Information Takes Over

While walking round the Business park, some time ago now, Richard and I got to talking about enquiries that you get in libraries from the great unwashed book reading public.   One I mentioned was the classic:

“I borrowed a book three months ago.  I can’t remember who wrote it or what it was called, but it was blue.”

So we got to thinking about how you could construct a search in a modern online catalogue to help with this query.  And that is how www.colourphon.co.uk was born.

We are building what will become a service, to take an image and return the most frequent colours in both a human readable and machine readable form.  If you have a look at the example links below, you will see results of our weighted ’scan’.  This analysis attempts to add weight to colours that it finds most frequently toward the centre of the image.

Need an example?  These examples will take a moment or two to calculate…

Try this one: Test number one. An ISBN lookup.
This one: Test number two. A Weigted URL
Or this one: Test number three. Another URL

Thought provoking? We’d welcome your comments over on the colourphon blog.

Just came across this useful looking data while looking for Haringey Central Library. Visions of people “lost in carparks”. Is this a prank? or is it a determined effort to come to the aid of people who never seem to be able to get out of carparks without going round twice?

The real answer may be that it is deliberate data or errors to act as a fingerprint so that any infringements of rights can be traced…

Technorati Tags: car park, google maps, google, GPS, Haringey

It’s been some time since I last had time to write a quick blog post.  In the past month, we have moved to Wolverhampton and finally found a cinema with more than one screen; been to the Isle of Wight and visited as many National Trust and English Heritage properties as possible; One of us has started a new job, and is looking for a folding cycle to play on the trains with; the other of us is painting anything that stands still long enough.

But we are back online, Broadband is enabled, and wireless rules.

So what have you been up to in the last month?

Theatre Skills for Adults Showcase: All Their Own Work

This vivacious group return once more for an evening of pieces they have lovingly created. From the early stages of simply staring at the dreaded blank page to the last night and the post show blues, you can join the creative journey as it heads to it’s final destination. A rollercoaster of an evening is on offer with some of the best new work in town.19:45 Tue, 10 Jul 2007, Courtyard Centre for the Arts, Hereford - Studio £2

This is looking to be a good evening. We are in the midst of rehearsals now, after all writing our own piece. Style and theme vary greatly, from the tragic to the comic to the unnerving… but I am sure that you will laugh, cry and be challenged by these pieces.

Come and see us - only £2 - Bargain at twice the price!

On Monday I woke up full of plans for the day - only to find my PC wouldn’t boot. Aaargh. A quick look in the BIOS showed - or rather didn’t show - one of my hard disks to be unrecognised. OK - now’s a good time to kick myself for not organising some sort of backup…

So with feelings of dread - I set about trying to see just how much of a mess my hard disk was in. Case open - seemed to be spinning - so something was happening…

Ok let’s try a linux boot CD, see if we can see anything from there… nope.

Ok lets try a parition magic boot disk and see what we get? success, I can see the drive and I can see the partitions. I run a few checks which all report OK. next step then is to get a new drive - then I should in theory be able to copy the partitions into the unallocated space and - fingers crossed - all should be well.

I bought a new disk, got it home, opened it. Doh! should have read the label on the box more carefully, I had a SATA not a PATA drive (I had never noticed that IDE had been renamed!). Took it back, got the IDE drive, popped it in the machine, fired up partition magic and - after several hours copying the partitions the data is all there and good. Now I just have to write a new master boot record for the drive and all will be well.

Oh yeah, and I had to set a flag in windoze registry to allow LBA-48 so that windoze would see all 320GB of the new drive.