www.kevingordon.org.uk - Kev's Web re-design

Here is an early design of www.kevingordon.org.uk;

It evolved from that, and I dropped the Sonic image at the top and replaced with a different header. Since 2010 I had a new design for the site planned, see the sketch below - it was based on a website I saw that I really liked;

So this month (October 2013) I finally got round to making the changes to the website, and this is what it looks like;

Internet and Raspberry Pi enabled model railway @ kevingordon.org.uk

I have been busy writing up my Raspberry Pi project, which is an internet and Raspberry Pi enabled model railway, see it here at http://www.kevingordon.org.uk/articles/raspberry-pi-railway-web-controlled.html In this article you will find the follow;

• The process I went through to create the project
• The source material
• The architecture diagrams of the design as it developed
• The source code, both for the Raspberry Pi (python) and server-side (PHP)
• Videos of the railway working at different stages/progress of the project
• Other relevant images
• The XpressNet API guide for download

I hope you enjoy, would love to hear if you use this to base your own project off of!

TheNotebookStore pilot project

I'm trying out a pilot to sell Notebooks at TheNotebookStore (The Notebook Store). You can buy them on eBay here; eBay sellers page.

As a pilot I'm trying to see the popularity, selling process and margin that can be made, I welcome feedback on this project.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Practical Study of Parallel Algorithms - by Kevin Gordon

This is the paper I wrote for my final year project at the University of Warwick. I include it here for personal reference, and also in the hope that someone else will also find this useful.

http://www.kevingordon.org.uk/projects/bsp/experimental-parlallel-computing-final-report.pdf

Abstract

This project gives an introduction to the field of parallel computing and the parallel computing model: BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallelism). The aim of this project was to carry out the implementation and analysis of two BSP problems. The parallel broadcast problem and parallel matrix multiplication were implemented, several experiments were run, and the results were analysed. Analysis of the results revealed that the experimental results didn’t always match what the BSP model predicted, and this was highly dependent on both the type of architecture running the code and the optimisation of the code.

Where is the missing search feature in iOS 7?

Some people have asked me how you can search in iOS 7, because you can no longer swipe all the way to the left to search.

Well all you need to do is on any of the home pages, swipe down anywhere in the middle region of the screen and the new search feature will appear.

Voila, done!

iOS 7 some of what I like about it

The lock screen now looks great, and really awesomeness you can access the notification centre and control centre right from the lock screen.

Slide across and you get the much more attractive unlock keyboard;

The new home screen looks fantastic, it took a little while to get used to, but it actually looks a lot better than it used to look.

Swipe down from the top and you get the notification centre;

Swipe across to get Today view, which although doesn't give the graphic weather output, it actually gives something much more useful - that is a current weather forecast and outlook in text, which I actually use, whereas the old weather widget for me just looked pretty.

It's really good to have the calendar accessible via notification centre and the lock screen, fab. And you get a list of how many events you have tomorrow - would have been better if it listed what those events were but, it's still very good. Also would be good if you could swipe to get the whole of the day's calendar view, not just the next few hours.

Swipe up for the control centre, this is very good - gives you control of music player, airplay, and allows you to quickly turn on/off Airplane mode, Wifi, Bluetooth, Do not Disturb, and the orientation lock. You can also control the brightness, and quickly open the flashlight, clock, calculator and camera, friggin great!

And the icing on the cake is the new multitasking view, by double clicking the home button, which brings up a window of the apps, and allows you to swipe up to close, very Touchpad/WebOS inspired, and I really like it, and it is useful, and much more fun to swap to different apps this way.

And the notification banners that appear are now much more pretty, and integrated better. Overall I'm very happy with the new iOS 7.

Getting iCloud calendar to sync with HP Touchpad

So you want to display your iCloud calendar from your iOS device on your HP Touchpad (webos).

Well there is an easy way.

In the calendar on your Mac - right click on the calendar and share the calendar / make it public, and copy the url.

Paste the url into this website;

https://icaltogcal.com

Then click continue, and copy the new share url.

Add this to your google calendar;

https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/178357?hl=en - How to add the calendar to google


Sign in to your Google Apps account in a web browser and open your GoogleCalendar.

In the left sidebar under Other Calendars, click the Add menu. Then choose one of the following:

Add by URL: Adds a team or company calendar someone created. Enter the calendar's address (ends in .ics).

Now it should process the url and add the calendar. It takes a few hours to start syncing, so it will be blank for a while, but after a few hours (I left it for 24 hours) it will start syncing.

Then on the Touchpad add your Google account to the calendar, and voila the calendar will appear on your Touchpad. 

Done.

Not seeing correct character encoding in SQL developer

So you're seeing characters from different languages or "special characters" not displaying correctly in SQL developer but you know they are definitely correct in the database, you are sure? Well go to Tools > Preferences and make sure the character encoding is UTF-8, that should fix it and you should then be able to see the correct characters. If the characters are still wrong there is a good chance that the characters are corrupted in you database.

Listing the unique file ids of files

I'm looking to link a set of files to a set of meta information, and I want to uniquely identify the files - and have some perl do processing to combine the files with meta data - so I can cross reference them with a unique id.

So I found that if you type "ls -i" it gives the unique file ids for the files - on OS X in the terminal.

Very useful, I'll remember that.

Use of Siri in iOS 7

I'm happy with Siri, and iOS 7, what I particular like using Siri for is when I am travelling in the car and I use it mainly for i) Setting reminders; ii) Reading notifications; iii) Responding to text messages; iv) making phone calls; v) Playing music.

It comes with certain issues the main issues are;

a) Occasionally, and actually quite often I get the message "Sorry I can't take any requests right now" or "I'm currently having a problem" or something to that effect. Normally it goes away after a few seconds, today it continued for 10+ minutes, it would be good to have a way to know whether Siri is working or not.

b) When I set a reminder I can set it to remind when I arrive "at home" or "at work" but when I say at a place such as "arriving at Basildon" it doesn't understand what I'm saying and makes that part of the reminder description. The same thing happens when I set it to remind me at a time, it sometimes gets confused and includes the time as part of the task description. Now when I want it to remind me I say "remind me at 1.30pm" and then it says "what would you like me to remind you about" and then I say "remember to feed the fish" or something, and then it allows me to create the reminder at 1.30pm.

c) Notifications sometimes gets confused when I'm trying to get it to playback my voice mail. So I think saying something like call voicemail, or listen to phone voicemail does the trick most of the time.

d) Playing music doesn't seem to understand when I say an album name and artist together .e.g. "play Counting Crows" works, and "play Recovering satellites" works, but not "play counting crows recovering satellites). Also at the moment I've got a bug where playing certain music, it says "playing xxx..." but then nothing plays, which is a bit annoying.

It's getting better though, and it's really useful. Especially replying to text messages is great.

Changing to a network disk on the mac in terminal

Changing to a network disk on the mac in terminal - e.g. if you've got a windows PC on your network, that you share disks on. Then open the network location in Finder, and then double click to open the disk.

Then in the terminal type "df -h" and it will list the location in which the drive is mounted.

e.g. //xxxx@xxxxxwin7pc/H  931Gi  611Gi  320Gi    66%        0 18446744073709551615    0%   /Volumes/H

Then all you need to do is type "cd /Volumes/H" to change to the disk.

Voila, done.

iMessage and multiple Apple Ids

I had an issue that my iPhone was sending receiving iMessages, that my other Apple devices weren't getting, and visa versa.

What I found is that on the iPhone iOS 7 I was signed into the other Apple Id I have, and no matter trying to add the first Id would seem to fix it - as it was asking to verify my first email address, but I couldn't get it to send a verification email.

What I then did was log out of iMessage and log back in with my first apple Id. Enabled a second email address and my phone number, and set all new messages to come from my phone number. And made sure could receive from both email addresses.

In doing so I got pop ups on my other apple devices, which I okayed.

Eventually the first apple id / email address now gave me extra options on my MacBook Pro, and I could set it to the phone number, and enable all my email addresses to associate with it. Same thing on my other apple devices. Problem resolved.

Spotify not working on MacBook Pro Retina

Spotify stopped working, first I was getting the error regarding "Missing framework", then it wouldn't even start. This is on the MacBook Pro Retina, Mac OS X.

To rectify the situation do the following;

1. Close spotify
2. Delete spotify app, and empty trash
3. Hold down the "option" key and click "Go" in the menu, Library will now appear.
4. Find the caches folder, and delete anything with "spotify" in it and empty trash.
5. Now reinstall spotify
6. Should work.

Cloning a Raspberry Pi SD card on a Mac

This really is actually quite simple;

1. Enter source SD card into Mac (make sure you have set it to locked before hand)
2. At the terminal type "df -h", the output will list the inserted disk as something like;

/dev/disk1s1    69Mi  9.1Mi   60Mi    14%        0        0  100%   /Volumes/Untitled

3. Now take a backup of the disk by typing the following;

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk1 of=/Users/kevingordon/Dropbox/kevscode/RPi-backup/raspbmc-backup.img

Where rdisk1 - the 1 is from the /dev/disk1s1 above. And the of will be the path with the image filename on your hard drive where you want to put the disk image.

4. It will ask your password, and then will take 1/2 hour or so to process. Note you can monitor the activity by opening System monitor and searching for the "dd" process - you will see that it is active. Once it is finished it will return some information like the following;

7744512+0 records in

7744512+0 records out

3965190144 bytes transferred in 4078.160970 secs (972299 bytes/sec)

5. Now eject the disk as normal.

6. Now copy this to the new disk, make sure the disk is unlocked, and enter the SD card

7. In disk utility, unmount the disk, an it should be replaced with something like disk1s1, and disappear from your desktop.

8. At the terminal type the following; 

sudo dd if=/Users/kevingordon/Dropbox/kevscode/RPi-backup/raspbmc-backup.img of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=1m

This may or may not ask for your password. Note the if directory is the location where you put the image file above. Then the of will be the same as the if that you used previously - confirm this information using df -h again.

9. Once the command above is running, it will take 1/2 hour or so, and you can monitor using the System Monitor and searching for the dd process.

10. Once complete it will give you the following (something like);

3781+1 records in

3781+1 records out

3965190144 bytes transferred in 792.939957 secs (5000618 bytes/sec)

11. Eject the disk using disk utility.

12. That's it! - You can now use this in your Raspberry Pi - a fresh clone of whatever you were running previously, awesome!

iOS 7 first impressions

What I like about it;

- Lock screen with access to camera, notifications and control centre is excellent

- New control centre, is fab way of accessing quickly some certain commands e.g. turning on/off wifi, airport mode, discrete mode

- Notifications is awesome, works much better, the notification alerts/bars look much better, and it's better integrated. Only downside is the post to twitter and Facebook share widget has gone, which is annoying.

- Calendar app is really good, as is the new camera app and photos app

- The email app is improved, looks good, and has now got some (limited) smart inboxes

- The look of the new iOS is fresh and new and the animations are cool

- The apps that have been re-engineered for iOS 7 look really good

What I don't like so much / or problems I've had;

- Siri's voice - Siri now sounds very strange

- Weather not appearing in notification centre - this was fixed by turning location services on, from within restrictions

- Post to twitter and FB has been removed

- Search from siri is unfortunately going to Bing rather than Google, and it doesn't appear to be fixable at the moment

- Loading/updating apps very confusing - initially the icons were very confusing, but I now understand how this works

- Where have events gone in photos - thought I like the way photos are grouped together

- All day events not appearing under notification centre - haven't been able to figure this out yet

  

New App Tablet Tracker released

New app Tablet Tracker http://www.kevsapps.co.uk/tablet-tracker/index.html released in the App Store. A simple application for tracking and reminding you to take medication or vitamins.

The app took 3-4 months to develop on - off in my spare time. I had to re-learn objective C and the Apple SDK in order to do this as I hadn't done an app for 1-2 years. The app is very useful personally, and I hope it is useful to you also.

iPhone App Store changed countries

On playing with iTunes connect, it asked if I'd like to change country in the App Store, which I did. Then how to get back to UK App Store. Do this;

1. Make sure to close the App Store app first
2. Go to Settings > iTunes & App Stores > Log out and log back in again.
3. Reload App Store, everything should now be in £'s

Courtesy of http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=519185


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

App icon not changing iOS Xcode

If you update your app icon and it doesn't update on your phone or simulator, do the following;
1) Copy in the icon as a new filename
2) Associate the icons with the new files under projects, where you can graphically choose the icon
3) In you app's info.plist under icons delete the rows for the previous icons, the new icons should have rows.
4) Clean the project (with iPhone plugged in) and build

You should now get the new icons.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Wifi issues long term fix - Mountain Lion dropping connection

Further investigation on the Apple site - I found that 10.8.4 has a wifi diagnostics facility. Access this by pressing the option button and clicking the wifi connection. This just let me know there was an issue. I rang Apple and the first thing we tried was rebooting and holding down cmd-r until the apple logo and spinning icon appeared. This went into diagnostic mode.

From there we tried browsing the internet, and again the connection dropped.

Very strange that it was only the two Apple MacBooks (Air and Pro) that were dropping. iPhones, iPads and windows PC were fine.

So we tried turning of the router (Time capsule) for 30+ seconds and turning it on again. When it rebooted the two Macs now reconnected and maintained consistent wifi connection - perfect! The helpful Apple support analyst explained that sometimes with too many wifi devices it can switch channels to compensate, and then get stuck on a channel. Hmm, not sure I fully understand that how that causes this. But anyway restarting the time capsule router has resolved the problem, thankfully.

I'm also doing an update of the other computer to 10.8.4 which includes an update of the time capsule firmware, which should ensure the problem has gone for good.

Wifi Issues with OS X Mountain Lion - temporary fix

Today I've been experiencing a critical Mountain Lion OS X issue on my MacBook Pro. Googling it gave indicated a short term fix is to use the ping command in the terminal, and ping to your router, and that will stop the Wifi going to sleep, and won't impact the internet speed.

This problem is affecting OS X 10.8.3 and 10.8.4 :-(

1. Open Airport Utility to find out the IP address of your router (assuming using an Airport Extreme or Time Capsule)
2. Open terminal window
3. Type "ping 10.0.1.1" where 10.0.1.1 is the ip address of your router
4. Leave this running and it will keep the wifi awake.

I hope Apple fix this soon.

Why did interflora get kicked off Google search rankings?

Here is a good question and answer from SXSW 2013 regarding why Interflora got kicked off the Google search ranking in advance of mothers day;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm7nVHslGyw

Question from David de Niese: UK there was a case regarding Interflora http://www.interflora.co.uk, where Google kicked Interflora off the search index, Interflora were probably responsible for that in some way as well, no doubt. But ultimately Matt was responsible for every mother in the UK not getting flowers for mothers day this year. What it does proof is that the algorithms that you use have a large material impact on every company in the world. How long do you think the work that you guys do will remain unregulated? 

Answer from Matt Cutts from Google: How long do I think the work we do will remain unregulated? That's an interesting question; I'm just a web spam guy, I'm not a lawyer, so let me prefix it with that. I've actually had the enjoyment of talking to regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, right, for FTC and EC. And so far that's gone relatively well. From our perspectives we try to make sure we run the search engine, we run google, just like you guys would run the search engine, like you would run Google if you were in charge. And so we have pretty clear guidelines like don't cloak, don't do sneaky javascript redirects, don't make doorways, don't buy links that pass page rank cos those violate FTC guidelines and the UK fair-trade guidelines and all that stuff. 

We force that on both small and large companies. But you don't always here about it because when we take action on large companies, we're not as more likely to talk about that as we don't always talk about it when we take action against a small company. So last week for example we and earlier this week we took action on 98,000 sites, that were all part of a link network. We don't feel the need to call those sites out, right. And we're probably not going to say this site did badly, this site didn't do badly.

But I'm actually kind of heartened that when people like the FTC come in, and look through 9 million documents then about how Google works, you know there was a great article by Tim Woo who was at the FTC and said the regulators were doing their job, they looked at what was going on, and apparently didn't find anything worth pursuing. For working at Google for 13 years I think we try to do a pretty principle job. So you know whether it's a big or small company, whether it's a site that sells flowers, or whether it's a mom or pop, we try an enforce our guidelines consistently. 

The Rules of Subtraction @ SXSW

"The world of business and commerce has never been more complex. We live in a constant state of stimulation and distraction. The choices and features we face daily are overwhelming. Living a “simple life” is no longer an option. The desire to tune out the noise is overpowering, driving users and consumers to seek experiences that address that desire.

Business success in this new age of excess everything demands the ability to design those experiences, through the mastery of a surprising new skill: Subtraction.

Enter The Laws of Subtraction.

Filled with examples drawn from industrial design, art, business, and science, this talk makes a compelling case for a new approach, one based on the paradoxical notion of gaining by taking away.

This talk outlines six simple rules for winning in the age of excess everything, and delivers a single yet powerful idea:

In business and in life, when you remove just the right things in just the right way, something very good happens."

My Notes

• The session was not a book reading... rather a story

• Working for a Japanese car company the author learnt a lot of these techniques

• Showed an example of a E with whitespace to indicate the letter. Once you know what it is you can’t unshift your knowledge of it

• Example of the Fedex arrow :-)

• Example of the Sopranos ending, not an ending ... put clues in the episode as to what had happened in the ending. People re-watched the show a number of times. Then 3 endings came on the internet...
• An example of a bicycle with a hole in the middle, being the leading most comfortable bicycle seat, rather than other manufacturers who have been adding more and more support, in contrast this company took away.
• Given an example of a car - toyota - they wanted personalisation - $15K car, stripped down all the facilities and added as options

• Added another $15k of options on it - all about what was added (what was left out)
• Traffic intersections - removed all the traffic signs and signals at high traffic intersections in towns. Video given for the intersection - looked crazy. Completely “unambiguous and uncertain” Therefore people slow down and look at human beings. Twice traffic flow, accidents almost zero or at least cut in half.
• Example of the Mona lisa - a lot of mystery about the smile... Somato - blurry, removed the distinct lines from around eyes and mouth ... and so each time you look at it the smile changes. 
• Comic books, comicon, what makes comics so magical is not what is drawn... it’s in the gutter (the space between the panels). Takes two images and mashes them together, and generates what has happened in the space between - you make up the animation in your own mind.
• iPhone 2007 magical ... implementation of this - big part misisng - the physical keyboard, most compelling part, big big hype. Usually meant lots of information and leaks. There was no advertising, or leaks or advertising. The radio silence, sparked the imagination of the world. By the time the iPhone went on sale, 20m had expressed desire to purchase - it has tipped. Limiting information fires the imagination.
• OutBurger - drive through, 1947 it started, simple menu ... only about 4 things, and it’s still the same way. What’s not there, not is there. Secret menu!!!! 2-3 other items on the secret menu. E.g. flying dutchman, animal style or grilled cheese, etc....... ! Limiting of information and constraint of not changing menu.
• Put in a policy that less work will make you more productive ... e.g. in a company stopped people working one evening. Breaks - not working, make you more progressive.
• “stand still when the hippos charge” - if you run you will die. Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something.
• The full slides can be found here: http://matthewemay.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/SXSW.pdf
• The author is called Matthew May
• Check out the book - Laws of Subtraction http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0071795618

Time capsule unrecognised volume error and not restarting

I tried backing up today and got a "unrecognised volume error" - that my disk had changed identity and a question whether I wanted to proceed to use the current disk. I chose yes but the backup failed.

So I tried powering off the Time Capsule as I thought that would resolve the issue. Only the time capsule rebooted with an orange light and was making strange clicking noises. I left this for 10 minutes but it still didn't reboot. And there was no connection to the Time Capsule through Airport Utility and no wifi.

So I thought I'd give it another reboot, this time it seemed to get further as after 5 minutes it was making some loading sounds then it stopped making noise and was still on orange, with no Airport Utility connection or wifi.

At this point I googled for the issue and there were lots of reports of Time Capsules dying without any kind of solution.

I was now thinking I may need to buy a new Time Capsule. But before doing that I thought I'd ask Apple Care for assistance. On the website I put in a problem with backing up on my MacBookPro (which has Apple Care) and I was able to get them to call me immediately.

Initially the support analyst asked me to do a software update on my Mac, then I explained I had rebooted the Time Capsule and it was showing an orange light (and I had no wifi), he then said we need to fix that issue first. Then the support analyst instructed me how to do a reset/reboot by pressing in a small button at the rear of the Time Capsule (I didn't know about this!). Unfortunately after several attempts that didn't seem to do anything - it was meant to make the light start flashing.

Anyway the next step was to unplug the Time Capsule and leave for 10 seconds and plug it in again. Miraculously the Time Capsule started flashing an orange light, making booting sounds and then it went green. I checked the computer and there was wifi and the Airport Utility could talk to the Time Capsule. I then kicked off a backup and this time it worked.

Thank you Apple Care!

The Making of Doom at SXSW 2013

The intro;

"Few games can match the ubiquity and legacy of Doom, the seminal first-person shooter that ushered in thousands of mods, clones, and successors. Nearly every significant FPS, from Resistance to Half-Life, Call of Duty to Halo, owes its success in part to the Id Software game. Programmer, Game Designer, Level Designer and Doom II final boss John Romero will deliver a postmortem on the game showing never-before-seen material, memorializing its immersive but nerve-wracking 3D environments, networked multiplayer deathmatches, Satanic imagery and themes, Barney WADs, exploding barrels, and BFG 9000. Romero was a co-founder of id Software, among other companies, and also worked on other significant shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Quake...."

Presented by John Romero

What a wonderful treat, the charismatic creator of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D gave an hour's presentation on the journey to produce the game. From the evolution of earlier games, such as building an earlier game for the difficult to programme EGA to Wolfenstein 3D through to the development of the amazing (for the time 3D engine) and realisation what they could do with it.

They were playing a lot of dungeons and dragons at the time, and really wanted to create something with demons in it - which was a big inspiration for Doom. The 3D engine they developed allowed more complex environments to be created with exterior and interior, and large rooms with variable height ceilings, and non-orthogonal walls. John tells of the guy that was producing level designs initially was developing levels that looked like Wolfenstein - and an early tech demo video showed how it was looking at that point, then he was instructed to build some military looking buildings / levels but these were really boring, so John experimented with creating something much more interesting. Another really cool aspect of the engine was the lighting, and ability to get shadows to fade out the environment in the distance.

Earlier demos show how the environments and level design was developing, and they showed some of the levels with the enemy characters without AI. The UI around the game window went through many iterations, a lot of the detail was dropped. The bobbing of the gun came in which looks cool. One of the creators modelled the shot gun reload on themselves. The chainsaw was a broken chainsaw borrowed off one of their girl friends, the shotgun was a toy bought from Toys r Us! The characters were designed by a wonderful artist, initially in clay - but these were found to melt under the light, so they moved to latex and plastic. They used a Lazy-susan to rotate the characters and record them into the computer.

They talked some what about the Apple pre-cursor computer the Next - and on one of these they spent $11K! I didn't quite follow how this was used in the development... initially they were just using the hints information, but I understand they developed a lot of the graphics on this. They developed the Doom bible which was lost, but they managed to recover a copy and re-digitise it.

Doom Bible: http://planetdoom.gamespy.com/classicdoom/doombible.pdf

The day before launch there was a big press gathering around congress with complaints that video games are too violent and the next day they released Doom!

During the launch they uploaded to a university's servers which made them crash several times due to user load, and before launch they were heavily spammed on usenet from angry gamers awaiting it's launch, as the makers held back the launch due to a critical bug which they had to resolve. Basically the game over-clocked the computer somehow - I didn't quite follow this, but the tick should have been 8 times a second, and they increased this to 100 times a second, to enable them to do all the music and the animation and creating of a high frame rate. Anyway they were setting a value to FFF, and it was trying to increment, but there is not higher value - so the system would just wait and cause the whole computer to freeze. By setting the value back to 0 it would ensure the computer wouldn't hang. They resolved this and released the software. Interesting they provided it to shops for free and told them to offer it for $10 and they could keep the money.

The screenshots, graphics and video demos were wonderful, and it was nostalgic and wonderful, and what a treat to be able to attend this lecture.

SXSW Google and Bing how to improve your search rankings

Good Q&A with Google and Bing regarding how to improve your search rankings. All about SEO/Search Engine Optimisation. Interesting points that came up;

• Facebook has a robots.txt file which blocks all web-crawling of their site. And Google mentioned that they have been blocked by Google. Whereas Bing has a partnership with Facebook. Could that be a big concern for Google. Especially in light of;
• Facebook Graph search - does that worry Google or Bing, they didn't really answer that one very directly, they just made some comments about them waiting and seeing and it could be interesting. Whereas I think it could spell quite a problem for Google...
• They re-iterated before contacting them in order to understand a problem on your site in terms of site ranking then you should make sure you are fully utilising the web master tools as they will reveal a lot of the problems / issues and how to fix them.
• Interesting discussion around when a site has gained a poor reputation, or you've taken over a domain with a poor reputation, you can request a "re-inclusion" request (after you've rebuilt the site and distanced yourself from the site before) - this will effectively wipe the slate clean and get you re-listed on Google.
• Interesting discussion about content behind a login - what's in front and behind the login or paywall should be the same, outside should be a subset. If you offer a completely different experience internally then this is known as "cloaking" and is frowned upon. The guy from Bing also explained you should do a spreadsheet of all the links/content on your site and place a value on all those links, and you need to flip it round and see how you can get a subset of your most valuable content outside the login, in order to help attract users in to the site.
• Note you can setup local listings options for your site, to reflect for a business, where the local region(s) for that business is.
• If you are having problems with content not getting crawled or appearing in search, use the "fetch as googlebot" and "fetch as bingbot" tools to see what the crawlers are seeing.
• Utilising schema.org to mark up your website is a good idea, as it helps the search engines understand your sites content and index it appropriately (and display it appropriately) it doesn't get you higher on the search rankings though.
• They repeatedly talked about how you can perform better on search when you are in a domain dominated by larger players - and that is to pick a niche keyword(s) and build a reputation around that, and then expand from there. Also the suggested phrases at the bottom of search can help you decide what keyword phrases to focus on.

MacBook Air setup

After giving some consideration I decided to get the MacBook Air 11 inch 64 GB laptop. The plan has been to use it as a cloud based device.

In order to utilise it as a cloud based laptop I have done the following;

• Followed the welcome screens and setup a user account
• Added in my iTunes Apple ID to get iCloud. I have two apple IDs one for iTunes and the one I had for mobile me. So I had to undo the iCloud service and put in my mobile me Apple Id - this didn't allow for notes and email - and it was asking me to create an iCloud email address - that is when I realised it was the wrong id. I then changed the ID and was then able to get all the iCloud services working.
• Configured my iTunes Apple ID in iTunes, authorised the new computer and setup iTunes match on my other MacBook Pro. Now when I got to iTunes on my Air it allows me to either download my music or stream it - really good. Strangely nothing appears on the iTunes match tab - which was slightly confusing initially.
• Installed software and software updates from the App Store, so this got me Pages, Numbers, Things, Xcode.
• Installed Evernote, Spotify, Drop Box
• I then moved my documents/projects folder to Drop Box on my MBP and moved my code to the DropBox
• On the Air I then selectively chose the project and code folders I wanted, and selectively chose some of my photos to download
• Setup photo stream in iPhoto, I'm not sure if I can get the DropBox photos to render within iPhoto so I am viewing them outside iPhoto.
• Configured iPhoto and Facetime - and my Air got added, and all the other devices notified me of this.
• Added my backdrops folder to drop box and setup a decent background to my desktop
• Bought a cover off of Gelaskins
• Now the policy is to do everything on this device in the cloud, and all setup.

Loss of page rank gone down to zero

Unfortunately my page rank of www.kevingordon.org.uk has gone down to zero (0), when it used to be 3 or 4, that might explain why the traffic to the site has also reduced.

It isn't clear why the page rank has gone down, but it may be related to the Twitter and Blogger plugins I've put on my home page. So I've taken the following actions;

1. Removed the Blogger and Twitter plugins from my homepage
2. Added a description meta tag to my home page
3. Now hoping for the best :-(

I will review in a few weeks and see if it's made any difference to my page rank, but going down from a page rank of 3 or 4 to zero seems some what unfair.

Please let me know if you have any other ideas why the page rank would have gone down so much?

Setting your Raspberry Pi up as a Media Server

So I've given up on getting BSP running on my RPi at the moment and instead I went about setting up my Raspberry Pi as a media server. And I've installed Raspbmc based on the xbmc (xbox media center) and it is friggin' awesome. All my videos stream - at a better quality than my PS3 media server and with very little buffering or lag. Not only that but it's got iPlayer too (after a bit of effort). I go through and explain how to get Raspbmc up and running, how to connect a network hard drive with your media, and how to get iPlayer up and running.

1. Download the Raspbmc installer for your Mac here http://www.raspbmc.com/download/ Follow the instructions here http://www.raspbmc.com/wiki/user/os-x-linux-installation/ to install it on a SD Card - note that you need an SD Card dedicated to running your Raspbmc.
2. Once you've downloaded the installer and run it, it will put the appropriate content on your SD Card, say no to installed to a usb jump drive.
3. Now you are ready to put it in your RPi
4. So put it in your RPi and boot it up, it usually takes 20 minutes plus to go through the whole installation routine, but it should go through without any issues - make a coffee - and then reboot a few times. I got a couple of warnings / error messages, but it all went through fine
5. Then it'll be up and running.

Linking to your media

1. To do this go under video, and go to files.
2. Go to "Add Videos"
3. When the Add videos dialog appears, go to "browse"
4. For me it involved selecting the "Windows network (SMB)" then choose MSHOME, choose the computer, disk and sub-folder
5. Choose a name for it (type it in), and choose okay
6. Choose that the directory contains Movies - to choose the movie scraper
7. Turn on "Movies are in separate folders that match the movie title" and "Scan recursively"
8. Choose okay
9. Choose "Do you want to refresh info for all items within this path" say yes
10. Let in scan the folders
11. Now go home
12. Now to play movies go within Videos and files and choose the movie of your choice.

Installing iPlayer.

1. Download the iPlayer plugin here; http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-iplayerv2/downloads/list
2. Place the zip on your media server / hard drive where you are getting the content.
3. Go to System Settings, then Add-ons, then choose "install from zip file"
4. Then navigate to the file, and choose for it to install
5. Once installed you've find it under Videos, then add ons

RPi BSP status update

I failed to get BSP to install on my MacBook Pro, there were two many make errors that I could not resolve.

However I tried running and installing the software on a raspberry Pi and it seemed to work fine. I chose single core, Linux, UDPIP, and everything looked fine, until I tried to compile a simple programme. When compiling a simple programme I get the following error;

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lbspcore_00
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lbspudpip
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lcpr

So it is basically failing to link some libraries that it can't find. I think when I did the initial make there were some errors - so perhaps these libraries failed to be created. Also it maybe something to do with choosing the UDPIP setting, so I could try installing BSP on another RPi and choose TCPIP. In fact initially I should choose the generic standalone one.

Running BSP on RPis (Raspberry Pi's)

For my university dissertation I did an experimental investigation into parallel computing using the BSP (Bulk Synchronous Processing) paradigm. You can download it here; www.kevingordon.org.uk/projects/bsp/experimental-parlallel-computing-final-report.pdf.

So this is my new project to get BSP running on a Raspberry Pi, what I'm going to attempt to do is the follows;

1. Install BSP on 3 RPi (Raspberry Pi) nodes
2. Get the BSP daemon to communicate between the 3 nodes using the test profiling software
3. Get the parallel algorithms I wrote as part of the dissertation running on the 3 node RPi cluster.
4. Write some more interesting parallel algorithms to run on the 3 node cluster
5. Buy addition RPi's perhaps get a 10 node cluster running
6. Profile the RPi cluster
7. Get the BSP running on OS X
8. Profile BSP running on a single multicore OS X node
9. Compare the 1 node (multi-core) OS X computer to the 10 node RPi cluster
10. Based on the resulting performance perhaps get additional RPi nodes to add to the cluster

So thats the plan, watch this blog and I will post the results.

How to get apps to open in a dedicated window OS X

Something that has been bugging me for a while is that when I restart my Mac, and I select to re-open windows, the apps get open in random desktop spaces.

Well I found a solution!;

Basically, you to the desktop space that you want your apps to open in, and for each app in that space, right click, and go to Options > Assign To > This Desktop. Then once you've done that for each app in the desktop space, do it for the other desktop spaces.

Now when you restart, the apps will open in their dedicated space, phew!!!