There is by far enough written words about the freedom and positives of leaving ones established job, for better or for worse I think it is the right way forward for me, now. I have had a long list of things to post about, technology thoughts and projects completed; now thankfully I have the control of my time enough that I can post about them.
2010 Has been a good year for travel, from the sandy cocktail beach’s and fast paced mountain biking through lychee groves of Thailand across to the lake of Pokhara and the remote Bandipur in Nepal; sidestepping riots in both countries and a ridiculous ash cloud, through grace or luck. From central park and the Guggenheim to the Robert Moses beach and Long Island, New York was epic; and now in 48 hours or so on to Agadir, Marakesh, Casablanca and Fez, Morocco, its been a good year for travel.
Find out if a user has "liked" your facebook page or app etc.
September 18, 2010
Working with integration of Facebook Connect for authentication is mostly easy at the moment, once you have got your head around FBML etc. However as they are in between switching from the old Restful API and the new graph API there remains the odd little thing that has only a splatter of useful documentation online. The first one of these I have come across is trying to find out if a user (who is logged in to your site via facebook connect) is a fan of page X.
There is infinite uses for this – with facebook more and more integrating “likes” with their search and other stuff you will need this functionality to drive traffic from facebook. Anyway this used to be the easy case of using https://api.facebook.com/method/pages.isFan?access_token=… to get a 1 or 0 depending on whether or not the user had “fanned” the page/website/whatever.
But then came along the big bad Graph API, which to get this IsFan functionality is a bitch. Getting the “likes” directly works for the page owner (which confuses everything) but not for third parties, showing just the popular/main category “likes” against them (and you need extended permissions.)
Something led me to happen across the following video from google I/O 2010 which gives a full expo (57 minutes) on their BigQuery and Prediction API’s. You can see they have made a lot of ground with ridiculous processing, claiming to be able to run SQL queries (or a derivative) on trillion’s of rows in seconds, essentially for free. BigQuery lets us, the general techy public do that, cool eh? Well yeah it is, but I cant help but ask the cynical, why? Data, I would presume is their goal, and if it’s yours to share and insensitive, BigQuery is probably a BigWin. Otherwise its often we find ourselves as technological problem solvers seeking services such as this, a way to fix X, a quicker way of processing Y, a ladder Z to climb fence A to get to B, which can lead us blind with determination down paths, data under arm, paths that are not as safe, sensitive or secure as we thought.
I look forward to someone tooling up the predictions API onto the lottery results.
Imagine films re-casted in 3D, re-mixed like music
August 7, 2010
A short while ago I read a press release about a software capable of producing 3d models of moving characters from a piece of video, I was certain the link was on reddit but I cannot find it. Anyhow it got me thinking about the uses for this, should it progress to a viable standard and there has got to be a few notable ones. For the film industry it will no doubt aid the allocation of 3d work over digital film, although it will have to get slick to replace the use of bright colour identifiers in place of actors.
*update: I found a similar software here on new scientist, its not the same that inspired this post but its relevant, video from there.
Betting arbitrage, miraclebets, surebets, sports arbitraging is a particular case of arbitrage arising on betting markets due to either bookmakers’ different opinions on event outcomes or plain errors. By placing one bet per each outcome with different betting companies, the bettor can make a profit. As long as different Bookmakers are used for arbitrage betting the Bookmakers do not have a problem with this. Each Bookmaker will still make profit due to their calculations.
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?!?)
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.
…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.
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.
