2012 will also see me starting a new job at the University of Leicester, which I am really excited about. I’ll be working as a Web Developer in the Marketing and Communications team and can’t wait to get stuck in. Developing for the web has been a big part of my working and personal life for the past decade or so, but this is the first job I’ve had where it will be the main focus of the role. Given the phenomenal rate of change in the industry I can’t wait to devote my full working day to learning about and applying some of the fascinating technologies that are being developed.

I’ve also been tricked agreed to run a 10k “fun run” in March with some of my former colleagues. We’ll be raising money for Rainbows Hospice for Children and Young People so give generously. Because of this 2012 (or the first three months at least) will involve me doing a bit of training. I haven’t done anything approaching exercise since May, so I’ve got a fair bit of ground to make up there.

Lastly, but most significantly, I’m going to become an uncle in the summer to my brothers child. I can’t say how excited my wife and I are and we can’t wait to meet the little Russell.

So that’s what I’m looking forward to in 2012. It’s gonna be fun.

As part of the course we used one of the major data mining products on the market. As an class of Masters Degree students, learning about the subtle intricacies of our chosen subject, the product served us well. We were able to tweak and twiddle with more switches than a 747. We had the luxury of time to run, re-run, rinse and repeat data processing over and over. I’m equally sure that for professional data mining consultants, hired by large wealthy companies to trawl vast private data repositories, these products are worth the thousands of pounds of license fees they pay.

But what about everyone else? What about the campaigns working to holding government to account over public data? What about the new-breed of data journalist exposing stories otherwise hidden in obscure facts and figures? What about the data evangelists enlightening and entertaining with wonderful visualisations? How accessible is data mining for these people? How affordable? How usable?

Not enough.

With increasingly more data being placed in the public domain, so increases the need for tools to explore this data. Data Mining tools are out there, but are no-where-near as accessible as the data that requires them.

It is with this in mind that I have begun to develop an accessible, usable and intuitive suite of tools to explore data sets. The first of these, Clusterbomb, will mine data sets to expose the hidden clusters of records buried within. I’m expecting to have an alpha release out early next year, but for now sign up to the mailing list to keep an eye on developments. Clusterbomb is also on Twitter and Facebook.

❝To be ahead of the rest, you need to see more than they do❞

The Good

The simple fact that this app now exists is the best thing about it. Submitting meter readings is a pain in the arse, made less painful and less arsey with this app. It’s also (largely) easy to use, if you’re already registered for on-line billing, just log in with your account details and that’s it. Your account history, meter reading submission and all the other bells and whistles are there for you. Being able to compare your energy usage against the average for your area is a great idea and the information is displayed very nicely. Making people competitive about their energy use can only be a good thing.

Access to support is great, you can fire off an email (expect a reply in 24 hour apparently) and important contact numbers are all easily accessible. Also, using the camera flash as a torch on the meter readings page is a wonderfully clever idea.

The Bad

I get prompted to log in a second time when trying to compare energy usage, which is annoying. And for this login (not the main one), my credentials aren’t remembered. The comparison feature itself is quite fiddly to use, the app tries to download comparison data for most navigation gestures, which is frustrating. To view the comparison results, you don’t click the box labelled “click to compare” but the teeny tiny arrow next to it. Oddly the button on the information display is styled differently to the rest of the app, and looks out of place. In general the comparison feature doesn’t feel very well integrated with the rest of the app, which is a shame.

While you can view your previous energy consumption in a table, it’d probably be more effective to see it in a chart. That you can’t do this is all the more surprising considering the icon for this feature is a bar chart?! Update: I’m informed that you can rotate the device to view data as a chart.

The Verdict

A great app, but needs a bit more work.

Well done British Gas. Looking forward to the alpha release.

“IE9’s emulations of older versions of IE are not the same as running the old version. The code is different. The emulations are very close but not exactly the same.” [ref]

That’s from Ted Johnson, a MS Engineer.

So adding IE9 to your browser testing suite won’t save you the trouble of having to run IE7 and IE8 too. And you’ll never waste your time changing “The Modes”.

Custom Post Types

The introduction of custom post types is a feature that many WP users have been waiting for for a while, now it is here it is awesome. I’ve created a custom post type (‘papertoy’), and extended it with custom meta fields, to make managing my paper toys far easier than before. I may write a post with more detail on this some time.

Editable Menu

WP 3 allows menus to be managed in a wonderful interface in the admin console. Posts, pages, categories, etc, can all be dragged and dropped around to create a menu hierarchy. And it is incredibly easy to code in to a theme.

Widgets

Ok, these aren’t new. But as of WP2.8 there has been a new widgets API, which makes the creation of widgets a billion times easier than it was before. I’ve created two widgets for this new theme; one with links to my social network accounts, and another to display my latest paper toys.

The paper toys widget basically pulls an image (stored in a meta field) from each of my ‘papertoy’ posts and displays it with a link to the page itself.If you’re planning on doing something similar yourself, you may to check out this problem (and fix) when using the WP loop with the new widgets API.

The social networks widget is pretty simple, I may publish it in the future, but right now I’ve got other things going on. Oh, the icons I used are from here.

1
2
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while read LINE; do
   echo $LINE
done < $0

Rather handily the highlighter script has been wrapped in to widget (several actually) for easily jamming in to WordPress.

Laters!

P.S. That script is my attempt at a Quine, a cheat I know, but it was the first code sample that jumped in to my head while I was writing.

EDIT April 2011: I’m now using a different plugin for syntax highlighting

My theory of gravity is simple, all objects on this earth have invisible pieces of string attached to them, upon the oppisite end of which little invisible goblins hang off. That’s correct – invisible goblins.

What do you mean you don’t believe me? Fine, I’ll prove it to you…

Pick up a pencil (or any other object you have to hand) hold it at arms length over the floor and prepare to release it (being mindful of any children or animals below). Now if my theory is correct, when you release the pencil, the Gravity Goblin (as I have christened them) will pull upon the invisible string, drawing the pencil towards the floor.

Ready…?

Release…!

Theory proven. I thank you.

Obviously, this is bollocks. But I tell it to illustrate a key part of the scientific process – falsification. Falsification allows us to differentiate between Gravity Goblins and Isaac Newton. Any monkey can “prove” a hypothesis (I’m using the more scientifically appropriate term now), finding evidence in support of a hypothesis is easy. Just pick any phenomena you fancy and make up some bullshit to connect cause and effect.

Soap bubbles in the washing up bowl? – Microscopic scuba elves.

Crystal Healing? – Energy flow and focusing and karma and that…

Homeopathic Remedies? – Diluted sub-molecular chemical memory or something…

The massive diversity of life on Earth and the subtle interactions and behaviours therein? – God.

For a hypothesis to be scientifically tested (and hence logically robust) you’ve got to attempt to prove it wrong. You’ve got to be prepared to say “if my hypothesis is correct, I can hit it with the sledgehammer of reason and it won’t crack”. Suggest a way to break it and invite others to try, if it stands up, well done, you’ve got yourself a robust theory.

Despite what you may (or may not) have thought, this kind of thinking doesn’t come naturally to our human brains. We have a habit of favouring evidence that supports our beliefs while giving less weight to the opposing evidence. Psychologists call this effect ‘confirmation bias’.  Understanding our natural tendency towards confirmation bias makes it all the more clearer why a scientific, rational approach to exploring ideas is so powerful.

Without knowing how to properly test our ideas, how to prove them wrong, we’d never be able to develop our ideas, to differentiate fact from superstition. Without falsification, we could all be believing in Gravity Goblins.

Actually, Royal Mail, here’s a suggestion for you, why not print to odd’s of a letter reaching it’s destination on to the stamp?

• 1st class – 10:1
• 2nd class – 20:1
• 1st class large envelope (don’t get me started) – Guaranteed to be bent.
• Anything that rattles – 2:1 it’ll be more rattly when it gets there.
• Anything that looks like a birthday card – 0 chance if it’s got a bit of cash in it.

Stupid post.

Henk from microdot.be, has got in touch about his “Paper Craft Stress Test” series. He’s graciously selected my Tiger model to test it’s strength against the most fearsome of classical Greek elements FIRE! As you can see, it didn’t do too well.