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Scotland Yard July 14, 2008

Posted by James Webster in : gadgets , add a comment

I have many childhoold family memories sitting around the dining table playing board games. Some of the games we played more frequently were classics like Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly but also less well-known games like Rum Rebellion and Scotland Yard.

With Friday’s release of the iPhone 3G with integrated GPS the big question is whether this heralds the moment that location-based services (LBS) take off or whether they will be consigned to be a plaything of the digerati.

One of the aspects of LBS that haven’t been explored in great depth so far are location-based games. So I wonder if a GPS and Google Maps enabled version of Scotland Yard, played in London itself, would actually be enjoyed by anyone, other than perhaps the LARPing community? Traveling on London’s public transport network is frequently an exercise in frustration so running around town trying to track down someone playing the role of Mr. X might not be that much fun. It could be an interesting one-off event in conjunction with something like the London Festival of Architecture however.

Apparently a group of students in Germany, the home of the game’s publishers Ravensburger Spiele, have already had a go at implementing a GPS-enabled Scotland Yard.

Everything old is new again July 10, 2008

Posted by James Webster in : development , 3 comments

Back in the day, I worked at a startup whose mission was to build a multi-application smartcard lifecycle management system. One of the things I remember a colleague (hey Jelte!) developing was an ASN.1 encoder/decoder which was necessary for exchanging data with EMV smartcard applications. Around about this time XML/XSD was also foisted on the world - which you could possibly claim is a bloated text version of ASN.1 (which some would also claim is a bloated and vague specification itself).

So it was interesting to see that Google have open-sourced their Protocol Buffers project:

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler.

In other words, their interpretation of an interoperable efficient binary encoding scheme but without the complexity of its forebears (ie. ASN.1 and Corba IDL).

At the moment there are only bindings to C++, Java and Python but I expect a .Net version to appear from the OSS community sooner or later.

Some thoughts/random ideas:

A GPGPU standard June 18, 2008

Posted by James Webster in : tech , add a comment

According to AppleInsider the OpenCL technology announced as part of the WWDC Snow Leopard preview may be adopted as a standard:

Apple has signed on to an industry-wide alliance that will see many companies, including some of the Mac maker’s processor and video card suppliers, work together to develop an open format for accelerating specialized computing.

This is hopefully good news for anyone keen on making an investment in technology such as NVidia’s Tesla. Intel, NVidia, AMD and other have signed up to the newly formed Compute Working Group. At the moment these GPGPU’s all have to be programmed in different languages (generally based on C). Within investment banking, the availability of a standard language for targeting any GPGPU platform will make it much more attractive for quants to write their analytics to run on such a device. To paraphrase a former colleague: ‘Why mess around with a grid when you have a supercomputer sitting on your desk?’.

Hopefully someone will devise a way to have F# code run on such devices as well.