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postA List Apart : The Survey 2008 - Me - 10th August

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postThe Dark Knight - Movies & TV, Reviews - 3rd August

Whoah, it’s pretty Dark. I mean, like, really dark. I kept forgetting it was only 12A rated and then getting confused when you didn’t see any blood or real violence. All the violence was implied and off-camera, which in some cases is actually more effective as our own twisted minds fill in the blanks.

I loved the bank heist opening scene, oh so very Michael Mann - someone Nolan admits was a big influence. Ledger is magnificent as The Joker, the expression on this face when he is locked up in the police cell is fantastic. Reading the “trivia” on imdb it sounds like he went to a pretty dark place to get the character right, something which unfortunately may have contributed to his depression.

I really want to see it again now. I haven’t immediately wanted to see another film again for a while.

My Rating: gold stargold stargold stargold stargold star
postFallout 3 Trailer - Gaming - 15th July

I do likes me a bit of Fallout.

postHiring - Work - 14th July

Valley Technology are looking for a Web Developer.

postHancock - Movies & TV, Reviews - 7th July

Very entertaining and most definitely “not your average superhero”. Surprisingly twisty and has a lot more plot than I was expecting.

My Rating: gold stargold stargold stargold stargrey star
postAhh, Paris! - Me, Photography - 28th June

It has been almost a month since Ria and I were in Paris and I’m only just blogging about it. My excuse? I’ve been busy!

We flew out from Edinburgh on a Wednesday and stayed all the way through until Sunday. Not too short, but also not too long. We stayed in an Apart-Hotel, basically a hotel room with an attached wee kitchen. It was a pretty good size and superbly located just off the Rue de Rivoli, about 2 minutes walk from the Louvre.

We managed to cram in a lot of sights: Musée d’Orsay, Eiffel Tower, Palais Royale, Rodin Museum, Musée des Arts et Métiers (science & technology), The Louvre, Cathédrale Notre Dame, cruise on the Seine, Musée Carnavalet, Sacre Coeur, Pompidou Centre, the cafe from Amelie, Montmartre, crazy bookshops and of course, lots of sitting drinking coffee and watching the world go by.

Being a geek, I took along my Bluetooth GPS receiver and had it logging when I remembered to turn it on. You can see an amalgamation of our wandering on Google Maps here. The crazy straight lines are when we descending into the Metro and then popped up somewhere else.

I have rather a lot of photos on Flickr, so here are some of my favourites:

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Browse the rest of photos…

postWanted - Movies & TV, Reviews - 28th June

An entertaining mish-mash of set-pieces.

My Rating: gold stargold stargold stargrey stargrey star
postBus Tracker API - Edinburgh, Technology - 9th June

A while back Lothian Buses fitted some fancy GPS tracking to all of their fleet enabling real-time tracking. Then LCD screens appeared at (selected) bus stops giving you a list of incoming buses and their ETA. All very clever. Then, at last they launched a web site which gave access to the same data: mybustracker.co.uk.

I think that making the website resemble the signs from the street is a poor design choice. Why not work with the medium you are presenting information over (the web) rather than trying to make it resemble something else? They constrain information into a tiny space, put it in a stupid font, make the background looks like all lcd-y, use excessive popups and it takes forever just to get to the basic information.

In shock news, this isn’t just a whiny post with no actual action. I present the beginnings of a “Bus Tracker API”. Think of it as a “cleaning” of the data for a fresh beginning. If we can get clean data out of the system then we can build a clean interface on top of it. My API is REST-ful and inspired by the flickr API. I have one method so far “bustracker.departures.getNext” which takes one parameter: the bus stop code. It shows you all of the incoming departures for a given bus stop. Here it is working for the stop nearest my flat. Feel free to change to bus stop code to another one by digging around the Bus Tracker website. I’ll hopefully have some other, more useful methods done soon and maybe some nifty google maps visuals…

Update: Source code now browsable at: http://trac.ollyjackson.com/bustracker/browser/trunk

postDevil May Care - Books - 19th May

Penguin are releasing a new Bond novel entitled “Devil May Care“. Guess who’s writing it? Yes, Sebastian Faulks. It’s released next week and it could be awesome.

Posting activity July 2002 to Present