Wednesday 30 January 2019

Dom’s PiWars contribution – Introduction

NOTE: Cross-posted from here

I am perhaps the least active member of the Pi Wars Team, but then again I did say that I would be. Arvind kindly asked if I’d like to help and of course I said yes. I then realised that there was likely to be very little I could do, being as inept as I am with anything other than the odd bit of writing and wrangling code (HTML, CSS and JS) into something that resembles something that you’d like to – hopefully – interact. I lurk in our piwars Slack channel and try to contribute here and there, though that generally involves merely adding a cute emoji to someone’s efforts, without any clear understanding of what they have done. It all looks intelligent and sophisticated, but I don’t have a clue of the effort involved because my mind doesn’t work that way. Give me a Lego set and some instructions, and I’m away with the fairies for a couple of hours. Ask me to create something physical or decipher the bands on a resistor, and I’ll look up instructions on YouTube (actually, one competency I do have is in the realms of Archery… when once asked who our coach was in an archery competition we had to answer, “YouTube”).

So, with all that out of the way, I’m going to try and write about what we’re (I use the term “we”, but you know…) doing concerning Pi Wars. I appreciate that there might be some level of competition so I’m going to steer well away from the hard facts and talk about the things that interest me: the people on our team that are doing the hard stuff and making Lego without the instruction book – I might even get permission to talk about what they’re doing. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be interviewing some (if not all) of the team so that you can get some insight into their personalities if or when you meet them at the final competition.

Of course, should you have any questions for the team, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and I’ll do my best to get an answer for you, subject to the solution not being sensitive regarding the competition?

Tuesday 22 January 2019

Google's GDPR fine

So Google was hit with a $57 million GBPR fine, instigated by France, on Monday 21st January 2019. I took to thinking about this today and seeing as Google posted its first $100 billion in sales in 2018 I calculated that this represents something like 0.057% of its sales... or 4.99651328 hours (0.057% of (1 year)). Please check my math though as my billions are different from modern billions.