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Y-Combinator -vs- Paul Graham

Paul Graham is famous for creating Y Combinator, a venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups. But what is their linguistic intersection?

L.I. Score:

6.4

'y-combinator': 1910000 pages
'paul graham': 45900000 pages
'y-combinator' 'paul graham': 1070000 pages

''y-combinator''

''paul graham''

What the results mean.

Try another two words:

Lamp Gallery Goes Live!

I'm proud to present the Lamp Gallery which went live today.

The gallery is a application for Lamp to show their extensive collection of product images. Here are some of the features:

Multiple languages (Spanish, English, French).
Grouping of images into albums.
Advanced search functionality.
Ability to build a selection of favourite images while you browse, and then export the selection to PDF.

Jeremy Lanig's new photography website

A friend of mine who I used to live with in Hampton House, has set up a really cool new photography site. Jeremy was a maths and skating enthusiast, but has recetly moved to Japan and turned his interest to photographing abandoned places and investigating the intersection of mathematics and art.

Premios Lamp Lighting Solutions

Have just finished off Lamp Lighting Solutions, a microsite for a lighting-design competition being held by LAMP.

Although the site is in spanish, the competition is open to students and professionals from around the whole world. There are three categories of prizes:

"REAL SOLUTIONS" - lighting solutions that have been implemented
"VIRTUAL PROPOSALS" - lighting projects that have not been built
"STUDENTS PROPOSALS" - student lighting projects

For any architects, lighting designers or students out there, inscription is now open and you can submit your projects starting on the 1^st of October 2007.

New Frome College Website

I noticed that the Frome College website has been given a facelift, now touting itself as a "specialist media arts college". It was nice to see some familiar names on the staff list and a video of a day-in-the-life of the college.

Living Barcelona - a weblog

Living Barcelona is a rather nice weblog from the city. It's growing at the moment, but has some cool restaurant reviews with addresses, telephone numbers and maps.

Fun Response Header finds

Using Firefox's web developer extension, I have been having fun using it to find unusual response headers.

Example 1: Hamsters in the works

Response Headers - http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2005 17:54:00 GMT
Server: Apache
Accept-Ranges: bytes
GUpoweredBy: X-GUHTTPD-HAMSTER25
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

200 OK

Example 2: DISCLAIM! DISCLAIM!

Response Headers - http://www.philippines.hvu.nl/

Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2005 18:10:27 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/3.0.16 mod_perl/1.25 mod_ssl/2.6.5 OpenSSL/0.9.5a
X-Disclaimer: The local sysadmins have *nothing* to do with the content of this server.
Last-Modified: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 21:09:49 GMT
Etag: "e805d-5a65-437a4e9d"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 23141
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=99
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html

200 OK

The Plains Cotton Cooperative Association is self-promotional:

Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2005 18:16:13 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Cotton: The Fabric of Our Lives
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Content-Length: 4884
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-Control: private

200 OK

How to install 'lisp in a box' on a Debian or Ubuntu machine

$ cd /usr/local/src
$ snarf http://common-lisp.net/project/lispbox/lispbox.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf lispbox.tar.gz
$ cd lispbox/emacs-21.3/
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
$ make clean
$ apt-get install termcap-compat

(The very last step there is the gotcha.)

Mosselfestijn!

Donderwolkje put up some great pictures of his great mussle and fries party on the rooftop if his barcelona apartment and also photos of what they got up to afterwards ... go have a look!

Prophet Mantra puzzle solved!

Last week I posted some news from smj that he had found mantra on the circuit board of his Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 synthesizer.

After some debate on the SDF bulletin board it seems that the answer to the puzzle has been found.

User Marten reckoned it meant warranty void if mantra removed!
However user pwyzlic thinks he's got it sussed:

TACKER:  pwyzlic (Peter Wyzlic)
SUBJECT: .. I need an INDIAN!
DATE:    19-Sep-05 20:18:47
HOST:    sdf


That's a Sanskrit Mantra in Tibetan script. In a roughly transcribed
version it reads:
Om ma ni padme hum hrih

It's fairly common in Tibet because it is related to Avalokitesvara (a
Bodhisattva). The Dalai Lama is considered to be a reincarnation of
Avalokitesvara.


Peter

Shackle Shuffle

News in from Theo Simon of Seize the Day: A quiet, suburban, UK manufacturer implicit in torture and erosion of human rights.

This is a brief report of an action that Seize The Day were part of on Thursday (8th Sept) outside the Hiatts Shackle factory at 111-115 Baltimore Road Perry Bar, Birmingham, England. The protest was called by a local doctor who discovered that the Hiatts company were supplying the Shackles and Hand-cuffs used on people being held without trial or any hope of justice at the US prison-camp in Guantanamo Bay.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/birmingham/2005/09/322788.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1565811,00.html

We arrived on a flat-bed truck to lead 20 orange-clad dancers in "The Shackle Shuffle" before an audience of about 15 media, 2 coppers, and assorted local residents. Behind us, comedian Mark Thomas, in regulation Boiler Suit, held one end of a banner reading "Tackle the Shakles - Call Hiatt 0121 357 4347". After the song, Mark spoke passionately about the disgrace of the torture industry operating in our country. He was followed by Abu Bakr, whose brother Omar Deghayes is currently on Hunger Strike with over 200 other victims of gratuitous American military detention. The hunger strike is now in it's 5th week, and if the prisoners demands for humane treatment are not met soon, innocent men like Omar will start to die from starvation. The realities of Guantanamo abuses were spelled out by UK Lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith, who represents many of the inmates, but is not permitted by the US authorities to tell the world everything which he has seen.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1566197,00.html

However thanks to the widespread reporting of this protest and the interest it generated through the BBC and the Guardian newspaper, the courageous and desperate struggle of the men and boys kidnapped by the Bush regime and deprived of their most basic human rights in the name of "defending democracy" is now in the news. Public awareness of the Hunger Strike may make a difference for people like Omar Deghayes. Please take the time to read about his case - he needs us.

http://www.save-omar.org.uk/ They all need us. Every "Human Right" we now take for granted was once a Human victory. If we do not protect them now, we may live to wish that we had when the same treatment is meted out to us, or those we love, in the future.

I hope that people reading this will think of other ways to apply pressure on the UK and US government to end the 3 year nightmare of Guantanamo. There are 3 issues:

The export by Hiatts of shackles - their address and phone number are above, and MPs may also want to raise it in parliament;

The plight of Omar Deghayes, who faces execution if the UK government force him to return to Libya upon his release;

The restoration of Human Rights to all the detainees, so that the hunger strike can end.

Lastly, this protest was helped fantastically by people who we emailed in the Birmingham area. If you live in Britain, and would like to be potentially available for any future actions Seize The Day are involved in, please email me with details of which area you live in.

Love, Theo
www.seizetheday.org

APPLE CRUMBLE

An apple crumble I made for a meet up with some people from Version Original language school in Barcelona.

Here is the recipe for my favourite dessert: apple crumble. I have tried this dish out on people from all over the world and it's always a hit :)

The following is enough to make a small crumble - enough for about 4 portions

Ingredients:

Cooking apples: Two
Self-raising flour: 4 ounces (100 grams)
Granulated sugar: 1 ounce (25g) + 1 tablespoon (on apples)
Demerara sugar (brown, rough sugar): 1 ounce (25g)
(+ 1 tablespoon on crumble)
Butter: 2 ounces (50g)

Equipment:

Scales (not essential)
A small bowl and plate
A knife (for cutting the apples and butter)
A pyrex dish (suitable for cooking in the oven)
A gas or electric oven

If you want to make custard to go with this, I recommend the recipe in Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course. Apple crumble also goes well with vanilla ice cream or plain fresh cream if you can get it.

Instructions:

Take two large cooking apples
Peel the apples and slice them
Add granulated sugar
Mix 1oz granulated sugar, 1oz demerara sugar, 4oz flour
Add the butter. Use your hands to rub it in.
Continue until mixture is lumpy - do not make it too firm
Place the crumble on top of the apples.
Sprinkle a tablespoon of demerara sugar on top
Bake in a pre-heated oven at about 350F (175C)
Remove from the oven after 30-40 minutes (when brown)

Top Tip

Here's a dead quick and easy way to make the crumble topping:
First melt the butter in a large bowl. You can do this either on the hob or in a microwave. Then just stir in the flour and sugar and watch it turn into crumble before your eyes. You will still need to get your hands dirty to break up the big lumps, but it is much quicker than rubbing cold butter into the flour.

If you want to make more there's a simple rule for the crumble. The Flour, sugar and butter are always mixed in proportions 4:2:1 respectively.

Delia Smith comes to Barcelona

The Complete Cookery Course by Delia Smith, a classic cookery book I picked up on a recent trip to the UK - only 9 quid at Amazon :)

Well, not literally, but while I was recently in England I picked up a copy of Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course. Now I am back I have been drooling over the recipes. I tried out the recipe for French Onion Soup which was a hit - the secret is to add an obscene amount of butter when frying the onions.

Next on the list is more traditional english stuff: steak and kidney pudding, fruit pies, flat meat and two veg. I really need to figure out how to make a decent custard too. More attempts will follow soon, if only I could pull myself away from delicious catalan mondonguillas or botifarra.

Citroen C4 Ad Spoof

Video:
Found a very funny send up of Citroen's C4 advert on Nothing to Do. Well, actually I rediscovered it after someone sent it to me a few months ago - thanks Raoul!
The film is from x-bam.com and is also available from their site in WMV format. X-bam also have some nice hi-res video stills. They say:

Preliminary construction of the car/robot took 16 hours followed by 16 hours animation, 8 hours creating the carpark and city, then a further two days of tweaking, lighting and preparing for rendering. Further refinement was completed between renders over the next week, including addition of the cape and creation of the physics model for the culminating crash.

Breaking news from Palermo

"Drunk driver causes near tragedy.
Batman is only Witness"

Who's the most famous Beatle?

I was just listening to Revolver one of my favourite Beatles albums. So when John, Paul, Ringo and George are searched against "The Beatles" who has the greatest Lingustic Intersection? An interesting question, now tested scientifically with the Google Concepts machine...

Beatle	Score
George Harrison	16.74
John Lennon	13.29
Paul McCartney	12.31
Ringo Starr	6.89

Have a try yourself (Explanation here):

Linguistic Intersections: Early Finds

I have been trying out the Google Concepts linguistic intersection calculator (see 'Google Concepts Returns'). Here's what I have found so far...

Politics
Putting to rest an old debate, we discover that a search for 'Iraq' and 'WMD' yields a fairly high L.I. Score of 5.91. However, I imagine that by now the search has all but stopped.
On the other hand the connection between 'Iraq' and '9/11' is a bit more certain with a score of 14.77
Programming and tea
Tea and programming (1.48) go together like hand in glove (2.95). But it appears that when drinking tea, cake (13.29) rules over biscuits (6.89); but cake php¹ with an score of 1.48 has some way to go.
Ego Googling
Yes, yes, too strong a temptation ... my name gives a score of 3.45. How about yours?
Where I live
Barcelona is hotter (1.97) than it is cool (1.48), but quite noisy (3.45) without being too smelly (0.98) ... shurely shome mishtake?
Also, Barcelona seems to be more catalan (7.39) than spanish (4.92), something that is bound to please the catalans.

Found anything interesting yourself? Write to me.

¹Cake PHP, the fantastic rapid development framework for php based on Rails

Editing a file and preserving Modified Time

Suppose you want to edit a file but not change the time modified - how do you do this? This could be useful for Blosxom bloggers, who want to edit their posts, without changing the order they are viewed on a page. Well, I came up with a solution in ksh:

#/bin/ksh
if [ test -a $1 ]
  then
        MTIME=`stat -t %Y%m%d%H%M.%S $1 | cut -d" " -f 9| sed 's/\"//g'`
   else
        MTIME=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M.%S`
fi
if [ "$EDITOR" = "" ]
  then
    pico $1
  else
    $EDITOR $1
fi
touch -t `echo $MTIME` $1

How to use it

Copy the above code and paste it into a file called 'blog'. Now make the file executable with chmod, thus:

$ chmod u+x blog

You can now re-edit old blog entries like this:

$ ./blog path/to/blog-post.txt

When you save and exit your editor will touch the file to update the modified time. Immediately afterwards the script will re-set the modified time back to what it was before editing.

User jlromano pointed out that you can do the same with perl, like this:

#!/usr/pkg/bin/perl
($accessTime, $modifiedTime) = (stat($ARGV[0]))[8,9];
system("$ENV{EDITOR} $ARGV[0]");
utime $accessTime, $modifiedTime, $ARGV[0];

Do you have a better way of doing this? Let me know!

Noxious Emissions

Flying somewhere on holiday this year? Why not calculate the amount of C0₂ you will release!

Each time you fly, you are contributing to global warming. Aeroplanes use kerosene, which is a non-renewable fossil fuel that releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as it burns.

Climate Care has a CO₂-emissions calculator which will tell you how many tonnes of greenhouse gas your flight will release - and offers a solution for those who may feel guilty!

Angry - but not off the rails

I have just discovered my snarky letter to the Guardian regarding an article about Moir Lockhead, chief executive of FirstGroup, thanks to The Guardian's new search engine.