Penny Dreadful

Imagine all the Gothic horror stories of the 19^th Century, real and fictional. Throw them all together in Victorian London and you'd end up with something like this:

Seems a bit over the top for me, but the acting seems up to scratch.

Goodbye to All That

Today was my last exam at Bromley for the Foundation Degree Course. It was Computer Systems, i.e. assembler and digital circuits using something called VHDL. My least favourite subjects on the course.

I've done very well at the development side of the course, pulling out all the stops and getting 91% in the object-oriented software development assignment, for which I won (jointly) first prize:

Rather expensive, too.

It's been an adventurous two years, something I never thought I'd be able to do, but I did it and that's something.

Introduction to Neo4j

Neo Technologies run little evening seminars to introduce their graph database technology and I took the liberty of attending one yesterday evening. You get a free book!

They're based around the back of the Tate Modern, in an area which seems like an extension of Shoreditch with loads of start-ups and overpriced coffee.

It was a very interesting presentation, given by Rik Van Bruggen (Belgian), giving the background to the database and a really good demo using belgian beers as a dataset. Neo4j also has a community version that you can download as well as a free on-line course (with registration).

Rick also demonstrated a web site that visualises recommendations in Amazon.com, which is quite groovy.

Premiership Blues

Y'know a while ago, I mentioned that it looked like Chelsea had the Premiership sewn up. Then Liverpool came into the running and it looked like they were going to win. Funny how things turn out...

Inch-by-inch, City took over the top slot, first from Arsenal, and then from Liverpool (Blue beating Red twice).

Even better is that not only have the people across town won nothing, they're not even in Europe, having been pipped by Tottenham. Sad, really. And funny. They'll be back, though. They're annoying like that.

It does feel weird, City winning things. Nice to have to get used to it, though.

UXB on the Wild Shore

Before I start my exams on Friday, in a kind of pilgrimage of sorts, I went for a walk on Shoeburyness sea front only to be faced by a long fence:

(Taken using the steam-driven mobile and thus the poor quality). There were signs on the fence explaining it's purpose:

Locals know that Shoeburyness was the army ordnance testing range for some years and still has a military/M.o.D. presence. Then again, the Luftwaffe used the river to guide them into London and could have dropped something on the way back; or it could be something related to the ammunition ship, the Richard Montgomery, sunk off the Isle of Sheppey, although that's mostly opposite Thorpe Bay, so that's alright, then.

Sid Meier's Ace Patrol

I'm always on the lookout for cheap games and I thought I'd check this one out.

I've managed to survive the missions so far:

It's £4.99 on Steam and, like all Sid Meier games, it has a certain charm and certainly fun. The game plays a little like Wings of Glory (what used to be Wings of War), a card-based miniatures game:

Lego Simpsons

Now I like Lego and I like the Simpsons: yes, it's lost it's edge over the years, and I got into (and out of) Family Guy, but it's still pretty good. However, I'm not so sure about the latest Lego minifig series:

Apparently it's to go with one of the latest episodes:

I must not complain about the new Lego minifigs. I must not complain about the new Lego minifigs.
I must not complain about the new Lego minifigs. I must not complain about the new Lego minifigs.
I must not complain about the new Lego minifigs. I must not complain about the new Lego minifigs.
I must not complain about the new Lego minifigs. I must not complain about the new Lego minifigs.
I must not complain about the new

Wednesday - The Graphs of Gaming and Recruitment

Yesterday evening, I went to a presentation on Graph Databases (specifically Neo4j, who were the organisers), hosted by Skills Matter.

First up was Nigel Small who talked about Zerograph, a new container/server for Neo4j.

Nigel gave a quick overview of Zerograph, highlighting it's ability to host more than one database and the use of ZeroMQ (thus the name) to increase reliability and robustness. ZeroMQ is a message queue, which is a piece of software designed to buffer and schedule messages between two systems in a more controlled way than a direct connection. It also, in ZeroMQ's case, allows for temporary disconnections, saving the messages to be processed when the connection is resumed. How this works in practise is another matter.

One of things emphasised throughout the talks was the speed with which Neo4j processes queries and returns results. Graph databases are designed to cope with information which is highly relational in nature, so something that in standard SQL would take seconds or even minutes with multiple joins, takes a fraction of that in a graph database.

Next up was Matt Wright to talk about the work at his company Stitched regarding the use of Neo4j in social networks for recruiting.

A quite amusing presentation, Matt illustrated the problems with existing social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and how "private" networks could be used to give more authentic results.

The last speaker was Yan Cui, from GamesSys, to talk about his experiences using Neo4j to model his company's Freemium online game "Here Be Monsters".

The game is resource based and can be incredibly complex and interrelated, so any small change in the underlying data can have considerable consequences. They've tried to make changes by rule-of-thumb, but this proved too unwieldy, slow and error-prone, so they've been modelling it with Neo4j and had much better results.

One of the things mentioned during the presentations was Cypher. Being interested in cryptography, I was a little baffled, but this turns out to be the Neo4j equivalent of SQL:

MATCH (n:Person)-[:KNOWS]->(m:Person) WHERE n.name="Alice"

Looks similar enough, although I can't see why they didn't call it Graph Query Language (GQL), which would be much more obvious.