Found by JediLlama at RandalFlagg

Here’s a totally random way to make your new random band’s new random album cover. Go to “Wikipedia.” Hit “random” and the first article you get is the name of your band. Then go to “Random Quotations” and the last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. Then, go to Flickr and click on “Explore the Last Seven Days” and the third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

(original article at BuzzFeed)

Namekagon Lake

Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.

Original Image: DSC_9961 by cislbasilicata

I admit – I cheated with the image – but it was the first one I found with CC licencing that allowed derivative work.

Not entirely sure what kind of tunes would be on there – probably somewhere between Faithless and Air.

30 years ago, the Iranian Shah was deposed, and was replaced with the theocratic Islamic Republic.

Last week, the Iranian public went to the polls to determine their new president. Since the polls closed, and Ahmadinajed declared the winner, many Iranians have taken to the streets, but there has been an almost complete media blackout.

But the regime has struggled to close all channels, and one of the most prolific has been Twitter. Just looking at the hash list for #iranelection nets an evergrowing number of tweets from people in Iran and participating in the protests that are continuing (and, unfortunately, a lot of hashed spam, too).

I’ve only been following one Twitter account – but what has been posted there is eye-opening and, at some points, rather harrowing. @Change_for_Iran appears to be one or more university students in Tehran, and is apparently reporting events that are happening in and around the part of the city he is in. (I say ‘appears’ and ‘apparently’ because there really isn’t anyway to confirm that a Twitter account is authentic – but in this case, that is a good thing as it makes it harder for Iranian security forces to track the origin of the tweets).

It now appears that the university and neighbourhood have been overrun by the Iranian Republican Guard and there have been shootings and deaths.

Living here in South Australia, it is almost impossible to imagine such a situation – and the same would be so for most of the readers of this blog. We are in established democracies. I don’t know about Australia itself – but that last major riots and protests in the UK were in the early to mid-80s, and they were nothing on the scale of what seems to be happening over there in Iran.

I wish that there were more that I could do other than read these postings, and other images and stories which are filtering through the communications barrier setup in Iran.

I really hope that these democratic reform revolutionaries are successful in achieving what they are working towards – and I really hope that they have outside help (the west was happy to invade Iraq and seek regime change – so why not help establish another democracy right next door?)

I’ve just read that the Guardian Council, the true power in Iran, will recount the votes in the election – but without independent witnesses, any recount is a nonsense.

Last month I heard about a festival celebrated in Moonta, a town about 175 km north of Adelaide where the majority of the population is descended from Cornish mining families who settled in the middle of the 19th Century.

While the mines are now all closed, and the local population turned to agriculture, they are still proud of their heritage. The Kernewek Lowender, though, is relatively new. It started in the 1970s as a tourist attraction, and is still a popular biennial event.

The festival is actually celebrated all around the region known as the Copper Coast, although the main event – the Fer Kernewek – is held in the town of Moonta.

I drove up with my camera to get some pictures of the parade.

I also took some pictures around one of the abandoned enginehouses which provided steam power for lifts and water-pumps out of the mines.

Unfortunately, the weather was pretty grotty for most of the day, and while I did manage to get some photos, it wasn’t the best day for a camera and I didn’t hang around too long after the parade.

Photos of the Kernewek Lowender parade in Moonta

Photos from an abandoned enginehouse near Moonta

Microsoft Live Search is dead – long live Bing!

Microsoft, despite some not terribly heroic attempts to gain ground, hasn’t been too big in search. Google takes about 90% of the market share globally, with Yahoo grabbing another 5%, and all the rest (including Microsoft) fighting to get a look-in. This is a major shift from where search was at in 2005.

Recently, Microsoft has sought to break away from the search peloton, and become a significant third (or even second) choice of search engine by killing the Live Search brand and replacing it with Bing.

First Impressions

The first thing you notice is that they have dropped the plain white of Live Search, and that which has served Google so well for over a decade. The background is now occupied by a nice photographic vista which seems to update on an irregular basis.

The next thing that hit me was that the default location seems to be the UK (at least for me coming in from Australia). Thankfully, http://www.bing.com.au/ gives me access to the option to only search for sites in Australia. Not sure why Bing can’t auto-detect my location like Google does, but the option is cookied for now.

The results page is quite a tidy design – looks a little bit more fresh than Google, but that might just be because I’m used to Google.

One nice thing is what happens when you hover the mouse over a result – a floating panel opens with more content from the page so you get a neat little preview.

Instant Answers

From the press release:

Bing provides Instant Answers that immediately return highly relevant direct answers in response to a specific search. For example, entering a flight number will return the most recent flight information and display it prominently in the results, saving the hassle of going to a separate page. Other Instant Answers on Bing include stock prices, local weather, sports scores and more.

That’s kinda cool – the flight from Adelaide to Singapore is SQ268, and the last flight arrived 35 minutes early. Google apparently does this too, so I’m not so impressed. And both search engines get their data from the same source – Flight Stats.

More Search: Images and Relevance

Image search only turned up 7 images associated with “horuskol” – while Google returned 214. This may be a result of Bing’s attempt to return ‘more relevant’ content, although one of the seven images is rather tangential to my alias.

Image search does have some nice filtering – size, type (illustration or photograph), people (faces/portrait), colour and shape – these finer controls over results here are most welcome.

A vanity search works nicely, though. This blog hits the top 2 spots for “horuskol” on Bing, while Google nets me my Twitter and Wikipedia profiles ahead of my own site. Fair enough, but I’d rather have this site on top, thanks – the problems of placing PageRank over relevance (considering my WikiPedia profile page has been untouched by myself for about a year, I’d rather it drop off the face of the internet – but WikiPedia has a very high PR).

Layout and Features

I quite like the results layout of Bing – it enhances what is already a well-developed formula for results pages. Sponsored sites, followed by image/video results, followed by results. Placing related searches on the left hand side is nice, and there is a quicklink to search ‘filters’ (maps, news, images, etc) to indicate that a good number of results in those sections.

Bing is missing one trick, though – I mispelt “lord of the erings” when I was testing, but Bing didn’t offer the alternative spelling. Google very handily places the alternative text right up the top of the page.

Overall

Bing saw a leap in usage right at the start, and outdid Yahoo for a couple of days. This could of course be due to a reported ‘glitch’ in some version of internet explorer (which Microsoft had previously said wouldn’t happen), but I think there was a fair bit of media interest which people followed.

The blip is down again now, and Bing usage is about the same as where Live Search was before the change.

Then again, I’ve become tempted to make the switch myself – at least for a little while.

Last year, a self-proclaimed ‘Google-killer’ was launched – Cuil. They came out with huge bang, which quickly fizzled into a farce, and they have pretty much dropped off the radar. Apart from making riduculous claims, they also made a large number of technical mistakes which caused a lot of angst amongst web-masters around the world. All in all, Cuil has pretty much dropped out of the media, and doesn’t really factor in any discussion on search.

Last week saw a very different launch of a rather different search engine – WolframAlpha. Despite the media attempting to label it as another ‘Google-killer’, the developers and team behind it were very careful to show how their search engine would be different from Google and not in direct competition.

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