Archive for July, 2007

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. 6 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.