February 01, 2005
MSN Search
MSN Search is now out of beta and I think it is very good. Three of the sites I have made are top on the list:
I think its cool how I get a higher rank than the 7 world time Snooker champion!
Update Make that 4 if I search for Pluto's Revolution with the ' it is top. Also come number 5 with KUCA for Julian Brazier MP
Posted by shendry at 02:39 PM | Comments (0)
January 05, 2005
Free Bird
Donkey sent me this today . Glad he has done something useful while he has been ill! BTW get better dude.
Free Bird
- Staring: Donkey, Oli & Tom:
- Cameraman: Stephen
- Director: Donkey
Shot on location in Peter's house.Sponsored by wavm. © wavm 2004-2005
Posted by shendry at 07:48 PM | Comments (0)January 01, 2005
WAVM update
Updated WAVM today with the photos taken since I have been back. This includes the Darkness and New Years!
Posted by shendry at 03:47 PM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2004
AoM
Rob posted this on his blog back in september about All OfMp3. Today I decided to try it out for myself as I aimed to feel the musical void I am currently experiencing. I was really in the mood to listen to the legend that is Jimi Hendrix. I downloaded all 28 tracks legally from his album Experience Hendrix - The Best of Jimi Hendrix.
To buy the album off Play it would of cost £9.99 for the 20 track version. Downloading it from All OfMp3 it cost me$1.669. Which when converted gives me 87p! What a bargain! In the words of David Dickinson "Cheap as chips." Its good quality, allot faster for me to download it then pop to the shops. I did look around Canterbury today trying to fins a Hendrix CD is some sort of offer the only place I found a Hendrix CD was HMV. HMV wanted to charge be £16.99+!! So overall I am very happy with All OfMp3 will be using it again that's for sure.
Posted by shendry at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2004
QRIO
I know it is said that student shave to much time on there hands but as a computer scientist I would disagree. how ever this week is project week and its extremely nice to have some spare time. I was watching Richard and Judy today and I saw the coolest thing! QRIO!
QRIO according to the web site is:
It is the product of cutting edge artificial intelligence and dynamics technology. An entertainment robot that lives with you, makes life fun, makes you happy.Its name is QRIO.
QRIO can gather information and move around on its own accord.
QRIO not only walks on two legs, it can also manage uneven surfaces,
dance, recognize people's faces and voices, and carry on conversation.QRIO is eager to be friends with people.
This is the point where I could really just rip the whole QRIO site and stick it here as its an interesting read. The video clips are a must as well. Well in CSCS we are currently trying to imitate a coach roach so we have some way to go to match this. Shame we cant get the department to buy one of these.... maybe we could but they do cost as much as a family car.
Posted by shendry at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)
November 08, 2004
Google Page Rank
One of the cool things about using Firefox as my primary browser is the ability to have extensions. I have a few installed like Web Developer 0.8, Gmail Notifier 0.3.3, and Google Pagerank extension.
Google Pagerank extension displays the google rank for a page. A google page rank is.
In short PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there’s no link there’s no support (but it’s an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page).
Quoting from the original Google paper, PageRank is defined like this:
We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one.
PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web.
but that’s not too helpful so let’s break it down into sections.
- PR(Tn) - Each page has a notion of its own self-importance. That’s “PR(T1)” for the first page in the web all the way up to “PR(Tn)” for the last page
- C(Tn) - Each page spreads its vote out evenly amongst all of it’s outgoing links. The count, or number, of outgoing links for page 1 is “C(T1)”, “C(Tn)” for page n, and so on for all pages.
- PR(Tn)/C(Tn) - so if our page (page A) has a backlink from page “n” the share of the vote page A will get is “PR(Tn)/C(Tn)”
- d(... - All these fractions of votes are added together but, to stop the other pages having too much influence, this total vote is “damped down” by multiplying it by 0.85 (the factor “d”)
- (1 - d) - The (1 – d) bit at the beginning is a bit of probability math magic so the “sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one”: it adds in the bit lost by the d(.... It also means that if a page has no links to it (no backlinks) even then it will still get a small PR of 0.15 (i.e. 1 – 0.85). (Aside: the Google paper says “the sum of all pages” but they mean the “the normalised sum” – otherwise known as “the average” to you and m
http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/
Now in the bottom of my browser it tells me the last ranking for a page. The rankings are out of 10. 10 being the highest (sites like google.com). Now during my web browsing its interesting to see where sites rank (well I find it interesting).
The blog here is a page rank 1 where as stephenhendry.net and shendry.co.uk come in as a ranking of 4. WAVM has a rank of 3, PlutosRevolution.com has a ranking of 0 and KUCA.co.uk comes in at 2.
Now my local MP, Julian Brazier also comes in at a ranking of 4 so he is tying in with me :-) The local Conservative association got a mighty ranking of n/a. Rob also gained 4. Out of people I actually know Matt came in the highest with an impressive rank of 5.
As you may be able to tell had a little bit of free time today for a change as it is project week at Uni. Going to do something constructive on Tuesday but after going home at the weekend I did need a day to just relax.
If any one is interested in seeing what google rank a page has try this free tool.
Posted by shendry at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)
October 29, 2004
Pizza Chalange
Tonight Rob very kindly went to ASDA and brought me a Super Pan 14" chicken combo pizza which I had planned to eat partly tonight and the rest either later tonight or tomorrow for breakfast. This was not to be the case! Some how it winded up with me having to eat the 14" Pizza in one sitting. So that was no leaving the table an d I had to each as much as I could.
After a fast start I soon slowed down. While AJ entertained us lot in the living room by reading the bible to us and singing with his guitar (we requested both) I plugged away at the pizza. 35 minuets later I was done! Not only did I eat it I also ate a papadom and scraped up all the little bits on plate!
Am feeling a little bit worse for wear I don't think drinking a liter of Cherry Coke helped at all. Wont be going out to Mungos tonight the thought of movement is not good. Bring on the next challenge!
Posted by shendry at 08:35 PM | Comments (1)
October 17, 2004
Well done Rob
Just flicking through the CS website to start some work and found this lovely picture of one of my house mates. Well done with your award rob. That picture came out allot better than the one I was trying to take from my seat.
Posted by shendry at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2004
Google Desktop Search
Downloaded and installed Google Desktop Search this evening and It is very nice. In short It allows you to search through:
- Web pages you've previously seen in Internet Explorer
- Email you've sent or received via Outlook or Outlook Express
- IM chats you've had using AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)
- Files in Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint as well as plain text.
Been playing around with it and it's a very neat bit of software. A few improvements and It would be awesome. One thing I would like to see integrated into it is the ability to submit you gmail account details so that Google Desktop Search so can search through your email at the same time.
Currently I am also using Picasa also from Google so the ability for it to search my photos if it had comments would be great.
Another two incredibly handy thing would if it could search through MSN messenger convos. Sure It may be able to if the logs are stored as a .txt but I have not looked into that yet. Also if it could search my hotmail account then all my dreams would come true. May look into playing around with this more tomorrow and If I find anything interesting I will post here.
Posted by shendry at 02:28 AM | Comments (0)
October 14, 2004
CSCS
Was looking around the cs website this morning and foudn that Cool Stuff in Computer Science is mentioned. If you wanted to know what CSCS is read about it here!
Posted by shendry at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2004
UEA's Livewire radio
Got an email from Mark and he is going to become a "radio star!" (Those are his words not mine ;-) )
The Alex and Mark Show is going to hit the airwaves every Thursday between 2 and 4pm on UEA's Livewire radio station. Lucky enough you can listen live via the power of the Internet. Livewire is available anywhere, yes anywhere!! From Hawaii to Sydney, Tromso to Cape Town to good old Canterbury and even the ghetto of West Addington Village!
So if anyone has nothing better to do and access to the Internet then please tune in and enjoy/laugh at Alex and Mark first tentative steps into the world of audio broadcasting!
So check out the show on Live Wire!
I will hopefully be listening so hopefully it will be my first review (not sure if I can make this Thursday dude to the by-election)
Posted by shendry at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)
