Raithe

Finished a re-run of Saints Row 2. Now going onto Saints Row 3. Pondering on if there are any interesting mods out there for it. Hm. Nope. Pretty much basic car tweaks and nudity mods. Ah well.

Trying to work on a Data Science assignment and getting lost. A series of sections that go in stages involving the MusicBrainz database, but its that..establish a batch of sql queries which isn't an issue, but understanding how Musicbrainz works, the relationships between tables and just what information is where is a bit of a nightmare. Then the create python script that will connect to the database, run the sql queries, and then print it out as an xml document. Then do it again, but instead producing json. Then flip it again to have a python script connecting to a MongoDB database to insert the JSON documents you produced earlier... Before wrapping it up by redoing all those queries in Javascript to execute on the MongoDB you created... The more I search on how to do any of it, the more I end up in overly complicated solutions and advanced areas that are way beyond what I'm trying to deal with. It is surprisingly hard to find some simple basic explanations of how to handle that sort of combination of elements. I think tis time for a break. Maybe a short hour of Saints Row insanity to soothe things before I return to it.

Well, they've announced Mass Effect: Annihilation. The story of the Quarian Ark that everyone wanted. Unfortuantely, it's just going to be a novel now.

This one might be of interest to a few folks here.. https://vimeo.com/25118844

I've been bouncing between Shadow of War (which has hit a very grindy stage), and Borderlands 2 lately in free time between lectures and studies, I'm pondering on re-installing Saints Row 2 for the sheer hell of it.

The university is putting on a coach to take anyone with a relevant background who might be interested up to the Cyber-Security Expo in London this week, so I decided to sign up for that and register out of curiousity.

Do you remember the other year when a research group asked facebook to let them run a research experiment? They spent one week using the news feeds of over 600,000 people worldwide. They divided them into groups, and slanted their news feeds to provide positive or negative news and then saw how people responded. Amazingly they discovered that if people only get negative news feeds, they start to post in a negative/down manner themselves, while people who get a majority of positive news feeds tend to post in a more up-beat and happy manner. The thing of course, is that no-one asked any of the people on FB if they wanted to take part. Apparently it's an automatic agreement to let Facebook do whatever they want when you click accept on those terms and conditions.

BBC - Pole Dancing is a Sport

Heh, I had a lecture in the week about Privacy and Internet Ethics. The lecturer showed us how easy it is to access Facebook API and developer and just how much information FB will provide to anyone using them. He then did a "Yeah, I stopped using FB 11 months ago when I found this" but he did amuse everyone present by whipping up a quick thing with the developer and then setting it on his own facebook to show what it extracts.

https://youtu.be/kB15UFO5ebA It can be strangely interesting to see how things got made...

Where on earth did you find it for £22? I keep seeing it for £34-39.

Sen. Klobuchar Questions Sen. Sessions on Media Protections https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppBGvOeIcNE (at the 54:00 mark)

And it's all natural, all recycled...