America

Why I hope there’s a SOPA v2

chris — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:00:59 +0000

The purpose of having a blog, as we all know, is to complain about stuff in an acerbic fashion without proposing solutions. Today, we’re going to talk about SOPA.

SOPA, as we all know, is a bill going through the the House of Representatives in the United States right now. It is intended to stop online plagiarism of intellectual property of various sorts, and proposes implementing this by allowing the police to delete Wikipedia, shoot internet service providers on sight, and detain potential suspects without trial indefinitely. No, wait, that was something else. Well, you get the general idea. It’s not a very well thought-through bill and I hope it fails.

SOPA inspires me to become grumpy about two things. Firstly, I’ve heard several times that this bill is being forced through by the film industry, who are incapable of waking up to a reality of digital distribution. And, of course, Viacom, Warner Brothers et cetera are all supporters of SOPA. It’s certainly true that these companies stand to make money if SOPA passes. But the list of companies that oppose SOPA isn’t a list of companies that have the best interests of the glorious internet close to their cute little altruistic hearts. It’s just an equivalent list of organisations that will lose money if this passes. It’s the companies who’ll have to spend a ton of money vetting user content, screening their output and adding infrastructure for reporting and monitoring. Facebook, Microsoft, Google, et al. The fact that some of these companies had the muscle to black out a chunk of the internet on January 18th is something of a confusing message, but I think we should disregard the corporate sponsors on either side and think about the bill itself.

The second thing I’m grumpy about is the fact that there’s far too much online piracy, and the death of this bill will probably mean the continuation of that. People justify ripping off films, music and software because they’re just taking it from a big company and they’re all bastards anyway. And I can see why that justification is socially acceptable most of the time. But this rampant stealing from “the man” has left people my age with a similar disdain for intellectual property rights in general. How many of us have needed a picture of two rabbits having sex for a work presentation, Googled “rabbits having sex“, taken the first image and stuck it in the presentation? Sure, it probably belonged to someone and they had some blah on their site about attribution but it’s only a presentation and, hey, they put it on the internet for heaven’s sake, what do they expect? My generation is habitually stealing this sort of content with only the merest hint of shame.

What I only really realised this week is that people younger than me are doing this with no idea that it could actually be wrong.

My friend Doug takes pretty nice photos. He doesn’t do it professionally, and he states on his web page that you can use his photos for noncommercial purposes as long as you give attribution, and should contact him for commercial use. He’s a nice sort of a chap. I suspect his total income from this has been less than the price of a nice lens. Doug doesn’t go off looking for stolen copies of his photos, but he’s a good enough photographer that he or his fans regularly just come across them.

Imma boop your intellectual property rights

Doug’s most stolen photograph is probably this one. It was turned into this by a gentleman, who unashamedly added a copyright message for himself and then posted it all over the internet. This week it was posted on one of those “funny thing every day” Facebook pages – Doug spotted it, and pointed out that it was his stolen picture. The usual mixture of YouTube-style comments (from both sides) followed, but what really struck me was a comment from the original poster who was incredulous that someone could be so “up-tight” about “A FUNNY PICTURE POSTED ON THE INTERNET”. This hit a raw nerve for me – I was kind of okay with us having a society that ripped off each other’s internet content the whole time, but we’re breeding a society that has no awareness that this is even wrong.

Ten years ago or so, I used to occasionally search for plagiarised versions of my own web site. I’d send them an email asking them to link to my actual site as well, and they’d normally reply saying they were happy to. I thought I’d have another look today, so I searched for a reasonably distinctive phrase which appears in my definition of “bollocks”. Rather disappointingly, my own site is the third result after copy-pasted versions on The Urban Dictionary and DictionarySlang.com. Other highlights were a Facebook page which seems to consist of nothing other than unattributed chunks of my book, several copy-pastes of swathes of my site content and the rather glorious version of my entire paper book that the Chinese search engine Baidu has, complete with a handy reader app, some colour added and “Mr_doody2004@yahoo.com” carefully written in the footer. Sorry to disappoint, ladies, but this is not my email address.

Shall I mail all these people asking them to attribute me? Probably not, because there’s every chance these days that these are people who are genuinely unaware of such a thing as copyright (well, except for Baidu). If I did this now I’d probably get incredulous replies wondering why on earth I’d try to shut down funny stuff posted on the internet.

People ripping off Doug’s photos and my book doesn’t really make a difference to the world. Although we both make a little money from our enterprises, we’re not trying to make an income and we’d both still do it if there was no money at all. But what about my sister, Joanna, who is trying to start a career as a professional photographer? What about my friend Nick, who makes a living writing online Excel training?

As I mentioned towards the beginning, I have no solution to this problem. Maybe it’s not SOPA, but we need something to teach our kids that going to a web site and hitting Ctrl-C is the same as going to the library, selecting a book, taking it home and starting typing from it verbatim.

The ten best track cars, chosen by a spreadsheet

chris — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:18:42 +0000

I’ve often wondered how successfully one could choose a car by looking purely at numbers, and nothing else. So, without further ado, here’s my list of the best road cars to drive on a race track, as declared by my spreadsheet.

Position	Car
1st	Tesla Roadster Sport
2nd	Porsche Cayman R
3rd	Lamborghini Gallardo Coupe LP 570-4 Superleggera
4th	Ferrari 430 Scuderia
5th	Porsche 911 GT3 RS 4.0 Coupe
6th	Audi TT Coupe
7th	Audi R8 GT
8th	Aston Martin V8 Vantage S Coupé
9th	Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG
10th	Audi S4 Sedan 3.0

Okay, there you go. That’s that decided. Now, should you be interested, here’s how I got to this list.

I downloaded the textfile version of Freebase’s automotive data
I loaded it into Excel. I am now looking at 23, 812 cars
I filtered out all the automatic transmissions – down to 6392 cars (presumably this data is somewhat skewed towards America)
I filtered out the front-wheel drive cars – down to 5312
I filtered for 0-60 times of less than 6 seconds – down to 355
I took the lightest ten by curb weight

Here’s the list I had at this point:

2010 Tesla Roadster Sport
2010 Tesla Roadster
2011 Tesla Roadster Sport 2.5
2011 Tesla Roadster 2.5
2011 Porsche Boxster Spyder
2011 Porsche Cayman R
2011 Porsche Boxster Spyder AT
2011 Porsche Cayman R AT
2011 Porsche Cayman
2011 Porsche Boxster

The list is actually fairly reasonable, although unfortunately it’s not very exciting, because it only contains cars from two manufacturers, and a limited set of models at that. So for each car model we’ll take only the lightest, because they make the best racing cars anyway. This cuts my list down to:

2010 Tesla Roadster Sport
2011 Porsche Boxster Spyder
2011 Porsche Cayman R
2011 Lamborghini Gallardo Coupe LP 570-4 Superleggera
2008 Ferrari 430 Scuderia
2011 Porsche 911 GT3 RS 4.0 Coupe
2012 Audi TT Coupe
2011 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 Cabriolet
2012 Audi R8 GT
2010 Nissan 370Z Roadster

The only problem with this new list is the presence of the convertibles. Without trying to get into mud-slinging here, it’s a fairly well-established fact that convertibles don’t have great structural rigidity and so the hardtop version of a given car will normally race better than the convertible. It’s certainly true that when a car has both convertible and hardtop versions, the manufacturer does not tend to race the convertible. Fortunately there are no rag-tops here without a hardtop equivalent, so I didn’t feel too guilty when I filtered out the convertibles manually, leaving me the list at the top of the article.

Obviously this system of selecting cars isn’t perfect, but there are a few caveats beyond even that in this specific data set. The Freebase database has hardly any weights for cars more than two or three years old, and the acceleration figures are missing for many. I’d love to have included some other factors (lap times; weight distribution; price) but these things aren’t present in the data set.

The exercise did teach me a few things, though. First off, Aston Martins and AMGs aren’t quite as fat as I thought they were, and neither is the Tesla roadster, despite all those batteries. Next was the heavy presence of Audis, which aren’t really known as especially wonderful track cars, and the entire lack of BMW, which are (the M3 fell just short of the top ten). And the complete lack of my own car (but hey, maybe this shows I’m unbiased).

Ah well. It turns out there’s more to cars than numbers. But you knew that.

Want to do your own filtering? Download my spreadsheet and play away.

Mind the bollocks: A quiz about Britain

chris — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 20:28:43 +0000

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Many people have asked me whether I have ever written a quiz about Britain, to go along with my horrible book. Well, actually, only one person. No matter. I have now written a quiz.

Oh yes, I know you're sitting thinking "I don't have time for this nonsense". But, let's be honest, you're sitting at work, and what you're working on is so late that, frankly, ten minutes isn't going to save it.

If you get answers wrong, you can try them again (but you'll get fewer points).

Start

Congratulations - you have completed this terrible quiz, and wasted another fifteen minutes in the office.

You scored %%PERCENTAGE%%.

Perhaps the most logical thing to do now is find some more details about the book you hopefully have in the back of your mind. Or visit the web site, where most of the book's contents are available free of charge anyway. Bugger. I knew there was some reason I didn't make any money from this.

Your answers are highlighted below.

Question 1

Which side of the road do the British drive on?

	Left
	Right Hint: Almost. But given that there are only two answers, also kind of crap

Question 1 Explanation:

They sit on the right side of the car, but they drive on the left side of the road. At least, most of them do.

Question 2

The legal age for purchasing alcohol in the UK is:

	16 Hint: In a way, but not what I was looking for
	18
	21 Hint: What sort of a civilised country would have that?
	25

Question 2 Explanation:

You can drink with a meal at sixteen when your parents are present, but you have to wait until you're eighteen to collapse face-down in puke in a bar. Good things come to those who wait.

Question 3

Politically, Northern Ireland is:

	Part of Ireland Hint: There are places you'd get strung up for that
	Part of the United Kingdom
	Part of Great Britain Hint: There are places you'd get strung up for that
	An independent state Hint: There are places you'd get strung up for that

Question 3 Explanation:

Although a part of the Ireland land mass, Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom state.

Question 4

The British Prime Minister is:

	Gordon Brown Hint: Cast your mind a bit less far back...
	Tony Blair Hint: Cast your mind a bit less far back...
	Her Majesty the Queen
	David Cameron

Question 5

The legendary Scottish dish, “haggis”, is primarily made from:

	The intestines of a sheep
	The vomit of a cow Hint: I'm never eating at your place
	The gizzard of an Englishman Hint: I wish...
	The bowel of a pig
	All of the above Hint: I'm never eating at your place

Question 5 Explanation:

Like every other country, Scotland has its share of delicacies from a time many hundreds of years ago when subsistence farming was the best we could do and all we had to eat was dog poo and grass. Unlike every other country, Scotland didn't come up with any replacement dishes in the intervening centuries.

Question 6

To a Brit, “fanny” is:

	A lady’s front bottom
	An old-fashioned girl’s name
	One’s posterior
	A and B
	B and C
	A, B and C Hint: This may cause more confusion than any normal society could bear.

Question 6 Explanation:

From The Septic's Companion a competitively-priced guide to the life, language and culture of the United Kingdom:

fanny: n female genitalia. This is another word which could leave you abroad and in dire straits. In the U.S., your fanny is your posterior and a “fanny pack” is what Brits decided to call a “bum bag” instead. There’s a neoprene belt sold in the U.S. that is designed to stop snow from entering your ski jacket during a fall. It is marketed under the name “Fanny Flaps.” It is not for sale in the U.K.

Question 7

What is the primary official function of the House of Lords?

	To write laws
	To double-check laws written by the House of Commons
	To represent the Queen in parliamentary discussions
	To allow elderly people somewhere comfortable to sleep Hint: I said "official"

Question 7 Explanation:

The House of Lords is intended to be the emergency escape valve of democracy in the United Kingdom in the same way as guns are in the United States. Difficult to tell which one works better, but guns probably work faster.

Question 8

British people measure their own weights in:

	kilograms Hint: What is this? The twenty-first century?
	pounds and ounces Hint: Sadly this is one instance where the Brits are even more backwards than the Americans
	hundredweight
	stones

Question 8 Explanation:

Although Britain is on the metric system for almost everything else, human weight is still measured in stones. One stone is fourteen pounds, although pounds aren't used in the UK any more, making stones effectively indivisible.

Question 9

British road signs show distances in:

	Miles for large distances, yards for small ones Hint: Perhaps once, but not any more...
	Kilometres for large distances, metres for small ones
	Miles for large distances, metres for small ones
	Kilometres for large distances, yards for small ones

Question 9 Explanation:

What else could possibly make sense?

Question 10

If you order a beer in the UK, it will be:

	One pint (16oz) Hint: Sadly that's not the size of a British pint
	Half a litre
	One litre
	One pint (20oz)

Question 10 Explanation:

Sure, Britain's metric, but you can't take away the pint.

Question 11

When you walk into a building in the UK, you:

	Are on the first floor
	Are on the ground floor
	Are on the second floor
	Have broken your nose Hint: Come on. Take this seriously. But hey, I bet you're at work anyway

Question 11 Explanation:

In the UK, the first floor is the one above street level. The first two-floor buildings were extensions to original buildings, and so at the time it seemed logical to only number the extension floors.

Question 12

The southernmost point on the British mainland is called:

	Land’s End Hint: This is the westernmost, not the southernmost
	John O’Groats Hint: Close - that's the northernmost
	The Point of Good Hope
	Lizard Point

Question 12 Explanation:

So called because... hmm... your guess is as good as mine.

Question 13

If a British person told you he could “murder a fag”, would you:

	Put the oven on Hint: Let's not even go there
	Put the kettle on
	Take him to a convenience store
	Phone the police Hint: If you're a militant health activist, perhaps

Question 13 Explanation:

From The Septic's Companion a famous and yet well-priced work of literature:

fag: 1 n cigarette. In very widespread use. One of the most amusing emails I’ve had concerning this word was from an American who had arrived at her company’s U.K. offices to be told that the person she was looking for was “outside blowing a fag.”

Question 14

What is a minger?

	A collector of Chinese pottery Hint: I like your thinking. But not enough
	A football goal scored on a rebound
	An unattractive woman

Question 14 Explanation:

From The Septic's Companion a seemingly familiar book:

minger: adj. pron. “ming-er” someone breathtakingly unattractive: She looked okay when we were in the bar, but when I woke up the next morning it turned out she was a complete minger. On fire and put out with a shovel, that sort of thing.

Question 15

A good way of cheating at the game of Conkers involves:

	A prosthetic leg
	Green paint
	A bag of sand
	Wood varnish

Question 15 Explanation:

From that bloody book again:

conkers: n a game in which two combatants, each armed with the nut-shaped seed of a horse chestnut tree on a string, take turns to whack the opponent's nut with theirs until one breaks. Yes, it's a little odd. Yes, there is very little skill involved. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Question 16

A friend’s mother asks if you’d like to have Spotted Dick. Do you:

	Get ready at the dinner table
	Take your shirt off Hint: Always an option, but not the one we were looking for.
	Pull out your medical records
	Politely decline Hint: Decline your friend's mother?! Have you no manners?

Question 16 Explanation:

spotted dick: n a suet pudding with raisins in it, often served on festive occasions and with custard. And yes, the Brits do use “dick” to mean the same thing Americans do.

Question 17

A friend’s mother asks if you’d like to have a shag. Do you:

	Get ready at the dinner table Hint: Not impossible, but not what I was looking for
	Take your shirt off Hint: It's your friend's mother, for heaven's sake. Have you no decency?
	Pull out your medical records Hint: It's your friend's mother, for heaven's sake. Have you no decency?
	Politely decline

Question 17 Explanation:

shag: 1 v lay (sexual). Usually refers to the act of intercourse itself, except when used by a bloke giving his mates the details about what happened with that tidy bird he pulled in the club the night before. In this case, the term shag should be interpreted to mean anything between a peck on the cheek and a punch in the face. Brits find very amusing the use of the word “shag” in the U.S. to refer to certain dances.

Question 18

How does one pronounce the word “water”?

	Waw-turr
	Wodder Hint: You're American, right?
	Wodr Hint: You're from the south, right?
	W’r Hint: You're from the deep south, right?

Question 18 Explanation:

No reference to book, but don't worry. There will be more.

Question 19

Snogging is best performed:

	By yourself Hint: If it were possible, this might be nice. But I'm thinking it's not
	With a friend
	With family Hint: This is a family quiz, geared at not that sort of family

Question 19 Explanation:

snog: v make out; French kiss: I had a couple too many beers and ended up snogging the bouncer.

Question 20

On what date do the British celebrate the 4^th of July?

	4/7 Hint: This wasn't the type of question you thought it was
	7/4
	They don’t celebrate the 4th of July

Question 20 Explanation:

Although the Brits are very pleased to be rid of the Americans, they don't celebrate it annually

Question 21

When was the British constitution signed?

	1215 Hint: This year saw the signing of the Magna Carta (which somewhat limited the monarch's privileges), but not the signing of a constitution
	1666 Hint: This year saw the Battle of Hastings. Some arrows chucked but nothing important signed
	1707 Hint: This year saw the signing of the Act of Union, which unified Scotland and England. No signing of no consitutions, though...
	There is no British constitution
	It's still waiting on the House of Lords to ratify it Hint: This is the second-best answer, but not the best.

Question 21 Explanation:

Although the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy, the constitution is not codified.

Question 22

When did England and Scotland formally unite?

	1215 Hint: This year saw the signing of the Magna Carta (which somewhat limited the monarch's privileges), but no unions
	1066 Hint: This year saw the Battle of Hastings. Some arrows chucked but nothing important signed
	1707
	They didn’t, they are technically still at war Hint: You've been watching too many football matches

Question 22 Explanation:

As Winston Churchill once said, Scotland and England are "two nations divided by a common language". Or was it George Bernard Shaw. And he might have been talking about some other country.

Question 23

In a pub, one should traditionally tip:

	Tip?! In a pub?! Are you crackers?
	£1 per drink
	£0.50 per drink
	10%

Question 23 Explanation:

Money left on a bar in a UK pub will be mistaken for an accident and invariably stolen by another patron or returned.

Question 24

You ask a Brit the time, and she replies “half nine”. Is the time:

	8:30
	4:30 Hint: In your mind exists a society so strange it may even be interesting
	9:00
	9:30

Question 24 Explanation:

Can't think of anything witty. It's a time of day, for heaven's sake.

Question 25

When driving on the motorway in your car, you see the following sign: This means the speed limit:

	Is 60mph
	Is 70mph
	Does not apply Hint: Probably for the best that you read this before going to the UK. Wait, you live there?!
	Only applies in wet weather

Question 25 Explanation:

Technically it means "national speed limit applies", but this is 70mph on motorways. The reason it doesn't just say "70mph" is because until 1965 there was no national speed limit, and the sign meant "go for it". And, well, signs are expensive.

Question 26

A good way to learn about the United Kingdom is:

	Invade it
	Have an affair with a British person
	Have an affair whilst pretending to be a British person
	Buy a copy of The Septic's Companion, a competitively-priced guide to the life, language and culture of the United Kingdom
	Any of the above

Question 26 Explanation:

They're all good, I'd say, so no points for this question. Of course, we each have our opinions as to the best.

Once you are finished, click the button below. Any items you have not completed will be marked incorrect. Get Results

There are 26 questions to complete.

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Flickr Explore photo now up

chris — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 06:52:17 +0000

As promised, I am going to get a photo on Explore. This, my friends, is that photo. Here goes nothing.

Click the photo to view on Flickr.

Pictures of funny things from my phone

chris — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 02:33:40 +0000

Like any other mobile phone owner, I occasionally take photographs of things that I find amusing. Often, like other irritating pedants, these are linguistic mistakes. More often than not, they involve things in quotations. These just languish on my phone… when I get a new phone, I copy them to it, and then they languish there instead. Occasionally after a few beers I get into one of those “everyone show each other the funny pictures from their phone” sessions, which is the only time they get an outing. Well, not now. Now I’m giving them to the world!

And, well, here they all are. They’re from a mixture of countries and date back to 2000 or so. Perhaps I’ll start a brand new collection, and blog about that in 2020.

There's cost cutting, and there's cost cutting.

For when the police coffers get low.

When autocorrect doesn't help.

It's like beer, but without the uncomfortable wetness.

The most important thing about goals is that they're attainable.

Honesty is the best policy.

No coming in here unless you have permission from the managing director! Or some excuse.

This never normally happens...

If you have to ask what's in the grog, you don't want the grog.

Sore cock? Try some nice wine.

When picking a web site URL, make sure it works in all variants of English.

A straightforward misunderstanding, I think.

It's on us!

For when you've had one of those days.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel, but I still "love" it.

A bag for my paintbrush? Yeah, sure, I'll take a bag. Oh.

45 days into the project, eight builders were fired.

Sure, you can cook. But can you name a restaurant?

Football scarves on sale on Basle, Switzerland. It's not so much who you support...

It wasn't so much a year as an emotion.

That’s all, folks. Get back to work.

A pledge to the world: I will get a photo on Flickr’s Explore by the end of the year

chris — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 03:09:51 +0000

Mount Rainier

As some of you know, I’ve recently started taking photos more enthusiastically. I’ve always been half-heartedly interested in this stuff, but eventually I bit the bullet and bought a Nikon D40 for $260 and a couple of lenses for another $400. Those of you who have already looked at my photos will be aware that they’re not, by and large, very good. Hey. I’d probably have spent the money on beer otherwise.

Honda S2000 at Pacific Raceways

One of the more fun things about getting involved in photos has been getting involved in Flickr. Whenever I look at my photos on Flickr I can see how many views they have had, who added them as favourites, et cetera. As always with new hobbies (or dental mouth guards), I discovered that everyone I knew was already doing this Flickr thing.

Moorgate tube station

And what was the great achievement that a Flickr photographer should aspire to? Ahah! That will be getting on “Explore“. Explore is a collection of the most interesting photos on Flickr – they take a thousand per day, I believe. The picking algorithm is kept a closely-guarded secret by Flickr staff. Of all my photography-enthusiast chums, I believe only two of them (Dougerino and AlexBrn) have gotten a photo onto Explore. There’s no way, therefore, that I am going to get into Explore by using my raw photography talent.

I decided, instead, to work out what the algorithm was. That seems like something I’d be better at. Well, after nothing more scientific than a couple of hours of buggering about refreshing the Explore page, I can officially announce here that I’ve got it sorted out. I am going to go out and deliberately take a picture that will get on Explore. I even have a pencil drawing of a couple of possible variants, and a prop set aside.

Why haven’t I done it yet? Well, obviously I wanted to make the prediction first, dimmy, as it otherwise wouldn’t make any sense.

Also I am not going to take it until the end of October, when I will have two more required props at hand. I will post this photo on Flickr sometime around the 5th of November, after which it will get into Explore. If it’s not in by the end of the year, I will be willing to call this prediction a failure.

More to come, of course, but the gauntlet is laid down. It’s on, Flickr. It’s on.

Free books for Facebook fans!

chris — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 03:12:08 +0000

The sun has arrived here in Seattle, and I spent some time out in it this evening. Why do you care? Well, the heady combination of that and the beer I just drank has driven me to introduce a scheme that cannot possibly do me any good at all.

Every month, I am going to give away a book to a Facebook fan chosen at random. The first random drawing will be this Saturday evening (July 10th). You have until then to become a fan, and you may get a free book! In fact this particular month it’s even better than that, because I’ll give away two books if the fan count is more than 1,000 when I do the drawing (it’s 988 right now).

Of course, if you become a fan after that, you might get a free book the following month. If you do not become a fan at all, you will probably not get a free book. The rules are quite simple. All you have to do is go to the Septic’s Companion Fan Page on Facebook and click “like” or “become a fan” or whatever Facebook have decided the button is this week. Good luck!

No more nonsense from my .com here

chris — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 03:53:59 +0000

Spurred on by the news that Apple is now bigger than Microsoft, I’m going to invest some time in doing more blogging for my fledgeling nest-egg, Beta Minus. I’ve started a blog on http://betaminus.com/, and migrated a couple of posts I had here about mobile app sales. Just to tempt you over there, I’ve written a brand new post about using my Proximity app whilst skiing.

I’ll try and keep this blog for things marginally more funny. Once I think of them…

Review of the Cotton Carrier camera harness

chris — Tue, 25 May 2010 04:57:58 +0000

I did say a while back that this blog would become somewhat random. Well, now I’m posting a review of a harness with which one can carry a camera. Variety, they say, is the spice of life.

I recently bought my first digital SLR camera, a Nikon D40. At the weekends I often climb up mountains, so it seems sensible that I use my nice new camera to take pictures of those mountains. As far as carrying a large camera up mountains goes, you have two options:

Leave it in your pack all the way up there and back again
Swear at it continually until you revert to option (1).

Enter the Cotton Carrier.

Simply put, The Cotton Carrier is a harness that straps over your chest and allows you to carry a large camera as though it was bolted to your chest. The unit has a sturdy plate which sits on your chest, and the camera attaches to that plate via a small mount that goes in the threaded tripod attachment on the camera. The camera is attached to the mount by turning it to face left and then sliding it into a groove – it cannot then be removed from the mount without turning it ninety degrees and sliding it upward, therefore making it unlikely (but not impossible) that you’ll disengage your camera from the mount by mistake. The device was created by Andy Cotton, a landscape photographer, and it’s described a lot better in Andy’s own introductory video on his web site.

I heard about this system from my boss, Doug – after explaining the whole concept to me he was then inspired to go out and buy one himself. It arrived on Thursday, and rather generously he lent it to me immediately so I could take it on my backpacking trip down the side of Lake Chelan that weekend. This I duly did, and here are my thoughts about the device. I ought to point out that Doug, being a man of great means, purchased the $170 complete system, but the parts that I am reviewing really just represent the $99 camera vest for regular cameras. The complete system has attachments for a secondary camera, bottle opener, lightning conductor, divining rod et cetera. Neither of these systems are cheap, so let’s hope it’s good!

Okay, it’s good. I was never an expert at suspense.

Putting on the harness was pretty simple and after a few experiments I found a height that works well for me on my chest. After you’ve done it a few times, taking the camera out of the carrier becomes almost instinctive. Once it’s out, it seems to magically end up exactly in the right place to take a picture – you can have the camera out of the carrier, take a photo and put it back in within a few seconds. It fits solidly into the mount so there’s never any doubt whether you’ve got it successfully in or not.

Historically I’ve always taken a point-and-shoot camera in my trouser pocket where it’s nice and accessible – carrying the SLR on the Cotton Carrier actually made it much simpler to take photos on the spur of the moment, especially given the extra power-on time that my compact camera seems to need. At one point, one of my backpacking companions leaned over and grabbed my SLR from my chest mount because he didn’t have the time to take his own compact camera from his pocket. It’s amazing the times when a handy pocket is actually not handy at all.

Alright, I think I’ve gushed about this enough now, so I’ll analyse a couple of details. First off, the way in which the camera is mounted to the stand. This is done via a small machined button – I’m please that it’s not heavy, but it does mean that the camera doesn’t sit level any more when you put it down on a table. The only real annoyance here is that it’s hard to take long exposure shots without actually using a tripod – I’m used to just sitting the camera on a rock, and it’s tricky to do that with the button on the bottom. The button comes off easily with the tool provided – it would be great if either the button was a little wider (so the camera could sit flat on it) or the tool could easily be attached to the harness itself (because, umm, I left it in the car). The slot to unscrew the button is pretty generic and the button could easily be removed with a coin or some other similar object, but I stopped short of this one given that the harness belonged to my boss and it might be a bit difficult to explain on Monday exactly what I had been trying to do with his brand new piece of camera equipment and a bent spork.

I was concerned that wearing the harness all day would make both it and me somewhat sweaty – somehow, this didn’t happen but I’m not exactly sure why. The carrier is made of some sort of mesh – Mr Cotton, I don’t know what this is or how it works, but please keep making it that way. Somehow, my rucksack straps ended up soaked, but the carrier did not.

On the subject of rucksacks, the carrier can easily be worn at the same time as a large pack. As you can see from the photos, I was carrying somewhere around 20kgs of stuff in a 70 litre pack and the carrier fitted fine underneath. The shoulder straps are wide enough that they cause almost no discomfort, although if I had to choose I’d have them wider rather than narrower, as that would mean the backpack sat entirely on them which I think would be even better. The carrier was sitting high enough on my chest that the chest strap sat just above the waist straps on my rucksack, so this worked ideally. I could easily have worn a climbing harness as well, and the carrier wouldn’t have got in the way.

Any minus points? Well, I jotted down a couple. However, I’m very much convinced that the positioning the Cotton Carrier uses is precisely the correct place to carry a camera, and some of my gripes are around this. Firstly, I was using a water-bladder inside my rucksack to drink from – the problem with this is that you’re drinking water from a spout directly above the back of your camera so you have to be a little careful not to cheerfully pour a torrent on top of the thing. The solution to this one is, I think, just to drink more carefully. Secondly, it would be inadvisable to keep the neck strap on the camera when using the carrier unless you were going to also put it around your neck as an emergency measure – there’s a reasonable chance it would slip down and you’d end up putting a knee through it when climbing steep terrain. Again, not sure of the solution – the carrier itself comes with a “jesus strap” that you can attach to the harness, so the right answer here is probably just to embrace that, and ditch the old neck strap.

Overall, this is a superb piece of gear – as you know, I don’t make a habit of writing equipment reviews on this blog but I was so impressed with this harness that I felt I ought to write something. I was approached by two people during the backpacking trip asking me what it was and where I’d got it, and my backpacking chum told me he was sorely tempted to buy one because right now his $1000 DSLR camera was largely worthless, gathering dust in his basement. I’m amazed that this device isn’t an open secret in the climbing community, but it isn’t – I’ll certainly be doing my best to remedy that, and I hope Mr Cotton continues innovating because he’s onto the right thing.

Now to persuade the wife…

Making usable reports of Windows Mobile Marketplace sales

chris — Fri, 07 May 2010 17:57:40 +0000

[Note: On 2010-05-07 I moved this to its new home on my business blog. Comments are enabled on the migrated post.]

As I mentioned in my last post, I am currently selling two apps on the Windows Mobile Marketplace. These are Carlos (an app intended to remind you where you put the car) and Proximity (a location-triggered alarm and notification system). My previous post detailed the sales I’m currently getting for those apps – I’ll post an update on those numbers at some point, but this post is about how I got those figures into a nice chart.

You can say many things about the Windows Mobile Marketplace, but if you’re an app vendor then one of them will probably not be a long treatise on how wonderful their sales reporting system is. Their primary reporting output is a mysterious “Fulfillment report” XML file that turns out to be SpreadsheetML, the ISO 29500 file format used by Excel. Oddly enough this crosses over into my day job, but enough of that. Here’s how to turn that file into something useful, using Excel.

Using the Template

Download my template reporting spreadsheet, mobileappsalestemplate.xlsm.

Open it in Excel. Enable macros.

Request and download a “fulfillment report” from the Windows Mobile Marketplace developer page:

Leave the report set to All Markets, All OS, All Platforms and choose “90 days” as the time period.

The report downloads as a ZIP file containing two XML files - save FulfillmentReport.xml and use File/Open to open it in the same copy of Excel that your reporting workbook is in and enable editing (if you open it in a new copy you’ll get a VBA error when you try to import the data).

Now you need to add your products. FulfillmentReport.xml has a “SKU detail” tab – copy and paste that data into the same tab of the template sheet. You have to repeat this step whenever your SKUs change (usually when you add a new product, or issue an update).

Now, save the reporting sheet somewhere. It’s going to keep a hold of more history than the Marketplace does.

Without closing the FulfillmentReport.xml workbook, go onto the “Consolidated Purchase History” tab of my template. There’s a button on the right hand side of the table - click this. It will import the fulfillment data from the FulfillmentReport.xml you currently have open, and put it onto the Purchase History tab. It will not import any history that’s already been stored in the template, so it’s fine to just keep requesting 90-day histories from the Marketplace and importing them over the old data. Unless I screwed up the VBA, of course. The VBA is dog-slow - it could take ten minutes for the first import. Yes, I could certainly speed it up. And no, I can’t be bothered. If you do, I’ll be pleased to use yours instead!

Once the import is finished, the yellow columns in this sheet should populate with the right product names – you have all your data now, you’re ready to report on it!

On the sheet imaginatively called “A Chart”, you’ll see that I have the data for the chart I used in my previous blog post. The data on the left is simply to aggregate sales by day. You’ll have to replace my product names in row 1 with yours before you see any data. I was using it to track two products – you can change the chart range if you want to track a different number. You can also create Pivot Tables based upon the data on the Consolidated Purchase History sheet, or add new charts, or what have you.

This is not intended to be a glitzy boxed solution. It’s something I’ve been using myself so there’s not really any error handling and there are all sorts of things hard-coded around the place. If you’re not very familiar with Excel, it’s going to be tricky to use. That said, if you make any improvements to the sheet I’d love to see them (feel free to link them in comments here) and I’ll also post an update if I make a newer version.

Back on my original topic, an interesting switch appears to be happening in my sales figures, so I’ll post updated sales figures for my apps in a month or so. If anyone comes up with a nifty new version of this spreadsheet, I’ll be delighted to do so using that!