titaniumbunker.com

We managed too blag some time off from the powers that be this weekend to send the scifi weekender.just heard a guy doing gangam style, Darlek style.

12pm Venice beach

12 hours later Kings Cross station

Recently myself and Rachel went to see Derren Brown’s Svengali show at Wolverhampton.  I won’t spoil the show – as that was a request of Derren.  But there was an interesting proposition that occurred during the show.

A contestant was asked to choose a box from a selection of boxes.  Derren explained that it is mathematically beneficial to change your mind if given the chance.

The way he explained it was :

Assume there are 100 boxes in the set – one of which is a winner.  You pick a box at random giving you a 1/100 chance of winning.

From the remaining 99 Derren removes 98 other boxes, and gives you the chance to change your mind.  His argument is that Derren’s box is now 98/100

This is the Monty Hall problem, and as I thought about it on the drive home, I got to thinking – “is it really better to switch?”

I read through the monty hall problem website, and I got really concerned by the solution given to the Monty Hall problem – that it is ALWAYS better to switch.  Here’s my take on the puzzle.

1. When you are presented with 3 boxes, you have a 1/3 chance of picking a prize, a 2/3 chance of picking a losing box.
2. Monty now opens a door to reveal no prize.  Monty knows where the prize is, and is able to pick a none prize door – this leaves the player with the door they have chosen and another door that Monty has chosen.The theorists would suggest that at this stage, if given the choice to switch you should, as it is ALWAYS better.
3. I believe that when you are asked if you want to switch boxes, what is actually being asked is which of these boxes would you like to open?  At this stage you are making a judgement about which is the winning box based on the position that there is a 50/50 chance of choosing a winning box

Let’s use a table to look at this, looking at all the possibilities

Assuming 3 boxes :

This table shows all the possibilities based on the monty hall problem.  From all the 24 scenarios, 50% are winning and 50% are losing scenarios.  Therefore I need to ask : is it really worth changing your mind?

Based on the table scenarios where the player changes his mind are highlighted in yellow, and in those situations – 50% of the time win and 50% fail.

I’m fairly happy with the explanation, but the table of possible outcomes doesn’t seem to support that. Anyone got any ideas?

I recently bought some stamps from the Royal Mail in an effort to avoid the new price increment.

For those of you not familiar with this, the royal mail bumped up the price of a first class stamp from 46p to 60p – a rise of 30%.

So I, like a fair proportion of the population decided to stock up on stamps ahead of the price rise.

Read more..

Here we are finding the geocache “Clent Eastwood”.

We had a busy day yesterday, attempting to fix a belkin router which dropped all connections when the wireless mode wad set to auto sensing 802.11b/g/n.

Had to call Belkin who advised to turn on wireless protection, and force the modem into 802.11g mode.

UPDATE :

Less than 24 hours after the ‘fix’ I heard that there were again problems – this time with the wired PC not getting access to the internet.

Belkin – you just made the list!

Yay, won an Easter egg from the office Easter charity tombola.  This year the charities are Promise Dreams and Lingen Davies Cancer Support.

Back at oggcamp, I gave a brief presentation about what I saw as the dangers of storing content with cloud providers.  My arguments were based on the fact that your provider may go put of business, putting your content at risk.

And now we have the Megaupload case. If you used cyberlocker services such as Megaupload, how safe should you be feeling right now?

The absolutely safest way to host your content somewhere that you control right? I would suggest that if you wanted to be more sure of safely storing your content somewhere, that you consider the possibility if storing it in more than one place. What I would like to investigate is some publishing mechanism that automatically pushes updates to sites.

Imagine you have written a cool book – you host your content in launchpad and an ubuntu package is built whenever you update. But perhaps you also want to make if available on an ftp site. What if launchpad could push your content to an ftp address once complete? I plan to investigate this possibility.

When Launchpad successfully builds a binary deb file is created.  What I want to do is to write something that will allow the server to pull a specific file from a DEB file.

I have a PPA which I have used to store the content of the Linux Reality podcast – you can find it here.

So – let’s take episode 100 as an example:

You can find the Deb file here.

What I am working on is a plugin which allows the user to add a link to a page or post like so :

Download something from a debian file file = something...deb = something else

Saturday in Town I read that Paul Daniels Had to have 2 fingers reattached following a DIY accident.  You can read  more about it here:

As we have already  made one game about Paul Daniels,  Puppet Pizza Potshot Challenge, it seemed only right that we make a new game based on this event.

As such here is our latest game: Give ‘em the finger

Everyone here in the Bunker would like to wish Paul a speedy recovery

Give 'Em the Finger
fingers.zip

Category:	Games
Date:	January 25, 2012

4.1 MiB
176 Downloads
Details...

Hate is such a strong word and I am not really into hate, But I definately have issues with the Spenglers

Who are the Spenglers I hear you ask? they are the current mascots that sell the sky+ services from Sky created by the design agency WCRS.  If you’re interested, Mike will be putting a nuclear boot into their website at the bottom of this article.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq2LcsUKlK4

Heres why I have issues with them:

1. They are all the same
   The spenglers are pretty much identical, thers a small difference for Brian and the daughter who seems to have stolen one of chers wigs. the talk in a very boring, monotonus voice and their faces barely seem to move. Despite a differnt haircut there is very little to differentiate them. the simpsons all have different heights and sillouettes but the spenglers are basically big lumps of blue fur, making them the bastard love children of Oscar the Grouch and Sully from Monsters INC with a little soupson of ‘where the wild things are’ thrown in for good measure        

 

2. The animatorinics suck
   The turtles in Teenage Mutan Ninja Turtles had way better Animatronics than the Spenglers, The Spenglers mouths just flap up and down. No eyebrow movement, no other lip movement and they all have the thousand yard stare of some one who has presumably seen too much Sky HD.  Not so much TMNT, more  ‘TMNT:Comming out of their shells’.         

 

3. The voice acting is phoned in
   Two of the spenglers are farily well known, John Goodman and Holly Hunter.  To be fair, they could have got anyone to speak the parts, heck even the people wearing the suits would have done a better job then them the lines are monotonous and have no life to them, When Brian Talks to Father Christmas, Thats pretty good, but the rest of the dialog suffers from being written by a bunch of marketing guys, who are not nececarily script writers.

 

4. Brian spengler rates Tv over his own childrens development.
   In one radio Advert, Brian complains about having to go to parents night at his children’s school arguing that by watching house ( of course in glorious HD) that the family will improve their medical knowledge and get to watch some first class drama – Is he high?  You would seriously prioritize an episode of House over your children’s intelectual development? And improve medical knowledge? Seriously? OK, say it with me: “maybe it its lupus?” there, done.        

 

5. They seem to think that any problem can be solved by $**&^% sky!
   They think that high quality films in HD will entice father christmas to give them presents, and then show him ‘Avatar ‘and ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks: the squeakel’ which basically undermines their own argument and shows their ignorance of the spirit of christmas.        

 

6. They seem to think that recording a tv show is amazing.
   There have been VCR and PVRs availiable for donkeys years.  Sky plus is in reality not that ground breaking

Wait there WCRS – we’re not done with you yet either.  WCRS are the ‘creatives’ responsible for the Spenglers video and a visit to their website induced much rage and angst within our web developer. Tag Mike, You’re in…

1. Horrible Flash intro.
   This site features an introductionary video.  A flash video.  This video features  two – lets say lovers for the sake of this argument – running towards each other in that wonderful film cliche.  Each of these ‘avatars’ have an added little arrow pointing to them indicating that the man represents WCRS, and the woman in this represents another agency called Altogether.  At one point the man starts to veer towards the ocean,and the woman starts veering away from the ocean.  Cut to the last scene where 2 completely different actors run to each other and hug.Considering the especially low cost of this video I am left wondering why they would do such a spectaculary poor job in matching the actors – Her hair changes colour, as does her swimming costume, and the mans costume suddenly grows down to his knees.  At a guess Baywatch, Baywatch,Baywatch,Baywatch, Baywatch,Baywatch, Southend.  Why not just shoot the whole thing in Southend ? At least the actors would be consistent.Try skiping the video just as it starts.  The music keeps on playing. so they got that 50% right then.
    I think a better approach might have been to have both actors run into each other – like they weren’t looking where they were going?, or perhaps have then both running towards an icecream van.  What I’ve don there is take a cliche and subvert it.  If our 2 ‘lovers’ end up sprawled on the beach or queing up for icrecream – there’s the pay off – there’s the punch line. 

 

2. Flash site
   Flash sites are, as far as we are concerned, terrible for search engine capability.  One hopes that the acquisiton of altogether might allow them to create a site that would atleast be scrapable via google.  Searching for WCRS does show the site at the top – so kudos there – but there’s nothing else – just the website name. Other sites give a brief synopsis of the site, but that won’t be possible if the site is a flash based site.  If you search for titanium bunker we are also top of the list – in fact we’re the top 6 links, including our twitter feed.  but our links also contain a brief synopsis.

 

3. Content. 
   Here is the site broken down into it’s various parts :

Home	If you click on the WCRS logo from any page it will bring you back here.  This page contains nothing apart from the navigation, which is existant on all pages anyway…So the question is, why have an empty page that you can navigate to. Bugs : Creative Experts @ engine – graphic does nothing.   How about linking that to theEngine.com ?
About	A wishy washy mission statement. We think it’s very important to be clear about what we’re all trying to do for our clients at WCRS.  We summarise this as Bold ideas that Breed Success, and this is built on 3 beliefs 1. That in cluttered and competative markets it’s a crime not to be noticed and remembered 2. It’s about big ideas for brands, not just flashy one-off commercials 3. That there’s no point in doing anything if it doesn’t pay back in pounds and pence So what do we mean by Bold ideas that Breed Success Ideas that are noticed and remembered Ideas that are spreadable and enter popular culture Ideas that last Ideas that work across channels Ideas that have demonstrable payback So this company sells ideas?  I thought they sold effective advertising.  I also think it’s back to front - I would personally writte the detail first, then explain how they summarise that as Bold ideas that Breed Success.  It allows you to put the tag line once with the emphasis that it provides.
People	A breakdown of the people behind this.  Bugs: It seems that the site uses a global variable to store the page number. This probably wouldn’t be a massive problem if the site reset the variable when you clicked on a person.  To reproduce this, click on “Penny Herriman”, scroll down (so you’re looking at the second page).  Now look at Johnathan Moore.  The  Chief Strategy officer has nothing to say.  Any of the staff members with a bio that fits onto 1 page will show as empty.  If they are lucky enough to have more than one page it will jump to the same page – click on Debbie Klein and it confusingly starts “1997 and was promoted to Head of planning in 1999″
Integration	A breakdown of the agency group behind the company – theenginegroup.com.  Seems that WCRS is the advertising expert in theenginegroup.com.
Clients	A picture of some of companies logo.  The logos don’t link to anything.  Might be an idea to link the logos to the creative section, allowing (where applicable) the adverts to be seen directly.  The idea that there’s no point in doing anything if it doesn’t pay back in pounds and pence would be great to add some case studies – perhaps explaining how successful the campaign has been.
Creative	A collection of videos and produced content for clients.   Bug: Playing a video from the creative section.  Now try pausing it.  Can’t do it right? How about adding some narative about why this artistic decision was taken.The % loaded doesn’t update.  The %loaded is actually used when loading the Print or digital media types.
News	Not updated since December 2009.  Really?  Nothing happened?  No new launches?
Contact	Some email addresses and a phone number.  Seems fine.

 

4. That Flash video.
   Everytime you refresh the page you get the atrocity that is that horrible flash intro video.  No option to set a cookie to prevent me from suffering it every time?  Is your merger so important to me?  Why would I, as a customer want to know that your company is about to take on another company, and the inevitable suffering that will ensure because of it?  Surely a discreet announcement somewhere that doesn’t distract from the viewing experience of the site would be called for here.