randomwire.com
life on the edge of the digital extreme



Signal Patterns (Jun 29)
Many years ago when I was at school we were made to take fairly crude psychometric tests (I think one was Myers-Briggs) in order to supposedly help us find what career we might like and understand our personality traits. I never found them particularly helpful and have always thought of the field as rather lacking [...]


The View From The Top (Jun 24)
Last weekend I was lucky enough to be taken on a tour of One Canada Square, the tallest building in the UK, courtesy of a friend who works there. Situated at the heart of Canary Wharf close to where I live the main structure is 235m tall with 50 floors and is a prominent landmark [...]


Life Relocated (Jun 15)
In this time of increased personal mobility and global connectivity the world is nowhere near as big as it once was. The days when you made a home for yourself near the place you were born are long gone and, certainly in places like the UK, multiculturalism is now well defined and spreading. Whilst a [...]


Wordle Cloud (Jun 14)
Whilst being more of a toy than having any tangible application Wordle is a cool way of generating “word clouds”. Words are given more prominance depending on how many times they occur in the source text. I generated the cloud above using tags from my blog - simple but effective. ShareThis


Attached to a Captcha (Jun 4)
While CAPTCHA’s are supposed to keep the evil spammers of the world at bay there is no doubt that they are an annoyance to the end user. Most involve deciphering a string of mangled characters in an image which you must get right before you can complete a transaction of some sort (e.g. for signing [...]


Semantic Services (Jun 3)
If you’re a blogger or have any interest in semantic/content management technologies then you may be interested in a couple of new services which have recently launched with the aim of making content creation easier by automatically suggesting contextually relevant images, links, articles and tags which you may like to include. Tagaroo Tagaroo is based on an [...]


Design Perspectives (May 30)
What do you notice about the design of these web pages (aside from the fact that they’re not English)? The top 3 are Korean and the bottom 3 Chinese - all are popular portals. Naver is Korea’s premier search engine (with 77% of the market there) and Cyworld could be compared to Facebook (with over 20 [...]


Solidarity in Numbers (May 22)
I thought I’d share this heart-wrenching story I received from a friend in China yesterday relating to the devastating earthquake last week - This is just one of many such harrowing tales emerging from the disaster which really brings home the reality of the situation. I sometimes feel that it’s all to easy for us to divorce [...]


Peking University Ruins (May 19)
One of my most curious discoveries in Beijing came on my final day when I visited the grounds of Peking University (colloquially known as Beida) which can be found in the northwest district of Haidian (very near where I used to live). The rambling grounds are located on the former site of the Qing Dynasty [...]


London -> Tokyo by Train (May 13)
Sometimes you come across an idea which is so mad that it might just have a chance of success. This was the case when I first heard about proposals to dig a 200km+ undersea train tunnel between Korea and Japan in a similar fashion to the Channel Tunnel which connects Britain and France (albeit 4 [...]