...all my blogging will end up at http://mocko.org.uk/b/. Buh-bye LJ.

Android users! Those of you running SwiftKey (and that should be all of you, it's great) should try this...

SwiftKey is a replacement keyboard which aims to be much better at predicting the words you'll type by analyzing your past SMS traffic (together, it seems, with pretty much anything else you type input into the phone) to learn the vocabulary you use and its applicability in different contexts.

From their about page:

"In our tests, around a third of next words are correctly predicted without any characters being entered and roughly 80% are predicted within two or fewer character prompts."

1. Install SwiftKey from the Android Marketplace (duh!)
2. Open any text editor. Composing a new email will do.
3. Without pressing any letters select the first word it suggests - the one from the centre of the selection bar.
4. Keep tapping it. SwiftKey will go on building the sentences it thinks you're most likely to type.

Awesome phone number is the first time I have a craving for one of the few good things about living here. I am a beautiful person. I am a beautiful person. I am a beautiful person. I am a beautiful person. I am a beautiful person. I am a beautiful person. I am a beautiful person. I am a beautiful person. I am a beautiful person. The only thing that you are looking for a few days. I am a beautiful person eats in a few hours. I think so. I am a beautiful person. I am a beautiful person to avoid the Christmas period. I am a fool of you who have been a bit of a question about the whole thing was that the information in the UK. I am a beautiful person. The only problem is that I have a craving for one of the few good things about living here. I am a beautiful person. Hi you. Hi there is anything you want to? Yes, I think the average number of people who are interested in the UK. I think so. Goofy time. I am A-OK. Bread. Please let me know when you get back to the list. Quick one yeah sorry lads, either get on with the word. We are looking for a few days. Old Court Gate. Ask the first time I have a craving for one of the few good things about living here. From the station. Well done! Mr Ben Sherman the end, the only thing that you are looking for a few days. Ugh the end of the xmlrpc pipe.

No BBC.  No no no no no.  Everybody with taste should scream at trust.enquiries@bbc.co.uk right now.

Fixed a bug (no trains showing when you asked for a single one)

Added new feature: search several potential journeys at once and combine results in order.  Useful if you can travel on different lines and want whichever train comes first.

See http://mock2.livejournal.com/444506.html for updated instructions.


/geek

Bookmark this on your phone and refer to it whenever you want to avoid dashing around London Bridge when you discover the next train leaves in 30 seconds and is half a mile away from the departure boards.  It's a deliberately spartan page showing the next 4 trains to/from Brockley (where I live) and their platforms.

http://mocko.org.uk/pda/trains

Those unfortunate enough not to live in Brockley can show times for any other direct service by appending the correct CRS codes to the url.

For example:

• Brighton to East Croydon: http://mocko.org.uk/pda/trains/BTN/ECR
• Watford Junction to London Euston: http://mocko.org.uk/pda/trains/WFJ/EUS

http://www.allonwhite.co.uk/morgan-v6-roadster says "Morgan Roadster – exhilarating performance and classic style!"

This is true.  However for the sake of accuracy they might also say...

• Engine: 246bhp Ford V6.
• Weight: as much as two or three squirrels
• Doors: sort of
• Brakes: not great
• Visibility: some
• Roof: leaky  Suspension: is for wimps
• Availability: 12 month waiting list
• Power/weight ratio: 240hp/t  (so, er, 100 more than my car)
• Wipers: three dinky 9" ones to fit the dinky 9" windscreen
• Safety features: no
• Chassis: yes it really is made of wood.  They use ash.
• Radio: none.  Luggage space: the glove box.

At the height of the Cold War America developed the XSM-75 "Thor" Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile.  Since the rocket lacked sufficient range to hit Moscow from the US they did a deal with the UK - we'd stash sixty of them around the countryside for operation by our moustache-twirling boys from the RAF. 

There was something gloriously Heath Robinson about the design.  A 20 metre long missile you have to airfreight over the Atlantic in a cargo plane, drive another 40 miles on the back of its launcher then  hide away in some woodland with 40 tons of cryogenic fuel and a team of bored missile technicians is not an entirely practical one. History fails to record how many got stuck in winding country lanes.

For ease of deployment the IRBM came with an integral lorry-based launcher and in 1958 the first of these trundled out of a transport plane and off into the countryside.  Unfortunately despite packing a 1.4 megaton yield (hear that North Korea?) the Thor IRBM had a couple of inadequacies.  Launcher vehicles were deployed at permanent locations and were pretty easy to spot. Optimistically speaking it'd take 15 minutes to elevate a rocket, fuel it and get the thing in the air - less time than the warning you'd have of an incoming Soviet strike.  D'oh!  Oh, and 24% of those ever launched blew up at the wrong end of their 18 minute raison d'être flight (the end you're standing at) hence the odds of destroying Moscow instead of, say, ten square miles of picturesque British countryside were not fantastic.


So why am I talking about it?


Check the photo on the right.  Serene, isn't it.  Summer evening, countryside, not a lot else.  Take a closer look at the centre of the photo...

Because three Thor missiles were stationed in the middle of that picture.  Since Britain's a small country (and you shouldn't put all your eggs in the same basket) XSM-75 thermonuclear chuckle-rockets were trucked out to sites all over the UK - including this one, the now-defunct RAF Caistor.

The proposed armageddon didn't arrive.  Four years later America developed proper ICBM's and Thor tootled off home to the states to spend a long retirement as an anti-satellite weapon.

So today I biked over there to see what's left.  The answer is "quite a bit".  Unsuprisingly the land's used by a farm now but a few nissen huts and crumbling buildings remain.  You can see the dispersal pans on Google Maps - note how they're placed a few hundred feet apart for simultaneous launching.  Never mind the early launch failures and the hundreds of tons of rocket fuel lying around, what could possibly go wrong?

A quick search reveals any one of them would have left a crater 1,000 feet wide and nothing standing or unincinerated within a 1.7 mile radius.  Within 3 miles there would have been few survivors.

What stands out to me is how small it all was.  The base isn't very large (zoom out on the map and you can see the perimeter) and was surrounded by villages and farmland.  It seems such a damn irresponsible place to put three live hydrogen bombs - to do that the government of the day must have been terrified.  Did the locals know what was there?  Almost certainly, it's hard to sneak three 20m long nuclear missiles past a hundred pairs of twitching curtains.  And does having three not-very-well-hidden IRBM's make you a priority target for a paranoid enemy?  It must have been one hell of a stressful place to live; even if the Russians didn't pounce you were still sat half a mile away from enough ordnance to obliterate Moscow. 

Scary, scary times.

23rd May 2009

Dear Radio 6,

Kudos to you for yesterday’s Goth Day. It’s rare to hear a mainstream radio station treating the genre with such genuine affection and enthusiasm. More please!

By way of thanks I include a picture of a bat.

the simple act of getting a good night's sleep is central to Lipman's approach. He prescribes a daily "electronic sundown" - all computers, mobile phones and TVs should be turned off by 10pm to allow for the "transition into sleep"

Wow, what an utterly bleak day. Have a picture of some sunshine to make up for it.

...and finally 70's sci-fi month is over.

Over the last month I've watched all fifty-two episodes of Blake's 7 in order. Go on, ask a question. Bet I get it right. The episodes are each an hour too - in 1978 the attention span hadn't yet been invented by the scientists at MTV. The BBC had no money for props so they pinched cast-offs from Doctor Who. Even their spaceship looks a bit like Tom Baker's hat and the effects are on a par with Button Moon. In the later series it has the air of a pre-release demo of Elite. All the computers on their ship are blatantly Acorn Atoms sprayed with silver paint.

It starts convincingly enough (evil totalitarian federation based on earth, good-guy rebel leading band of merry criminals who happen upon a powerful alien spaceship) and then chugs along reasonably for the first couple of series. After that it stumbles for a while until the finale where the rebels (now a bit too bloodthirsty to class as "good") go batshit-paranoid with stress, make silly mistakes and are beaten by the evil totalitarian stormtroopers. They all die, poignantly.

It seemed a good idea at the time. Load a few episodes onto an eee to watch while travelling, catch the odd half-dozen at the weekend and the occasional one for supper or breakfast. And now the ordeal is over and I feel like a bloaty-headed tramp who's drunk fifty-two tins of fortified sci-fi special brew in a row - quite possibly because I have.

no, unfabric first.

Grauniad: "After an epic five-hour session Mosley and the prostitutes relaxed with a cup of tea." - crikey, salacious stuff! But more thought-provokingly it's an article on how BDSM has become a relatively mainstream activity through increased publicity on the internets and a more exploratory attitude to sex.

Jolly good, but...

"Ann Summers, the chain of high-street sex shops, says its Bondage Starter Kits are one of its most popular products, selling in their hundreds every week. 'They are a great way of introducing the starter to the softer aspect of bondage'"

One of the most remote parts of Lincolnshire coastline is Donna Nook, an area of salt marsh a mile wide and several long. At high tide it's a few feet underwater and since the beach is so flat the tide comes in quickly. You have to be careful about that - people often drown out there or get trapped in the quicksand. It's a few miles from the nearest town (simply getting there is a slog - satnav doesn't work, you need the OS grid ref) and if you pick an off-day the place is totally desolate. It's a long way from anywhere and on a clear day you can see across the estuary as far as Yorkshire.

The red flags were out today which in laymans terms means "don't play on the beach today, we're bombing it".

That they were. I went for a walk along the dunes and was rewarded with the sight of two Tornadoes practising bonbing runs over the target markers. They came in one at a time at about 100m altitude, screamed down the beach and dropped a bomb each dead on top of the marker. Then they banked round over the estuary and did it all again two minutes later.

Folks outside a warzone don't tend to see jets using live munitions and it's a damn remarkable sight. You see them on the news but that doesn't even hold a candle to the real thing. The roar of a Tornado doing a bombing run a few hundred yards away from you is teriffic and the precision with which they're controlled remarkable, particularly at such low altitudes. If you fuck up 100m above the deck you don't get time to eject. It's also slightly odd that you can wander around an RAF bombing range with only a couple of red flags to stop you but hey, I'm not complaining.

I'm told the seals aren't too fussed by explosions. In any case they don't look like an Afghan wedding party so are pretty safe. Still couldn't see any.

Around midnight last night I heard rustling in the kitchen.  Opened the door just in time to see a tiny brown blur racing to the back of the worktop and in the corner, a not-so-tiny brown mouse staring at me with obivous disdain.  It'd been at the gingerbread and judging by his size the bugger was quite well fed.  I swore a bit and baited a humane (& previously useless) trap.

This afternoon I arrived home to find... FOUR OF THEM.  All bouncing around the inside of the trap nibbling gingerbread, squeaking and being cute.  They're surprisingly tame - mice I've heard of die of fright when captured but these even let you stroke them.  I haven't the heart to kill anything small and furry that likes to be stroked; in the end two escaped the trap before leaving the house (smart) and the other two I released in the park.  Hear me mice - this is what happens if you're lazy, you end up living in parks.  I bet they're already guzzling diamond white and slurring obscenities at au-pairs.

( Gratuitous mouse porn ) (more)

Poll #1135895
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 27

Cause of ignition?

View Answers

Electrical fault (boring)
0 (0.0%)
Critical mass of hairspray ignited by the friction of emos in cheap imitation 'punk' trousers
7 (31.8%)
Crack pipe dropped from window of Hawley Arms
10 (45.5%)
Charged particles emitted by ravers in punkyfish
0 (0.0%)
Terrorists bent on causing havoc by restricting London's supply of Goth Lolita clothing
5 (22.7%)

other:

Cornwall Experiment #1: Will seagulls eat Gillette?

Seagulls are fearless and greedy bastards. Many of them congregate around our holiday cottage. Some are downright huge; even the smaller ones are well over a foot long. You would not want to pick a fight with them. Apparently they killed a man around here some years back by flapping at him until he fell of the roof and caught pneumonia - and the perpetrators are still at large.

Our seagulls seem tame but aren't very bright. Although we're not supposed to feed them Dad and Angela sometimes do. But how does a seagull know what's food? I hypothesize that they'll try to eat anything we place outside the cottage. One of them even tried to eat the coffee I'd put outside to cool. But how far will they go? Will mister seagull try to eat... Gillette shaving foam? [*]


Steps to replicate:

Take a holiday cottage on the southern cornish coast, preferably one with a large patio overlooking the clifftop. Leave bread on said every few hours for a day - the gulls will gobble them up. Wait an hour then place on the patio a lump of shaving foam (*) If you're a particularly fastidious scientist sculpt it to look a bit like a fish.

Drink your weak lemon drink as you wait for greedy Mr Seagull.


Results:

Within minutes Mr Seagull lands and gingerly approaches his 'fish'. He hops around it and for a good thirty seconds we can hear the gears in his little birdy head thrashing around as he determines whether it's a predator, a date, the ground or his dinner. He settles on the latter and takes a first peck at his 'fish'.

Squark! Oh no Mr Seagull! It isn't a fish at all! He shakes his thread around and splats the foam all over the driveway then retreats to stare at us coldly from the garden fence. He's plotting some kind of seagull revenge from there as I type.


Conclusion: WIN. Yes, gulls can be convinced to try shaving foam. But they won't be very pleased with you afterwards.



[*] Don't worry, it's probably been tested on animals already

[ps - you can find the idiot screencap in all its glory here]

[grand livejournal reopening - one night only!]

Hello internets! I are off to see Carter USM tomorrow night @ Brixton Adademy. Spare ticket so anybody want to come too?

I really love the kitten-a-day app. It's my first attempt at coding for facebook and isn't big, clever or insightful, doesn't induce stalkerish behaviour or prey upon the terrible guilt and paranoia of fanfic obsessives. It doesn't start off huge flamewars over who said what on their friend's journal or who labelled whose ip address with obscenities and absolutely definitely hasn't ruined anyone's relationship. It doesn't make any money, either.

No, it just has pictures of kittens. People upload them, they stick around for a week and others get to rate them. Each day the highest rated moggy gets shown on 200 people's profiles. That's all. The whole thing is rather twee. Some of the users have obviously started taking pictures of their own cats specially to send in and in a good-natured way everybody wants their own tiddles to be kitten of the day.

I've made something nice and it feels weird.

Hello world. It's been a while since I posted anything meaningful on here. Here goes... [and yes, i'm cheating by crossposting it to facebook and lj and a few other places at once]

Terribly busy at the moment. Venda's never quiet but the real time sink at the moment has been setting myself up as... dah dah daaah... an independent geek. I'm in a charitable mood today so we'll just say I outgrew the current environment, that running a support team was never what I signed up to do and that despite being a great trial-by-fire source of experience this place was way over the wrong side of the cash/stress curve. Oh, and sharing a 2Mbit net connection between 50 people is definitely _not_ a bed of roses.

Here's the science bit. I've bailed out of Venda (last day is the 28th) and intend to go it alone. My own projects and a couple of days a week doing contracting & general hardcore linux/webby consultancy should be enough to live off; more than this and things will be just peachy. And I am convinced of this, really I am.

When not out being the IT-whore-extraordinare the plan is to put a lot more time into creating my own stuff. LJToys, the facebook apps and god knows what else comes up. There's always been a lot more inspiration than time and maybe now it'll get to lead somewhere interesting. Corollary to this if you have a neat project that you're serious about and would like to collaborate on please to be getting in touch!

So yeah - evil for hire! Do you need moderate quantities no-strings-attached evil and prefer not to commit to old, employment-style evil? If so mocktor-evil ltd. (which is not the real name - suggestions welcome) could be the source of evil you've always wanted. Types of evil covered include:-

Linux Systems Design / Administration. Coding in PHP/Perl/C in a pinch. DB administration for MySQL and Postgres. Management of many different flavours of webserver, dns, email, ftp and fuck knows what else. Small-scale firewalls & networking. Viirtualization (w/xen & vmware). Windows when it's necessary. Backups. Disaster causing. Disaster recovery. Blah blah blah lots of other stuff too (hell, it's not like i'm going to be getting any work through LJ so it's pointless listing everything)

Oh yeah, and I know how to fit sky dishes too.

-mocko


[edit: evil no longer for hire]