I was interested to read that Microsoft have over 17,597 employees registered on Facebook out of a total of 70,000 employees. I thought I would try to discover how other leading IT companies compared, including my own. The staff numbers come from Google Finance and the rounding errors come from me. The following Facebook networks are only open to company employees with a valid email address although, obviously, a better metric would have been some measure of recent activity. ...

Boring, alcohol fuelled haze Prelude Friday Saturday

My friends were disappointed, insulted and absolutely mortified at the suggestion (from a comment on this blog) that the Hook Norton Festival of Fine Ales was merely a ‘Boring, alcohol, induced haze’ However, I simply loved the turn of phrase that captures the very essence of Hook Norton in just four words. So much so, I had T-shirts made up for this weekend’s antics. New for 2007: The entire event will be live mob-blogged from start to finish so don’t forget to tune in to this blog, Twitter, Pownce, Facebook and BBC World Service for exciting, real-time updates. ...

Weird. This was also the subject of my final year project at University. My AI creation was written in ‘C’ on Unix and used the curses package. However, my effort wasn’t so accomplished, had severe problems when a piece was crowned and didn’t implement the ‘huffing’ rule correctly. Having said that, it did beat me on four occasions.

I own up. It’s a fair cop. It is 27 years and 5 months since my last confession. Since then, I have sinned, Holy Father. In fact, I have committed an absolutely heinous crime. Please forgive me for I have submitted multiple random guesses. May the high priests (and priestesses) of the BAAG movement, please have mercy on my wretched soul. Recently, I have been guilty of supporting and even proposing a multitude of ‘any guesses’, all of which were proposed as possible solutions to solve a critical system problem on a production system: ...