As a result of my photo series ‘Ffarwell Rhydfelen’, I was asked by a ITV producer to do a talking head interview and show my photos to the current pupils of the ‘New Rhydfelen’ school – which is now sits on a completely different site, a few miles up the road.(see history here)
Thankfully, I didn’t have to see any of the teachers, and the 6th formers were really nice and friendly and seemed largely unaffected by Facebook, My Twitter and the like.
The show is in the Welsh language and shown terrestrialy on S4C within wales (and parts of Bristol and other bordering towns close to the signal hahaaha). But it’s also on digital and English subtitles are available.
The best moment for me was when the producer said that we could meet in my studio in London, and I explained that it was more like a Studio flat – and that I was a software engineer by day not a professional photographer.
Here is the flyer for the programme:
And some backround:
Seventy years after the opening of the first ever Welsh medium school in Aberystwyth, 95,000 children across Wales now receive their education through the Welsh language.
In a new S4C documentary, Trip yr Ysgol Gymraeg, broadcast Tuesday night, 3 March at 8.25pm, Cardiff Blues player Nicky Robinson and friends discover the story of Welsh language schools.
The outside-half will join Media Studies pupils from Ysgol Gyfun Bro Morgannwg, Barry on a trip across the length and breadth of the country.
Their first stop is Aberystwyth – where the first Welsh language primary school was opened in 1939. The gang also visits Llanelli, where parents challenged the local authority for free Welsh education, and Ty’r Cymry in Cardiff, where a Welsh language Saturday school was held in the 1940s.
The bus then takes them to north Wales, to Ysgol Dewi Sant in Rhyl and Ysgol Glan Clwyd in St Asaph. They also meet First Minister, Rhodri Morgan at the Senedd building to discuss the future of Welsh language education.
Nicky and his brothers, Jamie, who also plays for the Blues, and Ellis were raised in a non-Welsh speaking home, with their mother coming from Middlesbrough and their father from London. But their parents were keen for their sons to attend the capital’s Welsh medium schools.
Nicky says, “It’s an intriguing journey as we ask a number of questions – what are Welsh medium schools, how did they start and who first had the idea for Welsh medium education?
“It was a great experience to join Ysgol Bro Morgannwg’s youngsters and see their attitudes towards the language. Most of them, like me, have been raised in non-Welsh speaking families – I could relate to them in that way,” adds Nicky.
With the latest news that Cardiff County Council is planning to build two new Welsh comprehensive schools in the capital by 2012, Nicky is a keen supporter of these plans and believes that Welsh education is going from strength to strength.
Trip Yr Ysgol Gymraeg
Tuesday, 3 March, 8.25pm
Welsh and English subtitles available
Website: www.s4c.co.uk/factual
Broadband: s4c.co.uk/clic
An ITV Cymru production for S4C
In this article, I talk about the problems of wrapping asynchronous function to make them look synchronous. I first focus on the asynchronous APIs in Symbian OS and how synchronous waiting can be implement, and then discuss how Qt(TrollTech) have solved the same problem.
(This is still a bit rough, so I may make a few changes) Read the rest of this entry
Last year, I wrote an article for the Reg about Google’s need for a mobile web platform which has Gears like functionality. There are a couple of ways of achieving this on S60, one is the Gears plug-in (a non starter on S60), develop your own browser (Firefox are doing this, and Chrome may or may not appear on mobile), or wait for the built in browser to implement the relevant HTML5 standards which allow interfacing with client side databases.
As I mentioned previously, the support for “canvas” tag in the HTML5 spec fills the need to draw arbitrary shapes, and Google demoed the potential of dropping Gears in favour of standard HTML5.0 primitives at MWC:
So all this standards love in is all coming together nicely, with the palm Pre getting in on the action. But I found it hard to find information about S60’s web browser and HTML5 support, anyone know?
Eclipse is getting silly. What started off a fairly sensible tool for Java development now appears to have been designed for no one in particular. The problem is that every plugin thinks it’s the most imporatant thing in the system and splats itself all over the place. Sure you can say it support feature X, but and the notion of a co-ordinated design, a tool which crafted for the benefit of the developer seems to have been lost. It doesn’t even look like a tool ‘for developers, made by developers’.
Exhibit 1:
Here is the result of right clicking on an “identifier”. I was trying to look up a header file.
Woah! The list scrolls up and down on my laptop screen. And now with the Qt plugins, I now have around 50 tabs to choose from (all of which seem to jump around when i press them).
Ok, there are quite a few context sensitve options that belong in that list, but “Preferences” – that’s a global project option which doesn’t even refer to the file i’m editing, let alone the highlighted identifier, and why oh why is “Run Leavescan” there?.
The BBC technology web site seems to be getting worse and worse at supplying seemingly arbitrary stock images with their articles. The images are usually irrelevant yet harmless space filler, but in a recent article on the Conficker virus, they include the following image with the caption “Millions of computers have been hit by Conficker”:
Not only is this lazy journalism, but it’s totally misleading. For the lay man, the image presents the notion that the virus can destroy computer hardware and the only course of action is to dump your computer (and monitor) along with all other infected machines in the neighbourhood onto a burning pyre to avoid the spread of infection.
The reality is that there are software tools and patches to remove the virus and at worse, windows could be reinstalled at the local PC Word (if the user didn’t know how).
For the most part though, the attempt to match a dull abstract subject to a stock image library photo can be justified by way of a metaphor. My fave being broadband, the utter bollocks of it is wonderfully humerous. Check out some recent photos and captions :
oh no, actually forget driving. It’s like space exploration:
The weak pound over the last few months has certainly made holidays in Europe more expensive (check your desk drawer for euros from your last business trip).
However, the upside is that exports from the UK are more attractive to our neighbours. A company that was charging for goods and services in Euros will get more sterling in the bank, and can be in a better position to discount, therefore expand the business (unless they themselves rely heavily on imports).
I’ve noticed that this has peculated somewhat to Ebay. In January, I sold a number of consumer electronic items on ebay to Germany, Spain and Italy for much more than I would have expected. In fact three items fetched a smige more than I originally paid for them, one of those isted as defective!
Ebay purchasing is irrational at anytime, but I was curious about this. It makes sense for foreign purchasers to weaker currencies. But I would have thought that buying brand new from UK retailers would have made more sense.
I think some of it has to do with Ebay’s interface and some to do with the bargain psychology associated with ebay. I have some thoughts:
Users of Ebay get their price adjusted to their local currency. This means that along with items available regionally, Ebay will list international items adjusted for the local currency.
What this means in practice is that a buyer from say Spain will look around for the going price at Spanish retail shops to get an idea of the lowest retail price, and then proceed to Ebay to see if it can be matched.
With the weaker pound, not only will the ‘buy it now’ and current auction price be lower – but the Postage and Packaging will be competitive with respect to regional items.
You would expect a period of adjustment following any radical currency devaluation and I’m sure some people make purchasing decisions without any real research – the “Get me an iPod from the US” effect. And while it would make sense for our Euro chums to search Amazon.co.uk to get a sterling valuation, many of the larger commerce sites redirect to local variants which sell goods at the regional price.
So I guess the tips if you are selling on Ebay are:
Mark your item as “will deliver to Europe”, and use Royal mail to calculate the cost by weight for international signed (or whatever suits your needs.)
Write in your item’s body text that you will deliver to Europe
I’ve made my developer.symbian.com Wiki search plug-in available on mycroft.
This plug-in adds an item to your Firefox3 or IE7 search bar, allowing you to search for FAQs, code clinics and other resources on developer.symbian.com.
Just spotted that ‘Crayon physics’ has been ported to the iPhone. I’d be interested in how well it works with a finger.
In case you haven’t seen it. It’’s a game in which you have to get a ball from one platform to another by drawing 2D shapes which ‘come alive’ – obeying the laws of gravity. For example, if you draw a closed roundish shape with your finger at the top of the screen, it becomes a heavy boulder which falls to the ground, being deflected by anything in its path.
See here:
Some time ago I introduced the PC version of the app to a customer (a handset manufacturer) and suggested that it would make an excellent product differentiator if they bundled it exclusively with their soon to be released touch phone.
At the time, the word differentiation was on just about every power point deck with big companies craving for original ideas, encouraging “blue sky thinking outside of the box” (to use Ian Pegler speak).
Anyway, the idea was not taken up, but I thought it at least interesting to document the reasons why I think this game should have been snapped up for ROM:
It’s playful – you can waste some time at the doctor’s waiting room without really caring too much if you have to put the game down (a bit like snakes)
It has a viral quality – it’s the sort of game you want to show your friends
It offers design/UI cachet so craved by some of the handset manufacturers
It’s 2D – 3D was one of the worst things to happen to game play
I wonder if it could work on the Nokia5800 touch. I’m not sure if the screen is big enough for Crayon Physics to really work, but certainly the stylus is the perfect tool for drawing.
Box2D
Incidentally, a lot of these recent physics toys are based on the excellent Box2d algorithms and library. Box2D was originally a C++ API for simulating constraints in a 2D plane. It’s fast and visually pleasing rather than an accurate physics simulator.
It has been ported to Flash and Nintendo DS, and you can see some of the demos.here.
And for those who are interested, a Symbian/S60 port has been attempted here.
