*update: I found a similar software here on new scientist, its not the same that inspired this post but its relevant, video from there.

But what about other avenues? democratise the tools of remapping motion from film and it could be like the mass adoption of photoshop, only for video. With clever mapping of 3d objects within a video stream you could augment your characters as if they were 3d objects, recolour body parts, resize them or inflate their limbs, replace their face with that of a 3d model, give them a tail, wings. As the software gets more clever perhaps we will see more of these quirks in our video.

Perhaps also it will lead us to question what we see in video, just as photoshops *should* have made us re-evaluate our trust in images (innately we seem to trust them still but I guess its only been a decade or so.) Mapping of video in 3d could allow modifications which alter the truths they it appears to show, conspiracy theorists could call fake a whole lot more. No doubt secret services or some agency does similar now but more fakes could become mainstream, with the ability to map anyone’s face over a video of another person no doubt people would use and abuse the technology. Making the system realtime could allow tv presenters to be thinner, accentuated or fat, it could change the way the media consuming world thinks of body image.

Apart from the possibility for fakes I would like to hope it opens doors for a whole new breed of indie producer, an indie film reproducer, remapping digital actors or placing 3d cut out actors onto new or improved sets, writing extensions to old movies and remapping classics. Replacing actors, improving lighting, adding dimensions or taking away reality. Remixing film like we do music, perhaps new breeds of film will spring up, what could the dubstep of film be?

So I happened across this post on foreign exchange arbitrage and got distracted for 4 hours into working out if there were any opportunities for using arbitrage betting from here in the uk, what with online gambling being so big and tennis being a simple outcome game I thought I would start with the tennis and see where it took me. More an excuse to practice my rapid application dev than anything else.

If you skip to the end of this post you can see the outcome, or read on, I will be brief.

So I started in excel, found a nice summarising scraper site which gives you all the odds from different bookies in one place (how convenient - I bet they make good affiliate revenue) and did the maths. Within 4 games that evening I found one which worked. If I had placed bet’s across 2 bookmakers totalling £1000 at that moment I would have made a profit of £10.74 (1.74%), guaranteed (unless some natural disaster killed both tennis players?!?)

Great. Well its not, but 1.74% was a start that could be turned into a healthy profit, provided easy money in, easy money out, repetition and scalability (not that I expected that but I thought I would go with it.)  The math I was using was as follows:

Where x was odds on outcome1, y the odds on outcome2
if c was less than one then it would be an arbitrage bet which held profit (this is a simplified version of the math, which I am fairly sure is correct)

This gave me a percentage of return based on a formula, next I wrote a quick scraper which pulled match’s from the odds aggregater, it pulls all tennis games across different championships and arena’s. I wrote the scraper in csharp, a variant on a rules based spider-scraper system I wrote in php a few years ago for ripping various things off the net into db’s. So 1 hour or so later at the flick of a switch I now had all tennis match’s popularly available to gamble online on in the uk with odds, bookie details etc etc.  I love RAD in c#. Apply the math to this and you get the following:

Yeah, its ugly, but it works.

So yeah perhaps that early game I found that made nearly 2% was a fluke or a miscalculation, perhaps arbitrage betting is as fluidly fixed by the free market as forex is, either way in the few days I have checked I haven’t found any arbitrage bets that are viable at all, let alone any healthy returns. There probably is scope in the practice, perhaps with 24 hour rate watching you might catch the book-keeper fluctuations and make the odd 1-4%, but really, for all the hassle of multiple accounts and bet-shop money holding its probably not worth it. Good excuse to re-write my scrapers in csharp though, and do a little maths.

*Gambling is bad, mmmmmkay? Its also worth noting that while if you couple finding this low % profit with the £10 free bet crap that all of these online bookies offer it would seem like a great idea, or at least a good one. Its probably not. These business’s run a filter model for your cash, good marketing, low number page hops and quick card transactions makes it easy to filter in cash, but isn’t so easy to get out returns, also quite often the free initial bet or bonus comes with proviso’s which wreck the rate of returns. Its no surprise, its probably easier to earn your money elsewhere, perhaps by starting up as a bookie? :p

As I said last post if I couldn’t find a reddit wallpaper downloading program I would make one. Well I found upboat (which is good) but with windows 7 (or display fusion) offering cycling desktop backgrounds every x minutes I thought I might write a more brute force downloader. So I did.

Reddit Wallpaper Grabber is essentially:

…a small program (77kb) that will grab wallpapers straight from their listings on reddit. With it you can download (in bulk) hundreds of the most upvoted wallpapers with the click of a button to a folder on your computer.

It’s only about 8 hours work, is unofficial and probably mildly buggy, but it works for me (and probably everyone on windows > 98.)

Features

• Save wallpapers in bulk, direct to a folder on your computer
• Get wallpapers from all the popular wallpaper reddit’s
• Sort by reddit sections (e.g. Whats Hot or Top of All Time)
• Include (or dont) NSFW Wallpapers
• Preview wallpapers before you download them
• Portable exe (No install needed, just runs when you open it)
• Its Free!

If you want to suggest feature requests/point out bugs then please do on the comments of this post. If you haven’t already – go ahead and download it.

Download v0.1 now of Reddit Wallpaper Grabber (its free!)
RedditWallpaperGrabber_0.1.exe (77kb)	RedditWallpaperGrabber_0.1.rar (52kb)

May was a month of brick lane curries, a new art exhibition (silent city), mini golf and a bunch of other blurry stuff.

June was a good month (on the whole apart from hackers and google caffeine?!?), did incalculable amounts of coding, new site rollouts, tennis, monopoly, booked new york flights and some other stuff. Wrote a lot, drank a lot of wine, updated a bunch of auction2post sites because eBay updated their api (for the better) – standard summer month.

I started 4 draft posts across these two months but none seemed to stick, it’s not like the months were dry, posts boning csharp just didn’t fit, I was going to post csharp iis and multisql management code, a nice project I wrote to datamine from ebays new api and I was thinking of digging out my seo hub php based hub and rewriting it as a multi threaded windows app, but yeah sometimes stuff just doesn’t seem to hold enough value.

As ever though projects continue to crop up and evolve. I am working on a stupidly simple file system snapshotter after an incident with a second hacker, I will probably post about ripping data from the Nike app on the iPhone, if it isn’t up already somewhere else. Also I will make a quick program to save the top 20 wallpapers from reddit to a folder so windows 7 can automatically show me new epics (theres even an rss!) if know one else saves me the effort. Unless that is, all this stuff gets superseded. Mostly it’s just me biding my time and making broader plans

Look out for possible random posts on business intelligence, the stock market and brain architecture too, as they seem to keep cropping up.

If you are an EPN (Ebay Partner Network) affiliate you will be familiar with their latest scheme which has been in play since Nov 09 or similar – the idea of a quality based click through deal whereby the higher the quality of traffic you send through to them the higher they pay you per click. The hybrid system encapsulating the benefits of PPC while associating to a finer level with quality seems to be working well on the whole but does change the game slightly.

The set-up before the move to EPC was clear – a campaign and its sub id’s (channels, custom id’s) were there to allow the publisher a clearer view on what was working – a means to allow them to refine their sites and provide a better quality through to ebay which returned more sales and which ultimately benefited both parties. This would mean traditionally a campaign per website and sub-id’s (channels) for each sub category, sub page, sub item or whatever would sufficiently track transactions and allow for later refinement, later. However with the adoption of EPC the campaign gained a new association in the relationship.

As it stands EPC is calculated per campaign (as I understand it) which means if we lazily coast on with the bigger sites all pummelling single campaigns our EPC is far from efficient. Say a site is getting 3000 clicks through to ebay a day, its set up as a single campaign with about 20 sections underneath it all using custom id’s so as you can track transactions later. Overall the campaign gets a measly 0.01 – 0.04 EPC per day depending on the moon or whatever. This 0.01-0.04 EPC is paid out for all 3000 clicks. Great. But if a single sub page is responsible for 1000 of those click through’s and is producing a 0.00 or a 0.01p EPC (performing badly) then potentially it pulls down the epc value of the other 2000 clicks.

In efforts to pull one of my larger sites from the low EPC it currently resides at I have now split it from being a single campaign with custom id’s to being nearly 20 campaigns titled “site – subcampaign x” – effectively making campaigns of the major customid’s. This does make the nice epn reports messier to look at but its all for the sake of refinement. If everything is averaged before calculating epc this should not really affect all that much, however based on the first week or so it seems to offer two clear advantages. Firstly its making me more money. The split up site is averaging a higher EPC overall and higher returns. Spreading it across multiple campaigns seems to distinguish the better from the worse allowing a higher overall average epc value per click. Secondly in terms of finding the poor performers from the group it couldn’t be simpler. No more digging around in transaction logs that really were built to allow refinement under the old system – you can see the epc’ of each area of a big site strait from the management reports – it allows you to identify the 1p-epc area’s of your site and axe them or improve them.

I am sure ebay will dilligently continue to improve their toolset for the epn, especially as I am sure they don’t want millions of campaigns created like this (lol), but in the meantime splitting your larger breadwinning campaigns may be a worthy pursuit – I shall repost in a month or so with some progress.

Probably not worth doing on your Auction 2 post sites this one! haha!

I got the bus out of Pai bus station (they run through national holidays like the water festival, despite what everyone says) for Chiang Mai – from here I hopped on a plane to BKK where I first heard news of the ash cloud. Bangkok airport was pretty rammed, tourists originally bound for Europe made the quiet airport not so quiet. I had booked an overnight stay (flight to Nepal was next day) in an airport hotel (Grand Residence) which included hotel transfers, I met the concierge who was supposed to sort this out who promised me a 10 minute wait – but another couple had been told the same yet had waited over an hour – we decided to just get a taxi. Turned out so did half of Europe and it took us 4 hours to get a taxi, BKK taxi’s made a killing that night.

3 hours sleep in a hotel later I woke up again and got driven in an E class Mercedes from the 1980′s to the airport, blacked out windows and leather seats that had probably seen more use than any bus. The hop from Bangkok to Kathmandu was a short 3 hours 40 minutes or similar and we were put into a holding pattern for about 40 minutes that gave us circling views of the Himilayas. Not all that bad really.

Kathmandu wasn’t that different to how I had pictured it, the week before when I had booked the ticket – pretty grimey, busy and smelly – huge chimneys where presumably waste or coal was burnt speckle the horizon as you fly in to land. Customs didn’t seem to care what I had in my bags but getting a visa took a while. Converting a few hundred dollars into Nepalese rupee’s also wasn’t such a great idea as the majority of hotels etc. prefer to be paid in $$, so if you need to pay in rupee’s then the rate is theirs to choose! I stayed in an average place just of Thamel, the tourist district. $25 for a room which would do for the night – the next morning I was getting a bus for Dumre.

Thamel restaurant ornament.. :/

We also walked around the complex a bit – there are tons of ornate buildings mostly entitled mansion x, mansion y – we got to another which featured a small moat and the other two went in but I decided to just sit outside on the bridge, there’s only so many glass cases you can look in.

JM and SH shot off to catch the night train north to Chiang Mai and I remained in BKK. That night me and LM went in search of the “moon bar” supposedly a more down to earth (but high up) equivalent of the skybar (Lonely planet oh yes) and while we failed miserably at finding it it did let us catch a bit more of Bangkok. That night featured a good indian meal on the second floor of a shop on Khao San with a random mango shake and samsung combo…classic. Locust eating, Cricket eating

The next few days saw visits to Starbucks, rooftop pools and then random walkabouts by myself through Bangkok. I originally had set out to find Tesco Lotus in the hope of acquiring a thai mobile but had literally headed out the wrong end of Khao san and so ended up aimlessly walking pretty much the entire outer edge of Bangkok central, through chinatown, business districts and at that point very close to tesco lotus, without realising it.

The whole time I had been walking through the red shirt protest which was at this point completly peaceful and placid. Roadblocks indeed did slow down taxi’s and tuktuks but in fact it didn’t impair tourists who walked at all. If anything the protesters were in high spirits. Based on this I never expected to see a few days after I left BKK the trouble that had gone down thereafter. Glad I missed it though!

Successfully reaching the tesco’s later on that day I managed to buy a Thai mobile – which makes so much sense by the way if your in Thailand longer than a week. It cost about 670 Baht (£13) and you can top it up at any 7 eleven. JP later joined me in BKK followed in short by several cocktails and beers and then finally JM and SH. As it was our last evening in BKK a torrent of activity ensued. Mulligans Irish bar on Khao San had a good pool table and JP enjoyed the strawberry dackerys (haha) although the Caipirinha’s were a bit sugary.

From Khao San the four of us ended up at a show of pingpong nature which was extreme. An hour later we returned to Khao San, had a gross cheap cocktail and entered what seemed to be the only club club on the road – entitled “the club”. Think uk club but a weird shape, half the people and all the people that were there were the usual khao san mix. Leaving “the club” at 3.50 there was 30 minutes of foot massage and Khao San observation.

The following day I flew out to Chiang Mai from BKK. An easy quick flight (55 minutes rather than 13 hours on night train) that cost £29 or similar. In Chiang Mai I stayed in a nice small family run guesthouse called ThaPae Garden – suggested to me by JM and SH. Outside of the walled town itself it stood about 1 minutes walk between the East gate and the night bazaar. If you ever stay in Chiang Mai I would recommend it. The first day I pretty much spent all the time in temples taking pictures and thinking etc.

While in Chiang Mai I did a days trek which included time riding/feeding an elephant, trekking (well walking really – 35 mins) to a nice waterfall, white water rafting and bamboo rafting (I am a bad bamboo rafting captain..haha.) It also stopped at a butterfly farm but to be honest there was far more butterflies by the waterfall. The next day I did a 35km mountain bike ride. I had chosen “3c” based on the advice of the landlady at Thapae garden, on arrival I was told it was the “excersize and downhill one”. eek. It was probably the most full on bike ride I have ever done – although afterwards it felt like an achievement it was ridiculously fast, rough and full on. Think 40mph off road ducking under lychee trees interspersed with sheer rough downhills, forest cross country, streams, dust tracks and 30% uphills. Granted the rice fields, villages and fruit tree’s were picturesque but in reality at 40 mph you don’t take much of that in. Fell off a few times, bruised some ribs, my neck and scraped a load of my arm up, still pretty amazing. Eating lunch at 2.30 in a bamboo raised room in front of a swimming lake in the middle of the mountains though was a great conclusion to the days riding.

The night bazaar in Chiang Mai is quite good – although selling a lot of the same stuff if you have been round the south and stayed in Bangkok for a few days. The food court is a good way to eat dinner with some random coupon operation and about 50 types of food – although I heard from a fellow biker that if you choose the wrong type the food can be not so nice. They have a Pantip Plaza in Chiang Mai too which is where I brought this laptop – should have brought one the whole time probably.

The next day I got up and booked the minivan to Pai – it cost me 200 baht (50baht of that is a commission for the landlady that booked it.) About 3 and half hours after getting in it it got into Pai – the journey is up through the mountains and takes curving roads to a whole new level. I think there was about 4 straits in the whole journey. We stopped halfway at the “halfway house” which I guarantee is more like the 2/3rds house in reality – but either way a nice cocao-banana shake was only 20 baht.

Pai is a sleepy town, the smallest I have visited while in TL but it has its own charms. Lots of specific little restaurants harbour a huge number of tourists. I have so far had a great Mexican meal and also a good humous/chicken meal. In Pai I have been staying in one of the more expensive central hotels, as I am now resigned to admitting I am more of a flashpacker than a backpacker. LiLU is good value because its technically off season and has alright wifi and decent rooms. The lady at the bus company advised me “Lilu…thats really expensive…but I hear they have good bathrooms..” – that didn’t sell it to me but the hotel fits.

Incidentally it is now Thai new year in Thailand which means Pai’s streets (and probably most places) are speckled with groups of kids and people with barrells of water and buckets, ready to soak every person in sight, regardless. I had managed to avoid the water festival like a grumpy old man but in the end its tough not to join in. Everywhere you go there are these outposts of people ready to throw water on you and people sitting on the back of mopeds with super soaker’s. You have to admire the fun element to this national holiday. We need more things like this in the UK.

Whats worse it was dark by this point. We got off and stood amongst the other bombarded people waiting to find our bag amongst 300 others in the dark as they were thrown off into a big pile. I’m amazed no one was knocked in. We had booked the ‘Buakoa Inn’ (Sp) for 3 nights starting the next day – so we tried there to get a room for tonight, to no avail. Mike – the owner, though was helpful enough to help us secure two other good rooms in separate parts of Thong Sala the port town.

That night after we got settled we had a meal at Becks Bar which was a huge hanger like building with an English themed style on someone’s advice. The food was pretty bad, one of us had a platter which featured barely cooked food and the other stuff was overpriced and average. The staff were interesting though and we had a waitress named ‘ICE’ who took a specific interest in me. Either way an ok bar probably but the food wasn’t amazing.

We went down to check out Haad-Rin – the beach where the infamous Full Moon Party takes place – taxi’s everywhere on Koh Phangan cost 100 baht (about £1.10) per person, regardless of where you are going. Its a strange system but it works I suppose. At Haad-Rin we bumped into my new American friend and went to check out the beach bars. As soon as we hit the beach we ended up at a bar named Cactus which was just starting a game of balloon popping, which a few of my friends joined in – you have a balloon attached around your ankle and your aim is to pop everyone else’s by stamping on them before yours get popped. Presumably a bucket of drink was the prize, although it ultimately got down to two blokes and the crowd forced a winner (none of my friends.) We got a drink and moved on.

There was uv paint-artists everywhere along the beach – painting dragons on legs and flowers up arms etc. They must make a fortune, charging £5-10 for a little paint! After a bit of average partying on the beach with a semi full moon aloft we ended up at the far bar which had a foam machine which produced a little area of foam that dissipated into the ocean – a bucket made one of my friends a little rough and I looked after him while chatting. He wouldn’t give me the room key either, which was annoying. After taking him home I went to the beach for a bit with my American friend.

The next day we moved out of our temporary room and into the Buakoa Inn which was much much better, probably the best room so far for about 1500 baht a night for a twin and featured foot deep mattresses. We chilled a lot this day, backed up photo’s and got ready to go to Haad-Rin again.

That night (pre full moon) we ate at Casablanca on the Haad-Rin strip. Food was better than previous night and we watched a badly subtitled rip off copy of avatar they were playing on the screen there. We walked along the beach but the party had not really started by that point (about 8 or 9pm) so we just ended up sitting at a table chatting. After a while at that the beach livened up and we went and partied a bit. An angered JM threw his bucket of drink over me and me mine over him at one point this night, but I don’t seem to remember caring all that much. This was another good night on Koh Phangan and I will remember it well. I got in at about 5.20, and unfortunately had to wake Mike because my 3 useless friends had gone home, passed out and were ignoring their phones.

The next day was Full Moon party day. I had booked into a cookery course along with two of my friends but in the end I bailed on this as needed more sleep. By the evening everyone was ready for full moon and we started the evening with food and a cocktail in the diner below our rooms – named ‘A’s Diner’ and run by mike, we got a free cocktail for booking the room online – Caipirinha’s which were very good.

Full moon itself on the beach was pretty much insane. A half mile stretch of 40 ft wide beach with every square meter packed with people, the air warm and the moon full, the water lapped at your feet if you were at the back of the dance floors. Numerous fire challenges from jump ropes to flaming rings. Slides with 6 ft drops at the bottom. I saw a fair few injuries, unscrupulousness and madness. Fairly reserved I went home at 6am but I had friends that did not get in until 10am JM! he even had curry for breakfast on the way home. The next day was mostly resting interspersed with market curry and spring rolls.

The 1st of April saw another move – we got up and jumped on a ferry to Surat Thani – 12.30 for 2 hours and I had stupidly only put on factor 10, despite sitting outside on the ship. Needless to say my arms are now tanned :/ From Surat Thani we got a coach transfer to the airport where I had some random spicy pork curry and then we flew into BKK.

After landing in Bangkok we jumped in a taxi and strait to Khao San road where we randomly again bumped into my American friend. We ended staying at a budget hotel named ‘at home’ which if you ask me was pretty awful. Loud, crappy air con and on the 4th floor or something. Not so nice. The next day though I moved to Khao San Park Resort – about halfway up KhaoSan and much better. The others then split to go to Chiang Mai (we had left Jon to do his Padi on Koh Tao) which left me in Bangkok for 4 days or so – staying in this better resort!

More soon – I am currently in Pai!

From Railay I got the long boat to the ferry which took us to Koh Lanta which is a nice semi island (connected to land if sea was a little lower) that is I think relatively newly touristy. Staying half way down the island offered relative peace, some relaxed but comfortable beach bars and a fair bit of sunny swimming. The best thing I found about Koh Lanta was the seaside BBQ where you picked the stuff you wanted cooking and then sat to eat. They had probably the biggest prawns I have ever seen that were amazing and only about 90p each. Koh Lanta is the part of Thailand I would probably come back to if I was with family, it offers a touch of nightlife but really nothing as busy as anywhere else.

Next up we got a ferry out of Saladan, Koh Lanta across to Koh Phi Phi. Koh Phi Phi is I think the most touristy island, and I think thats quite well known. Just a hop away from Maya bay where they filmed ‘the beach’ and having suffered a Tsunami in 2004 it still remains probably the busiest places of those I have visited, bar of course full moon on Koh Phangan. Stayed in PP Charlie which was entry level in terms of money but saw a few rooms and you can stay on PhiPhi for about 25 pounds and have all the niceties of uk hotels.

There is a lot to do on Phi Phi, begin a very small island it is also relatively communal and everywhere you go you seem to bump into people you met elsewhere or at earlier times on the island. We went to a thai boxing match which supposedly started at 9pm at the Reggae bar and ended up two of my friends being the main attraction, ushered into the ring to fight 3 rounds in exchange for a bucket of sangsom and mixer. We also did a fair amount of drinks tasting at the Banana bar which was a uv splattered roof bar and spent pretty much the rest of the time on the beach, either in the day swimming or sunbathing or at night partying at the very good beach bars (Ibiza bar.) Unfortunately at an apparent momentary lapse of awareness I did loose my camera on this beach but such is life. Luckily I only lost a days worth of pictures as I had backed up, but it was an excellent night I wish I had recorded proof of. We did other things on PP like kayaking, played pool etc and got doctor fished!

Snorkling in Maya bay and around the island just of PP was pretty amazing although it is not so great to see the coral in a lesser state, largely because of tourists and boats etc, it however does remain a stunning little island. The longtail ride back watching the sun set across the sea was great although with rocky seas the other passengers were not so impressed.

Food on Koh Phi Phi was good but more touristy as you would expect I suppose – The Rock restaurant which is made in the shape of a boat sticking out of the mountain (like a few on the island) gave another opportunity to bump into people we had met before. Ate Massaman curry as advised by Maria which was good although I am not a fan of potato in curries.

After a few nights of partying on the beach the group wanted to move on from Koh Phi Phi, I have to say I was quite liking the island but perhaps that was for other reasons, I could have happily stayed another night or two, but packing it in we left pp via ferry to Krabi and stayed a night there at a nice little guesthouse just out of town. We did a bit of shopping in Krabi and rested mostly – watched Daybreakers which was alright. We ate at a self serve BBQ where they place a platter of meats in front of you along with a heated plate for you to cook your own food on, connected to a circular channel which created a soup from the cooked meats released fluid. Its hard to explain but was a fantastic culinary experience.

I am actually writing this from Bangkok, but I shall update another time – time for some Pad Choi!