BinaryJam

Well its was due for renewal so I cancelled my xbox live subscription as I said I would.

Firstly its not worth paying for a service I rarely use, most friends being games developers don’t actually play on the xbox they play PC games, as work provides them some uber box.

Secondly as I said before now I’m on my fourth dead xbox 360 I will not send good money after bad.  So no more money from me to MS.  If I want a game it’s the pre-owned market, this may have some effect on the newly purchased market but its minimal, I’m just not giving my money to a company that has blatantly screwed over its customers by not replaced the 360 with a newly designed working system and endlessly recycles MB’s doomed to failure, or so it would appear.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=4&entryid=1653

With the warranty period due to end this year can you really blame me ? 

I cancelled my OneCare renewal as well, due to high cost and this episode has tainted my dealing with Microsoft. 

With blu-ray the winner, the PS3 is looking mighty tempting, just sort out that emotion chip and slap a big drive in it and I’ll buy it tomorrow, oh and make it smaller and quieter and use less electricity and paint it white or silver and and build in that digital tv-tuner*2.

Technorati tags: xbox 360, xbox live cancelled

Dan over at IsThereFood pointed out something I’d missed. 

I’d not been watching much TV of late, well the usual recorded bunch of American imported TV as the latest bunch of UK TV hasn’t left me exactly excited.  I waited with baited breath for Ashes To Ashes and I needn’t have bothered.

What I missed, Being Human, is undoubtedly the best thing I have seen on TV since Life on Mars, yes I know Doctor Who is good and Torchwood is watchable, just, but there hasn’t really been anything gripping and truly well written for what feels like such a long time. 

Finally something well written.  Something that sounds like its all going to be a bad farce, turns out to be the most enjoyable program in ages. I would go so far as to say was even better than LoM as it doesn’t have sad undertones that LoM did,  just creepy menacing ones.

I spoke to some friends who missed it too on broadcast, they thought it was going to be some dreadful documentary, you see titles are everything in the multi-channel world. I sent them to iPlayer.

The werewolf transformation was truly marvelous, real old school Werewolf in London style, not computer generated and all the better for it.  The vamps eyes occasionally, and for good effect, turn black.  Black eyes not normally part of the vampire legend as I recall, but considering it does help remind you that whilst the characters are trying to eek out a human existence they are definitely not human.

Top this off with a ghost in the house who can’t stop making tea like an old style northern housewife stuck in the house, doing it because the routine of it keeps her sane is icing on the cake.

The bad part.  This is a pilot not yet commissioned.  So please have a watch and bombard the BBC with letters begging for a series.  I know I will.

Well done to eBay.

They have got the feedback system correct. Well better for buyers anyway.

I recently purchased a product from a seller on ebay and the item arrived damaged and not from the location listed, I would not have purchased an item from china due to import taxes and delivery times etc, unless I really could not get it elsewhere for a similar price. 

But due to the fear of negative feedback I dared not give a bad review, considering I paid immediately by pay pal, how could I be a bad buyer ?  I admit I gave the seller no chance for reparation, as I was not getting into the whole sending back to china thing, too much hassle.  So I Neutral responded.  This was a lie.  I wanted to say Item damaged, seller not in UK, he’s a damn liar.  Lets face it its the only thing we can do if we choose to cos ebay do bugger all to help with liars when you report it. (based on my experience).

So now, we can give the seller the bad feedback they deserve when they lie and cheat and steal, as well as any legal reparations paypal may offer.

It’s evident in the feedback of my bad seller as people learn about it, the seller in question I dealt with now has more than double the amount of negative reviews in the last month and we are only half way through.  So as not to be totally biased about this chap here, he does have 98.4% rating, I’m just going to be interested to see how that changes when people learn about the policy.

Whilst trying to create a means of mapping my population data, I created a SQL statement to pull all the people out of the system grouped by outbound postcode.

But what I needed was to plot a circle bitmap dependant on the density.  I found some functions in T-SQl I’d not heard of before  rank() and dense_rank().

I used dense_rank() so rather than trying to deal with sets of numbers ranging from 1 to 109 I now had nicel grouped results from 1-34, the number of different types of density ranked in order.  This I used to calculate my ranges.   It helped when the top most range of density was massively different to all other values.  not much use in real populution density maps but really useful for what I needed which was a rough idea of where people where in general numbers.

Without the ranking I had lots of single pixel dots and 3 large 7 pixel blobs, not really representative of the data I wanted to portray, and there is the trick isn’t it, when plotting data like this you know what you think it should look like in your own mind, this is a sql tool that can help you quickly organise that data.

As you may have read I have been playing with GIS data.  Much of the sample data I have to play with is broken down by postcode.  Which makes life really simple, here for example is a map of the number of aardvark owners in a particular region plotted by registered aardvark club houses.  This map lets the club owners see the current club houses and distribution of people by postcode.  This way they could see if they need to site a new clubhouse or the effects of moving one.

I had a list of all  (most at least) the UK postcode sectors by lat/long.  My member data was by partial postcode. So the first thing I had to do was modify my matching postcode data to fit with my people data.   I did this by creating a new table of larger postcode areas and an average centre point for that new location.

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In my last post I found some great algorithms and libraries for calculating distances between two points.  I used it to update some archaic data listing adjacent postcodes.

With these algorithms and some online services that are now available it should be quite simple to create your own, “find my nearest store”, type service in your own websites/apps.  So here is how I plan to do it.

For ease of reference I’m going to talk about finding people instead of stores and it explores more avenues than a fixed number of stores and searching through large datasets for geo data.  Also SQL Server 2005 can do spatial searches and here is the article on doing it, it is probably really fast, but I didn’t have time to get my head around some of the complex topics discussed here, and sometimes its just fun to code it.

The system in question stores members details. They store, amongst other data, their address, postcode,zip code and work place.  Then they search the system for other members nearby who they can share a care journey with to a common destination, work.

Now trying to mathematically find the distance between 12 Arcadia Ave, Coventry and 26 The Oaks, Little Bottom isn’t possible.  So all this hinges on being able to get a mathematical representation of their location, this is the WGS84 co-ordinate system, decimal lat/long to you and me.

Imagine that you capture the address, you need to get hold of the lat/long info.  Thanks to the many API’s out their for mapping this is close at hand *. 

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A long time ago, before Google maps and live maps there was street map but no API, I wrote an car share application.  It was done in conjunction with a 3rd party who hardware bit. It logged data and awarded points for environmentally friendly travel.  That data fed into the membership system via web services.

The web based membership system interfaced with the identity system and people registered with this system and stored they type of travel they used and there outbound UK postcode.

We needed a way in this system for people to find other car sharers, so as public geodata was in its infancy and very expensive, it was done by adjacent postcodes.  A SQL table stored the adjacent postcodes for another postcode

e.g.

The full post code might be CV5 8FG  (I made this up)

I would store

CV5   CV5

CV5    CV6

CV6    CV5

CV6    CV6

And so on.

As the system grew and more sites came online, the search capability did not service the new sites for finding a car sharer as no one took responsibility for adding new postcodes and budget of course and ignorance of what needed to be done.

Yesterday I figured out that there must be some data somewhere that can help.

Well that proves hard as I have no budget and no time.

Unlike the United States our data is not free, you have the great USGS who recognise as they are funded by the public the data is in the public domain.  In the UK we have Ordnance Survey, a great organisation, but like all UK organisations, private and public alike they charge for pretty much everything, so us UK tax payers pay twice for all our data.  Likewise Postcode information was created by a public organisation, the Post Office, and whilst private now, does and always has charged for Postcode information.

I scoured the interweb for some information and eventually found a great little site, www.nearby.org.uk.  On this site he has a webservice for postcodes and location information in WGS84 format.  This is great, but even better for my purposes was the raw data available as a download !

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