Basically, it lets you set simple programming tasks for developers, which they can perform online and in the language of their or your choice, and then sends you a report of how their code performed against a variety of edge cases, for large datasets, etc. If you’re a programmer, try out the demo – I found it quite fun!

I think there is real value in this in a couple of areas, beyond its obvious use to those hiring developers. Firstly, as a way for teachers of programming to set coursework. And secondly as something that would give recruitment agencies a bit more credibility when they’re bombarding me with spam. I would be much more likely to look at their candidates if I knew they had gone through a preliminary level of filtering, especially if they had completed tasks in more than one programming language.

Anyway, very nicely done – worth checking out.

Just around the corner from my house, where the footpath from Cambridge to Grantchester begins, is Skaters’ Meadow. In the 19th century, the meadow would flood, freeze, and people would pay a penny or two to skate around the lamppost in the middle (which you can just see if you click it and look at the larger versions on Flickr).

These days, it’s managed as a nature reserve, and is no good for skating, partly because the winters aren’t cold enough any more, but mostly because it very seldom floods. So I snapped this picture after some heavy rain last week; it’s the nearest I’ve yet seen it come to being a skating rink again. There was a little ice around the edges…

Wouldn’t it make a great setting for a story, though?

On wintry nights, it is said that the ghosts of skaters past can sometimes still be glimpsed, twirling under the lamppost in the moonlight. The most beautiful, and the most graceful of all, is young Annie Crompton, a maid at one of the great houses nearby, who mourns the loss of her love, an adventurous lad who skated too far out onto the River Cam, fell through the ice and drowned. She circles endlessly, awaiting his return…

More photos of the meadows here.

Well, as tends to happen in the digital world, what was a still image yesterday is a video today. Sam O’Hare has done a day in the life of New York City using a similar technique. Worth playing in full-screen HD if your connection will allow it.

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare.

More information about how he made it here.

It was launched a year ago, but these books come out first as a hardback and a ‘trade paperback’ – a large paperback almost as big as the hardback, sold chiefly in airports. Today, however, you can get a standard-sized, easy-to-read copy for the first time. I much prefer these, actually, to their bigger brothers.

You can buy it from Amazon UK here.

Of course, the really exciting event for us comes at the end of this month when The Mistaken Wife hits the streets.

More info on Rose’s books at RoseMelikan.com.

(The very pretty village of Yelling was on one of my weekend dog-walks.)

It turns any ordinary idea, product or service into an award-winning idea, product or service! Just like that!

Visit Awardify.com, the internet’s premier award-granting service!

OK, in case you’re wondering, this was partly to make people think more about meaningless marketing phrases, and partly to experiment with how quickly and easily I could something like this using Drupal!

So, for example, you can find out that, six months after graduation, Computer Scientists are paid more than Architects or Lawyers – hurrah! – but they’re more than twice as likely to be unemployed. On the other hand, over 8% of Law graduates are soon afterwards employed as ‘Sales Assistants and Retail Cashiers’ – that’s nearly as many as for History! Oxford graduates earn a bit more than Cambridge graduates, at least initially, but then I guess they need some kind of compensation.

The site raises lots of questions – but that’s a good thing – even if all it does is start discussions about what’s behind the numbers. For example, Oxford graduates earn less and are much more likely to be unemployed than graduates of the Open University, which might be surprising if you didn’t know that OU graduates are generally quite a bit older and often employed at the time they take their degrees. Even the numbers I quoted above need some interpretation. They refer to a point six months after graduation. So law graduates may be employed as cashiers, and earning less than their hacker contemporaries, but that is massively skewed by the fact that 6 months after graduation, lawyers are still qualifying – perhaps they’re paying their way with an evening job, or perhaps they didn’t get a place at law school and have a temporary job until next year.

The site could be a valuable educational experience in itself on how to interpret statistics. I hope that kids get that kind of education before looking at it. Otherwise they might become computer scientists under the mistaken impression that it’s a better-paid profession than law. Trust me…

My friend and colleague Garry has become something of a poster child for the project, as he has achieved an impressive career path from a rather disadvantaged background – so much so that he appeared in The Sun today – see the section on the right-hand side of this page.

This means that he has added to his list of achievements perhaps the greatest accomplishment yet: to appear in the Sun and yet emerge with your dignity intact!

We conclude that placebos should not be routinely prescribed on the NHS. The funding of homeopathic hospitals—hospitals that specialise in the administration of placebos—should not continue, and NHS doctors should not refer patients to homeopaths.

Lots more good stuff summarised on Andy Lewis’s site.

Lovely walk this morning around Landwade. No, I didn’t know where Landwade was, either.

Photos here, trail and photos here.

So its successor is the new Powershot S90, with which I’m quite delighted so far. It’s substantially smaller and lighter than the G9 – it will slip in my shirt pocket – and it shoots RAW, has a better sensor than the G9, and boasts an F2 lens, though it seems to have a greater depth of field than most F2s I’ve seen.

Definitely much more pocketable, and, in the words of Chase Jarvis, the best camera is the one that’s with you.

All in all, a very pleasing, if rather pricey, toy. The only thing I need to fix now is the rotten British weather this week, which has given me only the gloomiest light in which to play with it. You see, once a bad workman can no longer blame his tools, he has to resort to the failings of the climatic conditions… but I was quite pleased with my first few shots:

Nothing earth-shattering, but I could only manage a few shots before the factory charge on the battery expired, and I had to go home and unpack the charger!

Anyway, sitting in slow-moving traffic on the way back, I found myself behind a van which had on its back doors a list of bullet-points setting out the services that the company offers. I forget the details; it was an engineering company doing things like ‘high-speed diamond cutting’. But one service did stand out.

“Robotic Demolition”

Oh, boy – I’ve no idea what that is, but I really want to do it!

I don’t have children, but just imagine what it would be like as a school kid, when asked what your father does, to have that as the answer… instant playground admiration…

The big effort by spammers these days has gone up one level – they’re less concerned about getting humans to follow links than they are about getting search engines to do so. Email spam doesn’t help much with your Google juice, and I gather, young reader, that the youth of today doesn’t use email much anyway? So ‘comment spam’, where people try to get a more connected web presence by posting comments on all sorts of blogs and forums which include embedded links to their site, is today’s weapon of choice.

A common example arrived this morning – I wrote an article a while back about the Sony eBook reader and somebody tried to post a comment which seems banal enough: “Nice blog adding this to my twitter now”. The punctuation is somewhat sparse, but I can imagine many would be taken in by such a comment and allow it through – not noticing that the link associated with the name (which would appear on Status-Q), would take you to a commercial site. The rogues no longer try to put compelling advertising or even keywords in the message, they just try to make it inoffensive enough that site owners will allow it to be attached to pages with a relevant theme. It’s highly unlikely a user would click it, but search engines might well follow it and so form some conceptual link between eBooks and the originator’s accursed site.

Another example a couple of days ago said something like, ‘Great post – very useful. The page doesn’t finish loading correctly in Opera 9, though’. I might have been tempted to let this through or waste time investigating, if they hadn’t also tried to post a second comment on another page claiming, in the same format, that it didn’t load correctly in IE8…

This morning’s one, though, was yet one step further removed from the spam of old. It was spam linking to a site about SEO – search engine optimisation. (This is about helping search engines find your site when people do relevant searches, in the same way that advertising is of course about helping people to find your product even when they don’t know they want it yet.) What’s more, this post wasn’t even about SEO, but about books about SEO! A comment, on someone else’s page, pretending to be about twitter, and in fact linking search engines to a page about books about how you can get people who are searching for eBooks to find your site… How many levels of indirection can you get?

Of course, the fact that the author of the post was someone named ‘SEO eBook’ was a bit of a give away…