Some of the data mining experts I’ve worked with get really upset about the misuse of statistics and also that people don’t understand the difference between a causality and correlation. I bought some new shoes last week and I suspect they wouldn’t approve of the labeling on Puma’s box. Apparently, the average contents of the box is two! Does this mean some people will be lucky and get three shoes and those less fortunate may only get one?
It may have been the MTV Pimp Your Ride marathon that inspired me to spent the morning cleaning the car. I did the inside myself, but went to the local car wash for a £1.49 clean. It’s not quite West Coast Customs quality, but it’s pretty shiny.
Yo! This is D to the A - Darren and I’m here to Pimp Your Ride, or your servlet, or your action script, or maybe just your non-compliant HTML. It was a Pimp My Ride marathon on MTV today and it did at least provide a little motivation to clean my car.
I do like the whole pimp my ride idea, don’t get a new car, just fix up your existing one. Even if it looks so busted that it can’t be saved they always manage to turn it into something that looks brand new and also has a basketball court, jaccuzzi or juice bar in the back. We have all these patterns in application development that people use to help reuse code (things like a singleton class). The point is that lots of problems you need to solve are just different instantiations of base problems. I think they also have business patterns too.
I wonder if there is already a pattern along the lines of Pimp My Ride. Taking some existing thing, an application for example, and instead of replacing it, just pimp it up a bit. Maybe we could have teams that pimp your applications, tune them up, add loads of fancy features, but don’t mess with the underlying stuff which essentially works?
Still at home for a few days holiday and as the weather has been nice we had a family BBQ. Dad has invested in some new “smoke free” fuel. As you can see from the clip below, it wasn’t spectacularly effective. The problem with doing video, is that it’s almost impossible to keep the camera steady if you’re laughing.
I’m on holiday at the moment and luckily it’s sunny. We’re all tuned into BBC News 24 waiting for the shuttle to land, after a short delay due to bad weather in Florida. In Blackburn it’s all blue skies though.
I want to catch up with a few bits of gui technology while I’m off. One is Laszlo and the other is Konfabulator. Laszlo is a way of developing Flash applications dynamically on an application server, like you would generate HTML in a JSP. It looks quite useful and I know a couple of people who have already started playing around with it. There’s an eclipse based IDE for it on the alphaworks site. I’ve done a little Flash development before, so it’ll be useful to extend it to the server generated side.
Konfabulator has just been bought by Yahoo! and they’re giving it away free. It’s a way of generating client applications using JavaScript, which fits in very well with the whole hacky web thing going on at the moment. It actually sounds very similar to the old IBM Sash project, which I always thought was a good idea.
Having dinner by the life sized fake cruise ship.
A nice Flash based visualisation of del.icio.us. It shows popular bookmarked pages, and how their popularity has changed over the last week. It’s one of those things that’s probably more a piece of art than a serious application. It’s just nice to look at an explore.
Things I’m listening to while working this week:
- Move On Now - Hard-Fi
- I Love You Always Forever - Donna Lewis
- Diamonds From Sierra Leone - Kanye West
- Don’t Lie - Black Eyed Peas
- The Sound of Settling - Death Cab For Cutie
- Talk - Coldplay
- I Predict A Riot - Kaiser Chiefs