The New Wolfs Howl

Last man standing

2008-05-13T18:26:55Z

WSOP Heads Up is the latest in my sometime series of experiments with online gaming. This one, though, is a bit more intense than the others.

The major difference is that Heads Up is a one-on-one game - no more of this playing against a multitude of faceless players. Here it’s just you and the other guy (or gal); the battle for who’s best is personal! Over at bet365 - one of the best places on the Net for learning to play, as well as playing poker - they’re adding to the pressure with the WSOP $14,000 winners package. Just think, all those lovely greenbacks at stake - provided you can just beat that one last person…

This post is sponsored by bet365.

Brief notes

2008-05-09T17:46:43Z

1 First and foremost, congratulations to Eastbourne Borough FC who were superbly victorious in their play-off final last night. We’re moving up into the Blue Square Premier League next season; national football for the first time in the club’s history. The guys done good!

If you saw the match on Setanta and wonder who the hell Health Plus are, they’re the company I work for who have been sponsoring Borough this season. We’ve also been helping them out with various supplements which coach Nick Greenwood has said have had a positive effect on the results this season. It’s nice to make a difference!

2 More stories to make your blood boil in the news today. The teenage killers of Kodjo Yenga have been given ‘life’ sentences and the judge has recommended they serve at least 15 years. So that means they’ll be out when they are in their late 20’s, early 30’s. Hardly life is it? Lock the door and throw away the fucking key. In these days of being too pussy to have a death sentence, life should fucking well mean life!

3 Apparently the latest edition of the Rough Guide that deals with England is coming in for a bit of stick, because it describes us as “overweight, alcopop-swilling, sex- and celebrity-obsessed TV addicts”. Seems fairly accurate to me.

4 Wikipedia, and the parent company Wikimedia, are coming in for a bit of stick, too at the moment because of various comments made by their second-in-command. I haven’t really been following the story but from what I’ve seen it seems like the “pedia” in their name might have a totally different meaning from now on. (Also here and here) (Thanks to Calacanis for bringing this one to the Wolfs attention).

Confused about Alexa

2008-05-09T05:53:15Z

I’ve never really understood why Alexa rankings are used as a guide to how popular a website is. As they themselves say that their data “may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. To the extent that our sample of users differs from the set of all Internet users, our traffic estimates may over- or under-estimate the actual traffic to any particular site.” Yet everyone wants a really high Alexa rank.

Recently, Alexa changed the way that they gather data and arrive at the rank for a website. It used to be that you had to have the Alexa toolbar loaded for your visit to a site to count. But the ranks that were arrived at gave no indication of how many people were using the toolbar (as a percentage of total internet users) and gave no indication of how many sites were indexed - you might be ranked 544,232, but how do you know how good that is? If they only index 544,233 sites then it’s really bad. If, though, they index 54,423,200 then it’s pretty good. Relevance is what we’re talking about.

And that was a system that could be “gamed” quite effectively. I’ve got the Alexa toolbar loaded in Flock (it’s not available for Safari) and have managed to dramatically improve the Alexa ranking for all the sites that I maintain at home and at work just from my own visits. Being able to improve a site’s ranking by over 2,000,000 in less than 10 days from one person’s visits seems like there’s something wrong.

With the changes, though, they use the toolbar data backed up with “data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.” Helpfully, they don’t give an indication of what those sources are. This should mean that Alexa rankings will be more accurate and more relevant, but I’m not sure that it does. The changes were made in mid-April (see this blog entry from the Alexa site), and immediately a lot of people were upset because their ranking got worse (see comments to the same blog post). The rank for this site improved by about 50,000 at that time, but since then hasn’t changed at all. Given that its been about three weeks, that seems odd (the old ranking system used to change the ranks every three or four days).

What’s also odd is that the current rank doesn’t seem to tie-up with Alexa’s own figures. On the traffic details page for wolfshowl.com, they state that all but 0.4% of the traffic comes from UK, US, Australia, Canada or Indoensia. The individual ranks for these countries range from 20,306 for the UK to 224,386 for the US - yet the overall rank for the site is 364,952. How does that work? If it’s done on averages, then the ranking in the 0.4% that comes from other countries must be really, really bad because the average of the countries they list is 140,002. Whichever way it’s done, how can a site have a ranking 120,000 worse than the result you get if you add together the ranks of the two countries that make up over 86% of the total traffic?

I’ve always wondered about the relevance of Alexa and lamented it’ use a measure for advertising spend, but now I’m also starting to wonder about its ability to add up.

Bass-ackwards once again

2008-05-03T11:27:06Z

The BBC is a good source for all sorts of news - including the stuff that really makes my blood boil. This latest story deals with a statement from the National Association of Head Teachers, calling for good parents to be rewarded for looking after their children properly.

Sorry? You want to reward people for doing what they’re supposed to be doing anyway? You want to make it seem like it’s something special to look after your children properly? If it really is, if the standard is for people NOT to look after their children properly then as a society we’re fucked. Pure and simple.

In a similar vein, there’s this story about a planned 38% pay increase for prisoners that was pulled at the last minute. 38% pay rise for prisoners? Come ON! You’re kidding right? They’re PRISONERS! They BROKE THE LAW! Why are they being paid for the work they do? Isn’t it supposed to be part of their punishment? It’s apparently all part of the rehabilitation programme. Here’s an idea - instead of making prison so damn cushy, why not actually make it a proper penalty - so that people would far rather NOT commit a crime because they don’t want to be put in jail?

Facebook again

2008-05-02T23:40:05Z

The BBC have discovered that it’s easy to write a Facebook application that will, when loaded on a users profile, harvest all sorts of information about that person and their contacts. If the BBC are the first people to think of doing this, I would be really surprised, yet there seems to be a level of indignation that I find hard to take. This is the internet; it is not anywhere near as secure as people would like us to believe and hacking goes on. If you don’t want anyone to find out enough information about you to commit identity fraud, don’t put it on a public forum - it’s as simple as that.

Until we all learn that our personal data is valuable - and that protecting it is OUR OWN RESPONSIBILITY - then identity theft will continue to increase.

Protected: Like I said, nice idea

2008-05-02T22:57:58Z

And another one

2008-04-30T18:07:20Z

After my post the other day about being requested to remove a post, I realise today from reading this story that perhaps I got off lightly. A blogger has been fined £150 and ordered to pay £364 costs for a blog post in which he “let off steam” about his treatment at the hands of the police and supposedly made comments that “any reasonable” person would find “menacing”.

The news article gives one quote from the post which seems to have been the line this whole thing hinged on, but it doesn’t seem particularly menacing to me. Unclearly written, perhaps, for the point he was trying to make but not menacing. Sadly, the post in question has been removed so I can’t go and check out the rest of it to see if, as claimed, “the context of the whole blog” makes that line more menacing or not.

What we seem to be moving towards though with this case and others is a that, far from being a place where you can have your say about the world around you, a blog is becoming a place where you have to make sure that you are towing the party line. Woe betide you if you cross that line.

Was a line crossed?

2008-04-28T17:02:21Z

And if there was, who’s line was it anyway? (see what I did there? No? Oh well). Let me see if I can explain what I’m talking about.

Avid readers of The New Wolfs Howl (I know there are a couple) may notice that there’s a post missing from the site at the moment; check your feed reader and you should be able to work out which one I’m talking about. It’s a post that I wrote about a new website that is related to the industry I work in. We’ve been having some dealings with them at work, and after various correspondence that’s gone back and forwards between the two organisations, I wrote my post about how I didn’t think that what they were saying to businesses tallied with what they were saying to their website users.

Now, there’s something I would like to make clear at this point. The post I wrote on this subject (indeed, all of the posts that I write, whatever the subject) was my own point of view and, as such, cannot be said to be the opinion of the company I work for, nor endorsed by them. But, the content of this particular post was informed by the correspondence I’d had at work.

Today, the PR company behind the website concerned emailed me at work, asking for the post to be taken down because by putting it up I had breached (for want of a better phrase) professional etiquette, in addition to making factually incorrect statements. We’ll come back to that second bit in a moment, but let’s take the issue of professional etiquette first.

I think it’s an important question for bloggers and I know that there have been some famous cases in the not too distant past where people have been removed from their jobs for what they’ve written on their blogs. I intended to write a post about what I perceived to be a conflict between the private face and the public face of a particular website. As a consumer, I would normally only see the public face but as someone who works in the industry, I got to see the private face and to me they didn’t gel. So I wrote about it - from a consumer point of view - to make other people aware. Perhaps I didn’t write in a particularly complementary way, perhaps I should have written to the website company first, perhaps I should have got the OK from my employer first. Whatever I should have done, I went ahead and wrote the post.

What’s interesting to me now is whether, by asking me to take down the post, the website has censored this blog - or whether I crossed a line that shouldn’t have been crossed and they have every right to request it be taken down. I’d be really interested in hearing your opinion.

Of course, by asking for it to be taken down they get no opportunity to correct the factual errors that I may have made. It also gives them no opportunity to respond publicly to the opinions that I put forward (yes, they’ve done so privately but surely better for them to do it publicly through the comments?). For any facts that I got wrong, I apologise (but the information I had available at the time indicated that my facts were correct) but please don’t ask me to apologise for my opinion.

Now I’m REALLY confused

2008-04-26T10:07:48Z

At work, we’re running a customer information database that uses an Access database file with a user-friendly Visual Basic front-end. Part of the set up is integration with postcoding software, for address verification. It currently runs on a Windows 98 system.

We’re looking at upgrading the hardware, so at the moment we’re trying to ensure that the database will run on either XP or Vista (we’re not yet in a position to also be able to upgrade the software). We know that the database will run on XP, as we’ve got an XP laptop that it currently works on. The problem is that we can’t recreate that result; none of us have been able to get the database running successfully on XP. The usual result is that we can get either the database to work (enable customer searches, add orders, etc) or we can get the postcoding software to work. Not both at the same time.

My latest attempts are even more confusing; run the database and it opens up without problems. Run the routine to print an address label and it will let you do that - and let you use the integration with the postcoding software to verify the address - but do anything that requires searching for a customer and you get a “Runtime 91″ error, which is what you normally get when the Access file can’t be found.

I’ve been trying to do this on an XP installation on the BootCamp partition of my Mac, and I’ve got nowhere. Today, I loaded a trial version of Parallels, the desktop VM software that allows you to run Windows without having to re-boot your Mac. I told it to use the BootCamp installation of Windows (couldn’t be bothered to try and re-set everything up) and everything seemed to work well. Just for a laugh, I thought I’d run the database program.

And guess what? It works perfectly - exactly as it’s supposed to. Yet I’ve changed nothing about the installation. The only difference is that it’s running in a VM window. I wondered if something had changed, so I re-booted into BootCamp and no, it still doesn’t work there.

Which is why I’m REALLY confused; what is the fundamental difference between Parallels and BootCamp that is making the software work in one and not the other? Any tech-heads out there able to give me any clues? Please…

Wish I’d thought of that

2008-04-25T18:31:13Z

Watching Dexter the other night, it was revealed that he has a scar on the side of his torso*. One of his girlfriend’s** kids asked him what it was: “Sword fight. I won.”

Why is this significant? I was burnt by boiling water as a toddler (my own stupid fault, apparently) and spent nine weeks in intensive care. I don’t remember the event at all (one of the good things about human memory is that it doesn’t really kick in until relatively late) so I just have a bunch of scars to commemorate the event. Most are hidden from everyday view - I was lucky that my startlingly handsome good looks were unaffected by the accident - but there’s one on my right arm that isn’t easily hidden.

Growing up, this meant that the one question I heard more than any other was “What did you do to your arm?”. If you get asked one question enough times, you start to develop a bit of a complex about it and by the time I hit my teens I had developed a rather sullen response (something along the lines of “Fuck off” if I remember correctly). Watching Dexter the other night, I was thrown back to those days and spent the rest of the episode wondering why I couldn’t have thought of something as witty and clever when I needed to.

And that, in turn, got me thinking about how things change as you get older. As I went through school, every year it was new class, new classmates and the same old question. I think pretty much every kid I went to school with asked me that question. Towards the end of secondary school, though, things started to change. First, by then as a student you’ve pretty much met all the new people you’re going to meet at that school. On top of that, people became more reserved about asking; you can see the question form in their head, but something (politeness, revulsion, who knows) stops them asking. Some people still ask, but they are very much in the minority. These days it’s only really young kids or really old people that ask.

The strange thing is that I miss it. I hated that question when I was a kid, but I can’t now remember the last time I was asked and I do, I miss it. Which is weird.

Actually it’s not only Dexter that’s got me thinking about my scars this week (I’d post pictures, but you really wouldn’t like them); Waking The Dead showed a scene where a man got a kettle full of boiling water poured over his legs, right around the area where I’ve got one of my scars. I normally like Waking The Dead but I did have to stop watching for a bit.

I don’t know why it is (as I said I can’t remember the event) but whenever I see anything about someone being burnt - whether it be truth or fiction, and no matter how they get burnt - I can’t take it. I can happily watch Tobe Hooper chop people’s heads off with chainsaws, or Clive Barker pull people apart with hooks and chains, but if someone gets burnt, that’s it I’m outta there. I once had a blazing row with a girlfriend who was watching a news story about a six-year old girl who’d been burnt in a fireworks accident and I turned the TV over; she insisted on watching it and I had to leave the room. (Equally, while I applaud all that Simon Weston has done for soldiers injured in combat and other charities and I identify with his situation, I can’t watch him on TV. I just can’t.)

As you can maybe tell, I’m quite conflicted over my burns. On the one hand, I can see how the scars that I have could be seen as freakish and off-putting to people and they are part of the reason that I’m quite introverted. On the other hand, I’m proud of them in a way. I don’t remember life without them, they are part of who I am and I’m not sure that - given the opportunity - I would give them up.

*For some of you, this episode probably aired months ago. What can I say? We’re backward here in the UK.
**His girlfriend is played by Julie Benz and is it just me, or do you want her to vamp out just once?