Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentI'm trying to build up my tolerance of scary movies. The Shining was pretty good - but not too scary. Now @summerbeth is making me watch An American Werewolf in London.❤️ 18💬 23♻️ 019:50 - Fri 30 October 2020 I have a theory about certain movies. Take, for example, "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace". It is not - so I theorise - a movie designed for audiences. It is a movie designed as an advert for Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects house behind the …
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In the late 1960s/early 1970s, a San Francisco cartoonist becomes an amateur detective obsessed with tracking down the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified individual who terrorizes Northern California with a killing spree. This is a rather plodding police procedural. There are a few directorial flourishes, but lacklustre compared to David Fincher's previous work. After the first hour and a quarter - which is halfway through the movie - it's clear that there's no interest in create a taut…
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I'm an advocate for open data - both in my professional role and in a personal capacity. One of the hard things is succinctly explaining that "open data" means "non-personally identifiable data at a sufficient granularity to be useful without proving a risk to any individual's (or group's) reasonable expectations of privacy while still being useful to researchers and civic society." What a mouthful! So, the NHS releasing the number of times a doctors' surgery has prescribed…
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Our community website - OpenBenches - has over seventeen thousand crowd-sourced entries. The nature of user-generated content is that there are bound to be duplicates. Especially around popular walking routes. Here's how I culled around 200 duplicates using the awesome power of SOUNDEX! Soundex is a clever algorithm for reducing a string of characters into a string which roughly represents its pronunciation. The "roughly" is key here. We could just search the database for identical entries,…
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If you've been around programming circles long enough, you'll probably have read the seminal "If PHP Were British". If not, go read it now. I'll wait. I love the idea of a non-American programming language. I'm aware that there are some, but I'm unaware of any which are in British English. Except, perhaps, BBC Basic. Although that also allows traitorous American spelling for some keywords. HTML was invented by a Brit (Hi Sir Timbl!). So why doesn't it use British spelling for everything? …
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It's always fun to look back at the predictions ancient man made about life in the future. 11 years ago today, Loïc Le Meur wrote 30 predictions for the future of Twitter (Video of the talk). This is a non-snarky look at those predictions. Not to ridicule his ideas, but to understand the errors made in order to help up make better predictions. 1. It will reach masses of people Yes! Perhaps not the whole world, but it is obvious a mass medium. 2. They won’t use
the same tools as we do …
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