Lemsip café

Published at September 28, 2007 in Rubber Buckets. 1 Comment

A while back, I read an article in which a smoothie vendor in Dublin complained that business was rather seasonal. Given that Irish summers are short to non-existent, smoothie bars apparently struggle for trade for most of the year (hence the extortionate prices). The interviewee couldn’t think of much in the way of alternatives; coffee would be competing with existing cafés, and isn’t quite the same market, since it’s perceived as not particularly healthy.

What does a cold, wet city-centre Dublin commuter want in the wintertime? Something healthy but also with a feelgood factor?

Well herbal teas strike me as the obvious answer. Not the watery camomile stuff, more like ginger or cinnamon-based stuff, hearty pick-me-ups. But I can think of something even more welcome. Lemsip. Can you think of anything more desirable when you’ve got yet another cold, you’ve missed your bus, and you really don’t want an alcoholic drink to further weaken your system? Open a Lemsip café - with paracetamol-free alternatives (lemon and honey, lemon and cloves) in case you feel like staying for a second drink; and the smoothie trade will be a summer sideline.

The Internet of Virtual Worlds

Published at September 20, 2007 in Rubber Buckets. 1 Comment

This is a bit of a late rubber bucket, as I’m only pointing out that I had the idea, at the point when it’s starting to come true (maybe).

Virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are far too important to be left up to monopolies playing with vendor lock-ins. Second Life itself currently looks like what the internet would look like, if Tim Berners-Lee had been a bit more commercially minded. Sure it’s making money for its creators, but for most of the world its presence hasn’t registered.

So I proposed an open interface standard for virtual worlds. Free 3d browsers, your avatar stored as an XML “cookie”, and so on. Well I didn’t make a technical proposal of course… I put it in a text-file on my own computer. Er, in the form of dialogue, references and notes for a novel. Just one clip:

“BBC’s Newsnight… referred to “online virtual worlds [as] one of the hottest business propositions of dotcom boom Mark II.” Imagine in 1992 saying that websites would be “one of” the hot new business concepts of the internet.” From now on, this is the internet.

Slashdot | Standards For Interconnecting Virtual Worlds

Sssh… US exceeds overdraft limit

Published at August 13, 2007 in News commentary and Witterings. 1 Comment

According to the US Treasury, the statutory limit on their public debt is $8.965 trillion.

According to the same source, as of last Friday, the actual public debt was $8,968,607,956,049.61. Oops.

I’ve searched news sources for an hour, and all I can find is comments that the debt ceiling was expected to be reached in October, and would need sorting out before then. I can only assume that there was a sudden increase due to the Federal Reserve’s actions to the stock market/liquidity crisis in the last few days. Perhaps that explains why their contributions ($2 billion today) were so puny compared to the ECB (€48 billion today).

The Treasury has issued press releases in the past, when previous limits were in danger of being breached, and temporarily stopped selling securities. There’s no such press release at the moment though. So why isn’t this rather dramatic event being reported? Could it be because, with markets already panicking, it might be the straw that breaks the camel’s bank?

The Worst-Named Pub in Dublin

Published at August 1, 2007 in Dublin and Witterings. 0 Comments

The worst-named pub in Dublin is O’Donoghue’s. Since few people will recognise the name, I’ll give another hint: Thing Mote. Ah yes, that place.

I’m not sure when Thing Mote changed hands and was renamed O’Donoghue’s. I can say that in the last 18 months that I’ve been back in Dublin, every conversation that mentioned O’Donoghue’s also included the phrase “the place that used to be Thing Mote”. More frequently, it’s referred to directly as Thing Mote, since many people including myself have trouble remembering its real name.

“Thing Mote” is just odd. It’s slightly jarring, and very distinctive. It’s quirky. The music they played before they changed hands was also quirky and distinctive. In fact the main problem with the place was that it was jam-packed every night of the week.

O’Donoghue’s, on the other hand… For a start, there’s already another Dublin pub called O’Donoghue’s, a few streets away on Merrion Row. It’s well-known for its live trad music, and has apparently been around for over 200 years.

More to the point, O’Donoghue is a bland, unmemorable name. It’s like O’Neill’s (of which there are also two in the south city centre). People have to say “O’Neill’s on Suffolk Street” - not just to distinguish them, but because there are so many Dublin pubs named with generic Irish surnames, that there’s nothing to stimulate your memory. Of course, after 200 years, pubs like O’Neill’s on Suffolk Street and O’Donoghue’s on Merrion Row develop enough character and reputation that they stand out in people’s minds. But 200 years is rather a long time to wait to build a reputation.

On the other hand, at least there’s no difficulty getting a seat these days.

Invest in the National Lottery

Published at July 26, 2007 in News commentary and Witterings. 0 Comments

The Irish Lotto has just been not-won yet again. Saturday’s draw will exceed €15 million.

I calculate that there are 8,145,060 possible combinations of numbers. Each panel costs €1.50 to play. So the cost of buying every possible ticket is €12,217,590, which will guarantee that you win the jackpot (and lots of smaller prizes). That’s a tidy profit of around €3 million, or a return on investment of around 25%.

Admittedly there would be some costs involved in obtaining all those tickets. At a maximum of 8 panels per ticket, you’d need to submit 1,018,133 entry slips. I recommend using a computer and a high-speed printer to print entry slips. If we guess that a Lotto machine takes an average of 10 seconds to process each entry, it would take over 2,828 hours to submit them all. If you started now (midnight on Wednesday), you would need 42 Lotto machines running flat out. Better bribe some shop owners to close for a few days.

Of course, there is one potential flaw in the plan…

Clothes shops for skinny people

Published at July 24, 2007 in Rubber Buckets. 4 Comments

No, not fashion shops.

Department stores and “typical” clothes shops cater for average people. Your typical department store jeans rack, for example, caters for a 32 to 40 inch waist. Sometimes they do go down to a 30-inch waist - but without exception, that’ll be with a 32-inch inner leg. In other words, they’re for small people. Shopping for trousers is a strain, for me. Forget about deparment stores. Zara and H&M might have some styles in 30/34 - or they might not. And to be honest, I’d prefer 30/36, which I only recently discovered do actually exist - online. As for t-shirts, I look forward to the day when I win the lottery and can get all my t-shirts tailor-made, i.e. without wings.

Now I am dimly aware that there are lots of small, painfully trendy shops around that exclusively sell clothes for slim figures. And I am also aware that the majority of the population have the reverse problem, and would dearly love to be able to fit into those slim clothes. That is not the point. Call me stingy, but I’m not prepared to pay upwards of €100 for every pair of trousers. I’m not fashionably-inclined. I just happen to be slim, that’s all.

And I’m not the only one. In fact I distinctly recall most of my college friends being skinny and untrendy. True, that’s because we were all geeks. Still, geeks have money.

There are high-street shops for extra-tall people, and for extra-fat people. Isn’t it about time there was a major chain of clothes shops for people who are skinny, but who otherwise just want to pay normal prices for normal clothes?

I hear marketing on Slashdot is pretty cheap…

Clickable links in internet video

Published at July 19, 2007 in Rubber Buckets. 1 Comment

I’ve never liked the fact that Youtube and all its competitors use Macromedia’s Flash plugin. Very dangerous to base a large part of the web on proprietary software. Still, one of the nice things about Flash is its interactivity. In fact, using Flash for playing plain video is a bit of a mis-use of technology - it just happens to work, and be hassle-free.

Still, it is very “old-media”. You sit, you watch it, and if you have the patience to watch until the end, you get offered a handful of vaguely-similar videos. That’s equivalent to having webpages that consist only of plain text; and at the end you’re offered a bunch of links generated by a search engine offering more-or-less the same information on another site. Or put it another way: it’s missing the whole point of the internet.

Why not allow video uploaders to add clickable links to their video? In the uploading process, the owner of the video clip would specify the link text, the time that the link appears (e.g. 1 minute, 20.4 seconds from the start of their clip), the length of time it remains visible, and a handful of formatting options (position: top/centre/bottom; transition effects; perhaps foreground/background colours)  The links might be to another video on the same site, but could equally be to a webpage (opening in a new window/tab), or a mailto: link, or initiate a VoIP call, etc.

So a video clip showing how to cook a certain dish might contain a link to a recipe page for printing out. A video clip advertising Volvo might link to a page of tech specs while referring to engine performance, then link to emissions information while discussing how green it is, then to a full list of safety features, and finally to a page showing their local dealerships based on geo-ip. The point is that the viewer chooses the information route that interests them, without being overly distracted by stuff they don’t care about.

How would this be profitable? There would be the temptation (for the hosters: Youtube etc) to charge per click on all videos. I would suggest this would stifle the market, because the majority of video uploaders are working for free. Viewers would then associate video-embedded links with crassly commercial pages, and learn not to bother clicking. Perhaps a better model is to allow embedded links for free as long as the video is viewed on the hosting site (Youtube etc); but if viewed while embedded in an external site, the creator would be charged per click.

OCR for mobile phones

Published at July 10, 2007 in Rubber Buckets. 5 Comments

Optical character recognition for mobile phone cameras. Why? Because, used in conjunction with basic machine translation or dictionary lookup,  you have real life, with subtitles.

Imagine this: you’re in a restaurant in a foreign country. They don’t have an English menu, and the waiter’s English isn’t great either. Pull out your mobile, switch on the camera viewfinder, hold it over each menu item in turn. As the phrase queso de cabra appears in the centre of the picture, an eggtimer appears in the corner of the screen, indicating that it’s attempting to recognise the words. A moment later, at the bottom of the screen in a shaded area appears the text queso de cabra in blue, and next to it, goat’s cheese in yellow. (The blue text confirms the original, so you can be sure it’s looking at the same words as you. The yellow text stands out more clearly as the info you really need.)

Optionally, it might also pronounce the original word and/or translation. Useful for learning the language.

Also handy for deciphering road signs, advertisements, notices in shops…

Advantages over electronic phrasebooks:

  • It’s software - no expensive qwerty keyboard etc - therefore huge price advantage over phrasebooks.
  • Enables easy downloads  - of updates, but also of additional language packs.
  • Could detect diacritical marks or potentially even other scripts (e.g. Arabic, Japanese), whereas many English speakers would not know how to input non-English characters on a keyboard.
  • Faster to use, more discrete, one less gadget to carry around or lose.

Potential issues:

  • A reasonably high resolution camera would make it more useful, by allowing the user to zoom in on distant signs while maintaining a good enough resolution to allow OCR.
  • A camera that could produce a reasonably sharp image down to distances of around 5cm, would be more useful. This would enable it to work with typefaces of preferably down to 12pt but at least 14pt. Smaller typefaces are probably unrealistic. This probably requires autofocus rather than the fixed focus lens found on most current mobiles.
  • It would be very elegant, from the user’s point of view, not to require pre-selecting a special mode to use this function. In other words, any time the camera is on, it is attempting to detect and recognise text. However this is probably not possible with 3rd party software; it might only be an option for the phone manufacturer.
  • It might be difficult to enable it to work on a live picture (possibly require image-stabilisation software?). Early/cheap versions might require the user to take a snapshot of the text before processing it.

Powdered alcohol

Published at June 6, 2007 in News commentary. 1 Comment

According to Reuters, some Dutch students have invented powdered alcohol. According to the story, one simply adds water to make it up to 3%. The inventors reckon they’ll make a killing selling it to the underage market. They also claim that the product would avoid alcohol taxes. There are so many flaws in this I don’t know where to begin.

Now I don’t know about Dutch legislation, and conceivably the Dutch word for alcohol includes the notion that it is liquid. But I’ve just checked a few Irish statutes, and they all refer simply to “alcohol”. I don’t see how they would be invalidated just because the alcohol wasn’t in liquid form.

Which in any case is clearly nonsense. Pure alcohol, C2H5OH is a liquid, and can no more be powdered than water - and Steven Wright already made that joke. Alcohol minus water would be ethylene, which is a gas.

And why claim 3%? Even a glue-sniffing 12 year old could figure out that adding less water would make it stronger.

In any case, any of the companies that allegedly expressed interest could hardly fail to realise that national legislation would be updated to cover the product before it could hit the market.

Never mind, Reuters, here’s another exclusive: in the Netherlands, April Fool’s Day falls on the 6th of June.

Big Brother wants you to watch yourself

Published at June 5, 2007 in Daft websites and Witterings. 0 Comments

EBay lets potential buyers ask questions about items for sale. But they don’t want them to arrange the sale outside eBay, since they would lose most of their commission. Solution? Get buyers to report themselves, if they catch themselves breaking the rules. This notice appears when the buyer uses the contact form:

Marketplace Safety Tip
Is this message an offer to buy your item directly through email without winning the item on eBay? If so, please help make the eBay marketplace safer by reporting it to us.

It reminds me of the question on U.S. Immigration forms: “Are you a member of a terrorist organisation?”