Cellular Automata

Whilst having one of my ‘cellular automata’ moments in my life, they are quite frequent, I came across an interview with Wolfram on Forbes, which is quite interesting and worth a read if you enjoy such things.  I personally am very interested in Wolfram, I am no mathematician and lack training but that is not important, Wolfram uses math to explore his ideas, not as as end in itself.  Cellular Automata are one of his interests, I have a copy of ‘A New Kind Of Science’, which I often refer to.  I am in full agreement with Wolfram that there is much to be learnt from the interaction of independent interacting entities.

btw. Looking at one of my old websites in the wayback machine, I found an old CA that a friend and I wrote one whiskey fuelled night. It is intented to model a sort of energy disserpation through the CA space. Works quite well, also as an Interactive java app it is quite good fun! Here it is (sorry for the line number, you will need to remove them before you compile the code)

001 import java.awt.*;

002 import java.util.*;

003 import java.lang.*;

004 import java.applet.*;

005 import java.awt.event.*;

006

007 public class EnergyCA extends java.applet.Applet implements MouseListener {

008   private Timer timer;

009   private double maxc;

010   private int GCS=2;                     // Grid Cell Size

011   private int GD;                        // Grid Dimension

012   private double MyCA[][];

013   private Image backbuffer;

014   Graphics backg;

015   private int width, height;

016

017   // run when applet initialises

018   public void init() {

019

020     // setup application artefacts

021     width = getSize().width;

022     height = getSize().height;

023

024     backbuffer = createImage( width, height );

025     backg = backbuffer.getGraphics();

026

027     addMouseListener( this );

028

029     // setup Cells

030     GD=width/2;

031     MyCA=new double[GD+1][GD+1];

032

033     for(int x=1;x maxc)

101                 maxc = MyCA[x][y];

102       }

103     }

104   }

105

106   // Draw the CA to the buffer

107   private void DrawCA(Graphics backg,int GCS) {

108     double dpa;

109     Color dc;

110     if (maxc==0)

111       maxc=1;

112

113     dpa = maxc / 256;

114     for(int x=1;x

Todays running route

Two laps of Regents park and a short one to get some water from the foutain.  As usual it’s up on http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1116577

UK house price reductions website

Gosh, I love the site http://www.propertysnake.co.uk, it tracks property websites and reports on reductions in prices.  Pure genius.  Hours of joy for all of us who work really hard but still can’t get the house they want in London!

Training for Berlin marathon

I managed the 7.5 mile NikeTown London club run last night, but they are so fast!  I was last in, but it felt pretty good.  Here is the route.  In short, the run is twice around Regents Park from Oxford Circus.

Doing Backups in a small business -do we always get ripped off?

Every week or so I receive an email from an IT consultancy informing me of their great services for offsite backups.  They always cost a  fortune and often they require a lot of technical know-how.  In my experience small business and non-profits do not have the technical experience to use these offsite services correctly. After all, they often struggle to use email , and that is ok, because IT is often far from their core business, which might be drama therapy, or cycling. 

I think there is room for a low cost personal service for off site backups, perhaps as a social enterprise, employing people perhaps with an interest but not experience in IT, and combied with a clear protocol for taking backups, to visit small business regualrly in a region and take backups to an off site location. 

Anyone agree?

Google analytics

I recently watched a video podcast by Robert Scoble about paid search engine marketing. I recommend it as a primer. Watch it here.

david.

Great paintings in Koln

Was away in Cologne this week for a conference, visited a restaurant and was really surprised to see these great painings of Ratzinger, Gorbachev and Merkel.  The Ratzinger  painting had been moved to the back of the restaurant because of complaints.  The restaurant is located very close the cathedral!

New web site looking ok

About six months ago I launched a new website for the non-profit.  It really did not rank well with Google. Best advice said that it would take at least six months to show better rank , well it’s about three months and starting to see some growth in visitors – which is nice!

tracking visitor movements

I was thinking it would be nice to see the movements of the visitors to our web sites (mouse move, click etc) and had just started to collect mouse movement and scroll action javascript snippets when I thought it was best to check if anybody else had got something going.  I though Google Analytics might have spomething like this built in, but if it does, I can’t find it.  But a few services are out there, and I am going to give them a try, they are: crazyegg, robotreplay and tapefailure.  If anybody has experimented I would be plaesed to hear of your experiences.

David.

Great little google maps hack for saving running routes

Verena and I have started our training for Berlin.  I wanted to calculate today’s route and expected Google maps to have this feature built in, but I could not find it.  But never mind because http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/ was there to  fill the gap.  A great little site that made it very easy to put in the route.  In case you are interested, here is today’s route.

David.