The code is 0060.

I went through the codes on this pdf: [download.microsoft.com]

It looks great and runs so quickly.  When you visit the site remember you can click the animation to morph between 9 or so animals and move your mouse to change your view of the sphere.

Displayed using lots of little vector pyramids in 3D in real time

On the GLOW website there is the animation in WebGL and the tutorial showing what techniques were used to make it.

Now though I rarely report users that follow me. Even if they are truly spammy and not just some start-up company wanting friends. And do you know why? One reason and one reason alone; my follower count increases by one.

On Twitter it seems that if you have plenty of followers, you are recognised as more interesting and real people are more likely to follow you. So in reality for each follow spam I receive, I secretly want them to not be reported as spam accounts and to bump up my follower count for as long as possible.

Twitter couldn’t really change my behaviour unless it actually proved useful to me to actually report these accounts.  At the moment, reporting a spammer reduces my follower count so it’s actually detrimental to do so. Even if they didn’t increase my follower count in the first place until that spam user had passed some process to officiate themselves, it would still be useless to report because “oh, someone else will do that”.

On the other hand, Eli Dourado has had a great idea to incentivise the process of reporting spammers. He puts forward the notion of increasing the likelihood of you showing up in the recommended users list when you correctly identify spam accounts on a regular basis. This I think would greatly increase the reporting of spam accounts, at least for me anyway, and thus have a great impact on the spam that fills Twitter on a day-to-day basis.

In my opinion, it is a great idea but yet it still requires some user interaction (the process of reporting spam accounts). If we look at another medium which battles with spam on an even greater level, email, we find that emails are filtered by our own chosen provider. Gmail have their own algorithms for filtering spam, as do Windows Live Mail and Yahoo!, as do many thousands of other providers. Spam protection for email inboxes is not a new ingenious idea; it’s an absolute requirement.

Could this then be a way of dealing with Twitter spam? Could Twitter become its own protocol with different providers providing different degrees of spam protection, privacy, security, analytics, or premium services? Could Twitter providers of the future trim our timeline for us by allowing us to view only interesting tweets based on the context? Gmail has introduced a Priority Inbox for your email which, based on the context of the email, categorises the email to varying degrees of importance. If the email is directed solely at you, it has a greater importance than a newsletter that is sent to thousands of other people.  Could a new Twitter provider highlight the most important or interesting tweets to you?

Allowing third-party clients to communicate with Twitter has been one of Twitter’s compelling features, by allowing users to choose any client that they wish. Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed, Hootsuite and many more allow users to plug-in and use Twitter in their own way, however they are severely limited to Twitter’s own API which offers no extra benefits such as context analysis or analytics. Implementing a Twitter feed provider would be a huge cost to Twitter and would effectively outsource their own ad revenue to other companies.

For many years Twitter’s fail whale has shown to millions of users when the service is overloaded or breaks for some reason. Or in fact even worse when Twitter is blocked to an entire country when tweeting the truth is deemed a huge security risk. These things would surely be rectified by implementing a Twitter protocol and allowing third-party providers to display, analyse, post to Twitter in their own way. It would also encourage competition in the market place where other micro-blog services would have the opportunity to offer more than the behemoth of Twitter.

This has all been simply written up over my lunch break and I’ve hardly had time to really contemplate what I’m suggesting so the idea may seem terse and undeniably infeasible but from what I can see, I can draw some similarities between Twitter and good ol’ email and can see some future in providing Twitter in a way which is more open and diverse. Perhaps this could call for a new micro-blogging format akin to diaspora* that uses collections of server nodes to share information.

Either way, I think that Twitter will eventually have to combat their spam problems or become so overridden with spam that users will at some point give up and leave the site completely. Nah, actually what am I even talking about? How else is anyone going to know how much the world just ♥’s Justin Bieber?

It sounded like a modernised version of the Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 theme tune! I don’t know if this is an ode to the game or to Lotus but the stadium you play at is Lotus Park.

I understand that advertisements are all over the game, with Samsung this and T-Mobile that. But the music is a subtle addition! I like it. Check the videos below to hear for yourselves:

Kinect Sports Football (Will automatically start at 6m 20s)

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

Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 – Music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQSsq7HCNHw

Note: I’m basing this completely on WordPress’s blog stats which only indicate visitors and not avid readers…

At my old blog, I used to get a regular flow of about 6-13 visitors per day and I could see they were mostly looking at my posts on Sub-Pixel Rendering (Hinting) In Chrome Is Inferior To That Of Firefox and my long gone implementation of a twitter clone in django.  So far so good, people were using Google to find information and my blog was quite high in the results. My old blog post comes in at #2 and #3 when you search for “django twitter clone”.  Maybe this was because of the wordpress.com domain, perhaps it’s held in high regard in Google as all blogs are kept under tight control.  But then it all changed; I moved to a different domain.

It was all the same content, same blogging platform, same publishing dates, but obviously I had lost my rank in Google.  As my old blog was hosted on wordpress.com there was no way of me redirecting all my traffic to my new domain (well, without paying), and no way of stopping google from indexing my posts.  So now my steady stream of low traffic suddenly landed to 0. No visitors whatsoever.  I was thinking how I would recover, seeing as how my old blog had little to no visitors anyway I am now going to endeavour to get back up the ranks in Google.

Getting up high in Google will be difficult though, I’m thinking I should delete en-mass my posts on wordpress.com and that will prevent google from indexing them.  I have written a short note on my old blog posts informing visitors that I’ve moved, but why would they click the new link when the information they want is right there on that page anyway?

Anyway, I guess the only way to get back up on the results is to post high quality posts that are understandable and get people commenting!  And that I shall do…

Laters all,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ECPUd8dmOY

You should always use the word fewer when talking about things that can be counted such as: miles, trees, lemons.  For cases where you would use the word less is for objects that can’t be directly counted such as: distance, forest, fruit.

I walked 5 fewer miles to get to the moon.
I walked less distance to interstellar space.

There are a gajillion fewer trees everyday thanks to deforestation.
There is less forest now that we have paper.

People eat lemons everyday, there are fewer lemons in the world today than yesterday.
When all these lemons get eaten, there is less fruit.

The Colonel

1) Could Colonel Miles Quaritch look any more like Major Chip Hazard? This alone annoys the hell out of me- couldn’t they think of any other look for him?

2) In the scene near the end with the big battle, The Colonel sacrifices his men and his ship to attempt to chase after his vendetta with Jake Sully. Ugh! Seriously, does this kind of Good vs. Evil thing have to be everywhere? Why is there always a boss battle between the lead character and his arch nemesis?

Jake Sully is King Dufus Of The Dufai

3) Jake is a dufus.  When he first meets the king of the tribe, Click-Tuck Toon or whatever his name is, Jake is all like “He’s your father? [Reaches out his hand] Nice to meet you sir…” What a tool.  You are surrounded by a tribe of what seem at this moment to be showing complete inane aggression toward you for encroaching on their land and you go and be a dufus and all like, “Nice to meet you sir…” UGH!

4) When he first gets in to his avatar and has a working body he can’t wait to get up, dismissing all warnings from medical staff.  This is so unrealistic (excuse me for pretending that this is meant to be realistic) but how the flizzle did he just get up and run around after entering a new body? And why wasn’t he punished for this show of disobedience? I hate it that he’s been given this awesome opportunity and he goes like a child and disregards everyone’s concerns for his safety. Dufus.

5) It’s the story of a man who was just in the right place at the right time.  In this case it was the fact that he had the same DNA as his twin brother who had been training for this job for three years.  His brother having died tragically left behind an Avatar that only someone of the same DNA could use.  What kind of training do you think his brother had to endure, how clever and intelligent he must have been- Only to be replaced by his ‘warrior’  brother who has never used an Animus (That’s what I’m calling it as it’s practically identical to that of the Assassin’s Creed games), nor learned anything about Na’Vi culture or whatnot.  Also when Naytiri tells Jakesully about the fact that only 5 people have ridden that epic dragon since the first songs were sung, Jake’s all like “Wow that’s a long time”.  Exactly how long is that Jake? Do you know? Was that part of your research? Oh wait no, you didn’t do any research.

6) “I don’t know how to open it, so I’ll just barge right through this door that looks like it could be double reinforced”. [When he first gets inside his avatar].

Husky-Voiced Chick Who Plays She Same Kind Of Character In Every Movie She’s In

7) This time she’s a greasemonkey pilot called Trudy. How original, ooo!

Continuity

8) During the scene where the army blow up the old stupid tree house, the Na’Vi pelt the ships with arrows to obviously no effect.  They just bounce off.  This part is heavily dramatised and is a big part of the scene that shows to the viewer that the Na’Vi have puny weapons against the humans and are gonna be completely owned.  Soon thereafter we see the big battle where their arrows are now all of a sudden armour piercing!  They not only crash through the bullet proof glass of the ships but still have enough energy to kill the crew members!  What’s up with that?

Unbelievables

9) The whole story of those stupid dragons.  Jakesully having spent only a mere number of months with legs and a functional body tames the uber dragon. What. So no one had thought about an attack from above before? It doesn’t take a genius (Jake isn’t one, he’s a dufus) to see that the safest way to board it is from above.  What happened to his own little dragon?  He was sweet and everything! Even came back to him about 30 seconds after he woke up from the tree house disaster even amongst the dense ash-filled smoke!

10) The humans lost and we’re meant to be happy about that.  Hundreds possibly thousands of trained men and women (supposedly from the US) died and with each ship going down the audience feels happy?  What is this?  I’m no Na’Vi, I’m not happy about humans dying!  Sure yeah as always, humans are the greedy race… Just after that Ultra-Rare-ium that’s supposed to be worth lots… pfft, nice way of presenting the human race eh?