The Lost Shoe Project

Posted on July 10, 2008 by Harry Wood

We went to see In Search of a Midnight Kiss about a month ago, maybe more. It’s a quirky artistic movie, with a quirky artistic character who at one point mentions that she likes to take photos of shoes, and publishes them on her quirky artistic website called “thelostshoeproject.com”. Seeing this, I was sitting in the cinema burning with curiosity. I had to know if the website really exists, and really does have photos of lost shoes. …but then I forgot all about it ….until now.

thelostshoeproject.com

So looking at it now, I was expecting to either find:

A website created by the official makers of the movie (possibly pretending to be someone’s quirky artistic lost shoe project)

A fan website dedicated to the movie

A holding page grabbed by some domain name parking search engine optimising asswipe.

But I’m not sure what to make of this site. It does really exist, and has photos of lost shoes. No mention of the movie, but a very personal little account of what the site is about, complete with a very personal looking email address. “Have you found a lost shoe? Send me a picture and tell me your story…”, and an unpolished “coming soon” section, all of which makes me think it is not an official site by the makers of the movie.

Maybe this is some clever double-bluffing. It could all be designed to harvest email addresses or generate confused blog posts like this, which help promote the movie.

Or am I being too cynical. It really is someone’s little quirky artistic pet project, which the script writer randomly came across and decided to write into the movie.

….Nah! Surely not. There’s only one way to find out. Anyone lost a shoe?

Alps 2008

Posted on June 24, 2008 by Harry Wood

Alpine paddling Excellent week of boating in the Alps!

I think there was quite a lot of snow on the mountains still, which made for unusually high water for this time of year (as the sun melts it all off). In fact we were arriving just a few days after a too-much-water kayaking ban had been lifted, and the rivers were indeed a little more bouncy and pushy than my memories of the same runs on previous trips.

This turned out to be a good thing. Plenty of challenges forcing rolls here and there, but I got into the zone pretty well. No swims, and I came away with a good feeling of paddling achievement. Our day on the Guile was perhaps the only exception. My nerves were on edge for some reason. Triple-step was looking too fearsome for me, although I would have loved to conquer this after fluffing it back in 2005. And when we got to the “slandslide” section (A.K.A. “staircase”) I bottled it and portaged. However there was some vindication when Ralph, despite being in the hugest creekboat known to man, got an absolute munching in the stopper at “letterbox”. He took a swim and was left looking a bit shaken. Apparently the hole almost stripped his shorts off him!

As I said before, we were staying in a posh chalet, but we’d met up with Ralph some of the other guys, who were slumming it on the campsite in the valley bottom, and we took pity on them on a couple of evenings when it was chucking down with rain. Everyone came round to the chalet, which along with James and his two mates, made for quite a gathering.

After the first three days of cloud/rain downpours, the sun came out. These are the conditions which make French Alps so enjoyable. Baking hot sunshine and blue/green glacier water to jump in and cool down. This picture is a nice tributary of the Ubaye which was particularly beautiful.

Holiday for a week

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Harry Wood

It’s funny how stressful things always seems to accumulate during the period in the run up to a holiday. This week’s been a bit frantic. I’ve ended up with a lot of work to finish off today, and now my PortalBuilder server has come up with a new and unexpected error message to thwart me. Looks like I’ll have to give up on that. I’ll be leaving a semi-half-finished-non-operational mess behind. That’s shame, but what the hell…. I’m going whitewater kayaking in the Alps for a week!

That’s right, I’m off kayaking, for the first time since January. I feel a bit out of practice. I’m also feeling a little bit apprehensive because I will be the only one of the group in a silly little playboat. Everyone else will be in more heavyweight creek boats. I have visions of being left behind looping in a stopper while everyone else punches on through. The plan started out as just a small group, with at least half of us being of a “laze around in the sunshine, take it easy on the rivers, and have a relaxing holiday” persuasion. But the group has since expanded to seven people (I think), most of whom will be persuading me to stop being a wuss and take on some adrenaline challenges. Right now that feels like the last thing I need.

I will be spending a fair proportion of next week chilling in the Alpine sunshine with a plastic bidon of cheap french wine. Oh yes.

Because this is an oldies canoe club trip, not the usual imperial college uni group, we won’t be doing the usual cheapo slumming on a campsite. No no. We have a chalet booked. Very posh.

I ordered myself a new camera. I had to, because last weekend my nice little Casio Exilim became very broken (dropped!) I decided it would be too unimaginative to order another ordinary compact camera, so I pondered SLRs (But they’re too big for carrying everywhere, and I like to carry my camera everywhere), and I pondered a camera-phone (but I don’t want a contract, so they’re quite expensive. Second-hand on ebay could be a good option, but I need to spend more time researching). Instead I’ve gone for a waterproof camera. Fairly ordinary compact, and not as beautiful as the Exilim, but great for kayaking! At least I hope it is waterproof. Some of the user reviews are saying that it broke as soon as they tried it underwater. I haven’t taken delivery of the camera yet. Picking it up a few hours before I set off on holiday this evening. So this is another thing I’m stressing about this week.

Never mind. Deep breaths…. Sunshine, mountains, beers and BBQs… mmmm

Green Hat buys Solstice

Posted on June 7, 2008 by Harry Wood

green hat solstice software

Green Hat has bought Solstice Software, a U.S. based testing software company.

“Solstice has always been an innovative company, and this acquisition will not only extend Green Hat’s technology but also provide North American sales, development and product support, something our existing North American customers have requested. We are delighted to welcome the staff of Solstice to the Green Hat family,” said Peter Cole, Green Hat’s Founder.

While I’m out consulting on site, this isn’t effecting me much, but it sounds like there’s a lot of activity back in the office, working on integrating Solstice and Green Hat. Lots of work on integrating our software offerings too. But hey… it should be easy. Integration is what we do. …well we’ll see.

Anyway expansion is always fun. We’ll probably bring that whole team onto the wiki (Green Hat’s internal knowledge-bank) so I wonder if we’ll see some good transatlantic wiki knowledge sharing in the coming months. We can’t easily meet face-to-face, and there’s only so much knowledge sharing that can be achieved over email/skype, so this kind of thing is where wikis can really excel. We already find it quite helpful on occasions for sharing/coordinating with our people in Belfast and Australia… and Ealing. But I’m hoping that there will be a wiki enthusiast or two among the new joiners.

Babies and Eden Project

Posted on May 31, 2008 by Harry Wood

We went on a brothers and sisters and girlfriends trip to into the West last weekend, to visited my cousins and my cousin’s new babies. Babies are great fun… although we did have the thing of “how on earth do make it stop crying?” at one point when we were left to look after the younger one. Interestingly shoving a full size football in the face of a 6 month old baby is good way to stop it crying for a little while. Flicking through the photos really quickly on my digital camera also seemed to have a good hypnotic effect. But on this occasion the baby was not going to stop crying until its mum returned.

We visited in the Eden Project on the Sunday, a big set of domed greenhouses with a whole rainforest inside. It was forecast to rain. Eden Project probably does very nicely out of rainy weekends in Devon. They were certainly packing in the paying visitors (£15 each) on this bank holiday. I suppose its one of the few big days out in the area, which is (mostly) indoors. It must be very profitable now I reckon. It would have been expensive to build of course, but with the ticket tills ringing like this, they must’ve reached their break even point a long time ago.

In the end sun came out, as you can see in this glorious picture of an artichoke.

Laser targetted ad words

Posted on May 20, 2008 by Harry Wood

On Friday google changed the graphic on their homepage, as they now seem to do quite frequently, to represent an important anniversary within the styling of the word “google”. Last Friday it was particularly striking:

Google Laser Graphic

I could rant about google abandoning its principles of elegant simple clarity in favour of cutesy gimmicks, but let’s face it, they are kinda fun.

If you click on the image, it takes you to a google search on the topic, to reveal what the image is all about. In this case they were commemorating the invention of the first laser, and so you are taken to a search for “first laser”, which predictably enough brings up wikipedia’s Laser article as the first match, to provide a useful explanation “The first working laser was demonstrated on the 16th May 1960”.

With such a striking image on the homepage of google…. (that’s the homepage of google!) …presumably millions of bored of people click the image to see what it’s about. We’re talking a shed load of web traffic, but it’s all good clean fun…

Google Laser Advertising

…but wait! It’s also showing some sponsored links. Laser related websites? Well no actually. The topmost prominent sponsored link says “Forget the first laser… findcheapmobiles.com”. These bozos have registered a particularly sneaky ad word to direct a large slice of this web traffic onto their unrelated website.

Clever advertising, or an abuse of the system? Google obviously decided this was an abuse. A few hours after I took this screenshot, all the sponsored links disappeared from the “first laser” results. I’d be inclined to agree. The site is not related to the search, and actually in this case users aren’t even searching, they’re just wondering what the image is about. Also clever though, and an interesting of example of google having tricks played on it, not just by blackhat S£O sp@mdexing scam artists, but by their own customers.

Sunshine, BBQ, Monopoly and Wikipedia Meet-up

Posted on May 13, 2008 by Harry Wood

Stinking hot weather in London at the moment, so the BBQ came out on Saturday, and so did the hammock! Francine and the brazillian ladies came round, and I tried out my caipirinha making skills with my wooden lime crushing thingy.

In the evening we played monopoly, and I won! (the first time I’ve won monopoly in a long time) I kind of felt bad about beating them because they were all new to the game, or hadn’t played it as many times as me, so I should’ve let one of them win really. They probably thought I had beaten them easily with my superior monopoly playing tactical experience, but no! I’ve never been convinced that this game involves much skill/tactics at all. I just happened to be more lucky this time.

Sunday was also very hot, so I put on my shorts and sandles as I headed out to the 9th London Wikipedia Meet-up. Unfortunately the Penderel’s Oak pub is not so great for sunlight, although we did at least have a view onto the insanely sunny street. It was another successful meet-up. Having nominated myself as cheif promoter (and talk page spammer) I was pleased to see a reasonable turn out. Gordo was doing his Three Mills Loop walk again, so he didn’t make it. Looks like they made the most of the sunshine

Mapping the Three Mills Loop

Posted on May 12, 2008 by Harry Wood

The weekend before last we went on an organised walk and talk called Three Mills Loop around Bow in East London. It was organised by Gordon Joly, who is someone I meet up with at wiki gatherings. He’s a prolific photographer of random bits and bobs around London, as indicated by his flickr photostream which literally streams a constant flow of new photos appearing on my ‘friends photos’ display. But while he was guiding us and talking about some of the sites on the walk, I thought I’d out-photo him on this occasion. I took 274 photos around the route! They were mostly exceedingly uninteresting though, because I was actually doing some photo mapping, so it was pictures of street signs, pubs, post boxes and other mappable things. In the openstreetmap software I can lay out the photos along my GPS trace.

click to enlarge

That’s what it looks like alongside the nodes and ways of the openstreetmap data (shown here as a deselected layer in faint grey). The openstreetmap data can be modified in this JOSM software. I was able to develop the coverage, adding new street names etc which were missing from the map before. My contributions now appear on the map of the area

A recently added feature of openstreetmap is the ‘Export’ tab, which allows export to SVG format. This means you can play around with a vector representation of a map, with full power and flexibility to craft your own image. I tried this for creating map images for wikipedia articles. This walk presented another opportunity to give this a try. Here’s a map illustrating the route of the Three Mills Loop walk:

This map image isn’t just a yellow line overlaid on top of an OpenStreetMap image. I’ve customised the map graphic (using inkscape) to tidy it up. I corrected some of the rendering quirks, including moving some street names, removing extraneous one-way arrows and A/B road markers. I’ve also made the area around Bromley-by-Bow station much clearer, including pedestrian underpasses, to make it easier to find the House Mill meeting place:

House Mill Access

This has been made possible by the recently added ‘Export’ tab feature of OpenStreetMap. Try doing that with google maps!

The walk route took us past some pleasant canal scenery, and we passed right through the Olympic construction zone. It turned out that the extents of this needed to be updated on the map (although it no doubt still needs some further corrections). This was an interesting sight to see, as was the old Victorian Abbey Mills pumping station.

London’s most active wikipedia editors.

Posted on April 30, 2008 by Harry Wood

There are 341 wikipedia users who have added themselves to Category:Wikipedians in London. I wanted to know which of these people had been active recently. My guess was that a small minority of these people were actually still around in the wikipedia community.

I wrote a little bot in java which harvested the information. I needed the date of their most recent wiki edit. Ranking the users by this metric, it turns out I was wrong. About half of these people have edited this month (pretty recently), and the vast majority have made edits within the last year. I guess people who go to the trouble of adding a ‘Living in London’ userbox, tend to be quite dedicated, and likely to stick around in the community.

Active London Wikipedians

My plan was to send direct messages to the active users, to make sure they know about the next London Wikipedia Meetup. My original idea was to whittle down the list, to eliminate what I thought would be the large majority of inactive users. But this hasn’t helped me whittle down the list at all! It’s a more helpful ranking than an alphabetical list though:

London wikipedians ranked by most recent edit

Fun to play with developing bots too.

Trafalgar Square Hawk

Posted on April 29, 2008 by Harry Wood

On Sunday we went on a walk through several parks, but at our start point, before we even got to any parks, we had another interesting ornithological encounter. In amongst the usual tourist crowds I noticed a big brown bird of prey swooping onto a perching spot in one corner. The hawk then flew past my head back to his owner, a guy standing by Nelson’s column. I hadn’t noticed until then, but there were no pigeons. Not a single one!

I must have missed the news, that the authorities have deployed this hawk as a pest control technique. Awesome. It’s amazing how effective it seems to be. We saw one or two pigeons flying very high up, and veering away from the square. Apart from that, nothing.

I notice the idea has its critics, and the enevitable save the pigeons campaign group. They call it “bloodsport”. I didn’t see any blood, because there were no pigeons! They’re obviously all scared shitless of it. Interestingly that website also claims that pigeons do not pose a disease problem. I think they’re probably right about that. How many people d’you hear about catching diseases from pigeons? But I’m not a fan of pigeons. There’s too many of them. They crap everywhere, and they’re just boring.

Hawks on the other hand…. kick ass!