Author: Rory

The trailers before Ice Age 2 almost had me convinced that animated movies are dying. A group of animals take back the farm. A group of animals take back the woods. A group of animals escape the zoo. A group of animals break into a suburban neighbourhood. Yeesh. I’m glad I’m not a child anymore; the movies were much better when I was younger.

Thankfully the movie itself dispelled my fears by virtue of being abslutely wonderful. I wasn’t a huge fan of the original Ice Age, but The Meltdown is easily and by far better than its predecessor. Scrat the saber-toothed squirrel deserves an Oscar.

Soylent Red was down for some time this afternoon because of a software upgrade on the server. It’s back now. Everyone wins.

As of right now, whenever you post a comment on Soylent Red you will be given the option of getting email notifications about new comments on that post. This is about the minimum that a site can do to try to keep conversations flowing, since most people (quite rightly) will not tend to check back on an old post looking for new comments. There may be bugs, so don’t be afraid to tell me if something doesn’t work right.

Thinking and writing at the same time so I apologise if none of what I write makes any sense…

I’m pondering an alternative way of presenting Web feed subscriptions. Something different to the standard "There are N unread posts from feed foo". Are there any readers out there that will group unread posts based on their topic rather than on their source blog? I’m envisioning something that I can log into and see that "8 of your feeds have new entries talking about Google Calendar" (or whatever the big story of the moment happens to be). It wouldn’t necessarily be the best way to read all of your subscriptions, but it would be useful to get that sort of summary for anything that gets mentioned on more than, say, X% of your subscriptions in a short time. Like a sort of heads up on what’s the big news among all (or most, or many) of your subscriptions that you can instantly see before you start to read through all of the details.

As for the implementation, posts could be grouped if they contain links to the same URL; explicit meta-data tags or categories might be useful (either clustering all posts that share one or more tags or at least using them as a partial heuristic); or the system could use more sophisticated clustering techniques to try to figure out what posts are on the same topic. I think it’s reasonable to assume that a Web-based aggregator would be able to cluster posts very accurately given their access to a huge number of feeds. They could then present to each user just the subset of their results that relate to that user’s own subscriptions. Even for a desktop-based aggregator should have a good accuracy though, given the amount of data to base heuristics on (I mentioned tags and links, and even the plain text should give something useful).

Anyone else think that would be useful? Assuming a decent accuracy in grouping posts, are there any other features that could build on top of it? Finally, has this already been done and am I just making myself look dumb and out of touch by presenting it as new?

My apologies for the paucity of posts in the last week. To make up for it, here’s the week in bullet points:

• Last Wednesday I finally got around to seeing Wrestelmania. Very good overall but I think the two main events let it down a little. It’s good to see Rob Van Dam getting another push. He was the highlight if the ladder match, a fine acheivement given that Shelton Benjamin was in that match too. Everyone else was just filler. The women’s championship match was exceptional, except for the disappointing ending. They’re in the middle of by far the best women’s angle ever in WWE. It’s also one of the best angles overall at the moment. I didn’t like the Triple-H – John Cena match. I always have trouble believing that Triple-H can be beaten, but tapping out to a non-technical wrestler is just going too far. It makes Chris Benoit’s victory at last year’s Wrestlemania much less meaningful. Thankfully it seems like they’re doing a very good job of rescuing Cena’s character now. He’s even on the way to winning me back.

• Jamie finished some college work on Thursday, so I took two days off to celebrate. We spent Thursday and Friday loitering around Dublin like any self-respecting slackers. Why do I keep trying to go to the cinema on Thursdays? There’s never anything on.

• My driving instructor cancelled my lesson on Saturday morning so I went out in Dad’s car instead. This turned out to be a bad idea. The phrase "not firing on all cylinders" is not often used in a literal sense but in this case it could probably be. I stand by my assertion that the car was broken before I drove it anywhere. When you’re relying on the engine to complain at you when you do something wrong it’s not terribly helpful for the engine to spend all of its time complaining anyway.

• I spent Saturday night and the early hours of Sunday playing Gameless, a game which I now realise I still haven’t got around to describing. I guess I was waiting for Jamie to blog about it. I’m not going to try to cram its description into a little bullet point, but I will say that it’s a board game loosely based on 1000 Blank White Cards and it has been endorsed as "better than chess" by a celebrity sportsperson.

• The UCD juggling society AGM was on tuesday. It was basically just a normal session but with more people, free booze (though only in the form of cheap beer, so I didn’t partake in that particular aspect), and games with prizes. It was looking like I was going to come second in every game until someone came up with the bright idea of a club balance race. Every competitor had to balance a club on his face (nose or chin), walk (or run, for the ambitious and the stupid) from the start line to the opposite wall, touch the wall and walk (or run) back to the start. Whenever anyone dropped a club he had to start the whole race again, so essentially it was a matter of being the only person who could finish the course rather than actually having anything to do with speed. I won a set of three hackey-sacks for my efforts. It’s just as well too, because that was the last game. Yeah yeah, I know, it’s not about the winning.

All in the title. You can see the trailer on YouTube. As noted in the comments, the YouTube video has been pulled due to copyright issues. No doubt the trailer will be available elsewhere soon. It’s now available at Apple’s trailers site. Is there still time to campaign to have Conan O’Brien write this movie?

An old friend of mine was fond of saying, "Falling is the best feeling in the world. Landing is the worst." At the time I never interpreted this in anything more than a literal sense. It now occurs to me that if you replace "falling" with "falling for somebody" you get a lot closer to the truth.

Yesterday was Opportunities Day in the department School of Computer Science and Informatics (I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but the head of the department school has admitted that he gave it that name just so that we could abbreviate it to "CSI" – awesome). The point of opportunities day is to let final year students know what options are open to them after graduation. They present their projects to researchers and technology companies, like orphans trotted out in front of potential adoptive parents, trying not to look like they have any major defects.

They also get to look at what some of the postgraduate students are doing, meaning many of us postgrads had to stand around for an hour or so in front of a poster and try to make our research look interesting. Apparently our work looked interesting to plenty of people, although I don’t think any of the final year students could care less. They just wanted to skip the whole day and get to the free drinks part at the end (an attitude that I will admit to sharing for the most part). I spent some time talking to a member of the new CSI Forensic Computing group, and to a guy from Microsoft, among others.

I was much more relaxed than I was giving the same demo in Sydney. I think I did a better job of letting people understand what we’re really trying to do, and how much of that we’ve actually managed to do. Ironically I did this by showing a lot less of the demo than I did in Oz. I think people can get a lot more out of the presentation if they can interact with a responsive and knowledgeable person than if they just get to see a scripted, one-sided pitch.

You know what I wish someone would have told me when this country’s education system was trying to indoctrinate me into Catholicism? That Sundays in Lent don’t count:

[I]n Rome (where [Lent] had been customarily three weeks), it was eventually extended to six weeks, but always leaving out the Sundays.

(Emphasis mine)

If you’re a Catholic, count back 40 days from Easter Sunday and see if you get to Ash Wednesday. You’ll only manage it if you’re as bad at maths as you are at discovering a self-consistent and rational view of the universe. You have to skip the Sundays for it add up. Demand your chocolate on Sundays during Lent!