from my still unready ad service, I feel that I need to rant about a couple of things. Come New Year and my splendid get-together come shindig in my flat – (with Tex-Mexican niceties (tacos, enchiladas, dips, chilli con carne) spread among 8), whilst purchasing the tasty treats I decided to embark on a Freeview adventure. Back in November I bought myself a Philips Freeview box (a DTR220, digital terrestrial receiver) for £35. Plugging it into the aerial atop of my flat lead to the discovery of 40 channels, with an almighty 3 of these being viewable (bid up TV, sky three and a radio station), the rest degrading into some sort of glitch-ridden madness. This didn't bother me too much; I took the box back and grabbed my refund from Curry's, one hour after purchase. In late December I picked up my signal booster from Bristol, bought the same box again and hey presto – 40 viewable channels.

It's been a month or so since I got the box, and a number of things have started to annoy me. The main niggle is the constant crashing of the firmware – I'll be merrily flicking through channels and all of a sudden it will turn itself off and on again, experience a control freeze up (the TV signal shall continue but all control is removed – forcing me to switch the unit off and on at the switch) or suddenly cease rendering the background image elements for the EPG and info bar – which again do not return until a reset. Temporary in-viewing problems also include a periodical five to ten seconds of black and white, cross channel interference (particularly annoying if the invading channel has scrolling text) and all on top of the ugly low signal digital pausing and image distortion that occurs during bad weather. The remote control interface is also entirely unintuitive, although it is slick – if I had to give a positive point to this pseudo review.

In conclusion, do not buy the Philips DTR220, it is a hunk of junk with a brand name.

To continue in the same vein, my television comes equipped with a solitary SCART connector. I regularly switch between my Xbox 360, Wii, PC output and Freeview box. This wouldn't be a problem if an affordable yet decent switch-able multi SCART adapter existed. Finding a manual switching device that doesn't use automatic signals to change the display is difficult enough – given that my PC is on all the time this isn't an option. Robert and Dyas do stock one, a 4 connector with push button switch – fantastic. Up until the point you plug it in and get hideous interference between all the SCART channels and incessant screen flickering. Product returned and I'm still looking.

Ideally I would upgrade my 20 inch CRT to a flat screen LCD, but the TV isn't that old and it does its job well enough – except when it comes to Xbox 360 gaming, but that isn't its fault. Of the 4 games I have, only one has legible on-screen text – the others all result in tiny blurred text that is impossible to read – rendering it useless. This is entirely a design flaw – expecting all users to own an LCD is an outrageous assumption that continues to thwart me. Gah!

Ok, electronics rant over, time to get back to fixing some session stuff.

Cursed Week for British Sport

2007-10-21T19:22:00.001+01:00

Last weekend we were revelling in it. England had knocked out France in the Rugby World Cup final and they were on their way to a Saturday show down in Paris with South Africa. Lewis Hamilton was top of the F1 Championship leader board with one race to go and the Scotland and England football teams were minutes away from Euro 2008 qualification.

Come Sunday evening and we've got nothing.

England dramatically lost 2-1 to Russia away from home due to a poor penalty call and some shoddy goal-keeping and defending. Putting qualification out of England's control, and relying on a Russian falter against Israel. Scotland meanwhile left themselves the task of needing to beat Italy at home to qualify, after their torrid display in Georgia, losing 2-0. This all happened on Wednesday. Next up is Saturday, and with thousands of English fans, the rugby team are in Paris for the World Cup Final. Whilst a gallant and brave performance, a demoralising disallowed try and some lack of discipline and BAM, the final is lost. Now our nation's hopes of a great victory fall to the young rookie Lewis Hamilton, with a second place position on the starting grid in Brazil for the last race of the season. Things quickly go wrong as Hamilton falls to the back of the pack with car problems, finishing the race in 7th, resulting in a Raikkonen race and championship win.

It seems I was lucky enough to have the pleasant distraction of going to Leicester for the weekend for Samantha's birthday, drawing me away from such shattering realisations. So whilst England lost - left, right and centre, I merrily drank wine, ate Risotto and sampled fine Hotel Chocolat delights. It seems I was lovingly spared this time around, gifted with a wonderfully relaxing long weekend. On this occasion I am thankful to have missed out on all the sporting commotion.

My New Flat in St Albans

2007-09-13T23:12:00.001+01:00

Here it is. My spangly new flat, complete with computer desk and leather sofa...

... TV, Wii and plant ...

... a table and another sofa thing ...

... door and drawers ...

... bedroom and double bed ...

... a spangly tiled bathroom ...

... and checkered floor for chess ...

... kitchen with microwave, toaster and washing machine ...

... fridge, freezer, cooker ...

... and acres of worktop space ...

... and finally my well constructed desk!

Hoorah!

Amateur Alumni Adventures

2007-09-13T22:56:00.001+01:00

So, recently I graduated, spent some time at home over the dismally wet summer and looked for a job. The job hunting aspect pretty much dominated my time. It started out with two or three phones calls a day from recruitment agencies with a number of roles they thought I might be interested in, including throughout my holiday to Plymouth - everything from Control systems sales to supply chain management - I selected the roles that interested me most to pursue - this transformed into a multitude of interviews and tests. I travelled to London, Surrey, Hertfordshire, Leicestershire, Gloucestershire and more, completing no more than 9 separate interviews. These interviews included aptitude tests, intelligence tests, reasoning abilities, problem solving tasks, data analysis tasks, group exercises and other such nasties. For the sake of prosperity, these were with such companies as Unilever, Data Connexion, GE Sensing (they do not refund travel expenses), Smiths Aerospace and Ocado. Both Ocado and Smiths offered me a job, and I opted for the more interesting and superior offer from Ocado, based in Hatfield.

Whilst not looking for jobs or houses I turned on the TV, linked it to an AV output from the PC and watched some X-files or Twin Peaks to fill me up on my mystery-weirdness fix for the year. I am about half way through season 2 of Twin Peaks now. Agent Cooper is my hero. Anyway, moving onwards. With a job confirmed and a start date of September 10th I had 3 weeks to arrange viewings, partake in viewings, make a decision and sort out all the fine print, on a single solitary residence. I arranged six viewings, two in Welwyn Garden City, two in Hatfield and two in St Albans for the bank holiday weekend in August.

I can't be bothered to find pictures of all of them, and to be honest, I want to forget a few of them, they were that awful. In fact the last one we saw needed a light on in every room in order to see anything... this being at 2 pm on a cloudless day with the sun high in the sky. It was also disgusting with a shoddy door, the whole thing was tacked onto the back of a house - they wanted £625 a month for it!

Here is the second best candidate - a one bedroom 'mini' house. This was in walking distance from where I work and was a strong contender at £650 a month. Although in the end we decided the nearby amenities weren't great and living in Hatfield wasn't the nicest of options.

My third arranged viewing for a studio flat in Hatfield fell through, and in that spare hour we roamed the streets of St Albans, popping in every estate agents we came across on London Road. Eventually one such agent had two apartments we could look at straight away, one just (the day before) coming back onto the market after a previous deal had fallen through. The first of these was an atrocious annex in London Colney, it was damp, smelled of wet and was pretty much a shed. We left (the family and Sam) as fast as we possibly could. The second was a one bedroom flat for £725. This was like a breath of fresh air. It was clean, spacious, light, secure, well-appointed and very close to both rail stations, the town centre, a supermarket and retail park, a large park with golf course et al. and a bus route to get into work. It was perfect except for the price. We continued looking at our other appointments - except for one cancelled two-bedroom viewing which nastily clashed with a much needed toilet stop on my part. The flat was always on our minds and at 3pm we decided that I should go for it - and cancelled any further viewings, the extra price was decided reasonable for the distinguished improvements that it offered.

Having settled that matter we spent the afternoon drinking in a nearby pub, watching the football results (which were also amicable). I remember having a lovely large glass of Newcastle Brown Ale, before moving on to Wetherspoons to have Steak for dinner. It was a nice evening all around. We were there for the weekend, so on Sunday we had a picnic in Verulamium Park - right next to my new flat. Crispy fresh baguette, pasta and salad selections and a Mars bar to cap it off. Activities also included "playing catch in the park", buying expensive chilli chocolate, a tour of the lake, excitement over the kiddies water park feature, remote control boats and Ye Olde Fighting Cocks pub. Then we headed back to Bristol, with Sam going north. I would move in on September 3rd, the next Monday.

In the week following I spent some time learning Java, managing my websites and frantically sorting out the huge deposit and one month's rental payment (£1800) to be made available in only four working days (bank holiday issues) in cleared funds! That was a laugh. On the Friday I watched Knocked Up at the cinema with Mum and Stu, post scrumptious Chiquito Lazy Boi starter. I also watched the Bristol Rovers vs. West Ham game on Sky as well as a number of the England vs. India ODI's, including the stunning 8th wicket partnership of 99 runs to seal a win, which we celebrated whilst eating chips on the way back from visiting my Aunt (avec graduation photos).

With only one car the packing needed to be ruthless and precise. Fitting a computer, tv, all the clothes I will need for a number of months, crockery, cooking pans and utensils, duvet and sheets and any additional entertainment I decided to bring was akin to those crazy Christmas toys that involve arranging shapes into a cube.

* Chocolate Muffin Break *

Mum and I arrived in good time via M4 and M25, signed the contracts, picked up the keys and moved in, with Sam quickly behind us with her odds and ends and a much needed set of drawers. Then we set about with the ickle things - arranging internet and phone installation, sorting out water, gas and electricity, television license, finding myself a computer desk, filling my cupboards with food (Sainsbury's is very expensive!), unpacking and making myself feel at home. Mum left the next day, to return to work, it was a sad goodbye, and I had that melancholy feeling all day.

I think that is enough of the tale, I have now been here ten days and obviously the internet has been installed (20mbit, woo!) and once again I have spent too long writing this, it is late and I must go to bed to get up for work tomorrow. All I have left to say is thank you so much to Mum, Sam and Stu - your help was invaluable, I couldn't have done it all without your help.

Now for the academics - My marks

2007-07-19T00:05:00.001+01:00

1st Year (83.4% average)		Credit (CATS)	Mark (%)
ES155	Design and Computer Techniques	15	80
ES156	Professional Studies	15	79
ES157	Mathematics for Engineers	15	82
ES160	Materials and Production	15	82
ES161	Engineering Mechanics	15	81
ES162	Modelling and System Dynamics	15	85
ES163	Electrical and Electronic Systems	15	92
ES164	Fluids and Energy	15	86

2nd Year ( 81.4% average, 20% of degree)		Credit (CATS)	Mark (%)
CG203	Systems and Control	15	85
CG204	Signal Processing and Communications	15	94
ES21J	Analogue Design	15	81
ES21L	Applied Linear Algebra	7.5	92
ES21Q	Design of Measurement Systems	7.5	70
ES21R	Digital Design	15	80
ES21T	Electronic Systems	7.5	79
ES22E	Software Development	15	92
IB229	Starting a Business for Engineers	7.5	58
PX258	ULSI MOS Devices and Technologies	15	70

3rd Year (85% average including 7.5 over CATS, 40% of degree)		Credit (CATS)	Mark (%)
CG351	Digital Signal Processing	15	75
ES316	Analogue and Digital System Design 1	15	91
ES327	Project	30	78
ES335	Communication Systems	15	86
ES372	Automation and Robotics	15	86
ES379	Finance and Accounting	15	88
ES390	VLSI Design 1	15	83
PX317	New Concepts in Electronics	7.5	74

4th Year (89.3% average including 30 over CATS, 40% of degree)		Credit (CATS)	Mark (%)
ES312	Systems Modelling and Simulation	15	85
ES330	Control 1	15	92
ES410	Group Project	30	75
ES425	Engineering Business Management 1	15	76
ES436	Directed Reading for Electronics	15	78
ES462	High Integrity Systems	15	87
LL130	Learning Chinese 1	30	82
PX400	Future Electronics	15	72

Overall Degree calculated as: 86%
First Class Honours

The end of an era

2007-07-18T23:51:00.001+01:00

Well, that's it, done and dusted. University life is now officially over - I am no longer a student. My four years studying a Masters in Electronic Engineering at Warwick University have come to a fruitful end. It's odd thinking of the very first day when I moved into Rootes with my big boxes, going up the stairs for the first time, seeing that awful bright yellow paint, unpacking and chatting with Sam and Kayte for the first time. Good memories.

This final year was spent in Redfern campus accommodation, with old friend Steven and new flatmates Jo, Madhumita and Robert. It has been a great year. Here is a short but happy-memory inducing list. Ten pin bowling - both real and Wii based, massive marathon video game conquests (Burnout Revenge, Katamari, Bomberman, Wii Sports, Red Star), birthday celebrations, the adventures of Bobby Green and Snowy Bob, talkative fridge magnet nonsense, watching Planet Earth, fridge and freezer space mayhem, the rotting celeriac, Madhumita's bell ringing and superstitions, the donkey-film fiasco (and the associated eeyore jokes), New Year celebrations, Christmas decorations, Madhumita's quotes and blue tac sculptures, outings to Zizi's and Piccolini's "I could be a vampire - but you're vegetarian", eating two meals at once in Wetherspoons after Oceans 13, sharing artsy fartsy films with Jo, going on walks around Heronbank (to my secret pond), taking trips to the perfect Arts Centre Cinema (£2.50 student ticket for films such as Zodiac, This is England, Infamous and others), buying bargain £3 DVDs from the now defunct Fopp, juggling in the kitchen (3 ball, 4 ball, mill's mess, 5 on the floor), the faulty Xbox 360 issues, completing that Mars EBM assignment, Future Electronics "big time" and "for sure", kitchen visiting sparrows, woodpeckers, rabbits, squirrels and a single fox, Warwick Art Centre's tuna jacket potatoes with salad garnish, my internet ban and resulting scrubs marathon, basement lab concrete slab testing for hours on end, painful all nighters on 300 page project report and poster, my poor tummy and appendicitis, rewarding revision marathons (and missing the Bristol Rovers promotion), learning mandarin chinese, the lunar eclipse on the night of Steven's birthday meal and wii competition, watching Liverpool knock out Chelsea on HD projectors outside in the garden after feasting on a BBQ, reading Graeme's friday evening "weekend joy" texts and laser/smell of burning eye stories, eating fresh French baguette and Camembert after returning on a long hard bike trip to Tescos, the mounting rust problems my bike suffered as a result of being left outside in the rain, the magpies attacking the bin bags, the "cost-cutter" chime, the incredibly wet summer, playing Frisbee on the green outside, watching films with the TV at the foot of the bed, watching the cleaner rotation as ours was off sick again, building up recyclable skyscrapers in blue bags, playing corridor golf with the plastic golf set and Steven losing his ball under my bed, playing long range corridor darts and skittles, being solemn as Madhumita rushes away for the last time, doing that 1000 piece puzzle on top of my drawers, buying fans and creating custom made wasp nets, seeing Madhumita play Halo, boiling up the kettle and having a nice coffee and croissant breakfast before starting revision, playing Scattergories and LOTR Risk (too geeky?), rearing my grape found caterpillar to a full fledged moth, indoctrinating Sam in the ways of BSG, taking down my posters for the last time, Jo's regular parsnip-carrot and mince meal, Steven's toad in the hole and chips, Roberts plastic cutlery and balloon antics (see: Madhumita's cupboard), Madhumita's smelly night time thing and yoghurts left in the microwave, the 2 for £3 tesco pizzas that got me through, weekend trips to Leicester to visit Sam where we would shop at Fenwicks or on the off chance go to Riley's or cook something wonderful and inspired. And taking pictures for the last time as I pack up the car and prepare to go home.

Music Vision

2007-06-05T16:35:00.001+01:00

I found a stats site that takes Last.fm data to produce a tidy graph showing listening trends over a set period. Here's my resultant PDF from September 2004 until this month, June 2007, with a minimum of 10 plays required to trigger an artist being shown:
My Listening Trends PDF

Preview of my March 2007 listening trend:

The site is called LastGraph and it was built using Processing.

My Own Personal Appendectomy

2007-05-12T22:18:00.001+01:00

Warning, pictures of surgery below (not graphic, because I normally squirm at these things).

Come night time Wednesday 2nd May, my day had gone well, revision was on schedule, I was trying a new mouth wash and all was sweet and well. The hard grind of revision, project work and coursework was under way and uni life was as any hectic third term normally is. I think I'd just released my latest fb2k config that day also. At 5 am I was awoken with awful stomach pains; a horrible gripping feeling as though my digestive sack was being used as a stress ball by an over worked underpaid office employee. I couldn't sleep through it so I grabbed some crackers and made some quick fb2k updates until I felt duly capable of heading back to the land of nod.

Thursday was much the same, only worse. I'd hoped the pain would have left me; maybe it was just me lying awkwardly or some bad sausages from the champions league BBQ. I set about revision as normal, struggling to get anything done, some Ibuprofen helped and I continued through until the afternoon thinking I had past the worst of it. With late afternoon the painkillers rescinded and I was thrown full-whack back into the torment of having my digestive tract deciding it wanted to leave my body by turning itself into a truncheon and beating its way out from the inside. Gaviscon stomach sweets failed, as did all the anti-acids and little tricks like drinking Milk or eating dried foods. With the doctors now shut and at a loss for what to do, I tried to simply just rest, sit back and watch a film - I chose one I wouldn't particularly care if I enjoyed or not (My Super Ex-Girlfriend - don't watch this). By the end of the film my intestinal baton had grown spikes in a stepped up bid to escape. I was bent double and in agony with a stomach pain that hadn't caused sickness. I called NHS Direct (with my mum's advice and diligence in finding a Skype compatible number) and they soon advised me to get myself checked out ASAP, just as a precaution. With the walk-in centre shut it was off to accident and emergency.

My very kind accommodation warden drove my friend and I there where we started to wait. One hour later I saw the triage and enjoyed blood sugar tests, blood pressure tests and the usual check-up mumbo jumbo. With intensifying pain, growing hunger and tiredness the two hour wait to see a doctor was horrible. Mid-wait my official accom' warden, Adam, turned up and swapped shifts, bringing crossword entertainment, although we never completed a single one. Both wardens were especially helpful and I wish to thank them both very much for their efforts and care. At 1am I was called into see the doctor, he prodded me and asked where the pain was, whether I'd been ill, etc. He did a blood test and issued an abdomen X-ray. Half an hour later, lying on my back, I was wheeled into the X-ray room and wheeled back out again moments later.

Lying on a bed had its benefits and coping with the wait was not as bad, though just as painful. It wasn't until 4:30 am that someone came to see me and tell me I was heading to the critical decision unit where a surgeon would later see me. At 5 am they decided to keep me in for the night until next morning's breakfast, see how I was then after some food and take it from there. With this news both my friend (thanks Steven!) and warden were relieved to be able to go home whilst I tried to get whatever kip I could. Come 8 am I was up and ready for brekkie! Whilst the patients around me were being served up Weetabix and porridge an important looking fellow associated with the university (with a number of students around him) informed me that I did indeed have Appendicits and that I would be needing surgery sometime during the day.

Whilst in the process of letting whoever I could know what was going on a bubbly anaesthetist explained the procedure to me and said I would be prep'd for surgery within half an hour. And that was that, before I knew it an IV was being put in, pads stuck on and general anesthetic administered, "You'll be asleep within 20 seconds"... I remember thinking, "I don't feel tired".

That's a traditional appendectomy, I didn't get this done (thank goodness), I was given a modern keyhole laparoscopic surgery which is "minimally invasive", at least this seems to be the case given the size of my wound.

Here's a video of a keyhole appendectomy, not mine I might add:

I woke up at about 12:30pm in the recovery ward, dreamy and blissfully enjoying my deep sleep and distinct lack of pain. About half an hour later I was fully awake and another cheery nurse wheeled me to my ward. As the anaesthetic wore off some pain returned (including a sore throat because of the tubes they had to give me) but I was much more comfortable than before, I was soon happy to see my grandpa, sister and girlfriend shortly followed by Steven and my warden.

My recovery was (mostly) a smooth one. For the duration of my stay the IV remained attached, through which I was fed and administered the necessary antibiotics. 4-hourly pulse, temperature and blood pressure tests were given; my temperature was high each time ( 37.5) and I was given paracetamol to bring it down. The only problem I had was a growingly uncomfortable and soon to be painful feeling which mounted in the hours after surgery; in short I was having problems taking a piss. The nurse suggested I may need a catheter but before getting one did a quick ultrasound to check if my bladder was full, her response upon seeing the result was quite comic and she soon returned tubes in hand. My bladder was so full it was putting enormous amounts of pressure on my back, wound and abdomen, which suffice to say, hurt a lot. The bladder can typically hold 0.6 litres, within 15 minutes of the catheter being added the bag was up to 1.5 litres, and reached 2 litres before the hour mark. Time for the great British pun, "that really takes the piss". A catheter is quite uncomfortable and it dramatically reduces your mobility, even when you're tied down to an IV, its removal was also quite painful. Getting it put in wasn't too bad, but I was probably still seeing the influences of some anaesthetic.

All this took place at the brand new University Hospital (UHCW) outside of Coventry. It really is a beautifully new, clean and impressive place. I particularly enjoyed their bed-entertainment suite, which, for £3.20, gave me 24 hours of freeview digital letting me watch the morning football round-up, some Jeeves and Worcester and quite painfully with stifled laughter "Have I Got News for You".

It's been about a week since my discharge and despite having a busy week, catching up with work, etc., I am making a good recovery.
My stitches are all internal and set to "dissolve" in the next few days, hopefully I'll be right as rain in no time. This is my wound as it stands (oooh skin!) - doesn't look too bad.

That wound is just on the belt line which has meant this past week I've had to wear my trousers like all those hip boxer showing kids do these days.

Improving Google Web History

2007-04-25T17:58:00.001+01:00

I'm loving Web History but I think there are a couple more things I still want to see from it:

A sidebar formatted history page similar to Firefox's existing history but with all the smart features of Google's Web History
A bookmarklet/button to Pause and Un-Pause the Web History with ease
Website thumbnails: I often forget the name of a site but can spot it from a thumbnail
Total number of visits to a particular domain/page, trends for these domains/pages.
Keywords I have used to reach a domain previously.

Google Channels, Google Recommendations

2007-04-20T13:46:00.001+01:00

Back in December 2006 I sent in a reply to Google's "Big Idea Challenge";

What is Google's Next revolutionary product and why? We are looking for final year students and recent graduates who are creative and think differently. By answering the question posed above in the The Big Idea Challenge*, you have the opportunity to impress us and get a job at Google. Your answer can be in any format you choose; this might be a business plan, schematic diagram, presentation, or just some text. The top entrants will be invited to the Googleplex in London to meet the team and talk through their Big Idea.

Google responded with a phone call asking for details and they said they'd send me some information via email, I never heard from them again. With Google's latest spate of recommendation gadgets and their latest product change, "web history" (something I have been waiting for for a while because I was fed up of never being able to search my history - an offline version would be nice and more secure), it seems relevant to post what I submitted.

I called it Google Channels, for lack of better words and to embrace Google's brilliant naming tradition (see: Froogle's death, one of my favourite play on words). This was my pitch:

PDF Summary & Advert for Product

PDF Google Proposal

Google Channels
A free, automated, user specific and editable channel to facilitate the discovery of entertainment on the internet.

The Problem

Finding entertainment is very much a different process to an information search. For information, a user, for the most part, knows what he or she is looking for and creates an appropriate search query to find what they need. For current entertainment search processes, a user must know what they want to read, watch or listen to before beginning their search. This, in many respects, is contrary to the act of discovering fresh entertainment. In mature mediums there exist two paths - one for the acquirement of media and a second for its discovery. Internet search acts predominantly as the former similar to a cinema which shows a film you chose specifically to watch. Examples of the latter are television, radio and libraries; each provides a selection of entertainment services for the discovery of new quality content.

The internet today offers a unique worldwide medium for text, video and audio; it has quickly become the ultimate entertainment, communication and information hub. Google, with aims to organise the world's information, has made great strides in providing tools for finding information fast, and via Gmail and Google Talk (amongst others) online communication is being made easier. With the emergence of flash streaming and legal movie and music downloads it is now the entertainment aspects of the internet that must be addressed by Google. The first steps have already been taken with Google Video and YouTube. I believe Google's next big innovation should be to improve the accessibility and discovery processes for the wealth of quality content available on the internet, to match the second element of Google's aim: to make content universally accessible.

The closest the internet currently has to an entertainment discovery service is "StumbleUpon" a site that allows users to recommend web pages so that readers may stumble through the internet finding its hidden sweet spots. Other undertakings include; The "Venice Project", from Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, creators of Skype, which sees their focused efforts in creating a recommendation driven Broadband TV service for quality video content delivery and discovery. Last.fm, a British based company, collates music listened to and generates free customised radio stations for discovery of new music. I believe now is the time for Google to begin developing a service in this field, as internet content begins to escape the confines of the PC box. Last.fm's growing popularity and success is proof that there is a demand.

The Solution

For Google Channels to solve these entertainment search issues it needs to offer two things; first it must deliver interesting content and secondly this must suit the user's tastes. Google already has a head-start with regards to content delivery; its extensive crawl index, video and book libraries present the essence of a solution (though to my knowledge no Google owned music or audio database currently exists). To show content that is relevant, knowledge of the users' tastes must be known and items must be grouped by similarity. Google Sets is already the foundation of these grouping functions - searching for television shows like "Family Guy" and "The Simpsons" yields "South Park" as a top suggestion. Knowledge of the user can be obtained through existing data or by user input.

Creating the Channel

Google's personalized search data can give an accurate portrayal of a user's tastes (e.g. top search terms), as does their rating trends, labelling actions and Google Talk's music trends. Collating this data with similar neighbours and data from Google Sets, a selection of materials matching the user's tastes is produced without needing search. Hence a user-specific recommendations channel is generated, creating the basics for a discovery driven internet service (an extension of the pre-existing personal homepage gadget "Interesting things for you"). With refinements through categorisation this channel can be split into genre specific bands.

The alternative approach is to ask the user for a few things they already enjoy - favourite music artists, websites, television shows and books may be key pointers. Using a grouping structure a list of recommendations can be generated, allowing relevant content from indexes (Books, Google Video, RSS feeds, etc) or established channels to be combined into a personalized channel. As Google Channels evolves the accuracy of recommendations will improve.

Channel Implementation

Implementation becomes the next question; channels may be video, audio or written, or an amalgamation. Video channels may be a generated stream of video not unlike television channels, with one recommended video continuing directly on from the previous - this stream may play live to multiple parties, play from a chosen point (e.g. select first video from a list), be skipped through or downloaded. Music channels may act like those on Last.fm, playing music similar to artists the user already knows, they could also be geared towards podcast discovery or online radio which may then be played in-browser. Reading lists would act much like existing feed aggregation services, however could contain a degree of useful automation and Google Book recommendations to inform users of literature, sites and news that interests them yet lies outside of their confined internet corner.

User Control

User editing adds significant benefits:

· Remove subjects that are uninteresting.

· Actions when viewing channels may include:

· "add similar items to my channel"*,

· "add this item to my channel",

· "add items in this label to my channel",

· "create new channel based on",

· "label item/channel",

· "ban items in this category",

· "ban this item",

· "blog this item/channel",

· "share this item/channel",

· "combine channels",

· "recommend item/channel"

· "invite user to chat"

· "rate this item/channel"

· Recommendations can evolve using rating systems that promote good content and ban bad content.

· Complete control of channel could bring true "internet TV" to life.

* e.g. "add sites similar to Slashdot.org", letting users find domains that match their normal reading materials without the trouble of building a specific search query to find them.

Once channels are created the next logical steps are sharing of channels, channel labels, recommended channels, RSS channel feeds, top channels lists, searchable channels database, public and private channels, embeddable channels, sponsored channels, channel collaboration, Google Talk integration for chat whilst viewing, content databases allowing creators to add their work directly to channels (much like the existing YouTube channels system), exclusive content or subscription channels.

Targeted Advertising

Revenue streams for Google and content creators are also instantly apparent. Google would know the full specifics of the 'now playing' content. Hence incorporation of Google Ads is only a stone's throw away. Video channel features can be interlinked by relevant video ads, and similarly for audio. For incentives to create channels owners may receive payments from a pay per click or impression initiative. The cost of displaying ads on a channel may also be proportional to the number of regular viewers or readers a channel has.

Creators of content (e.g. a television network) may wish to receive more return and have greater control of proceedings; a corporate control panel may be an option. Similarly an advertising control panel may be helpful to large advertising corporations that want to specifically control when and where their ads are shown.

Benefits Elsewhere

Other benefits to Google are the natural categorisation and sorting made by users of channel content, which will not only improve recommendation quality but also add to the usefulness of Google search results; for instance a fuzzy search that returns results matching the users search aims but not necessarily matching their query; particularly helpful for those having trouble refining search terms.

Movie Chronicles Network

2007-04-16T20:53:00.001+01:00

And onto my new online project, I welcome you all to The Movie Chronicles.

Movie Chronicles is a blog (for the lack of a better word) network delivering the latest news updates on a range of in-production movies. Launched in April 2007 the site aims to provide the latest development news from casting decisions, director announcements, latest reviews and release dates. There is no strict method to our choice of movies, and if you want a movie to be tracked feel free to post a request for us to do so. Happy browsing.

The Easter Break

2007-04-13T16:54:00.001+01:00

Alas, I am back from my Easter break, university's final exams beckon me whilst Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet spur me on. My 12,000 word directed reading assignment is almost past me, after submitting it I plan to put it up here and pass it around the net a bit. I have spent too much time on it to have only two parties read it. In fact I'll probably put up PDFs of all my uni work once I am done here. It seems a waste to have many hours of work read and marked by only one person.

Anyway, two Saturdays ago I left in the evening by car from this here Redfern accommodation; leaving my neighbourly rabbits, robins and squirrels for town and terraces. It was the weekend before Easter and I was to watch my local team, Bristol Rovers FC, perform in their first cup final for a long time (the Johnstons Paint trophy) at Cardiff's millennium stadium – the last cup final to be played there. We were against Doncaster; our support turned out 40,000 strong and this was the scene:

After watching the under-teams play their big games and a team warm-up and pyrotechnics display the game started. After 5 minutes we were 2-0 down and out. It stayed that way until half time; with a penalty and fine shot we took it to 2-2 extra time. Sadly our league 2 stamina lead to a mishap and we ended up losing 3-2. Yet it was a most enjoyable day out and the fivelive consensus agreed that Rovers had performed well – the fans were happy. A three hour traffic jam on the way back was however not so fun.

When asked on Monday what we should do I promptly replied, "Absolutely nothing". And that's what I enjoyed doing – I caught the most atrocious 80s super-hero movie on Sky Movies – "Howard the Duck" with Marty's mother from Back to the Future. We played multi-player super monkey ball on the Wii and lay about in the sun reading our novels – I'm still making my way though Kerouac's "On the road". In the evening we turned geeks and played 4 player Lord of the Rings RISK – the incomplete mordor-less version. I take great pride in winning, given my terrible starting position.

On Tuesday we went to Bath for the day, it just so happened that the sunshine went away for a day, much to our disgust. Though walking about the lovely sandstone spa was interesting – if any of you readers should come across the fudge-packer in the fudge shop, please berate him for taunting me with chocolate goodies whilst I was still under the self-inflicted restraints of lent. That night we declared a RISK rematch wherein I came first or second, depending on which rules we used. On this night Liverpool also beat PSV away from home 3-0 – a fine showing.

Sam left for Surrey, and later Kent, on Wednesday morning without her coat. Left with family, cats, book and Wii I made myself at home, spending a couple of hours on some website code and a couple here and there on coursework assignments. The footie that night was not so great; both United and Chelsea had poor champions league showings. Thursday through week was much of the same, sun tanning, book reading, film watching, work writing, cat petting. I cut grass in gardens front and back and watched others plant peas and spray fences with protective brown sludge.

Thursday brought about the Masters Golf tournament at Augusta – what a tough year that proved to be. Not a single player made a 4-day par over the x amount of holes. As I have already said, I was supporting Justin Rose, right up until hole 17 on Sunday – what an unlucky break that was – it's a shame but in the end I was quite happy for Zach Johnson to take away the prize, his second to last shot on the 18^th was a beauty. This spur in golf interest led to a number of Wii golf rounds on Wii sports – I made a personal best of 7 under par playing with my Johnny Depp Mii and making a few very nice eagles. I got taught a couple of nice new tricks too, such as using an iron out of the bunker and driver when faced with trees.

Thursday evening also took me for a meal at Chiquito's to celebrate my sister's 20^th. Those lazy boy rib quesadillas are truly scrumptious. As was the New York baked cheesecake.

On Easter Sunday I welcomed back the taste of chocolate with Thornton's, KitKat and Cadbury's Crème eggs. Now my teeth are rotten. I'm also eating croissants again much to my delight. After a lovely beef roast cooked by my sister I spent the day with my grandparents, watching England lose to Australia in the cricket, studying Chinese and eating delicious home made trifle.

Monday and Tuesday it was back to the garden for more fun filled outside laptop based essay writing. Tuesday evening was graced by Manchester United's 7-1 stomping of Roma, truly an incredible performance. It's hard enough to put seven past a lower league team let alone coming from behind against second-place Serie A Roma that were unbeaten in their previous 20 matches and had conceded only 5 goals in the champions' league tournament. Just wow. Now 3 teams out of 4 left in the competition are English, the top three sides in the Premiership no doubt. There could be a messy Chelsea-United showdown come May – fighting for the league title, playing each other in the FA cup and Champion's League finals.

I don't know if there's much else to talk about – I spent the afternoon with my Grampy on Wednesday talking of the future and the past et al and I came back to Warwick yesterday via the M5 and Tesco. Now I am back home with this as my view:

Making posts with images is now much easier after I created my sweet little small and thumbnail generation script.

Movie Images

2007-04-09T13:40:00.001+01:00

I've recently been working on churning out some dynamically generated PHP images using my personal movies database. This of course has been completed in-between watching Zach Johnson win the Masters (I had my fingers crossed for Justin Rose right up until hole 17) and Manchester United losing to Portsmouth on Saturday. In fact, the majority of time over this Easter period has been spent watching sports - cricket world cup, golf and football - still more to come with Champions League matches tomorrow - what fun! My work can once again be fuelled by chocolate as I have ceremoniously ended lent after having successfully given up chocolate, croissants, pasties, crisps and those tasty iced buns.

Anyway - back to the case in point; the generated images have three modes: a) Show the details for a given IMDB number b) Show details for the top item in a keyword search c) Show my most recently rated film. Upon generation these files get cached, the cache updates once a week for film details and one a day for the rated film. So, here are some fun fun dynamic images:

http://movies.trivialbeing.org/my/rated/rated.png

http://movies.trivialbeing.org/pic/lost in translation.png

My Movies Catalogue

2007-03-29T20:22:00.000+01:00

I was meant to make this blog post last night but I ended up watching Scrubs instead. Then I couldn't make it this morning because I had an oh-so fun directed reading dissertation write-up to continue with and a painstakingly monotonous test procedure to carry out on some newly made sample blocks for my project. Yesterday the results made no sense, today the sensor broke halfway through.

However, I have written my 1800 words today and I am ready to take some time off. So, in-between work and more work I squeezed a little bit of MySQL PHP coding into a new site specifically for my movie collections. The site lists my owned movies and my rated movies (grabs my personal ratings from IMDB - all 400 of them), using the IMDB catalogue number it fetches data such as title, year, director, runtime, rating, plot and poster image automatically. I guess I am bringing the site out of beta by including the link here, check it out:

http://movies.trivialbeing.org/

UK PS3 Launch

2007-03-26T12:01:00.001+01:00

It is here at last it seems. In fact it is perfectly clear that it has arrived - newspapers are filled with ads shouting about the PS3s that they have in stock - get them now! And, on perusing the shopping centres late on Saturday, I noticed that every electronics store outlet from Game-station to HMV and Curry's Digital had large protruding signs announcing "Playstation 3 in stock... hurry". Should I have had £500 to lay down on a system + game I could have bought one from anywhere. Though, if I wanted to buy myself a Wii I would be hard pressed to find one; HMV, Game, et al. had all sold out and many stores still had waiting lists. I'll take my £300 + Wii over a PS3 and Resistance Fall of Man any day, in fact, 4 months later I and my house-mates still avidly play Wii Sports. I do plan to purchase a PS3 (ICO 3, Little Big World), though not for a good 18 months.

Fooblog2000

2007-03-21T11:21:00.001Z

I seem to have failed to note to everyone perusing this site for its foobar-ness that all foobar related posts have now been moved to my new site, Fooblog2000. I'll no longer be posting updates to my configurations here, which are now up to version 0.6 with some very nice new features such as ratings panels and a singles SCPL mode.

With that said, the interim period for the site, i.e. its opening month, has come to an end with quite a razzle dazzle; v0.6 of my configuration made it to the front page of Digg and fooblog consequently succumbed to the effects of lots of visitors. Fooblog uses Dreamhost as its provider which offers 2Tb of bandwidth a month; I had plenty of preparation for such an attack, or at least I thought I did. What I was not prepared for was a catastrophic failure of Wordpress 2.1.2. To save the MySQL databases from too much stress I turned on the advanced WP caching system, however when 2000 people arrived in an hour or so something went wrong and all WP pages failed to load. Due to the stresses of such high traffic volumes I assumed the problem was caused by traffic alone and that it would rectify itself when things calmed down, I put up a temporary page and let it be. However several hours later it was still playing up, it took me a while to track down the problem but in the end deleting the cache fixed everything. It's a shame this happened because the down period of the site occurred during the period the site was on the front page of Digg. Oh well, I will know the fix for next time.

Here's a fun screenshot of the traffic stats:

Overpriced Cinema tickets and an ugly IMDB

2007-02-22T13:00:00.001Z

I love it when Blogger takes six hours to publish a post that I make via email. It fills me to the brim with joyous green radioactive goo, none of that half assed polonium business though. I apologise for my posting frequency in January – my residential campus Internet provider banned me for 28 days due to "suspicious use" which probably constituted using a wireless router to connect my Wii and a weekend uploading blitz that saw me backup 10GB of digital photos to some web space I have.

With no connection to the outside world I found time to complete all sorts of life changing things, from my previous posts it is evident I worked on my foobar designs; I also completed a number of assignments and project work. Life without the Internet wasn't hard, more inconvenient. Scrubs got me through (until I reached the rather unfunny downfall that is season 3… but that's another story).

Anyway, I was going to make this post about something. Yes – the price of cinema tickets these days. I wanted to see Hot Fuzz on Saturday in the Odeon but we thought better of it – no way did we feel that a discounted £6 student ticket was worth it, considering within 12 months the film could be purchased for that amount or less. I hate to think what the full price was. A shining example of the perfect cinema is the local Warwick Arts Centre cinema - £2.50 for a ticket and every sixth film is free. What's more it shows quality art house films, classic cinema and has comfortable homely seats. Even sitting in the very front row for the entirety of Babel I did not feel uncomfortable (the soundtrack for which is immense). So instead we decided to watch Woody Allen's Match Point, a brilliant (and very different to the standard Allen) thriller starring my favourite Scarlett Johansson.

My next point is the internet movie database, more commonly referred to as IMDB. What on earth have they done with their design? It is categorically the messiest and worst redesign since the all-music guide abomination. Huge over sized middle buttons, with an indistinct sidebar and non-fitting page highlight. Did they not realise that Web2.0 was/is a fad? – IMDB was the last staple & successful "web 1.0" site. Now section header images look small and out of place; the cast list is oddly inward shifted; the text is too small; it's not instantly clear what the information you are looking at relates to; nothing matches up; ratings are in a less important page zone and when I vote I need to count the stars. Give the main body some colour – make sections more distinctive, shade cells in tabled information, make the sidebar bigger, put the rating back in the middle of the page… it is that important. Yikes, I am very glad that the former IMDB layout is still online here.

In other news, I bought Okami for PS2 – a very original and interesting video game.

Foobar Code Release Pack Version 0.2

2007-02-20T09:22:00.000Z

Many have asked for this, rather than rush out the first release I spent a while refining the code and commenting the various sections. Hopefully everything will be relatively understandable. All image sources are defined in variables at the top of the code, as are font sizes, colours and alignment variables. Please look at the readme.txt file which contains links and information about the required components, fonts and images. The code is in the new standard .pui format which should be placed in your " C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\foobar2000\PanelsUI" folder and loaded through Foobar2000's PanelsUI preferences dialogue.

The code has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license which allows derivative works. Please do not remove the link back to this website or the copyright information.

Download Version 0.2

I am now openly accepting feature requests and answering questions. NOTE: For Single Column Playlist, Row Height: 17, Group Rows: 5 My Windows Visual Style is Inverso Reborn Balanced and a discussion and link can be found here. A good resource for downloading artist images is http://artists.trivialbeing.org

Components Required

Fonts

Bebas
Calibri - Comes with Windows Vista and cannot be redistributed (but you may find a site that has it)
BigNoodleTitling

PanelsUI - The next step in Foobar aesthetics

2007-02-14T23:37:00.000Z

Terrestrial has done it again, this time it is his third component, PanelsUI . Until now, all foobar menus, toolbars and panels were arranged using ColumnsUI in any desired grid format - these panels were distinguished by irremovable borders that were defined by Window's visual style, much to the distate of budding user interface designers everywhere. PanelsUI offers a clean new approach - using scripts (in the familiar trackinfo mod format) panels themselves can be absolutely positioned and played with. New "persisting variables" or PVARS allow these scripts to store and edit variables in memory using buttons (see function: $button). In combination a slew of exciting new opportunities are possible; tabbed panels without the need for tabs_ui, clickable pop-ups, scripted interaction between trackinfo's, SCPL and PanelsUI, amongst others. To explain in words the potential is proving difficult, so I will show you some early design animations:

Tabbed panels, changed by clicking the buttons on the bottom menu

Pop-up playlist, this appears beneath when thin (as below) and to the side when wide.

A pop-up menu, buttons and control panel

Im sure I will think of some much more advanced uses of this integration in the near future. But for now I think this is exciting enough. For those interested, to get going, the code for tabbed panels in PanelsUI is:

$select($add($getpvar(display.mode),1),
$panel(Option1,Track Display,0,20,%_width%,140,)
,
$panel(Option2,Album list,0,20,%_width%,140,)
,
$panel(Option3,Console,0,20,%_width%,140,)
)
$button2(0,160,0,0,14,14,button text,button text,'PVAR:SET:display.mode:0',)
$button2(14,160,0,0,14,14,button text, button text,'PVAR:SET:display.mode:1',)
$button2(28,160,0,0,14,14, button text,button text ,'PVAR:SET:display.mode:2',)

This simple example (that needs the button text replaced with a $font()text code) is the basis for tabs, clicking the first button shows the track display, the second an album list, third a console.

My Movie Votes List

2007-02-05T17:06:00.000Z

After working on the artist images project, essentially a site that shows you an image of any musical artist you specify, I decided to home my efforts on movies. IMDB has all the movie details you could ever need. Using a similar system I have devised a method (which again will not be made public) to obtain director, poster image, year, run time, plot outline, rating and most importantly title when given an IMDB number (the numbers with which movies are catalogued). On each movie load the information and image is stored or cached respectively.

My first use for this new script is to display my IMDB movie votes on my blog in a neat little package. Recently my votes list was made public by IMDB so I did not have to create a bot to login etc. Scraping the IMDB numbers and my votes from this page has allowed me to enter the movies into my service and create a sexy little list. You can now find this list of 500 movies here: http://fofr.trivialbeing.net/page.php?p=movievotes (or under the "My Movie Ratings" link to the right)

Foobar SCPL Code Fix

2007-02-03T12:09:00.001Z

Just a quick note to say I have cleaned up my SCPL code and fixed all the known bugs, get the latest code here (the old one had a lot of code left over from a previous SCPL, all of which has now been removed):

http://host.trivialbeing.org/up/foobarfixed2.txt

- Fixed the crop issues related to selected and now playing songs
- Made the track title text area adaptive to the width of the window, so it crops only when it needs to
- Stopped album art showing for groups with only 1 track, as in this case the picture is ridiculously small.

Some images:

Foobar SCPL Updates 2

2007-01-30T12:14:00.001Z

Well, it seems I am never satisfied with my foobar designs, so I spent some time last night refining it some more.

I decided to alter my SCPL to make things clearer. The code is here (note, this is a work in progress and the code still looks messy), row height = 17, group rows = 4: GROUP | ITEMS

Some things to note, the album art resizes to an optimum display size, so that albums of three tracks only can have art work displayed without all the other albums suffering from a small display size. The maximum image size is also easily defineable, so with one change I can make all the artwork scale up to 300px. The second image shows how Various Artist albums are handled.

I built the playcounts into a form of hotness rating, so that the more a track is played the deeper orange and brighter the track becomes. The ratings system is separate to this.

Artist Images Update

2007-01-25T18:29:00.000Z

Just posting to inform people of some updates to my newly announced site http://artists.trivialbeing.org. The main landing page when you search for an artist has been spruced up and a fully fledged browse feature which allows you to specify the number of images per page, oldest images, newest images and random images has been implemented here: http://artists.trivialbeing.org/browse.php

Also large images are now available if you append an artist image url with &imgs=large

Foobar Design Refinements

2007-01-25T18:16:00.001Z

I have been working a little bit on my foobar design over the past few days, shifting the artist images into a more prominent position, adding a moody background and spicing up ye olde playlist. Click the images to see them in their crisp full res or visit the images section of this blog to find the wallpaper image. I plan to release the code for this when I am happy with it.

Artist Image Downloader, Service, Script etc.

2007-01-10T16:46:00.001Z

A big feature I wanted to include in my foobar2000 music player was artist images, i.e. pictures of the performers. If I had the images this would be possible using either the track info mod (which I now favour) or the album art panel. The trouble was, unlike album art, there was no service that offered image downloads and the only website that offered a comprehensive artist image database was last.fm. My first approach to this problem was to create a local C script that would, in a very roundabout manner, obtain the artist image url from last.fm and then download it. This proved rather slow and buggy due to various artist names, timeout problems and image creation, yet it sufficed for the majority, leading me to a collection of 2000 artist images which I posted earlier.

Still not happy, I looked into creating a web service, based on hydrogenaudio forums member Chronial's efforts and ultimately we developed an online resource for downloading artist images. I do not plan to make the code public, mainly at Chronial's request. I have created this service here: http://artists.trivialbeing.org/?a=ARTIST where ARTIST is the performer's image you are looking for, for instance:

http://artists.trivialbeing.org/?a=the microphones
http://artists.trivialbeing.org/?a=blondie
http://artists.trivialbeing.org/?a=radiohead

Images are first sourced from Last.fm before being cached so as not to cause any undue strain on last.fm's servers.

To make things more useful you can append the URL with &outputmode=img,
e.g. http://artists.trivialbeing.org/?a=blondie&outputmode=img
and a wrapper of sorts is available via http://artists.trivialbeing.org/pic/ARTIST.jpg
e.g. http://artists.trivialbeing.org/pic/blondie.jpg
which can be used on forums:

or in an artist download script. I use the URL2File command line application with this command:

URL2File http://artists.trivialbeing.org/pic/%1.jpg C:\artistimages\thumbnails\%1.jpg -o 60
Where %1 is the first parameter passed to the batch file and 60 is a one minute timeout.

Using a custom run component I can call this batch file using foobar and a keyboard shortcut or button; when passing the artist (%artist%) to the batch file you should take care to replace characters that cannot be used in creating windows filenames. Foreign characters work too, as do special characters such as the artist "Why?" or "Wham!".

When using image output, if no artist is found the script returns this image:

With regards to copyright issues, Last.fm's uploading policy states:
Because copyrighted images tend to be very restrictive about where they can be used we ask that you only upload images which are public domain, or that are explicitly licensed for promotional use. There are a number of places you can find images open to public use. First, try to find out if the artist has any promotional pictures on their official homepage (they usually do).

For those without foobar2000, I give an example of an alternative use. I took the recently played tracks RSS feed, played with it a little using magpierss and create a page that shows recent tracks along side artist images, an example can be found here:
http://fofr.trivialbeing.net/page.php?p=nowplaying