Rich of March House

Racism?

nospam@example.com (Rich) — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 08:33:26 -0700

I've uncovered a major diversity issue - a clear disadvantage based on colour and I think it requires immediate action to resolve.

In painting the primary colours are red, blue and yellow, right? Well, if you take some blue paint and add some white paint to it then you end up with light blue paint and if you add white paint to yellow paint then you get light yellow paint. However, if you add white paint to red paint then do you get light red paint? No - you get pink paint. Why is red so special that its light version is a whole new colour but poor old blue and yellow have to make do with lighter versions of themselves? There should be equality. Either we need to rename pink to light red, or we need to invent names for light blue and light yellow. Who's with me? Down with this sort of thing!

There's an App for That

nospam@example.com (Rich) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 08:23:11 -0700

Rich's First Law of Internet Content: There is absolutely no application that you can think of that doesn't already exist on the internet.

Rich's Second Law of Internet Content: You will continually fall foul of the First Law. Time and energy will be wasted recreating something that already exists and is better than yours.

Rich's Third Law of Internet Content: I bet these Laws already exist somewhere on the internet, in a better format.

Determined to never again buy the same book twice due to a limited brain capacity for remembering titles, authors and plots, I decided to create a web-based database that would enable me to catalog all of the March House library, storing titles and authors. This would let me check whether I already own a book by accessing the database from mobile phone while stood with the potential purchase in my hands in the bookshop.

Initially this was going to be dead easy - a very basic no-frills php/mySQL setup with only three fields. But then I thought how tedious it would be to have to sit there typing in all this information. It needed to be more efficient, probably by stealing someone elses work.

The first refinement was to discover the online ISBN database. Version 2 of my application let me simply type in the ISBN of a book (and better yet, use my barcode scanner to capture the number) and it then queried the ISBN site, scraped title, author and publisher information from the search results page and inserted it automagically into my own database.

This was a bit clunky but after some sniffing around I discovered that the site has a useful API, which returns the data I was after as XML without any of the kludgey scraping needed at all.

However, I'm not very good at extracting the actual data from XML using PHP so I had to learn lots of new functions to do that. It ended up working after a fashion but had pages of code that didn't all look entirely necessary. Fortunately a little bit of further research - reading the PHP documentation - led me to a function someone else had written in the comments that did exactly what I wanted. I pasted this into my increasingly efficient application.

That was all well and good but then I discovered the age old problem of things with apostrophes in them causing grumpiness on the part of the constructed SQL insert statement. Fortunately, after an invaluable tip-off this gave me the ideal opportunity to learn all about prepare statements, with the added bonus of making my application slightly more secure than a Group 9 security van (anyone remember that incident?).

The next refinement came about as a result of wanting to do something a bit prettier. Wouldn't it be nice to show the front covers of all my books? Rather than having to scan them all in, the obvious method for achieving this seemed to be to steal someone elses work.

Amazon is a small comany that sells books. All I had to do was to get my application to send a search request to Amazon with the ISBN and to scrape the data from the returned results page, identifying a suitable image to automatically steal. As I started the chore of writing this I suddently decided to have a flash of inspiration and to learn from my ISBN database experience. Would Amazon would have an API to let me do exactly what I wanted without all the unpleasantness I was intending? Yes they would.

This API was way more complex, involving advertising or something. I wasn't entirely happy so I did a bit more googling during which I found the Library Thing and scrapped my project.

School Fête

nospam@example.com (Rich) — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 16:30:58 -0700

This afternoon was the school fête and we went along to see what was happening. While Claire was roped into helping out on the shove-ha'penny stall I meandered around looking for something interesting until I stumbled across the Tombola. Three tickets for two pounds and anything ending in a 0 or a 5 resulted in a prize.

I never win at these things so I had a couple of goes and something went horribly right! I won! I won some prizes! Look at this lot.

That's:

A big tin of Cornish clotted cream fudge, shortbread and nuts;
A wooden box of "Christmas spices" from Past Times (shelf price £15);
A bottle of Cava;
A bottle of Moët & Chandon fizz.

I reckon that's about £40 worth of prizes for a £4 outlay. I might have to take up tombolling professionally.

Discovery in Garden

nospam@example.com (Rich) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:41:11 -0700

Look what we found while we worked in the garden ~~toady~~ today. This chap was sheltering under a huge pile of branches destined for taking to the tip. He's got some small woodlousey pals too.

(clickety for biggety)

International Inconsistency Emergency

nospam@example.com (Rich) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:07:17 -0700

As I was sat in an interesting meeting this afternoon looking at the nameplates of 29 other nations my mind started pondering something.

In French, the USA is Etats Unis and the UK is Royaume Uni. Since the states that are united are plural the 'unis' gets an s on the end, but because the kingdom that is united is singular we have an s-less uni instead. That's fair enough but it got me thinking about the whole 'united' adjective in place names and I reckon we've got an unliveablewith inconsistency that needs sorting here and now. Either:

a) it should remain as 'United States of America' but the UK should become 'United Countries of Great Britain and Northern Ireland', or even better, simply 'Kingdom' (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) because a single Kingdom must be united anyway, making the 'United' redundant, or

b) it should be the 'United Country of States of America' and the 'United Kingdom' if the united is referring to the fact that a bunch of things got bundled together to make a single thing.

On balance I reckon option a) is the winner for me, which means we don't need to change the UN organisation to "United World of Nations" or "Nations" but we do need to change the football club to "Bits of Manchester United" (or maybe just "Manchester").

(On rereading none of this makes as much sense as it does in my head)

Also...

nospam@example.com (Rich) — Sat, 29 May 2010 21:17:12 -0700

Please be a bit cheery. I might kill myself after Ukraine's entry.

How to Win at Eurovision

nospam@example.com (Rich) — Sat, 29 May 2010 21:04:56 -0700

1) Start your song off with a big bang or effect or something. Honestly - these countries who start off softly with silly balletical movements and wind in their hair are on to a loser. So far, Moldova and Greece win this aspect for me. They started off how they meant to go on.

2) Have an unusual musical instrument. No-one wants to see a dull grand piano - get yourself a neon blue violin like Moldova or, better yet, an angle grinder like Turkey. Woo!

3) Be Spain and bribe the judges to get yourself another go at the end of the evening.

4) Don't be UK.

That's my running commentary for now - we're only up to Albania so about halfway through. Might post some more words of winning later.

Leather on Willow

nospam@example.com (Rich) — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:38:29 -0700

It's cricket! Click for bigness.

The world-class batsman stands at the crease, contemplating his first shot...

The ball is delivered - a tricky, spinning, fast bowl down the off side. The batsman relies on his well-honed reflexes to take a strike at it, planning its trajectory with infinite precision...

He makes contact with the sweet spot on the bat, and the ball is sent off towards the boundary, the fielders lost in its wake...

Feeling confident, the intrepid batsman faces the second ball of the over, smiling wryly to himself. There is everything to play for in this most important of all matches...

Oops.

Brush off the cobwebs

nospam@example.com (Rich) — Fri, 21 May 2010 17:11:41 -0700

Right, time to get this place back into a habitable status. No blog entries for quite a while and things are a bit stale. I'm going to have a Return!

Roundabout Competition

nospam@example.com (Rich) — Fri, 21 May 2010 19:46:50 -0700

I learned to drive in and around Hemel. Here's an interesting comparison table. Which is more challenging?:

Feature	Swindon Magic Roundabout	Hemel Hempstead Magic Roundabout
What are you on about?	This	This
Number of mentions on internet	Lots	Half as many lots
Number of mini roundabouts involved	Five	A monsterous SIX!
Number of cul-de-sacs off roundabout	One	NONE! Ha! Much more traffic
Steep hills from M1 to roundabout	None	ONE! A whopper! All the way down from Adeyfield, and a dual carriageway too!
Vehicle escape lanes required	None	ONE! And it didn't always work because I remember a lorry once ended up in the RIVER in the middle of the roundabout! Ooh that reminds me...
Number of rivers in roundabout	None! Ha!	ONE! Beat that, Swindon!

Hemel wins!

RIP Genius

nospam@example.com (Rich) — Mon, 24 May 2010 20:00:18 -0700

I was much saddened by the recent death of Martin Gardner, prolific author, puzzler and "polymath" as the NY Times called him in his obituary. I have thoroughly enjoyed all of his books, particularly those on recreational mathematics. Recreational mathematics is a brilliant method for getting people who don't enjoy maths to give it a go and explore what fun it really is. Martin Gardner invented the concept - or at least popularised it - as far as I'm concerned. If you haven't read any of them, I'd advise you to give them a go.

What's disappointing is that, as my brother pointed out, the BBC didn't even recognise his death as significant - no mention at all.