The launch of http://data.gov.uk (runs on Drupal), a central place for making uk government datasets available to the public can only be a good thing. It will prove useful for geeks making mash-ups, but also hopefully help journalists, policy-makers and the public make informed judgements about everything from road safety to public expenditure.
However, as with most datasets, they provide "old news". Data collection is not a trivial process, and then the data has to be validated before it is published. This all takes time. And by the time the data is published, it is often way out of date. This uncertainty is a real problem when you want to make a decision about what you should do in the future.
This was the first football game I ever played - Match Day on the Amstrad CPC. Marvel at the way the players trot out to the Match of the Day theme tune, and then stand their respectfully as if it is the national anthem.
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Just like the real football season, Match Day turns out to be a disappointment. Despite being "ground-breaking" in 1985 when it was released, by the time I came to play it in around 1991 it was already obsolete.
I just found this animated gif I made back in 2006. B3ta.com was one of the first "user-generated content" sites, and as far as I can tell remains totally dedicated to bad jokes and juvenile scribblings of rude bits.
Whilst I was supposed to be revising for my finals at uni I re-discovered the site and began a desperate crusade to be recognized by b3tans by getting something I made promoted to the front page.
At last, with just weeks to go until my exams, I produced this: http://www.b3ta.com/board/5884938.
But aren't animated GIFs great though? You hardly see them anywhere except B3ta these days. Damn you Macromedia / Adobe for bringing Flash video to everyone and ruining this naffest of art forms forever.
I remember the good old days when the first part of every web project involved registering a domain name and then choosing a good "Under construction" sign. The more garish and animated the better. All of these people were wrong: http://www.andrews.edu/~rickyr/noconst.html
I was lucky enough to wangle a ticket to an advance screening in Leicester Square yesterday. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but it turns out that Dumbledore is Harry Potter's father, and Princess Leia is his sister.
This is the best book in the series, and the film adaptation largely does it justice. Despite the 10am start, and being surrounded by over-excited fidgeting children I enjoyed the film. The kids seemed to enjoy it too, so this will surely be another box officer winner.
Who's twittering about their holiday? A quick look at the response to Vodafone's #ukhols twitter campaign
As a thunderstorm made me reluctant to leave the office this afternoon, I thought I would spend a bit of time analysing the response. I started tracking #ukhols in Google reader at about 5pm on Friday afternoon. Just as the buzz was dying down for the weekend. However, this does mean that I have a nice small sample to analyse, of 195 responses.
I was curious to what extent people would play along with this. It seems that most respondents were happy (0r didn't think about) to tweet their age and gender.
Twitter is a bit like a pub where all the drinks are free. To get your free drinks you are required to tell everyone in the pub what you are having, as well as anything else that pops into your head.
Despite the free beer, all that shouting can get a bit oppressive. There is a hard core of locals, and they are a rather odd bunch. It's not like they stop and stare at you when you walk in, it's actually worse than that. They carry on shouting at each other and rudely ignore your very existence.
A terrible plague is sweeping the earth, the likes of which we have never seen before. Or not since that terrible Bird Flu outbreak that killed 2 swans, a barn full of Bernard Matthews and sold 2.6million extra copies of the Daily Express. Happily however, I've watched plenty of Zombie films, so I know how to keep myself safe.
The post room at work received an exciting piece of mail today from the China Trust Commercial Bank.
The heroic Sun Chang, Principal Assurance manager, and a family man with a wife and children is fed up with the corruption of the banking system and has decided to take action. He wants a piece of the pie for himself. And he's not afraid to use mail-merge to get it.
The funniest April Fool's Joke? Guardian on twitter? Home Secretary buys sex toys?
Nope, it's Alan Shearer for Newcastle boss.
And they aren't even joking!
One of the joys of 24hour news is that stories are written before they actually happen, hence the morning news declaring "DEFLATION IS BACK" before the ONS announced that actually it wasn't.
From the ONS website:
Retail Prices Index (RPI) inflation slowed to 0.0 per cent in February, down from 0.1 per cent in January. The main factors affecting the CPI also affected the RPI. Additionally, there was a large downward pressure from housing with the main effect coming from mortgage interest payments which are excluded from the CPI.
