The video game Guitar Hero isn't just a video game - it's also the foundation of a reasonably strong user authentication system.
People have been trying to find effective ways to authenticate users with biometrics for ages. It's now routine to see fingerprint scanners attached to machines, iris and retina scanners, and voiceprints. However, nobody has yet harnessed the power of rock as a method of authenticating that someone is who they claim to be.
Guitar Hero (and its open-source and therefore more useful for this exercise clone, Frets On Fire) is a game in which the player pretends to be a kickass rock star by playing notes on a guitar controller with 5 "fret" buttons and a bar which is hit to actually "strum" the selected note. A line of notes on an extended guitar fretboard scroll down the screen, and at the simplest level all the player has to do is to hold down the correct fret and hit the strum bar as the note scrolls across a line at the bottom of the screen. It starts out easy and gets very, very hard indeed at higher difficulty levels. Frets on Fire doesn't even need the guitar controller - it can be keyboard controlled.
What makes this interesting, though, is that every guitar player you listen to - every musician, really - will have a slightly different style. Nobody plays exactly on the beat and exactly according to the score - there are going to be individual patterns in the timings of the notes in a particular piece depending on who's playing them. Guitar Hero knows this - the player actually has a short but measurable window of time in which to play a particular note. Just measure the deviation from the "ideal" time for each note played, and you have a fingerprinting mechanism. This is similiar to the way in which telegraph operators developed distinctive "fists", enabling them to identify each other from the characteristics of the Morse they sent.
Even if someone miraculously plays every note right at the millisecond it's intended to be played, there's plenty of extra data to mix in from the timings of the players' manipulation of the fret buttons. Anyway, you definitely don't get style points in the world of rock for playing all your notes exactly in time (with the possible exception of some particularly tedious prog rock). That ain't rock and roll.
In short, it should be possible to make a reasonably good guess that someone is who they claim to be based on how they play a few of the widdly bits in Bark at the Moon. It doesn't have to be an entire piece - just a few licks will suffice. The more notes the better, obviously - just as longer passwords are more secure, rocking for longer is also more secure. Military applications and cryptoheads would probably insist on using the whole of Free Bird.
Higher levels of difficulty would also be more secure, as these involve progressively more notes and more frets. Thus, Guitar Hero practice would become a core job function for system administrators and others in positions requiring a high level of data security awareness.
There are vulnerabilities, but no more than other authentication systems. Impersonation is very difficult (everyone has their own rhythm, baby - even if you set up the sound to be identical, you can still tell if it's not Angus Young playing Back In Black), so the most obvious replay attacks would be resisted. However, this technique has unexpected strengths as well - alcohol and drugs will alter the player's reflexes and thus their timing fingerprint, enforcing sobriety requirements where these are necessary. That said, if while providing the initial sample the player is under the influence, they'll subsequently need to be drunk to be allowed to log in.
]]>The video game Guitar Hero isn't just a video game - it's also the foundation of a reasonably strong user authentication system.
People have been trying to find effective ways to authenticate users with biometrics for ages. It's now routine to see fingerprint scanners attached to machines, iris and retina scanners, and voiceprints. However, nobody has yet harnessed the power of rock as a method of authenticating that someone is who they claim to be.
Guitar Hero (and its open-source and therefore more useful for this exercise clone, Frets On Fire) is a game in which the player pretends to be a kickass rock star by playing notes on a guitar controller with 5 "fret" buttons and a bar which is hit to actually "strum" the selected note. A line of notes on an extended guitar fretboard scroll down the screen, and at the simplest level all the player has to do is to hold down the correct fret and hit the strum bar as the note scrolls across a line at the bottom of the screen. It starts out easy and gets very, very hard indeed at higher difficulty levels. Frets on Fire doesn't even need the guitar controller - it can be keyboard controlled.
What makes this interesting, though, is that every guitar player you listen to - every musician, really - will have a slightly different style. Nobody plays exactly on the beat and exactly according to the score - there are going to be individual patterns in the timings of the notes in a particular piece depending on who's playing them. Guitar Hero knows this - the player actually has a short but measurable window of time in which to play a particular note. Just measure the deviation from the "ideal" time for each note played, and you have a fingerprinting mechanism. This is similiar to the way in which telegraph operators developed distinctive "fists", enabling them to identify each other from the characteristics of the Morse they sent.
Even if someone miraculously plays every note right at the millisecond it's intended to be played, there's plenty of extra data to mix in from the timings of the players' manipulation of the fret buttons. Anyway, you definitely don't get style points in the world of rock for playing all your notes exactly in time (with the possible exception of some particularly tedious prog rock). That ain't rock and roll.
In short, it should be possible to make a reasonably good guess that someone is who they claim to be based on how they play a few of the widdly bits in Bark at the Moon. It doesn't have to be an entire piece - just a few licks will suffice. The more notes the better, obviously - just as longer passwords are more secure, rocking for longer is also more secure. Military applications and cryptoheads would probably insist on using the whole of Free Bird.
Higher levels of difficulty would also be more secure, as these involve progressively more notes and more frets. Thus, Guitar Hero practice would become a core job function for system administrators and others in positions requiring a high level of data security awareness.
There are vulnerabilities, but no more than other authentication systems. Impersonation is very difficult (everyone has their own rhythm, baby - even if you set up the sound to be identical, you can still tell if it's not Angus Young playing Back In Black), so the most obvious replay attacks would be resisted. However, this technique has unexpected strengths as well - alcohol and drugs will alter the player's reflexes and thus their timing fingerprint, enforcing sobriety requirements where these are necessary. That said, if while providing the initial sample the player is under the influence, they'll subsequently need to be drunk to be allowed to log in.
]]>Then possibly the biggest shock - pre-race favourite Alexander Vinokourov produced a positive A-sample for homologous blood doping (i.e. transfusion of blood from someone else) after his time trial victory, and was slung out of the race so hard that his entire Astana team went home as well. Then the storm clouds which had been building around Michael Rasmussen ever since it was announced that he'd missed 4 out of competition tests in the last year finally burst when Rabobank withdrew him from the race, maillot jaune or not, and sacked him for having allegedly lied about his whereabouts in the week leading up to the tour.
Along with all that, a positive for testosterone from Cofidis' Cristian Moreni was almost an anticlimax, even if it did result in, yes, the whole of Cofidis booking an early flight home.
As I write this, various blogs (and Politiken, a Danish newspaper) are reporting rumours that one of the jersey holders produced a positive for something after Stage 14, but we'll have to see if that one turns out to be true. As L'Équipe doesn't seem to have anything on it, I'll remain sceptical until tomorrow.
Naturally, it's sad when this happens. It is, however, a good thing that cheats are being caught (although let's not forget that all the above are pending B-sample analyses which may still vindicate them). It's a sign that finally, the anti-doping systems are more or less starting to work. They're by no means perfect, but still, people are being caught. All of the other hundreds of tests carried out before and during this Tour have so far turned out negative, meaning that of the 189 riders who rolled down the start ramp in London, 186 haven't tested positive for banned substances. I'm including Rasmussen in that number as it's fair to do so - he hasn't, indeed, tested positive for anything, and that's important to remember.
The mainstream press has, naturally, reacted predictably (the usual 'Tour de Farce' headlines, calls for cycle racing to be banned, etc, etc). The cycling press is full of readers letters about how "I've followed cycling for 30 years, but this is the end". Dick Pound (now there's a name to conjure with) of WADA has helpfully offered to host an "anti-doping summit" to address the "crisis" of doping in cycling, after dissing cycling at every possible opportunity for the last couple of years. Everyone who has an axe to grind is grinding like crazy in the hope of getting themselves in the papers, even including Greg LeMond, who seems to be trying to set himself up as a representative of a semi-fictional era of cycling when all was lovely and there weren't dopers round every corner. Even Germany's two main public TV channels, ARD and ZDF, have got in on the act by self-righteously dropping coverage of the Tour.
What a load of bullshit. Hypocritical, self-serving bullshit. I tried to find a more elegant and poetic word to use here, but no - bullshit it'll have to be.
Why is it bullshit? Well, it's getting late and there's a lot of typing involved. I'll tell you tomorrow.
]]>Then possibly the biggest shock - pre-race favourite Alexander Vinokourov produced a positive A-sample for homologous blood doping (i.e. transfusion of blood from someone else) after his time trial victory, and was slung out of the race so hard that his entire Astana team went home as well. Then the storm clouds which had been building around Michael Rasmussen ever since it was announced that he'd missed 4 out of competition tests in the last year finally burst when Rabobank withdrew him from the race, maillot jaune or not, and sacked him for having allegedly lied about his whereabouts in the week leading up to the tour.
Along with all that, a positive for testosterone from Cofidis' Cristian Moreni was almost an anticlimax, even if it did result in, yes, the whole of Cofidis booking an early flight home.
As I write this, various blogs (and Politiken, a Danish newspaper) are reporting rumours that one of the jersey holders produced a positive for something after Stage 14, but we'll have to see if that one turns out to be true. As L'Équipe doesn't seem to have anything on it, I'll remain sceptical until tomorrow.
Naturally, it's sad when this happens. It is, however, a good thing that cheats are being caught (although let's not forget that all the above are pending B-sample analyses which may still vindicate them). It's a sign that finally, the anti-doping systems are more or less starting to work. They're by no means perfect, but still, people are being caught. All of the other hundreds of tests carried out before and during this Tour have so far turned out negative, meaning that of the 189 riders who rolled down the start ramp in London, 186 haven't tested positive for banned substances. I'm including Rasmussen in that number as it's fair to do so - he hasn't, indeed, tested positive for anything, and that's important to remember.
The mainstream press has, naturally, reacted predictably (the usual 'Tour de Farce' headlines, calls for cycle racing to be banned, etc, etc). The cycling press is full of readers letters about how "I've followed cycling for 30 years, but this is the end". Dick Pound (now there's a name to conjure with) of WADA has helpfully offered to host an "anti-doping summit" to address the "crisis" of doping in cycling, after dissing cycling at every possible opportunity for the last couple of years. Everyone who has an axe to grind is grinding like crazy in the hope of getting themselves in the papers, even including Greg LeMond, who seems to be trying to set himself up as a representative of a semi-fictional era of cycling when all was lovely and there weren't dopers round every corner. Even Germany's two main public TV channels, ARD and ZDF, have got in on the act by self-righteously dropping coverage of the Tour.
What a load of bullshit. Hypocritical, self-serving bullshit. I tried to find a more elegant and poetic word to use here, but no - bullshit it'll have to be.
Why is it bullshit? Well, it's getting late and there's a lot of typing involved. I'll tell you tomorrow.
]]>As an obsessive nerd, this offends me. If the lab work is shoddy or the testing protocols are dodgy then the science is bad and the evidence is bad too. Of course people who dope and cheat deserve to be caught and dealt with severely (and in all sports too, not just in cycling), but such terrible evidence handling would never stand up either to scientific scrutiny as a piece of research or in a court of law as evidence. The anti-doping agencies too often prefer to simply rely on their word being stronger than that of an athlete to get a conviction, and that's neither fair nor valid.
As with anyone accused of anything, suspected dopers deserve due process, and right now it seems they're not getting it. Due process is replaced with trial by media as test results are almost routinely leaked even before athletes and their teams have been told (Sinkewitz's result was faxed to the news agencies, for heavens' sake). This runs the risk of ruining peoples' careers and stripping them of their livelihoods and reputations just so an anti-doping agency can hold smug press conferences about catching cheats - never mind if they can be called guilty with near-100% certainty or not.
This shouldn't be rocket science. It should be possible to carry out doping controls accurately, scientifically and fairly. I'd like to present Mike's List of rules for drug testing protocols in sports which should help restore the confidence of athletes and fans alike in the ability of testing regimes to accurately catch cheats with as little suspicion as possible of false positives. Just as you don't want the innocent to be wrongly punished, you don't want the guilty to have a question mark left hanging over the validity of their test results.
There. Of course, they stand no chance of being enacted as this is only a random bloke's blog after all, but it makes me feel better.
]]>As an obsessive nerd, this offends me. If the lab work is shoddy or the testing protocols are dodgy then the science is bad and the evidence is bad too. Of course people who dope and cheat deserve to be caught and dealt with severely (and in all sports too, not just in cycling), but such terrible evidence handling would never stand up either to scientific scrutiny as a piece of research or in a court of law as evidence. The anti-doping agencies too often prefer to simply rely on their word being stronger than that of an athlete to get a conviction, and that's neither fair nor valid.
As with anyone accused of anything, suspected dopers deserve due process, and right now it seems they're not getting it. Due process is replaced with trial by media as test results are almost routinely leaked even before athletes and their teams have been told (Sinkewitz's result was faxed to the news agencies, for heavens' sake). This runs the risk of ruining peoples' careers and stripping them of their livelihoods and reputations just so an anti-doping agency can hold smug press conferences about catching cheats - never mind if they can be called guilty with near-100% certainty or not.
This shouldn't be rocket science. It should be possible to carry out doping controls accurately, scientifically and fairly. I'd like to present Mike's List of rules for drug testing protocols in sports which should help restore the confidence of athletes and fans alike in the ability of testing regimes to accurately catch cheats with as little suspicion as possible of false positives. Just as you don't want the innocent to be wrongly punished, you don't want the guilty to have a question mark left hanging over the validity of their test results.
There. Of course, they stand no chance of being enacted as this is only a random bloke's blog after all, but it makes me feel better.
]]>Unfortunately for the long-suffering T-Mobile, Mark Cavendish climbed off the same day (not unexpectedly), then Patrik Sinkewitz hit a spectator on the ride down from the finish to the team hotel and had to abandon too. Then today, Marcus Burghardt hit an unattended labrador. He was okay and the dog was okay (there was a team car behind with a rack of spare labradors anyway, and a Mavic bike with a few yellow neutral service poodles) but his front wheel was trashed. He still finished the stage, but you've got to feel sorry for T-Mobile right now. This isn't their Tour...
In yellow now, however, is frighteningly-gaunt Dane Michael "The Chicken" Rasmussen, who stormed over the cols so hard on Sunday that he took not only the fetching polka-dot climbing jersey but the yellow jersey too. It'd be nice if he was able to defend it for a while, but the overall win may be a bit of a problem because he finds it hard to time-trial without falling off. We'll see. One thing for sure, though - the Rasmussen Group Of Pain on Sunday looked like somewhere team directors send riders for punishment if they've been very naughty and refused to apologise. He shelled out the rest of his group and just rode away at a speed alarmingly close to what I can do on the flat, leaving the pursuers weeping in his wake and radioing back to the team car to say they were very very sorry for being bad and can they come back to the peloton now, please?
As for me, the 'cycling bounce' which was hoped for in London in the aftermath of the Tour's visit has so far resulted solely in someone trying to push me off my bike today at the lethally-dangerous Albert Gate exit from Hyde Park, presumably to see if I bounced.
]]>Unfortunately for the long-suffering T-Mobile, Mark Cavendish climbed off the same day (not unexpectedly), then Patrik Sinkewitz hit a spectator on the ride down from the finish to the team hotel and had to abandon too. Then today, Marcus Burghardt hit an unattended labrador. He was okay and the dog was okay (there was a team car behind with a rack of spare labradors anyway, and a Mavic bike with a few yellow neutral service poodles) but his front wheel was trashed. He still finished the stage, but you've got to feel sorry for T-Mobile right now. This isn't their Tour...
In yellow now, however, is frighteningly-gaunt Dane Michael "The Chicken" Rasmussen, who stormed over the cols so hard on Sunday that he took not only the fetching polka-dot climbing jersey but the yellow jersey too. It'd be nice if he was able to defend it for a while, but the overall win may be a bit of a problem because he finds it hard to time-trial without falling off. We'll see. One thing for sure, though - the Rasmussen Group Of Pain on Sunday looked like somewhere team directors send riders for punishment if they've been very naughty and refused to apologise. He shelled out the rest of his group and just rode away at a speed alarmingly close to what I can do on the flat, leaving the pursuers weeping in his wake and radioing back to the team car to say they were very very sorry for being bad and can they come back to the peloton now, please?
As for me, the 'cycling bounce' which was hoped for in London in the aftermath of the Tour's visit has so far resulted solely in someone trying to push me off my bike today at the lethally-dangerous Albert Gate exit from Hyde Park, presumably to see if I bounced.
]]>The idea was fairly basic - ride out for 20 minutes, then turn round and ride back again, seeing how close my inbound time was to my outbound and how far I'd got at the turnaround point. This seems like a fairly good measure of overall fitness. Not wanting to waste any more time I started working a lot harder, and 20 minutes out from home I reached the turnround point after having covered just over 10km. The journey back took eight seconds longer - 20:08 - and had some stiffer uphill digs than the outbound, so in general not too bad.
Then I looked at the numbers. My average speed over the whole ride was 30.1kph, which isn't too bad when compared with, um, grannies on shopper bikes. Fabian Cancellara's ride in last Saturday's Tour prologue was at an average of 53.74kph (although to be fair, that was a much shorter and pan-flat course with not much wind), which means that my performance today can be measured as 560 milliFabians. Maybe one day I'll break 600.
]]>The idea was fairly basic - ride out for 20 minutes, then turn round and ride back again, seeing how close my inbound time was to my outbound and how far I'd got at the turnaround point. This seems like a fairly good measure of overall fitness. Not wanting to waste any more time I started working a lot harder, and 20 minutes out from home I reached the turnround point after having covered just over 10km. The journey back took eight seconds longer - 20:08 - and had some stiffer uphill digs than the outbound, so in general not too bad.
Then I looked at the numbers. My average speed over the whole ride was 30.1kph, which isn't too bad when compared with, um, grannies on shopper bikes. Fabian Cancellara's ride in last Saturday's Tour prologue was at an average of 53.74kph (although to be fair, that was a much shorter and pan-flat course with not much wind), which means that my performance today can be measured as 560 milliFabians. Maybe one day I'll break 600.
]]>Maybe they're looking for some business from the professional cycling world. I could script some new adverts for them if they like -
"I was riding along at the back of the peloton and a spectator suddenly stood out in front of me on a piece of road which hadn't been barriered. I came off my bike, gouged my knee badly and lost my sunglasses. Accident Claims R Us helped me get back on the bike, and I got £5000 from the local council. - Mark C., T-Mobile"
"I was collecting musettes in the feed zone, and a bag got tangled in my spokes and made me crash heavily. The bag didn't carry any warnings about the possibility of this happening. I suffered severe grazing and blood loss, finished 44 minutes behind the leaders, needed hospital treatment and had to exit the Tour de France. Accident Claims R Us helped me, and I was able to get £12000 from my directeur sportif for the distress and pain this caused. -Geoffroy L., Cofidis"
"My chain slipped with no advance warning and made me lose my balance, causing me to crash. I had to wear out my entire team getting back to the back of the pack, spent hours in hospital, and started the next day's stage looking very silly with both knees heavily stitched and bandaged. The pain was tremendous, but worse, the honour of Kazakhstan was damaged and I may now not be able to win the Tour de France. Accident Claims R Us were happy to help me, and I got £8000 from Campagnolo for the distress this has caused me and the Kazakh people. -Alexander V., Astana"
]]>Maybe they're looking for some business from the professional cycling world. I could script some new adverts for them if they like -
"I was riding along at the back of the peloton and a spectator suddenly stood out in front of me on a piece of road which hadn't been barriered. I came off my bike, gouged my knee badly and lost my sunglasses. Accident Claims R Us helped me get back on the bike, and I got £5000 from the local council. - Mark C., T-Mobile"
"I was collecting musettes in the feed zone, and a bag got tangled in my spokes and made me crash heavily. The bag didn't carry any warnings about the possibility of this happening. I suffered severe grazing and blood loss, finished 44 minutes behind the leaders, needed hospital treatment and had to exit the Tour de France. Accident Claims R Us helped me, and I was able to get £12000 from my directeur sportif for the distress and pain this caused. -Geoffroy L., Cofidis"
"My chain slipped with no advance warning and made me lose my balance, causing me to crash. I had to wear out my entire team getting back to the back of the pack, spent hours in hospital, and started the next day's stage looking very silly with both knees heavily stitched and bandaged. The pain was tremendous, but worse, the honour of Kazakhstan was damaged and I may now not be able to win the Tour de France. Accident Claims R Us were happy to help me, and I got £8000 from Campagnolo for the distress this has caused me and the Kazakh people. -Alexander V., Astana"
]]>The sprinters have put on a good show too - Robbie McEwen coming back from a nasty crash 20km before the end of a stage, getting back onto the back of the peloton and then working his way through to surprise Boonen and Hushovd with a mighty sprint out of nowhere was an awesome thing to watch, and I'm sure the people of Ghent were happy to see a Belgian one-two at the finish there after Tom Boonen... well, either let leadout man Gert Steegmans win or didn't. Nobody's telling for sure. Boonen got to break out his green shorts as a result anyway, although he's now had to give them up (possibly temporarily) to Erik Zabel, who seems to have been taking sprint points since roughly the time of Jacques Anquetil.
The British riders have distinguished themselves, too - David Millar made up for his disappointing form in the Prologue by going on a suicidal break on stage 1 and ending up in the polka-dot jersey for a few days for his troubles, and as I write this Brad Wiggins is 18 minutes off the front of the bunch on a solo breakaway. It's most likely a doomed breakaway, but if the peloton doesn't fancy pursuing him then you never know - tomorrow's the first serious climber's day with the Col de Colombiere near the end, so people will be looking to save their legs. Poor Mark Cavendish hasn't had the best of times, though, not least having had a contretemps with a spectator in Kent which led to a bike change, then the next day getting caught up in another crash near the finish.
Hero of the Tour for me so far, though, has to be Cofidis' Geoffroy Lequatre. Why? I mean, he turned pro in 2004 and hasn't got a single professional victory to his name yet, and rides as a humble domestique. Yeah, but then again, this is a guy who crashed heavily in the feed zone yesterday after his wheel had an argument with a musette, scraped himself raw and was assumed to have abandoned. But no, 44 minutes after the leaders he struggled bleeding across the line while everyone else was packing up and going home. Nobody would have faulted him for abandoning on the spot, but he still made it to the finish, just because.
This was of course well outside the time limit and by rights he should have been eliminated, but the commissaires decided to allow him to start today for 'combativité extraordinaire'. He spent the night in the hospital being cleaned up and stitched and eventually didn't start today after all, but this gesture allowed him a much more dignified exit from the Tour than being simply slung out for being outside the cutoff time. Huge respect to the man, especially in a sporting world where footballers will writhe around on the floor and have to be stretchered off whenever they sustain a slight cut to the knee.
Will Boonen regain the green jersey and hold on to it this time? With Kloden and Vinokourov both suffering from injuries, who will grab yellow from Cancellara? Will Michael Rasmussen use his mysterious alien powers to levitate up the mountains again? Will Eurosport ever start their goddamn cycling coverage on time? Will David Duffield choose a combination of shirt and jacket one day which clash so excitingly that my television actually explodes? Stay tuned for the next two weeks to find out..
]]>The sprinters have put on a good show too - Robbie McEwen coming back from a nasty crash 20km before the end of a stage, getting back onto the back of the peloton and then working his way through to surprise Boonen and Hushovd with a mighty sprint out of nowhere was an awesome thing to watch, and I'm sure the people of Ghent were happy to see a Belgian one-two at the finish there after Tom Boonen... well, either let leadout man Gert Steegmans win or didn't. Nobody's telling for sure. Boonen got to break out his green shorts as a result anyway, although he's now had to give them up (possibly temporarily) to Erik Zabel, who seems to have been taking sprint points since roughly the time of Jacques Anquetil.
The British riders have distinguished themselves, too - David Millar made up for his disappointing form in the Prologue by going on a suicidal break on stage 1 and ending up in the polka-dot jersey for a few days for his troubles, and as I write this Brad Wiggins is 18 minutes off the front of the bunch on a solo breakaway. It's most likely a doomed breakaway, but if the peloton doesn't fancy pursuing him then you never know - tomorrow's the first serious climber's day with the Col de Colombiere near the end, so people will be looking to save their legs. Poor Mark Cavendish hasn't had the best of times, though, not least having had a contretemps with a spectator in Kent which led to a bike change, then the next day getting caught up in another crash near the finish.
Hero of the Tour for me so far, though, has to be Cofidis' Geoffroy Lequatre. Why? I mean, he turned pro in 2004 and hasn't got a single professional victory to his name yet, and rides as a humble domestique. Yeah, but then again, this is a guy who crashed heavily in the feed zone yesterday after his wheel had an argument with a musette, scraped himself raw and was assumed to have abandoned. But no, 44 minutes after the leaders he struggled bleeding across the line while everyone else was packing up and going home. Nobody would have faulted him for abandoning on the spot, but he still made it to the finish, just because.
This was of course well outside the time limit and by rights he should have been eliminated, but the commissaires decided to allow him to start today for 'combativité extraordinaire'. He spent the night in the hospital being cleaned up and stitched and eventually didn't start today after all, but this gesture allowed him a much more dignified exit from the Tour than being simply slung out for being outside the cutoff time. Huge respect to the man, especially in a sporting world where footballers will writhe around on the floor and have to be stretchered off whenever they sustain a slight cut to the knee.
Will Boonen regain the green jersey and hold on to it this time? With Kloden and Vinokourov both suffering from injuries, who will grab yellow from Cancellara? Will Michael Rasmussen use his mysterious alien powers to levitate up the mountains again? Will Eurosport ever start their goddamn cycling coverage on time? Will David Duffield choose a combination of shirt and jacket one day which clash so excitingly that my television actually explodes? Stay tuned for the next two weeks to find out..
]]>And yeah, yeah, I know. No postings. I should probably just start going on about cycling a lot or something. That Fabian Cancellara's a class act, eh?
]]>And yeah, yeah, I know. No postings. I should probably just start going on about cycling a lot or something. That Fabian Cancellara's a class act, eh?
]]>Don't worry too much about what to wear when interviewing at Google. If you wear a really sharp suit people will wonder why you own a really sharp suit rather than one you obviously keep just for formal occasions and hardly ever wear, but other than that it doesn't really matter. Don't go too far the other way, though. At least make sure you shower and put on something clean, as you'll be stuck in a small airless room all day for your onsites and if all that people remember about you when they come to write up their feedback is the smell that's a bad thing. You'll get irony points for turning up in a Yahoo! or Microsoft T-shirt, though.
Be nice to everyone. Be especially nice to the recruiting coordinator who's looking after you. And if you need a break for the bathroom or just need to get the hell out of that small airless room for a few minutes or whatever, don't be afraid to ask. One of your interviewers would probably quite like to go for a stroll outside rather than be sitting in a small room anyway. Similiarly, if you have a phone screen which turns out to be at a bad time or you're suffering from lack of sleep and can't think straight, don't be afraid to ask to reschedule. We want everyone to give us the best impression they can when they're interviewed, and if you don't think you can do yourself justice for some reason or another tell us.
Don't worry too much about getting 100% right or 100% wrong answers. If you don't know the answer to a question, try to derive it from what you do know. Theorise and hypothesise and think aloud. People who answer every question straight out are few and far between, and that actually tells an interviewer less about you than listening to you reasoning. Be interested in everything, or at least pretend to be.
Don't be arrogant or cocky. Leave your ego at the door. Arrogance and cockiness will kill you when it comes to assessing your culture fit. We're looking to hire Obi-Wan, not Luke, and we don't care if you used to bulls-eye womprats in Beggar's Canyon in your T-16.
Do come up with interesting questions to ask us, but do be savvy enough to know that questions like "Please give me a detailed description of your production infrastructure" and "How many servers do you guys have exactly, anyway?" aren't questions we can answer. Please don't ask us "How have I done? Will I get hired?" or "How much will you pay me anyway?". We really can't answer that one.
Don't make assumptions about how you've done unless you, say, ran screaming from the building halfway through your second interview of the day (and hey, you probably wouldn't be the first to do that).
Do poke your recruiter gently for an update if you haven't heard anything after a week or so. But be polite - they're insanely busy. Generally when they have information to pass on to you about your application they'll do one of the following:
Do understand that while the hiring process is tedious and frustrating, it's tedious and frustrating for just about everyone. It does mean that if you get through it alive you get to work with lots of insanely smart people, and it's worth it in the end. I promise.
]]>Don't worry too much about what to wear when interviewing at Google. If you wear a really sharp suit people will wonder why you own a really sharp suit rather than one you obviously keep just for formal occasions and hardly ever wear, but other than that it doesn't really matter. Don't go too far the other way, though. At least make sure you shower and put on something clean, as you'll be stuck in a small airless room all day for your onsites and if all that people remember about you when they come to write up their feedback is the smell that's a bad thing. You'll get irony points for turning up in a Yahoo! or Microsoft T-shirt, though.
Be nice to everyone. Be especially nice to the recruiting coordinator who's looking after you. And if you need a break for the bathroom or just need to get the hell out of that small airless room for a few minutes or whatever, don't be afraid to ask. One of your interviewers would probably quite like to go for a stroll outside rather than be sitting in a small room anyway. Similiarly, if you have a phone screen which turns out to be at a bad time or you're suffering from lack of sleep and can't think straight, don't be afraid to ask to reschedule. We want everyone to give us the best impression they can when they're interviewed, and if you don't think you can do yourself justice for some reason or another tell us.
Don't worry too much about getting 100% right or 100% wrong answers. If you don't know the answer to a question, try to derive it from what you do know. Theorise and hypothesise and think aloud. People who answer every question straight out are few and far between, and that actually tells an interviewer less about you than listening to you reasoning. Be interested in everything, or at least pretend to be.
Don't be arrogant or cocky. Leave your ego at the door. Arrogance and cockiness will kill you when it comes to assessing your culture fit. We're looking to hire Obi-Wan, not Luke, and we don't care if you used to bulls-eye womprats in Beggar's Canyon in your T-16.
Do come up with interesting questions to ask us, but do be savvy enough to know that questions like "Please give me a detailed description of your production infrastructure" and "How many servers do you guys have exactly, anyway?" aren't questions we can answer. Please don't ask us "How have I done? Will I get hired?" or "How much will you pay me anyway?". We really can't answer that one.
Don't make assumptions about how you've done unless you, say, ran screaming from the building halfway through your second interview of the day (and hey, you probably wouldn't be the first to do that).
Do poke your recruiter gently for an update if you haven't heard anything after a week or so. But be polite - they're insanely busy. Generally when they have information to pass on to you about your application they'll do one of the following:
Do understand that while the hiring process is tedious and frustrating, it's tedious and frustrating for just about everyone. It does mean that if you get through it alive you get to work with lots of insanely smart people, and it's worth it in the end. I promise.
]]>I've finally given up and turned off comments - as it seems that there's no reasonable solution to the comment spam problem out there which doesn't involve Typekey (I'm using the MT antispam plugins already) it's the only thing I can do in the meantime until I have time to look at how to run this whole thing again from the ground up.
I love spammers. These amoral bastards have ruined just about every good thing that the Internet's generated in the past decade. I was on Usenet waaay back when spam was first invented and remember the hoo-hah it caused then. I don't think anyone back then seriously expected just how destructive an effect spam would be having by the year 2007. Spam carries a lot of the responsibility for the Internet having gone from a place of openness and freedom to locked doors and paranoia. Remember the days when if you needed to you could relay mail through just about any host that came to hand? Seems almost unbelievable now, doesn't it?
]]>I've finally given up and turned off comments - as it seems that there's no reasonable solution to the comment spam problem out there which doesn't involve Typekey (I'm using the MT antispam plugins already) it's the only thing I can do in the meantime until I have time to look at how to run this whole thing again from the ground up.
I love spammers. These amoral bastards have ruined just about every good thing that the Internet's generated in the past decade. I was on Usenet waaay back when spam was first invented and remember the hoo-hah it caused then. I don't think anyone back then seriously expected just how destructive an effect spam would be having by the year 2007. Spam carries a lot of the responsibility for the Internet having gone from a place of openness and freedom to locked doors and paranoia. Remember the days when if you needed to you could relay mail through just about any host that came to hand? Seems almost unbelievable now, doesn't it?
]]>The 1980s was the heyday of the coin-operated arcade game. Sure, they'd started to emerge during the 1970s, but two bats and a square ball that went "boop" could only be taken so far. In the 1980s games became better and, well, more playable, to be honest, and ruthless competition between manufacturers led to the best 1980s arcade games being just about the most fun you can have by grasping a joystick and pushing all the right buttons, as it were.
The classic years were the early 1980s. Pac Man, which apparently wasn't actually inspired by a pizza with a slice taken out, was a social phenomenon despite having what today would be considered very simple gameplay - just up, down, left, right, eat the dots and avoid the ghosts. Other games such as Defender (shoot everything that moves, and don't let the unfortunate humanoids plummet to earth and splat or be converted into those annoying bleepy mutants) had their afficionados, while other connosieurs of the period will talk about the vector graphic classics such as Asteroids (shoot everything that moves, especially the fast-moving tiny UFO that went bweeweeweewee), Star Wars (shoot everything) and Tempest (uh... what was that about, anyway?) as being the foremost games of the period.
Pac Man, of course, went on to a long and illustrious career. Donkey Kong (which Wikipedia will tell you does not contain any actual donkeys) launched the career of a plumber named Mario. But other characters from 80s video games are not so famous today. What happened, for instance, to the little man from Berserk? Did Blue Wizard go any further in his career after Gauntlet, or does he still need food badly? I guess we'll never know. What actually happened to launch the war that Missile Command put you in charge of? History does not tell.
As the 80s wore on, video games started becoming a bit more like pinball, in that what people needed to get them playing were gimmicks. People were now used to zapping aliens, and what they wanted was... well, to zap more aliens, but higher-resolution aliens. They wanted the aliens to explode in stereo. This culminated in games like Space Harrier, a ride-on game which tipped up and down with stereo sound and all kinds of exciting things, not least a semi-comprehensible sampled voice that was maybe slightly more understandable than the famous BBC Micro speech box which sampled newsreader Kenneth Kendall.
So people zapped and blasted their way through the 80s. Billions of space invaders got zapped, untold gazillions of dots were, well, eaten by Pac-Man, Defender players generally failed to defend, but then towards the end of the decade came the first major threat to arcade games - home games consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System. These let people play at home without the hassle of substandard ports to home computers or loading from tape. So the arcade game slowly started to die off, and the next big revolution was launched in gaming - home gaming and the console revolution went on to change the world.
Time up - 10 minutes precisely.
]]>The 1980s was the heyday of the coin-operated arcade game. Sure, they'd started to emerge during the 1970s, but two bats and a square ball that went "boop" could only be taken so far. In the 1980s games became better and, well, more playable, to be honest, and ruthless competition between manufacturers led to the best 1980s arcade games being just about the most fun you can have by grasping a joystick and pushing all the right buttons, as it were.
The classic years were the early 1980s. Pac Man, which apparently wasn't actually inspired by a pizza with a slice taken out, was a social phenomenon despite having what today would be considered very simple gameplay - just up, down, left, right, eat the dots and avoid the ghosts. Other games such as Defender (shoot everything that moves, and don't let the unfortunate humanoids plummet to earth and splat or be converted into those annoying bleepy mutants) had their afficionados, while other connosieurs of the period will talk about the vector graphic classics such as Asteroids (shoot everything that moves, especially the fast-moving tiny UFO that went bweeweeweewee), Star Wars (shoot everything) and Tempest (uh... what was that about, anyway?) as being the foremost games of the period.
Pac Man, of course, went on to a long and illustrious career. Donkey Kong (which Wikipedia will tell you does not contain any actual donkeys) launched the career of a plumber named Mario. But other characters from 80s video games are not so famous today. What happened, for instance, to the little man from Berserk? Did Blue Wizard go any further in his career after Gauntlet, or does he still need food badly? I guess we'll never know. What actually happened to launch the war that Missile Command put you in charge of? History does not tell.
As the 80s wore on, video games started becoming a bit more like pinball, in that what people needed to get them playing were gimmicks. People were now used to zapping aliens, and what they wanted was... well, to zap more aliens, but higher-resolution aliens. They wanted the aliens to explode in stereo. This culminated in games like Space Harrier, a ride-on game which tipped up and down with stereo sound and all kinds of exciting things, not least a semi-comprehensible sampled voice that was maybe slightly more understandable than the famous BBC Micro speech box which sampled newsreader Kenneth Kendall.
So people zapped and blasted their way through the 80s. Billions of space invaders got zapped, untold gazillions of dots were, well, eaten by Pac-Man, Defender players generally failed to defend, but then towards the end of the decade came the first major threat to arcade games - home games consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System. These let people play at home without the hassle of substandard ports to home computers or loading from tape. So the arcade game slowly started to die off, and the next big revolution was launched in gaming - home gaming and the console revolution went on to change the world.
Time up - 10 minutes precisely.
]]>By the mid-1980s, Doctor Who had been running for over twenty years, and had become as much part of the televisual furniture as the news. John Nathan-Turner had been producer since about 1981, and while pointing the finger at him is a popular hobby for Who historians I don't think he was single-handedly responsible. The reasons were probably twofold.
Firstly, the format was getting tired. While it was a winner, ideas were running thin, and during the Davison years it became alarmingly clear that the series was in a rut. Certainly there were some great stories, but nothing like the outpourings of writerly creativity that marked the Pertwee and Baker years. This rut was mishandled by the producers. Rather than looking at the whole series in a new light (for instance, being stuck on Earth was good for Pertwee's Doctor, as without the TARDIS available most of the time they had to concentrate on writing good stories rather than handwavey science fiction) they tried to get round it with short-term gimmicks and celebrity guest stars. Bonnie Langford's always the person people think of here, but far more harmful were casting decisions such as Ken Dodd in Paradise Towers. When the Happiness Patrol and the Candyman burst onto the scene, you knew things were getting bad.
The series was, in short, taking its continued existence for granted, rather than continuing to justify its production budget and prime teatime scheduling. This was finally realised in Sylvester McCoy's second season as the Doctor, leading to a totally new direction and some fantastic, innovative, thought-provoking stories such as Ghost Light and the Curse of Fenric, but by now it was too late.
Secondly, of course, BBC management was not sympathetic to Doctor Who. Michael Grade made no secret at all of his disdain and dislike for the series, interfering to the extent of insisting on Colin Baker's replacement. Whether Baker was a success or not in the part I'm not going to dwell on here, but when senior management are so openly hostile to a programme it's unlikely to change many minds. The rot had set in - hostile management needed to be appeased with ratings, and ratings were to be acquired.. how? With good stories? No - ultimately with big-name guest stars, as mentioned above.
Ultimately, the series would probably have continued a few years more had radical corrective action been taken by the production team earlier, producing a quality series which would help swing sceptical management minds towards the idea that continuing the series was a good idea. By the end - well, before that epic last season - it simply wasn't very good any more. It wasn't the series it had been, and I think the end of the series was more or less inevitable once Colin Baker got fired. That showed the management wanted an end to a dead-end series, and the producers failed to use the chance to rescue the series before it got canned.
In summary - a bit of both!
Time up! (10 minutes exactly). No time for any editing.
]]>By the mid-1980s, Doctor Who had been running for over twenty years, and had become as much part of the televisual furniture as the news. John Nathan-Turner had been producer since about 1981, and while pointing the finger at him is a popular hobby for Who historians I don't think he was single-handedly responsible. The reasons were probably twofold.
Firstly, the format was getting tired. While it was a winner, ideas were running thin, and during the Davison years it became alarmingly clear that the series was in a rut. Certainly there were some great stories, but nothing like the outpourings of writerly creativity that marked the Pertwee and Baker years. This rut was mishandled by the producers. Rather than looking at the whole series in a new light (for instance, being stuck on Earth was good for Pertwee's Doctor, as without the TARDIS available most of the time they had to concentrate on writing good stories rather than handwavey science fiction) they tried to get round it with short-term gimmicks and celebrity guest stars. Bonnie Langford's always the person people think of here, but far more harmful were casting decisions such as Ken Dodd in Paradise Towers. When the Happiness Patrol and the Candyman burst onto the scene, you knew things were getting bad.
The series was, in short, taking its continued existence for granted, rather than continuing to justify its production budget and prime teatime scheduling. This was finally realised in Sylvester McCoy's second season as the Doctor, leading to a totally new direction and some fantastic, innovative, thought-provoking stories such as Ghost Light and the Curse of Fenric, but by now it was too late.
Secondly, of course, BBC management was not sympathetic to Doctor Who. Michael Grade made no secret at all of his disdain and dislike for the series, interfering to the extent of insisting on Colin Baker's replacement. Whether Baker was a success or not in the part I'm not going to dwell on here, but when senior management are so openly hostile to a programme it's unlikely to change many minds. The rot had set in - hostile management needed to be appeased with ratings, and ratings were to be acquired.. how? With good stories? No - ultimately with big-name guest stars, as mentioned above.
Ultimately, the series would probably have continued a few years more had radical corrective action been taken by the production team earlier, producing a quality series which would help swing sceptical management minds towards the idea that continuing the series was a good idea. By the end - well, before that epic last season - it simply wasn't very good any more. It wasn't the series it had been, and I think the end of the series was more or less inevitable once Colin Baker got fired. That showed the management wanted an end to a dead-end series, and the producers failed to use the chance to rescue the series before it got canned.
In summary - a bit of both!
Time up! (10 minutes exactly). No time for any editing.
]]>I'll take suggestions for subjects. I'll then either pick one of those subjects or (if enough people vote, which they probably won't) let people choose them for me by voting on them. I think having the subjects chosen by other people has far more potential to be fun, but I guess it depends on how many suggestions come in. Every day (that's the fantasy target, which I have no delusions about my capability to reach) I'll spend exactly ten minutes - no more or less - writing what I know about that subject, based entirely on what's in my head - no use of references or Googling allowed.
Hopefully most subjects will be ones I know at least a little about. I get the feeling, though, that the ones which will turn out much more fun will be the ones I know nothing about and therefore have to bluff frantically.
It'll be factually unreliable, it'll probably be downright silly, but it'll hopefully be fun. I've got a suggestion for the first entry in the series, which will follow... well, shortly.
Enjoy, and please do let me know what you think of the new format.
]]>I'll take suggestions for subjects. I'll then either pick one of those subjects or (if enough people vote, which they probably won't) let people choose them for me by voting on them. I think having the subjects chosen by other people has far more potential to be fun, but I guess it depends on how many suggestions come in. Every day (that's the fantasy target, which I have no delusions about my capability to reach) I'll spend exactly ten minutes - no more or less - writing what I know about that subject, based entirely on what's in my head - no use of references or Googling allowed.
Hopefully most subjects will be ones I know at least a little about. I get the feeling, though, that the ones which will turn out much more fun will be the ones I know nothing about and therefore have to bluff frantically.
It'll be factually unreliable, it'll probably be downright silly, but it'll hopefully be fun. I've got a suggestion for the first entry in the series, which will follow... well, shortly.
Enjoy, and please do let me know what you think of the new format.
]]>Unfortunately, this insane busyness, combined with the desire when I actually have spare time to just spend it sleeping and attempting to do as little as possible, means that I'm a little tubbier than I was a year ago, something which I'll have to start working hard to remedy pretty soon. If I haven't got myself back into at least a little bit of shape and run at least one competitive (for me) 10k by the end of March, kick me.
As a result of this I haven't seen nearly as much of many people as I'd wanted to. This blog's also suffered, mostly because I've had lots of interesting things which I've wanted to write about but never got around to that either - by the time you finally get to sit down in front of a blank screen whatever inspiration had struck had gone. This is, as you can guess, somewhat frustrating, so I've decided that I'm going to take uffish.net in a new, er, direction as an experiment to see what happens. Details will follow in my next post.
Happy 2007!
]]>Unfortunately, this insane busyness, combined with the desire when I actually have spare time to just spend it sleeping and attempting to do as little as possible, means that I'm a little tubbier than I was a year ago, something which I'll have to start working hard to remedy pretty soon. If I haven't got myself back into at least a little bit of shape and run at least one competitive (for me) 10k by the end of March, kick me.
As a result of this I haven't seen nearly as much of many people as I'd wanted to. This blog's also suffered, mostly because I've had lots of interesting things which I've wanted to write about but never got around to that either - by the time you finally get to sit down in front of a blank screen whatever inspiration had struck had gone. This is, as you can guess, somewhat frustrating, so I've decided that I'm going to take uffish.net in a new, er, direction as an experiment to see what happens. Details will follow in my next post.
Happy 2007!
]]>What this means is that I've been accumulating bank statements, utility bills (in Britain, a gas bill is for some reason considered better ID than a photocard driving licence by many places), charge slips, all those irritating bits of paper which are pointless after a few months of existence but which are almost impossible to get rid of with confidence. When I finally decided that I really didn't need to keep bank statements dating back to 1998 anyway (fascinating reading though they sometimes make) I gave up and bought a shredder.
And wow, after the best part of a day spent shredding old bank statements and cellphone bills and whatever and blatantly disregarding the rated capacity of the shredder (a home model rated for 8 pages per cycle and about 10 cycles per day) I have a couple of bin liners of baggage shredded and ready to be chucked out. Freedom at last! It'll be weird to be moving house in a month or two without having to schlep along boxes of pointless old documents that I was only holding onto because, well, it was easier to do that than it was to get rid of them.
I guess the next thing is to do a ruthless cull of my book collection, but that'll be a little harder.
]]>What this means is that I've been accumulating bank statements, utility bills (in Britain, a gas bill is for some reason considered better ID than a photocard driving licence by many places), charge slips, all those irritating bits of paper which are pointless after a few months of existence but which are almost impossible to get rid of with confidence. When I finally decided that I really didn't need to keep bank statements dating back to 1998 anyway (fascinating reading though they sometimes make) I gave up and bought a shredder.
And wow, after the best part of a day spent shredding old bank statements and cellphone bills and whatever and blatantly disregarding the rated capacity of the shredder (a home model rated for 8 pages per cycle and about 10 cycles per day) I have a couple of bin liners of baggage shredded and ready to be chucked out. Freedom at last! It'll be weird to be moving house in a month or two without having to schlep along boxes of pointless old documents that I was only holding onto because, well, it was easier to do that than it was to get rid of them.
I guess the next thing is to do a ruthless cull of my book collection, but that'll be a little harder.
]]>