I think that most Community Support Officers and Special Constables do an excellent job, but you can’t know every law inside out. However, you should know laws like when and where people can film/photograph if it’s your job to film the streets of London…

I think it would just portray an image of a room full of mindless corporate drones, unable to express themselves with so much as a small picture of their son/daughter, or a amusing Dilbert strip to alleviate the day-to-day.

I exaggerate of course, I break the rule constantly as my desk is a permenant reminder of what happens when you employ someone like myself. I am, however, sat in the middle of the room, so I guess I serve as a reminder of how your desk SHOULDN’T look!

The real kicker is that everyone at work thought it was cool…

And for good reason - python is an incredible sophisticated language that’s both elegant and easy to learn, add Django into the mix and you’ve got a winning combination! Learning Website Development with Django by Ayman Hourieh is one of the first books on the subject and sets the bar very high.

From the outset Ayman Hourieh makes no bones about the fact that really, you need to have more than a passing knowledge of python. You don’t need to know all it’s nuances, but being familiar with the syntax will help immeasurably. However, his code examples are excellent and even if you just copy verbatim what he’s written, you’ll soon pickup enough to call yourself a python/Django developer.

From describing the actual installation on multiple platforms to the reasons behind some of the choices the Django team made, the book makes an effort to help you understand the whys and wherefores of Djangos (and pythons) existence as well as the technical and development facets.

The book helps you build a bookmarking application, but anyone who knows anything about web2.0 will instantly see that there are many more uses for the application. Your mind will be a-flutter at the possibilitiesDjango opens up for you and the author will show you far enough down each path to give you a taste of the power at your fingertips. Each chapter is structured as steps in the build process and guides you through the application. At first I was a little dismayed to see basicMVC (or MTV) rules being broken so early on with HTML in the python code, however it’s merely an example and later on in the book the author discusses proper use of templates with some first class examples.

Any coding language is too big for one book so don’t expect to learn everything Django has to offer, but Ayman Hourieh has written a guide which is succinct, accurate and elegant, with an application which you can re-purpose in hundreds of different ways or use as a foundation for the next killer web2.0 app!

Buy ‘Learning Website Development with Django’ here.

They have the odd lemon, well, I say that, what I should say is they have the odd story which isn’t to my taste, but the majority of the stories are excellent. Two that are though were outright amazing were Edward the Bear and the Very Long Walk and Homecoming at the Borderlands Cafe. I’ve listened to quite a few of the backlog now (about 40 odd) and the quality is consistently high.

Anyway, head over there and subscribe, it’s well worth it!

Anyway, I did say I wasn’t going to show anyone until I’d edited it and re-written parts etc etc. But, now I’ve read it through myself, it’s a bit simple plot-wise, the characters are thin and it’s interspersed with random gibberish as I fell asleep at my keyboard.

To that end, I’ve put it online in the hopes that someone will read it and offer me any feedback - should I edit it and rewrite parts? Is it worth spending the time? Did I waste many precious hours on a blithering bucket of bilious carbuncles? (Actually, the answer to the last question I already know, no, I didn’t waste any time, I thoroughly enjoyed doing it.).

So, click the link below, have a read and let me know what you think … please!

The Centre of the Earth is an Attraction

Research published in December showed that Catholicism is now the most popular Christian denomination with more worshippers attending mass than Church of England services.
Reuters UK

While it doesn’t scite it’s source, it’s an interesting statement!

Update: The Times agrees.

With that said, here’s some content:

I recently finished my first every short story entitled “Extremely Bad Luck“, you can read it by clicking that title, or clicking here: http://oort-cloud.org/?q=node/539.

That’s all for now!

Don’t get me wrong, visually this game is an absolute stunner, pretty much setting a new benchmark for the way games should look on next gen consoles. The first time you round a corner and see the first city spreading out in the valley below you is a real jaw-dropping moment. The first time you swan dive from a viewpoint, or perform a retaliation kill will cause you to spontaneously whistle through your teeth in amazement.

But a game isn’t all about the way it looks.

It’s about the gameplay. Isn’t it? Assasins Creed starts with some phenominal gameplay and then, well that’s the point, it just does the same things over and over again. Without giving too much away, there are several set peices you need to do in order to learn enough about your mark to then be given the go-ahead to stab ‘im up good. These things never vary from level to level, they are always “Pick Pocket”, “Interrorgate”, “Evesdrop” and “Talk to Informer” the latter being either collect some flags an idiot has carelessly dropped or stab someone (or two, or three) who your informer doesn’t like. There are also side missions, well, side “mission” and that is to “Save the citizen”. Someone will be having a bad day at the hands of the city guards and it’s your job to rush in, kill the guards and talk to the Citizen. They will then tell there brother/husband/uncle/dog who will tell their mates and then you’ve got either a walking camoflage point, or some people who’ll get in guards’ way if they’re chasing you (more about guards in a moment). But that’s it. There is little more to the game, save the assasinations. Some assasinations will take you a fair amount of time, especially if you have to get into a castle, or somewhere similar.

But thats it. Seriously. The same 7 or 8 tasks over and over again, set in some of the most beautiful computer game environment ever made.

Somebody dropped the ball.

On top of that are the guards. The guards who roam about the city have some not bad AI. They will chase you up buildings and through tunnels, so no problem there. The guards on the roof tops? Idiots, all of them. When you climb up onto a roof, they will stand there and say things like “You’re not supposed to be up here.” and after a period, will start to fire their arrows at you. But they won’t give chase or do more than stand there firing arrows until you nip behind something and out of their line of sight.

‘Fair enough,’ says you, ‘can’t ask much more from a city guard.’

Well, you can, you see, after an assasination, you’re most sought after, meaning that any guard who sees you will raise the alarm and soon you have five or six chasing you, if you run up onto the roof tops they’ll run up too and chase you there as well, yelling “Stop him!” and “He’s an assasin” and “He’s just murdered so-and-so!”

Then you’ll hear “You’re not supposed to be up here.” as you run past a rooftop guard seemingly oblivious to whats going on behing you.

*Sigh* dropped the ball again.

It’s these little things that make the game so much less impressive than it could be. They could have mixed up the tasks a bit. For example, evesdropping: instead of just “Sit on bench, look at someone, press button to evesdrop on someone who is a hundred yards away in a crowded market square you couldn’t possibly hear even if you had 20th century technology.” you could have “Get within so many feet of this person and listen to them, if they spot you, you have to try again.” - that would have been more fun.

The thing that really amazes me most is that the biggest plot twist, the thing that, if saved for the end, would blow your mind, is used to open the game. What a waste.

Even after all that though, I still go back occasionally, not for the gameplay, but for the mindless sprinting across rooftops. Anyone who played Spiderman2 and just webbed round the city for hours on end will know exactly what I mean. It’s not Spidey, but it sure is purdy.

Some people will have you believe that the reason Assasins Creed is shit is because:

… you have to understand that the game has had to be limited in order to make it accessible to the lower-spec XBox 360.
The Golden Monkey’s Blog

While that is quite obviously the largest peice of bullshit ever written on a webpage, even if it WERE the case that the game was “limited” in order for the XbOX360, I doubt anyone, during the entire lifecycle of the games’ development, ever said:

“We need to make this accessible for the 360 - let’s remove most of the gameplay elements and keep the pretty, pretty.”

Because that, ladies and gentlemen, would be hamstringing the game JUST so you could have pretty visuals on the PS3. Plenty of great games on the 360, and no. Gears of War didn’t push the 360 to it’s limits; Assains Creed is a far more punishing game visually yet there’s still plenty of stuff left to do on the 360.

The idea is that Flickr users will recognise people or places in those photos and add the relevant tags to them. It’s a fantastic idea, but unless Flickr has a special deal with the LOC, then it’s fundamentally flawed. Let me explain…

A photo has attached inside it’s very file something called EXIF data. This data, amongst many other things, including the lens used to the the photo, shutter speed, apeture, ISO, contains all the keywording and meta-description data you could need. If, when you import the photos onto your computer, you add meta data to each of them, everywhere that you use the photograph (be it Flickr, Zooomr or Photobucket) those sites will use that meta data, the EXIF data, to infer things about the image and add them to your upload. That’s how Flickr auto-generates tags and how it knows who uses what cameras.

Wind it back a bit. If you add tags and meta data to an image on Flickr, you’re adding the tags to FLICKR and not to the actual picture. As Thomas Hawk has previously blogged about, Flickr doesn’t add the tag added to it to the meta data of the photo. What I want to know is, how does the LOC get that meta data, added by Joe Public, back into the original file (because, I can guarantee that the Library of Congress stores these images as multi-megabyte files and not the Jpeg you see on Flickr).

Unless they have a special relationship with Flickr, then I don’t see how this project can be anything other than a Flickr based project. This data cannot be taken back into the library unless it is done manually.

Your visit to the Library of Congress to research some photos will be able to be done just as effectively as if you’d never left the comfort of your armchair.

If you’d like to read more, then the LOC blog post is here and Flickrs’ news about it is here.

I love what Flickr do, but not giving you a way to export your tags in a meaningful fashion is a hamstring.