And the lift in this building had a button marked R which is for Random. So people can press this button and the lift will pick a floor at random to take them to. Apparantly, this is to get people to explore the building more than they would do.

So I started to think, what other places and things would benefit from a Random Button?

• MP3 or CD Players: OK, has already been done. And they do benefit from a Random Button.
• TV Remote Controls: Have you ever flicked through the TV channels and found something quite interesting on that you wouldn’t have found otherwise? Think about it…
• Internet: Browse the Internet by pressing a random button and see what happens.
• Sat Nav: Have a Random Button on a sat nav device, press it and see where it takes you. Hopefully it won’t drive you off a bridge or onto a railway. I think they’re getting better now though.
• Food: There’s a line in ‘dinnerladies’ where the main character Bren says that she takes the labels off her tins of food at home so she doesn’t know what she’ll have until she opens it. Perhaps Internet shopping sites should have a ‘random basket’ button which will just fill up your shopping basket with random items up to a certain amount.

Actually, this is harder than I thought. Any ideas?

* Footnote: As it happens, there were some other intresting quirks of this building – one of which was that it can create music based on how people pass through the building. I did actually tape the programme which I might watch at some point, maybe post the relevant bit here so you can see what I’m babbling on about…

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I now bring you to today’s B3ta newsletter, and more importantly the ‘Stupid Fight‘ which takes messages from Twitter, so you can find out who’s fans are ‘more stupid’. It uses SCIENCE apparantly (their caps, not mine) but I don’t know the algorithms behind it, and quite frankly, I don’t need to know.

The B3ta issue suggested that they’ve been comparing @labour, @conservative and @libdem with each other.

Well, I’m using a more interesting method. The most intelligent Twitting celebrity I know is Stephen Fry, or @stephenfry to use his Twitter name. Surely then, his fans are among the most unstupid Twitterers there are. Therefore, by comparing Mr Fry’s fans (I could not call somebody with his intelligence by his first name) with those of Messers Brown, Cameron and Clegg (I could not call somebody with their stupidity with their first names) I should get a good guage of the intelligence of the voters in this country and perhaps an idea of how the election will go. A lower score is better.

@stephenfry -vs- @labour: ‘Oh dear. @labour’s fans are more stupid. Heaven forbid you use punctuation.’ – 274 for Mr Fry, 413 for Mr Brown.

@stephenfry -vs- @conservative: ‘The honest truth: @conservative’s fans are more stupid. Someone’s going to claim they were being ironic.’ – 274 for Mr Fry, 640 for Mr Cameron.

@stephenfry -vs- @libdem: ‘Our survey says: @stephenfry’s fans are more stupid. Fortunately, you can always block them.’ – 274 for Mr Fry, 125 for Mr Clegg.

Hmm. That would suggest that the @libdem fans are more intelligent than @stephenfry’s fans.

Just out of interest, let’s try the BNP, everybody’s favourite fascist current political party.

@stephenfry -vs- @bnp: Mr Fry’s 274 is met with only 377 for Mr Griffin. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that – the fans of @bnp are cleverer than those of both @conservative and @labour.

Finally, can I just say that I’ve never worked out why the Conservative Party haven’t used the fact that the word ‘Conserve’ can (sort of) be found in their name in any of their campaigns? I may of course be wrong here, but hey ho.

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A few years ago, when something was to be done on the computer and the makers wanted to sound ‘hip and cool’, they would put an E in front of it. Sometimes a capital E, sometimes a lower case e, sometimes with a – , other times without, and in one case that I remember, even the € symbol was used. The word ‘email’ has had many similar permutations, e-mail, email, E-mail, eMail* and soforth.

Then Apple came along with the iPod (actually, I believe the iMac came first), and since then, the E has been replaced with an I. Even the BBC have succombed to it with the iPlayer. People who want to sound ‘hip and cool’, or ironic, put a lower case ‘i’ in front of their product name, for instance I could start calling this website iStupid or something like that. Don’t worry, I won’t – for a start it’s too much work.

In 1997**, Microsoft introduced a HTML tag that was, as is often the way with Microsoft, suitable for Internet Explorer, has since been extended to pretty much all browsers, and while it has been depreciated in the latest version of HTML, is still widely used, both on older sites which haven’t been updated since 1997 (I believe I made a post about that a while ago talking about ‘large’ images) but also on new sites. It can be quite a useful thing really, and I will readily admit that I am currently working on a site that will use this tag. The tag is, of course, the inline frame, or ‘iframe’ or ‘IFRAME’.

Or, and this brings me onto the point of this post (if there was one), the ‘iFrame’.

This has probably been going on for a long time (this question to Yahoo! Questions was posted, according to YQ, 9 months ago) but the first I heard of it was about a week ago when a post containing this snippet was posted to the Creative Commons mailing list:

If I include SA content within an iFrame in my course (with no modifications), that would seem to not require my entire course to be SA?

To be honest, it is probably just as well that the inline frame is being depreciated. Otherwise, thanks to Apple, we will have a generation of websiters who think that it is an iFrame.

The only advantage as far as I can see, and to be honest, it really doesn’t bother me (honestly!) is that if it continues, Apple will, in a possible reverse of fortune, be credited for the creator of the inline frame because of the preceeding ‘i’. Possibly.

I may be speaking nonsense.

Footnotes:
* The most irrititating use of this that I know of is that all emails sent from work to external email addresses still refer to them as ‘eMails’ in the disclaimer. This means, to me, that there are certain aspects of the IT department at work which are still stuck in the mid 90s. I cannot pinpoint when the term was generally agreed to be ‘email’ with no silly capitals, but it hasn’t been the case for many years now. Also, I remember reading a while ago how disclaimers to emails were generally pointless and, despite many containing threat of legal action, not legally binding.

** Even though at the beginning I said that dates weren’t accurate, this date is (or at least, according to Wikipedia.)

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So, last night I was asleep. Nothing unusual there (well actually given my sleep patterns recently, but that’s another post for another time!) except that I found myself dreaming – which actually isn’t that unusual either.

I have heard that you only know you’re dreaming when you’re not in a deep sleep, or that you can only remember that you dreamed if you weren’t in a deep sleep when you were dreaming. Anyway, I’ve digressed slightly.

Last night in my dream, I realised that I had come across an idea that I needed to remember. Of course, in that subconscious way you do sometimes, I knew that I was in a dream and that this idea needed to become reality so had to think of a way of doing this. The cartoon from XKCD as shown above came to mind, so I found a keyboard and started typing.

I could feel my real fingers moving as if I was typing, and I assumed that I was using my laptop keyboard to do so – my laptop being still switched on on the floor beside my bed (no officer, I wasn’t downloading anything…) so I assumed that I had managed to pick it up, open it, and start typing.

You can therefore imagine my surprise this morning when I woke up to find that absoutely nothing had happened.  I hadn’t typed a message to myself in my sleep, nor had I remembered this idea that I needed to remember.  Knowing my dreams though, it was probably either a very extraordinarily good idea or a pathetically bad one. I also found that my laptop had turned off as the night went on as the power went in the house at some point during the night and the battery ran out. This is also the reason why I was late for work, because I woke up and looked at my phone and realised that it was half past 8.

The moral of the story? Well, there isn’t one to be fair. There usually isn’t.

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I was told this story by my Granddad this afternoon, with the question ‘how many grains of rice were there in total?’. Being the former IT student that I am, I recognised this as being binary – which to a certain extent it is. A square on the chessboard is equivalent to 1 bit, a line on a chessboard is 8 squares, therefore a line is equivalent to a byte and would have 128 grains of rice on the line.

This is where things started to go a bit awry in my mind. Not having any pieces of paper to work things out on, and realising that it wasn’t simply a case of having 8×128 (the ninth square would be 256), I figured that this was impossible for me to work out. Nevertheless, I started to think that I might be able to work it out once I returned home and had the computer in front of me.

8×8 is 64, thought I, therefore a chessboard is effectively 64 bit, and the answer would be that number, multiplied by itself, minus 1 (which in binary would be 11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111)

Thinking that it would be easy to work out what the 64th number in the binary world would be, I did a quick Google search but gave up. (I have since worked this out, see below.)

That is when I started to write this blog post, thinking that I could allow you all to see me work through this mathematical problem. To give the story a proper retelling, I then searched Google for ‘rice chessboard’ or something like that. What should pop up high on the list, but an article from good old Wikipedia, which not only told me the story – the Chinese gentleman was in fact an ancient Indian mathmetitian named Sessa so -1 point for my grandfather there – but also the answer.

The answer is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 – which when read out is eighteen million four hundred and forty six thousand seven hundred and forty four million seventy three million seven hundred and nine million five hundred and fifty one thousand six hundred and fifteen (I think anyway).

Now, having the answer to this conundrum has made me a much better person.  Admittedly, I didn’t work it out myself (which actually would have made me a much better person) because I looked it up on the Internet. I was going to, but the Internet stopped me from doing it as it made it quite a pointless thing to do.  The Internet has ruined my life. But it has made me a better person for it.

Possibly.

(To conclude, the 64th number in the ‘binary sequence’ is √(18446744073709551615 + 1) which is 4294967296. That bit was worked out by myself, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s wrong…)

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Yesterday while I was in the shower, for some reason I started thinking about the designs that have been on this very website in the past. I remember posting a copy of an old design which I found that had been done in MS Word, and other designs had been completed in MS Publisher and Dreamweaver before I started coding the pure HTML of sites.  One design that I remembered yesterday was composed mostly of lego, where all the page headings and the like were created in Lego and then photographed. I mention designs because I’m currently contemplating switching over to WordPress so I’ve actually got a website that works…

I’ve also been looking at some old websites that are still around, and earlier on today came across this little snippet of text: “If your browser can cope with it, there is a bigger version of this photo (1402×1170 pixels, 168 KB).”

I very much doubt that you’d need to put that on images any more…

I’ve also forgotton what the main point of this post was except to say that I’m still alive… Take care all.

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