Category: Other Stuff

decorative tag cloud

It’s not often that I’d consider adding pure “eye candy” to the OPAC, but I couldn’t decide what would be the best way of making this tag cloud functional. So, I made an executive decision and decided it shouldn’t be functional šŸ˜€
If you run a keyword search on our OPAC, at the foot of the page you should see a keyword cloud (it might take a few seconds to appear). The cloud is generated from previous keyword searches used on our OPAC. Here’s the one for “library“…
tagcloud1
For multi-keyword searches, an electronic coin is tossed and you either get a cloud of the union or the intersection of your keywords. The former uses previous searches that contain any of the keywords, and the later is only those that contain all of them (if that makes sense!)
As it’s not functional, the cloud is just a decorative window into the hive mind of our users.
I’m interested to hear what you think — should the cloud be functional, or does it work as just “eye candy”?

RIP: Edward Lorenz

Very sad to see that Edward Lorenz, one of the founding fathers of Chaos Theory, has died.
600px-Lorenz_attractor_yb_svg
There can’t be many people who aren’t familiar with the concept expressed in the title of his 1972 paper “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”
Lorenz was awarded the Kyoto Prize in 1991 for his work on determinsitic chaos — “a principle which has profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton.”

Calling all Librarians, Calling all Librarians!

Okay — I have a reference question that might just need the awesome combined power of the biblioblogosphere to answer!
A few minutes into the 1960 film “Psycho“, we get to see the following painting hung on the wall of George Lowery’s office…
psychopainting
(click to view larger version)
Firstly, is it a Picasso? If not, is it by a known artist? Can you put a name to the painting?
Other paintings in the film appear to have been chosen for their symbolism, so perhaps this one was too.
If you can answer any of the those questions, please put Joel or myself out of our misery!!!
šŸ˜€

Book covers, revisited

Just spotted that Tim is busy working on something that I dabbled with last February:
www.colourphon.co.uk
I’m actually in the midst of revisiting my code, as I want to automate a way of locating visually similar images from the “1000 Frames of Hitchcock” project, e.g.:
Blackmail (1929) Easy Virtue (1928) The Pleasure Garden (1925) Downhill (1927) Jamaica Inn (1939) Rebecca (1940) Number Seventeen (1932) Jamaica Inn (1939)
Anyway, today seemed like a good opportunity to return to Ed Vielmetti‘s original question about sorting books into the colour of a rainbow…
rainbow

God bless Google (again)

The Guardian article about celebrity liar and all round Walter Mitty type Robert Irvine made for some chucklesome reading at lunch time today.
Not surprisingly, the “about me” page on his web site is now “Under Construction”. Fortunately, good ol’ Google still has the cached version from a few weeks ago…
hehheh
Curiously, his “about” page fails to make any mention of his Knighthood and the castle in Scotland which the Queen gave him šŸ˜€
I’m also intrigued by the disclaimer on his home page which reads “The site is not affiliated with Robert.com”.
So, to save any confusion, I’d like to take the opportunity to say that this site is not affiliated with Dave.com, Davey.com, DP.com, or WaveyDavey.co.uk. However, I would like you all to start referring to me as “Sir Dave of Huddersfield”.

God bless Google!

…in particular, the Google cache of web pages that it’s trawled.
Although Woolworths have removed the “Lolita Midsleeper Combi” from their web site, you can still find the product via the Google Cache…
lolitawoolworths
(BBC News: Woolworths withdraws ‘Lolita’ bed)
I can’t decide what amazes me more — that a company would name a product for young girls “Lolita”, or that Woolworths don’t seem to employ anyone who was aware of the single definition of the word!
Anyway, I’m sure I can hear Nabokov giggling quietly in his grave šŸ˜€

It’s on days like this…

It’s on days like this that I’m glad we no longer live in Armitage Bridge, but halfway up a hill which looks down on Armitage Bridge.
The BBC web site has this photo of Armitage Bridge…

After spending several minutes wondering if the Armitage Bridge that I knew (which is mostly traditional old stone houses) had been washed clean away and replaced by a row of newer looking red brick houses, I noticed that the file name of the image mentions Doncaster (which is at least 50 miles away).
The local newspaper has this video, although be warned that the narrator sounds like she using a megaphone.
Quite a few local roads have been closed and the area at the south of the University campus (Aspley & Bradley Mills) is still subject to a severe Flood Warning from the Environment Agency.

“Spin, spin, spin the Wheel of Justice…”

Kudos if you automatically sang to yourself “…see how fast the bastard turns” šŸ˜‰
If you’ve no idea what I’m on about, then YouTube is your friend.
Anyway, I got to playing around with the OPAC keyword cloud data and ImageMagick and came up with this (reload that web page to get a new image)…
wheel4 wheel3 wheel5 wheel10 wheel8 wheel11 wheel13 wheel12
I was struggling to remember how to find the points on the circumference of a circle until I remembered that one of the chapters in the original ZX Spectrum manual covered the topic.
The word in the middle is chosen at random from the top 200 most popular keywords used on our OPAC and the surrounding words at those most commonly used with that word.