The stock market....

The stock market is a weird world, isn't it?
The reason for the rhetorical question is due to reading a bbc article on the bbc, "Technology - the party really is over".

What I don't get is the volatility of it all. There are articles out there that say that any comment or "random" event can cause major fluctuations in a companies stick. For instance take this article about a citizen journalist who claimed on iReport.com that Steve Jobs had had a heart attack. As a result apple stock dropped more than 2%. Give me a break! That's like me changing Steve Jobs wikipedia profile to add "Steve has confided to friends that by the end of 2008 he will be in a comfortable position to retire." A quote that is completely untrue and probably would be edited out very quickly, but nonetheless, if it is then quoted a few times with some bold headline "STEVE JOBS SET TO RETIRE" the impact could be substantial but completely unnecessary.
Another example of this can be seen with the United Stock when it was announced that they were going bankrupt in September 2008, unfortunetly the article was from 2002... The result:
"After trading around $12 a share Monday morning, the stock of United parent company, UAL Corp., dropped at least as low as $4.62 about five minutes after the ISA article was posted on the Bloomberg terminal. The shares fell as low as $3 before Nasdaq halted trading less around 11 a.m. EDT" Herald Tribute

Back to the original point. Looking at the current apple chart at the moment:

$200 - $90 in a few months...

Even with the credit crunch this is astonishing. Fair enough, with the banks failing, loans defaulting and large credit card bills many cannot afford to go on spending sprees. Honestly though, who is not going to buy an apple product in the next year?!? I'ld go a step further, which parents at christmas are going to get requests from their kids, for ipods, iphones, imacs, itunes...

Furthermore, the news recently for apple has been fairly decent:
- they were successful against the NMPA against raising music royalties
- they successfully launched a new ipod and iphone with the other phone and palm manufacturers playing catchup at the moment
- there is positive speculation of a rumoured under $1000 laptop

So to answer my initially question:
Yes Piers, the stock market is indeed a weird world!

A few jokes to liven up the day

The intellectual capacity of kiwi rugby greats:

"Nobody in Rugby should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein." - (Jono Gibbs - Chiefs)

"I'm going to graduate on time, no matter how long it takes." - (Rodney So'ialo - Hurricanes) on University

"You guys line up alphabetically by height." and "You guys pair up in groups of three, then line up in a circle." - (Colin Cooper -Hurricanes head coach)

Chris Masoe (Hurricanes) on whether he had visited the Pyramids during his visit to Egypt: "I can't really remember the names of the clubs that we went to."

"He's a guy who gets up at six o'clock in the morning regardless of what time it is." - Colin Cooper on Paul Tito

Kevin Senio (Auckland), on Night Rugby vs Day Games "It's basically the same, just darker."

David Nucifora (Auckland) talking about Troy Flavell "I told him, 'Son, what is it with you. Is it ignorance or apathy?' He said, 'David, I don't know and I don't care.'

David Holwell (Hurricanes) when asked about the upcoming season: "I want to reach for 150 or 200 points this season, whichever comes first."

"Andy Ellis - the 21 year old, who turned 22 a few weeks ago"(Murray Mexted)

"Colin has done a bit of mental arithmetic with a calculator." (Ma'a Nonu)

"He scored that try after only 22 seconds - totally against the run of play." (Murray Mexted)

"We actually got the winning try three minutes from the end but then they scored." (Phil Waugh-Waratahs)

"I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body." (Jerry Collins)

"That kick was absolutely unique, except for the one before it which was identical." (Tony Brown)

"I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father." (Tana Umaga)

"Sure there have been injuries and deaths in rugby - but none of them serious." (Doc Mayhew)

"If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again." (Anton Oliver)

"I would not say he (Rico Gear) is the best left winger in the Super 14, but there are none better." (Murray Mexted)

"I never comment on referees and I'm not going to break the habit of a lifetime for that prat." (Ewan McKenzie)

Murray Deaker: "Have you ever thought of writing your autobiography?" Tana Umaga: "On what?"

"Well, either side could win it, or it could be a draw."(Murray Mexted)

"Strangely, in slow motion replay, the ball seemed to hang in the air for even longer."(Murray Mexted)

Source:jokesrus@netspace.net.au

Wired Motion Contest

Wired has got another Contest to do with Photos in motion.



This is my favourite photo so far.

Other peoples ideas

I was thinking today about the development of new ideas. How much of what we actually write is new and how much has been done before?
Furthermore how much of what we do is groundbreaking and how much is a development of ideas already thought of.

These thoughts have been due to a number of this, I've been reading Bill Bysons "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and the majority of the individuals with scientific groundbreaking discoveries were not the initial discovers. Often enough, the discovery had been made many years previously and additional work done on it had brought the discovery to the limelight.
Of course as with everything there are exceptions to this, specifically Einsteins theory of general relativity which "many physicists believe that without Einstein, it could have been another few decades or more before another physicist worked out the concepts and mathematics of general relativity".

The other reasons for these thoughts are the nobel prizes which are being awarded at the moment. What does it take to get a nobel prize and for the person who wins the prize, how many other peoples ideas were used to arrived at that point?

I think in the end we'll find that everything is linked, nothing is original but every new step is original. A bit like in nature where everything evolves from one thing to the other, our ideas evolve, just at a much faster rate.

A short blurb

These days it look like laziness has become my preferred passtime, hence the lack of updates to this blog.

Here is my pathetic attempt for today:

A short Matrix style flipbook that is pretty cool.



Here is another animation that has been around for a while:



and the sequel:

Fantastic Contraption

A quick blog post until I put my proper one up.

A few contraptions from the game Fantastic Contraption made by other players.

not mine
GrabTrain

A4 Paper cuts

Here are a sample of some incredible sculptures from A4 paper by Peter Callesen:

There are a few other amazing works of his at his site

Truly Random

Here is a random gif to be enjoyed. Honestly there is not much to say about it, unfortunately I cannot reference it because I received it by email.

Wired Portrait Contest

Wired has got another Portrait Contest up with some good submissions



This is my favourite photo so far.

AI programming language

I wonder if anyone has created a programming language that can create code based on simple commands.
For instance:

Input
I want a code that can add up all the numbers from 1 to 100.

Output

int output = 0;
for (i=1; i<=100; i++){
output=i+output;
}

There would have to be additional steps, but this would make basic coding very simple.
The issue would be to generate a good AI program to interpret the text and to suggest good examples.
Suggestive guessing has already been researched, for instance the 20 question game uses neural networks to guess what you are thinking. The users using this program expand the neural network the more it is used hence the guessing gets more accurate.

Room for thought, for now...

Cool Physics Videos

Here are some cool physics videos from Wired

The Sound Waves on Fire and The Superconducting videos are really good.

Here are some alternative videos of Ferrofluid which are pretty cool

Catagories in the Sidebar

Solved, but the solution is fairly complicated and messy.
If you are interested in just expanding your posts I suggest reading this post as it provides an interesting solution

• Problem
  
  After looking for a widget that enables Catagories in the Sidebar, i.e. Coding, Games, etc, I have yet to find something that suits my needs.
  It is possible to use labels to catagorise my posts but this is not exactly what I'm looking for.
  What I would like is something like the Blog Archive widget. I would manually edit the script adding posts under their respective catagories.
  For instance
  
  Personal
  Personal post
  Coding
  PHP
  php post
  Reviews
  Game review
  
  As with the archive arrows would exist to hide/show the subsections.
  
  I think I will keep looking, although another options would be to code it myself using a show/hide javascript. That could be the solution, the problem being that at the moment I don't know how to do that...
  
• Solution
  
  The Solution to this problem is pretty complicated although useful once it works.
  
  There are 4 components to implementing this:
  1. Javascript code
  2. CSS code
  3. HTML code
  4. minus and plus images
  
  The Javascript code is based on the MarkTree script. I removed all the parts which were not needed to give the following code:
  
  • Javascript Code
    var lastnode=null;
    var listnodes = null;
    
    function is_exp(n) {
    if (n==null) return false;
    return ((n.className=='exp') || (n.className=='exp_active'));
    }
    function is_col(n) {
    if (n==null) return false;
    return ((n.className=='col') || (n.className=='col_active'));
    }
    function is_basic(n) {
    if (n==null) return false;
    return ((n.className=='basic') || (n.className=='basic_active'));
    }
    function is_list_node(n) {
    if (n==null) return false;
    if (n.className==null) return false;
    if ( (is_exp(n)) ||
    (is_col(n)) ||
    (is_basic(n)) )
    return true; else return false;
    }
    function getsub (li) {
    if (li.childNodes.length==0) return null;
    for (var c = 0; c < li.childNodes.length; c++)
    if ( (li.childNodes[c].className == 'sub') || (li.childNodes[c].className == 'subexp') )
    return li.childNodes[c];
    }
    
    function onClickHandler (evt) {
    if (lastnode==null)
    {
    listnodes = document.getElementsByTagName('li');
    lastnode=listnodes;
    temp=listnodes;
    }
    var target = evt ? evt.target : event.srcElement;
    if (!is_list_node(target)) return;
    toggle(target);
    set_lastnode(target);
    }
    function setSubClass(node,name) {
    sub = getsub(node);
    if (sub==null) return;
    sub.className=name;
    }
    function toggle(target) {
    if (!is_list_node(target)) return;
    if (is_col(target)) {
    target.className='exp';
    setSubClass(target,'sub');
    // getsub(target).className='sub';
    }
    else if (is_exp(target)) {
    target.className='col';
    setSubClass(target,'subexp');
    // getsub(target).className='subexp';
    }
    
    }
  
  The CSS code is also based on the MarkTree script. As with the JS code I removed all the parts which were not needed to give the following code:
  
  • CSS Code
    div.basetext {
    margin-top:11px;
    margin-bottom:11px;
    margin-left:1%;
    margin-right:1%;
    padding-top:0px;
    padding-left:20px;
    padding-right:11px;
    padding-bottom:0px;
    text-align:left;
    font-weight:normal;
    }
    
    ul {
    margin-top:1px;
    margin-bottom:1px;
    margin-left:0px;
    padding-left:3%;
    }
    
    li {
    list-style:outside;
    margin-top:5px;
    margin-bottom:2px;
    }
    
    ul li {
    list-style:square;
    font-family:sans-serif;
    font-weight:normal;
    }
    
    li.basic {
    list-style:square;
    list-style-image:none;
    margin-top:2px;
    }
    
    .sub { display: none; }
    .subexp {display: block; }
    .sub { display: none; }
    .subexp {display: block; }
    
    li.exp_active,
    li.exp {
    list-style:square;
    list-style-image:none;
    margin-top:5px;
    cursor:pointer;
    }
    
    li.exp:hover {
    list-style-image:url("plus.png");
    margin-top:5px;
    cursor:pointer;
    background-color:#E4F8F3;
    }
    
    li.col_active,
    li.col {
    list-style:square;
    list-style-image:none;
    margin-top:5px;
    cursor:pointer;
    }
    
    li.col:hover {
    list-style-image:url("minus.png");
    margin-top:5px;
    cursor:pointer;
    background-color:#E4F8F3;
    }
    
    li.basic_active {
    list-style:square;
    list-style-image:none;
    background-color:#E4F8F3;
    margin-top:2px;
  
  The HTML code uses the css classes to determine what to do with the code as can be seen:
  
  • HTML Code
    The code has to start with the following line:
    <div id="base" class="basetext">
    This div class has the main styles attached to it
    
    If you want the first level expanded use the following code:
    <ul>
    <li class="col">Expanded level
    If you want the first level to be collapsed then
    (this also serves as the second level being collapsed if the first is open)
    <ul class="subexp">
    <li class="exp">Collapsed level
    After this use
    <ul class="sub">
    <li class="exp">Hidden level which can be expanded
    Then for the final level use
    <ul class="sub">Next level
    For the final level you can also use
    <ul class="sub">
    <li class="basic">This li class allows bullet points
    
    Then at the end remember to close everything
    </li>
    </ul>
    </div>
    
    Lastly one example to use if you didn't understand above
    
    <div id="base" class="basetext">
    <ul class="subexp">
    <li class="exp">
    <span style="">Test header 1</span>
    <ul class="sub">
    Test Text
    </ul>
    </li>
    <li class="exp">
    <span style="">Test header 2</span>
    <ul class="sub">
    Test Text
    </ul>
    </li>
    </ul>
    </div>
  
  The two images which can be saved straight from this blog need to be hosted somewhere so that the CSS code can refer to them as shown below:
  
  • Image Code
    list-style-image:url("minus.png");
    list-style-image:url("plus.png");
  
  
• Thoughts
  1. I need to figure out how to change my js show/hide code in the post below to be initially hidden.
  Solved Will use a similar code to the sidebar, new todo
  2. I need to figure out how to jump around the post by use of links but I'm pretty sure a bit of js code could easily solve that -- Makes the summary section more useful if you can jump to the relevent section.
  3. Lastly a simple one, figure out how to indent... Solved Use & nbsp; source
     

Customising my blog

Considering I have just started playing around with blogspot, I feel like publishing the sites and information that I'm using/gathering.

Summary

1. Removing borders from your title and picture
2. Changing the width of the blog, the sidebar and the main menu
3. Archive entries into folders
4. Code Comment Box
5. Current Date and Time
   

• Removing borders from your title and picture
  Source: Customize your blogger template
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  Method:
  
  1. Customize -> Edit Html
  2. Search for #header-wrapper { and #header { for the title
  3. Search for profile-img { for the profile picture
     
  4. Remove or comment out the following line border: 1px solid $bordercolor;

• Changing the width of the blog, the sidebar and the main menu
  Source: Customize your blogger template
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  Method (using the minima template for inital size):
  
  The breakdown of the width of the blog is:
  Whole Blog - Text - SideBar = Extra
  660 -410 - 220 = 30
  If the extra is negative your sidebar will go to the bottom of the page, so try and keep some extra.
  
  Whole Blog:
  
  1. Customize -> Edit Html
  2. Search for #outer-wrapper { and #header-wrapper {
     
  3. Change width: 660px; to width: 700px; to change it to 700px
     
  4. As suggested in the original post the widest you should probably go is around 780 px, personally I went for 700px (remember people have different monitor and this is not a % its a defined width)
  Main Text:
  
  1. Customize -> Edit Html
  2. Search for #main-wrapper {
     
  3. Change width: 410px; to width: 430px; to change it to 430px
  Sidebar
  
  1. Customize -> Edit Html
  2. Search for #sidebar-wrapper {
     
  3. Change width: 220px; to width: 260px; to change it to 260px
  Final result
  
  Whole Blog - Text - SideBar = Extra
  700 -430 - 260 = 10
  
  So all good :D
  Use the Preview button to preview what it is going to look like an make small changes.
  

• Archive entries into folders
  Source: Catagories in Sidebar Blog Post
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  The Solution to this can be found in the source link.
  

• Code Comment Box
  Source: loadaveragezero
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  For my code I used loadaveragezero's code as a basis and modified is until I arrived at What I currently have:
  
  div.code-box {
  font-family: 'Lucida Console', 'Bitstream Vera Sans Mono', 'Courier New', Monaco, Courier, monospace;
  white-space: pre;
  width: auto;
  line-height: 1.4em;
  margin: 1em 0;
  border: 1px dashed #aaa8a8;
  padding: 0.5em 0 0.3em 0.5em;
  font-size: 80%;
  color: #000;
  overflow: auto;
  }
  
  div.code-box {
  background: #fff url(http://loadaveragezero.com/img/cut.gif) no-repeat top right;
  }
  
  div.code-box a:focus,
  div.code-box:hover {
  background: #CFECEC url(http://loadaveragezero.com/img/cut.gif) no-repeat top right;
  }
  
  
  to use it I just use the div class i.e.
  
  <div class="code-box">
  
  Currently my only issue with it is that it can be difficult to scroll across occasionally.
  

• Current Date and Time
  Source: Blogger hack
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  Blogger hack has a good solution to this. In addition you can add the time by including the following addition to your js code:
  
  
  var seconds = themelib.getSeconds();
  var minutes = themelib.getMinutes();
  var hours = themelib.getHours();
  
  document.write(hours+":"+minutes+":"+seconds+" ",dayarray[day] + ", " + montharray[month] + " " + daym + ", " + year);

Review of Spore

There has been a lot of anticipation over the release of Spore and having played it a bit I feel like adding/summerising the pool of thoughts and reviews out there.

Firstly I think Gamers Global sums it up very well:

GOOD: Unique linking of five different sub games (phases)
GOOD: Superb editor(s) for changing the looks of nearly everything in the game
GOOD: Tidal and City phase are worthwhile (albeit short) experiences
GOOD: Space phase is very motivating for about 6 hours
GOOD: The streaming of user generated content into your game
GOOD/BAD: The interface shines in the editor and works well in many parts of the game – but is also cumbersome in others (especially in Space phase)
BAD: Far too much micromanagement, especially in Space phase (e.g. the need to collect Spice periodically by visiting your solar systems)
BAD: Diplomacy does not really feel like interacting with a wide variety of aliens, they mostly act like humans although they “speak” differently. Diplomatic options are limited, too.
BAD: Not enough mission types, combined with an abundance of unsatisfying standard missions (attacking pirates, eco disasters) that “force” you to delay what you’re currently doing.
BAD: The design editors are about looks, not about functions: Where you put a weapon or some body armor is not important, the part will give you its bonus anyway. Also, the influence of your designs get less important with each phase.

My first impressions with spore were, WOW! The game is huge and the level of detail is crazy.

Initially in the first few stages you mold your creature together or grab already created creatures from the sporepedia. As mentioned above the design editor is about looks but the bonuses (attack, charm, etc) tend to determine what your create. Therefore there is a trade off between functionality and looks.

Once you get to the civ stage you get the ability to create vehicles (land, sea and air) which are almost effortless to create yet look remarkably good and before you know it you are in space.

What I like the most about the first few stage were that they blend so well together. You really start enjoying this creature you are creating and are sad to leave him/her behind.

Once you get to space the game expands like crazy and is very addictive. Although after about half of a day's play, the micro management does start to kill you -- or rather -- the constantly having to return to your planets to get rid of ufo's/enemy invaders or clear up ecological disasters.
Personally for someone like myself who loves the civilisation series I was looking forward to a game which had a bit more strategy to it. I really liked the creativity involved in spore but feel that so much more could have been done in the city and space parts.