Alex Stanhope

When I do get round to film reviews, I thought it would be nice to be (legally) allowed to show some stills from the film with my review. I'm discovering that many of the big studios have dedicated PR sites that you can register and download preview content from.

Here's a shot from the latest 'Cars 2' movie:

Here's a batch file that executes a few cygwin (unix) commands from Windows.


@echo off
rem get (DOS) current working directory
set inputDir=%~dp0
rem change slash direction for cygwin
set result=%inputDir:\=/%
echo.Processing directory %result%
echo.
echo.DiSCO (php and js)
rem execute a cygwin script using bash
bash --login -c 'cd %result%; wc -l `find ../receiver/classes/DiSCO ../receiver/js/lib/DiSCO -name "*.php" -o -name "*.js"`;'
echo.
echo.WITO client (js)
bash --login -c 'cd %result%; wc -l `find ../receiver/js/global -name "*.php" -o -name "*.js"`;'
pause

I read a great blog post from Hasan Bakhshi at NESTA entitled Innovation policy through experimentation and commented:

I was asked recently to contribute some thoughts under the heading of "Transdisciplinary collaboration". How do you encourage two different communities of innovators to work together? Is there anything that collaborators can do to deliver better projects when working across sector boundaries?

For me the critical thing is translation. I believe:

• a single message for two communities doesn't work. We have to describe the challenge for each community in a language it understands;

I've just posted two pieces of very negative feedback here and here. Upon submitting the feedback I got a message saying:

"Thank you for your review of this item. It has been submitted for approval by our staff."

Recently I've been blighted by a minor network glitch that meant I couldn't file share from my Windows 7 laptop. I was convinced it was something to do with Windows Firewall, ESET NOD32 or even the ZyXel router. I downloaded the excellent Wireshark and used it to analyse the packets; lots of outgoing requests but nothing back from my server (miata). I could ping and transfer HTTP packets, but no file sharing.

The last few weeks of development have driven me to adopt some old technologies from my C days. I've got PHP setup with a debugger (Xdebug and the buggy Komodo IDE) and a profiler (Kcachegrind) under Windows (WAMP Server). Today I optimised one tiny part of the DiSCO codebase:

I've been fielding a lot of questions about how Thinko.pe will evolve. Here's a mockup in Prezi that shows the zooming/panning interface that we're working on.

I spoke on a panel at Media Festival Arts about Technology Strategy Board and our £5m Metadata competition.

I'm consistently bowled over by the way communities of users solve each others' problems and share their solutions. I race online in SimBin's Race 07 / GTR Evolution. Following the release of MMG's F1 mod, I'm playing more custom games, which necessitate the installation of additional mods (tracks/skins etc.) To participate in the latest games means spending time surfing the forums looking for the right download, then installing it. There's usually a lot of trial an error.