— aleatory

Following requires fixing:

- 3D glasses.

- the complete fragile ineptitude of Sony earbuds.

- those social newspaper middlemen on facebook that try to force you to share that article on enhanced woman/donkey bonding before you can read it.

- The Google Analytics UI is the most unintuitive experience I’ve had to endure on the web.

- all white tech goods. Apart from original Game Boy.

- haptic feedback on my Sony Ericsson Mini Pro that doesn’t work when my fingers are sweaty or it’s wet. My phone is effectively indoors-only in Belfast.

- Google’s secondary search box has disappeared from the bottom of results page requiring additional scrolling for no obvious gain.

- lack of cross-device cut & paste.

- ‘Google Docs capturing of the right click event destroys Chrome’s ‘search for’ highlighted text function.

- ‘playstation certified gaming’.

We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible.

Google Company Philosophy, Ten things we know to be true

With the launch of the ‘knowledge graph’ and the subsequent decrease of outbound links as a percentage of the total on Google search result page, is this still their stated goal?

Granted the two concepts are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but it is difficult to see in the general case how a user who starts off with a single query does not spend more time on Google.com if they are encouraged to view more search pages than they would have done otherwise.

I develop on my local Windows 7 (or XP netbook when out of town) and to test/deploy projects I need to send them to my Gentoo Linux server. While manual copying of files quickly becomes a pain in the arse a fully fledged continuous integration environment is needlessly complex for a single programmer project so I created the following batch script that once run checks my windows folders for new & updated files since the last time the script was run then sends them across the ether using scp¹.

The script has been tested on XP & 7 successfully.

For the linux side of things I run a python paster instance with the —reload flag that means paster will pickup changes and restart automatically, making deployment from my windows box a single click action.

Initially I started out a little rusty in my command line knowledge

circa. 2001

2011

An insightful blog post¹ the other day railed against having lots of ideas and emphasised the need to stay on track, to concentrate on execution of The Big Idea. Here’s the other side of that argument.

There are many economic activities in which the rapid generation of ideas is a must have – take trading as one example. This is purely the game of projecting your ideas for where the market is going onto what is happening in reality. And just as you must see both sides of the trade as they say, so too do you need to foresee multiple scenarios ahead in order to understand all potential market movement. Because how it gets to the projected end result is just as important as when/if it gets there. Multiple & even contradictory ideas are the lifeblood then on which trading activity is based.

Last time round. The blur matches the state of my inebriation.

The urban sprawl is rapidly outpacing the idyllic rural lifestyle it engulfs at the city limits – a man & his wife tend to their vegetable field against a backdrop of high rise apartment blocks. The buildings are new, but retain a drabness that is subtly Soviet. Elsewhere the other chief external influence on modern Baltic architecture is evident – Scandinavian ‘box’ living spaces with their dark wooded veneers & pastel green panelling.

I’m a longtime fan of netbooks over other mobile tech gadgets, finding their versatility an important stepchange in the prior arms race for increasingly powerful ‘portables’ that weigh a metric ton and need their own special carrying case, or mobiles with a preposterous array of unusable functions.

May have missed the hackathon at QUB but I’ve still managed to do a bit of hardware related fiddling with this guide on boosting my 4211′s performance & removing a niggle.

Confusing some of the people some of the time is enough.

Less

More

How perceptions of Being Bigger may not always play out in reality.

First Mover Advantage. A popular adage in this era of perennial web startups. Equally as strong has been the thought that established players – the big fish – can simply move in on the small fry’s niche patch and bring it to the mass market – the Free Rider effect.

Groupon is arguably a case in point. Out of nowhere the young gun from Chicago has been described as the world’s fastest growing company and a $6bn gamble, only for such heavyweights as Google and Facebook to begin to muscle in on it’s coupon territory, sensing their already huge ecosystems will at least make the new guy irrelevant.

This is the textbook case. What happens when the innovator is somewhat higher up the foodchain? We may be about to find out.