Nick Jackson

It’s Disney taking the piss out of Disney. Fantastic.

Truuuue loooove’s kiiiiiss.

After writing 1500 words on it, I can safely say that Systems Thinking is yet another instance of consultants coming up with a set of convenient buzzwords and terms to explain something at £500 an hour that I could explain in 10 minutes for free.

I acknowledge that there is a need for people to sit back and look at things like processes and systems in order to better understand and improve them. What I don’t get is why it has to be wrapped up in endless diagrams, words that nobody else understands, and marketed as a silver bullet to solve all business woes.

Systems thinking is an approach to analysis that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system will act differently when isolated from its environment or other parts of the system.

That’s it in a nutshell. Wikipedia rules. I have somehow managed to drag that sentence into a 1500 word report. It’s like UML all over again, but with fewer boxes.

My iPhone has been playing silly buggers for a few days now, so I decided to bite the bullet and do a restoration on it. Having had some experience of restoring various gadgets to factory settings and the subsequent pain of getting them back how I liked them, this was something I approached with no small amount of trepidation.

Dock iPhone… it shows up in iTunes and predictably throws up an Unknown Sync Error (-39). No worry, I’ve already decided to click the “Restore” button. A single approval window appears, and I confirm my intent.

iTunes goes away and unpacks the new firmware, wipes my phone, re-flashes it and then restarts it without any input from me. I even went and played on Facebook whilst it was getting on with it. Next thing I know, the iTunes icon is merrily bopping away in my Dock and asking me if I would like to set my iPhone up as a whole new device or if it should just restore my backup.

Simply put, I restored my backup and it’s currently got all my settings (As far as I can tell) absolutely as I left them and is busy restoring all my media/contacts/email and so on. Apple wins for easy fixing of mildly broken phone, infinitely easier than fixing most other broken devices, even those with so-called ‘one-click recovery’. Even so, it worries me that people feel the need to put in a big “Fix It” button no matter how easy to use it is. Perhaps a more elegant solution would be an option tucked away in a menu, and a ‘cock-up counter’ which automatically asks you something like “Your device has failed to sync properly the past 10 times you have docked it - would you like to run an automated recovery and restoration of your backup?”

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Apparently the wonderful University of Lincoln have acquired some bicycle storage huts, allowing students with everybody’s favourite two-wheeled transit method to lock them up securely. Students have to provide their own padlock, but this is only to be expected and is no more unusual than any other bicycle storage method. However, I spotted a slight problem in the message telling us about this.

There are three huts by the GCW Library and a further six by the Sports Centre on the Brayford campus.

So by my maths that’s a grand total of nine secure bicycle huts. For a student and staff body of somewhere in the region of 30,000. (more…)

It is with joy I report that the BBC have started transcoding iPlayer content for the iPhone/iPod Touch. What this means is that whenever I am hooked up through a WiFi hotspot, I can get hold of any of the BBC’s programmes which are stored on the iPlayer.

There are also some other interesting points raised. Firstly, the ’security’ mechanism behind this is that the BBC does some user-agent checking. Basically, anything which can pretend it is an iPhone (Or Touch) can get the iPhone video stream. It was possible to rip the Flash video stream the BBC was using before, but it was fairly low quality. However, the H.264 stream given to the iPhone is higher quality, hence higher quality rips which are ready to go on an iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV.

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And lo, with the blocking of “Have You Ever?” and “Which Les Miserables Character Are You?”, my Facebook blocked applications list now includes over 100 of the most irritating bits of the internet to ever have been created.

I’ll admit to having had a couple of Facebook applications installed. I had a couple of interesting network visualisation ones installed, and still do have one for inserting mathematical formulas in messages around the site. I have even shared applications with people who I thought would find them interesting. However, I object to having people mindlessly send invites to everybody on their address list. Anybody who knows me will know that I don’t do the pointless quizzes, and I have a penchant for elegance and simplicity in websites. Why anybody believes that I would want to fill my profile with things saying “I am most like: Peter Petrelli” and “I have 1,285,395.4 fish in my tank!” is beyond me.

Seriously guys, I don’t want your app invites unless you think I’ll genuinely be interested. I’m far more likely to spot a useful application on your profile and just add it myself.

Oh, and as for the coloured profile people? You can go swivel on it as far as I’m concerned. Facebook started as a simple, elegant method for students to keep in touch. Despite the opening to everybody (Bad idea in my opinion, but oh well) it’s being kept mostly that way, providing you know how to block all the crap. Coloured profiles, even if limited to preselected themes, are a bad idea. Sure, allow users to theme their own view but please, for the love of all things holy, don’t let people expose us to fuschia pink on green.

I reckon next year I should be able to collide my robotics/AI units with my elective Games Design unit and build an exmersive game, or at least an interface to one. What is exmersive you say? Simple, it’s the opposite of immersive.

There has been a trend in gaming to bring gamers deeper into the gaming world. This is awesome for some games whose worlds are amazingly crafted with some stunning story and environments. FPS like the Half-Life series and Bioshock instantly spring to mind as worlds which are carefully built for the player to just drop into. Likewise with RPGs and pseudo-RPGs such as Grand Theft Auto 3 (VC/SA included) or World of Warcraft. Even some top-down simulation  such as Command and Conquer can really drag you in with its amazing backstory and the work which goes into keeping the ‘world’ working and believable even though when you sit back you realise it’s only a few pixels on a screen.  Immersive gaming is taking that same world and trying to drag you into it through means such as VR glasses or enormous projected screens. Alienware have a big curvy screen which fills your peripheral vision and is a good step towards taking this into the home.

Exmersive gaming, on the other hand, is the opposite. You can go on with your daily life and the game is brought out into the real world, with the computerised ‘players’ (Robots in my case) interacting with normality. There have been some attempts at this collision mostly by puzzles such as Perplex City, but they again try to bring players into believing the game world. Here’s where exmersive is different, for example in this RPG:

You get given your ‘quests’ by robotic or static computer terminals, and the chances are your quests will have a bearing on the real world. Since if this happens anywhere it’ll be round campus, you may well get a quest to take some printouts down to the admin office in return for which you will gain experience (Allowing you to undertake bigger quests) and a reward (Print credit, for example).

Another possibility would be to involve real people as actors in the game (Perhaps clash with some robots somewhere) and only have the computer being a Dungeon Master of sorts, instructing people in what roles to take. Hook up some gadgetry to detect movements and you’ve got yourself a real-life Dungeons and Dragons. Sweet.

UML is horrible, cludgy, trying to be all things to all men, and all in all an over-complicated method of shoehorning an OO system into a non OO modelling framework.

It’s the kind of thing that actually gets in the way of real work, the type of thing generated by some consultant ’systems analyst’ to make the development team stop programming and document the system using a godawful syntax. Then the ‘consultant’ can look at the UML diagram and say “here’s your problem, this arrowhead should be filled in” when in fact the only reason it isn’t is because the developers couldn’t give two shits if the arrowhead is filled, hashed, open, closed or even pointing to the right place.

Seriously, I’ve spent longer trying to draw the UML than I would have taken to just write the damn program. Even in COBOL.