Girl, most associated with Trouble

Brushing up on natural language processing (NLTK) and saw this amusing example from the Brown Corpus.

Seems like Trouble is for a Girl what Butter is for Bread.

girl trouble

Amazon recommends switching from EC2 to Google App engine

Having used the Amazon web services hosting stack for a while, this email felt quite ambiguous.

Amazon email 1

Going Just Awesome

My desk buddy Jamie had an idea to create a wordle out of your twitter stream. I know I'm late to the game with this one but I liked the outcome of mine. Going Just Awesome.

Wordle

Webby awards and a Golden Cube!

This has been a great week! Not only was monday a bank holiday, but we managed to win 3 awards aswell! Balloonacy got the Telecommunications awards (it sounds so 90s) and we also won a Art Directors Club's Golden Cube!

Golden Cube and Webby

Lonely Planet which is another Poke project, also got a webby in the travel category.

I'm a happy bee.

Balloonacy videos and Webby awards

I just found some fun little videos I made about a year ago when we did the Balloonacy game.

Timelaps video

Made from screenshots of my blog over a few hours time

40,000 balloons in 22 seconds

The second one is a speed run through the map and most of the balloons on it. It looks a bit mental in the middle.

(Thanks Gav for wicked AF skills)

Map + Balloon data visualisation

This is more geeky and it's showing the basic data structure we used for the race map and some rainbow portals and balloons. It was rendered using Ubigraph.

I have no idea why it got such bad framerate when transcoded by Vimeo.

Vote for us in People's Voice!

Balloonacy is nominated in three categories in the Webby Awards. I'm super thrilled about this and I'd love it you helped us win! Sign in at the People's Voice and in the Website section, balloonacy can be found under Services > Telecommunications. In the Interactive Advertising section balloonacy is under Game or Application and Online Guerilla & Innovation.

Fresh tweets straight out of the oven

Yesterday we installed Bakertweet at Albion right across the road from work.

It's a little Twitter box hanging off the wall telling followers when fresh bread is coming out of the oven!

bakertweet demo

@aszolty did a great job with the arduino that talks to our bakertweet website, that in turn syncs the freshly baked croissants to twitter.

bakertweet

If you like your buns hot, and are stationed around Shoreditch, go to Twitter and follow @albionsoven.

Google street view in London

Big brother has been around and taking snaps of London.

Here's my house.


View Larger Map

It's time for a good old book burning ceremony

We're having a clear out of some old programming book at work. A part of me feels a little weird about throwing away books, it's sort of something you just keep, forever. But don't worry, we're getting some brand shiny new web3.0 books to fill the holes in the bookshelf. ;)

Here's an excerpt from Spainhour & Quercia's Webmaster in a Nutshell (First Edition 1996):

This is a book that needs no introduction. By this time, if you don't know what the World Wide Web is, then you probably haven't heard of Rollerblades, VCRs, or Boris Yeltsin either.

programming books