Monthly Archives: August 2009

You are all mindless sheep. Yes, even you.

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In Ender’s Game there’s a subplot wherein Ender’s older brother and sister decide that there’s something wrong with the world, and they’re too smart to sit by and watch humanity edge its way to another world war. They jump onto the Internet and start talking on message boards using the  pseudonyms Demosthenes and Locke, just passing their views around. Both children — who’re barely into their teens at this point — start to amass followers, slowly at first, but then they’re invited to write for professional, upstanding establishments. By then, Demosthenes and Locke have built up their own cult groups, with polar opposite politics, and either one could say something no matter how outrageous and their followers would accept it unquestioningly.

(Please go and read the books.)

I wondered if that was possible today. Could two single people take to the Internet and split the entire populous of the globe into two separate groups. No, was my initial reaction, surely people can’t be that dumb, and sheeplike, that they can’t make their own minds up.

I mentally retracted that thought immediately. Manipulating people to your point of view isn’t that hard.

I’m a fairly intelligent person so figured I wouldn’t be bought around to someone thinking blindly, but I guess I over estimated myself. If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that I’ve been playing with objectivism, and it actually fits into my political philosophy and general ethos really well. And then the whole health care thing kicked off in America and I felt like I had to pick a side. Yaron Brook – head of the Ayn Rand Institute – has so far been the guy I turn to for arguments and ideas which have always nicely fitted into how I feel.

So, this time I just decided to assume his stance without doing much research. National health care would enslave doctors, give substandard care, make patients spend years in queues just to be refused care because the government doesn’t think they’re worth saving. All things I agreed with (and some still do) and just accepted because Brook has always been a good source for me before.

But because it’s been such a large issue over at reddit, I’ve heard hundreds of arguments most of which I could just wave away. But some really hit home, and I couldn’t justify the capitalist system much longer. Only after a few days research into stuff (and a huge push from watching Sicko), I reluctantly started to realise that maybe universal health care isn’t that bad.

But most people won’t bother, or aren’t smart enough, to go and research how I did. They’d have just followed their mentor’s lead unquestioningly, like I almost did.

“I’m voting Labour because my parents voted Labour, and I’m working class, so there’s no one else I can vote for,” is something that I hear all the time. Regardless of their policies, people will stick with the party that’s gained their trust with catchy motos that sound cheery enough. Labour could unleash Three Waters, admit to it after most the population has been killed, and they’d still get votes from those loyalists.

You can get the general principle for this from watching The Real Hustle, or any heist film. You do something that makes your mark trust you, something honest, or even just something they want to hear. Your mark can be one person, or an entire country. Demosthenes did this by reminding the country of the imminent threat from Russia. Using fear to make them trust him. “You have to follow my ideas, because they’re the only way we’re going to avoid another world war in which you’ll probably die.” Locke did the same by being logical, calm, and rational. People ended up trusting both of them.

Shortly afterwards either of the pair could have said literally anything, and their followers would follow.

Today, I don’t think it would work out the way it would in the book. Once someone is hailed as a celebrity, they quickly generate circles in which they’re infamous, where people hate them just because they’re well known. My Chemical Romance aren’t  bad band, but when they blasted to success out of no where people started hating on them. Twilight isn’t an awful book, but it’s hated by people who have never read it for similar reasons.

This is the age of celebrity, where people are fickle. And so a two-party system will never work. There are far too many demographics that need to be heard and, yes, manipulated. So maybe not just Demosthenes and Locke, but throw in a Galiani, and a Lysias and I think it would work.

The moral here is that you need to actively disagree with everything you hear. It’s your moral obligation to question and judge things (there’s a little Rand for you). Find your own views and don’t just sit in labels like “socialist New Labour”, or “Christian”, or “Republican”. When our Shadow Work Secretary says, “Worklessness has become a generational problem” don’t just agree with her and then immediately go out and vote for the Conservatives. Go and research if she’s telling the truth (she obviously is in this quote), and then go and check their other policies.

Gosh, dammit people, think.

Why can’t schools (even partially) fund themselves?

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The tl;dr of this Guardian on Labour cutting spending on schools article is that we have literally no money, so schools are going to have to start “tightening their belts” (a phrase used at least four times in that article), and a lot of small schools will have to close, or partner with others and share resources. Despite that, they still plan on opening at least 167 new Academies in the next year, albeit with them all having reduced budgets.

That’s analogous to building hundreds of level one pellet towers and hoping you can get to level fifty. It’s quantity over quality and that’s not how I want England’s education to be heading. I don’t care if people have to get up at seven o’clock in the morning to get a fifty minutes bus to school (I had to do that for college and it didn’t harm me, and I had to go up hill both ways). It’s freaking free. They should be happy to be getting it.

I’d rather people be getting a good, well funded education a bus ride away than being taught the difference between meiosis and mitosis from a browning leaflet from a museum, in some shack at the bottom of their street.

But I also think that schools don’t make the most out of their possible revenue avenues. For instance, my old school is a sports college so we had a pretty decent sports suite. I thought they rented it out during the evenings, but every time I pass there there’s clearly no one parked outside. People would pay good money to use the massive field, three good sized sports halls, and a fitness centre.

The school also has hundreds of computers just lying around at night. It’s a computing school too, so their equipment is nothing to sniff at. Why not rent those out during the evening to people doing night courses on how to use Word and whatever?

My school also has compulsory uniform. Why can’t some company has their logo on there? For instance, Adidas could have their logo on the pupils uniform; they’re generating brand loyalty from the kids, making uniform more fashionable (I guess), and hundreds of people will see the kids walking from and to home each day with the logo. It’s pretty good advertising. So long as the advertisers knew that they could have no control over what was being taught in the school, I don’t see a problem in that. The school could earn a hefty sum from that.

Schools need to quit looking for money from the government and start looking for ways they can make money for themselves.

Hashmask for WordPress plugin

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Check me out being in the WordPress plugin directory!

I decided to add Hashmask as a plugin to the WordPress login form, mostly because I hated the problem that arc90 fixed. Wasn’t really that complicated, nor is it world stopping, but it’s totally my first submitted plugin!

Screenshot of Hashmask in WordPress

Screenshot of Hashmask in WordPress

Game Boy resolution problem has no real resolution.

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I was looking up information about the resolution of Game Boy Colour, and found it to be a few different sizes depending on what version you own. But I don’t remember playing any games on a 640 x 350 screen. The smallest resolution available is 160 x 140 which may have made more sense, but I was still unsure.

Ah, I remember it well.

Ah, I remember it well.

I decided to look around my house to find my Game Boy and my Link’s Awakening cartridge so I could just count the pixels, but apparently my sister is holding them hostage somewhere. I had to settle for a screen shot and found the image to the right.

That’s pretty much how I remember it, to scale and everything. But the resolution of 320 x 288 doesn’t fit any of the resolutions for any figures I can find. And even then each pseudo-pixel is 4 x 4.

That must mean that developers were able to set the resolution they wanted to work with, and the Game Boy just scaled it up or down to fit the screen.

Come to think of it, that makes absolute sense, being as we don’t have four different versions of the game for four different consoles. Although, I’m not exactly sure how at the moment, since by just looking at the numbers I can’t see how they’d all factor to the same scale. Maybe some games just have a border around them. I can’t remember that though.

GBCanvas: A canvas experiment

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I’m pretty sure my body doesn’t work on a 24 hour day cycle. I went to bed around 2300 two nights ago, and got up around seven. Though I’d been lying in bed awake, trying to sleep for much longer. I say I got about five or six hours sleep that night. I went to bed at ten tonight, and was awake by two. I feel I could stay awake until tonight now. I’m not tired or anything. Maybe so little sleep has just become a habit.

My sleep schedule isn’t why I’m here.

I’m doing some tests with the canvas element, and decided to make a class for it. You can see it over at the GBCanvas github I set up for it. (I’ve never used github. Just heard a lot about it.) The code is kinda broken at the moment though.

The class is based on the idea of pseudo-pixels, where you have a 300×300 canvas, and can set it to have ten rows and twelve columns. Then you can manipulate each of those segments, which I’ve decided to call pixels. The “GB” comes from Gameboy, because I figured it’d be cool to remake Zelda with canvas.

I want to add an edit mode so the user could do something like

$(document).ready (function () {
  var canvas = new gbCanvas ('canvasid1');
  canvas.editModeOn (true);
});

Which would allow clicking of a pixel and it fills it with a chosen colour. I  mostly want this feature so I can create pixel art, and then get the raw data:image/png data, which I can import into the project whenever. I’m aware I could just create sprites in Paint or something and import the file, but I don’t want to. I’m fond of imposing restrictions stubbornly unto myself.

After a few rethinks, I figured it would be fair simple to just bind a click event to the canvas

//  Turns on edit mode so onclicks are registered and bubbled
this.editModeOn = function (mode) {
  if (mode) {
    //  .click is a jquery thing
    this.canvasDiv.click (this.editModeClick);
  }
}

And then working out which pixel was clicked, and filling it with colour

  this.editModeClick = function (event) {
  //  getSelectPoint just returns an array with the X and Y coord of the click
  //  relative to the top left of the image (to avoid problems with scrolling)
  clickPoints = getSelectionPoint (event, this.canvasID);
  console.log (clickPoints);
  //  Work out which "pixel" they just clicked
  var coordWidth = parseInt (clickPoints[0] / pixelWidth);
  var coordLength = parseInt (clickPoints[1] / pixelHeight);
  console.log (coordWidth + ', ' + coordLength);
  this.colourPixel (coordWidth, corrdLength);
}

This doesn’t seem to work because the event is rarely passed. It is sometimes, but hardly ever. The function is bound correctly. It’s entirely a problem with the event being passed – something I’ve always had trouble with if I’m honest…

Update: Ladies and gents, do yourself a favour and check all your variables before you go bitching on your blog about your code not working. The event was being passed fine. The problem with my code is that since it’s a function that’s being bound to an event, it effectively loses it’s place in the instance of the class, so it no longer has access to the this variable.

My problem was that this.cavasID was undefined.

So, I fix that by simply passing it “this”. Changing the bound event function to something like this:

this.editModeClick = function (event, _this) {
  console.log (event);
  console.log (_this);
  clickPoints = getSelectionPoint (event, _this.canvasID);
  console.log (clickPoints);
  //  Work out which "pixel" they just clicked
  var coordWidth = parseInt (clickPoints[0] / _this.pixelWidth);
  var coordLength = parseInt (clickPoints[1] / _this.pixelHeight);
  console.log (coordWidth + ', ' + coordLength);
  _this.colourPixel (coordWidth, corrdLength);
}

That’s all well and good, but now I’m confused as to how to bind it…

this.canvasDiv.click (this.editModeClick (event, this));

The event needs to be the first argument, but I’ve no idea how to pass the event here… That obviously doesn’t work (event is undeclared).

Edit: Of course it was something ridiculously simple.

var self = this;
this.canvasDiv.click (function (event) { self.editModeClick (event, self) } );

You can take a bird to water, but it’ll only eat worms. Or something.

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Check me out being awake before lunch time, five hours in fact. I’ve not seen the morning where the sun isn’t totally glaring in a while. I had egg in bread! I propose this shall be a good day.

I decided to come update here because it’s mine to update, even if I have nothing to say. And because I have nothing else to do till nine o’clock, when I want to start work. I’ve not decided what work I want to do though. I do have two “you really should get these done” projects though – a secret one, and a WordPress landing page – so probably those first.

I decided to do a night project (in which I see how far into a project I can do in one night), and I got my facebook people to give me the idea for it. Ended up being “porn”, so I started making a porn reddit. To be honest though, after an hour I got distracted by Alias or Greek or some other show and only got a bit done, but I still plan on continuing it.

As always, tonnes of other ideas. Mostly being stopped by my not spending enough time with OAuth though.

I’ve not really updated this blog in a while because I’ve been lazy. I’ve really improved on my politics which I really could write  about. I figured I’ll actually start vlogging, from my YouTube account, and I’ll embed the videos here. I make a lot of political arguments on reddit too, and at some point I’ll link to some of my important ones. Although, they mostly get downmodded.

Competition in services and employment

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Although I usually talk myself back into objectivism by the end of it (and I’m sure that’s how this post will turn out), I do always think about the consequences of various things. A truly free market, for instance. An article about Google Maps being sued in France because they’re offering their service for free, so competing services can’t charge.

I think this small company has a point. The two offer pretty much exactly the same services to businesses, only Google does it for free. Google’s able to do it for free because they’re okay with making a loss, even massive losses if necessary. Bottin Cartographes, the guys suing, say that Google just wants to kick everyone else out of the market and then maybe they’ll start charging once there are no alternatives. Which’ll give them a monopoly.

Much like if Asda decided to give away all their products for free, paying for it out of their past profits and reserves, until every other supermarket decides they just can’t compete and go under. Then Asda could start charging £100 for a can of beans to start making their money back. You’d pay it because there’d be no where else.

Of course, they’d never do that because they’d just lose too much money far too quickly. But for Google giving away their data in an API only costs them a bit of bandwidth. For a company that makes billions of pounds a year from advertising, Google could probably go forever before they’d run out of money and have to start charging for their services.

That’s not a possibility though. There are other companies that too can give away their maps and data for free. Yahoo, although faltering, can still offer the same service. Bing maps, Maps.com, Mapquest. I’d say there’s enough competition in these waters. All of them giving the same service and all of them embracing revolutionary business models.

So, once again, I guess an unregulated market seems to stand on its feet. And it looks like Bottin Cartographes are going to go the way of every other business that refuses to innovate.

Another problem though is exactly that, how do the innovate? You need fresh blood that isn’t afraid to try quirky things. No discredit to the people at Bottin, I’m sure they’re good at what they do, but maybe they just don’t understand how things work around these parts. So they have to go job hunting for those people, and the prime place to get their from is universities.

Therein lies the problem… It’s no secret that Google and Microsoft, and more and more so Apple, try to get as many graduates as they can. Google especially, with them hiring more engineers than they actually even need, just so they have the whole ‘class of 2009′ set, I guess. Students know that when they actually get to Google they’ll probably get mundane customer service jobs, and maybe not see any code for a good few months, but who cares? It’s fucking Google! The enticement is just too much for them.

And that leaves none left for the smaller start-ups, or people like Bottin that really need a new a revitalising wave.

My first though to combat that was that maybe businesses that need the graduates could sponsor them, paying for their tuition fees on condition that when they graduate they come to work for them for a reasonable rate (considering they just paid for your schooling) for a certain number of years or something. Free tuition and a definite job at the end of the course would be something I’d snap at.

But at $38,925 a year, I doubt a start-up could afford that much for one kid, who could fail horribly and not be able to work for you or even pay the money back. It’d be a huge risk that no one but these big companies could afford – and they’re exactly the opposite of the people that should be getting these graduates.

A lesser investment could be something strongly advertising jobs around campuses. Or even just being in close contact with the university’s employment centre. I don’t imagine that a cool company like Twitter or Tumblr, even though they’re not big high rollers, would have a problem getting the right employees. But not all businesses can be that cool. There needs to be professional businesses that maybe just inherit a boring reputation. How would they entice students to work for them when they’re competing for them with Google?