ashok.videdot.com : Ashok's elsewhere

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Media: LoveFilm; SHOWdates; CAT; R4; R4 comedy; Today prog; Daily show guests; NYT GenLink
Games: It's Your Turn; Urban Dead; Bio Nightmare
Travel: TfL simply; Rail; TfL routes; TfL refunds; Palm Train Timetables; Live rail:; Edinburgh; Clapham Junction; Fenchurch St.; Paddington; Waterloo; West Brompton

You almost certainly want elsewhere, this is simply a page of convenience...

I graduated with a first class degree in Computing from Imperial College in July 2001. I came back for my PhD in stochastic modelling under Prof. Pete Harrison as part of the AESOP group. I have stayed with AESOP to work on PerformDB with Dr. Jeremy Bradley.
Future i, did pretty smart stuff (but I'm biased). gallery.future-i.com is still pet project at the moment, looking at ways to organise information collaboratively. events has just been sorted out, films.future-i.com will launch eventually (just as soon as I have written the code) as a collaborative film site with none of the obnoxious, overbearing commerce stuff that Amazon have graced IMDb with. It maybe should have been called gizzaDVD, but what the hey...
videdot, a (currently) solo project to do a decent, usable networked computer-based video recorder under BeOS. It started as my final year project, but has taken on an independent life of its own.
Logic Wand is another site of mine, which plays host to a few random projects - notably a taglines service and a couple of games I am working on with friends.
fuckwittage·org, my shot across the bows of fuckwits everywhere.
notcontrary.com is my beautiful wife's site.

Alternatively, some other things that interest me - which I use to get about each day.

Web Seeky - searching et al
- Googling obviously - but what about Googlewhacking or the Google Dance?
- AllTheWeb
- Teoma
- archive.org - like Google's cache on steroids. Fantastic for tracking how people's privacy policies change, comparing what happens to a previously clever company after the marketroids land, and so forth.
- Miscellaneous fact/idea-tastic sites
  - Halfbakery
  - The real Hitch-hiker's Guide - not quite so funky since the move to the BBC, but at least it still has a pulse.
  - Everything2
Web development
- W3C - mmmm, tasty standards goodness.
- HTML Help including a decent spidering validator.
- CSS Pointers - Cascading Style Sheets, go on just suggest how you want it to look.
- CodeStyle.org including a fantastic CSS font survey of what fonts might be found on how many Windows, Mac or Unix boxes.
- W3Schools - a variety of tutorials for people learning web stuff. Their CSS tutorials are especially useful - simple to follow and quite well written.
- Jakob Nielsen's useit.com is generally decent stuff about usability, although for me it focusses a little too much on e-commerce applications, rather than the wider Web.
- My own guide to Writing Web services (from info.future-i.com).
- My general rants on dopey Web development, web·fuckwittage.
- A nice, strongly worded list of rules from a guy doing maths at TCD.
- Apache web server
  - Apache Week
  - Apache Today
- PostgreSQL relational database (since I can no longer develop a half-decent web site without a database behind it).
  - Interactive Documentation
  - Reserved words for when I'm data modelling.
Semantic Web
- SchemaWeb - fantastic resource for finding people's ontologies. Far better than everyone rolling their own independently.
Security
- Bruce Schneier - excellent researcher and writer on security matters, has a blog worth following.
Typesetting in LaTeX
- CTAN - the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network.
- The UK TUG's quite thorough FAQ.
- eng.cam.ac.uk page
- LaTeX tips, especially the top ten common mistakes list.
- Lovely, simple introduction from Donald Ballance at gla.ac.uk.
- chktex, a semantic checker for TeX.
BeOS - free.be.com
- Versions, clones and possibilities
  - Haiku - a good shot at delivering an open version of a fine OS (formerly known as OpenBeOS).
  - yellowTab (bugzilla) - have licensed code from the last (unreleased) version of BeOS and built Zeta around it.
  - BeUnited - building standards for a base of compatability between different Be-like systems.
- Annotated Be Book - keeping Be's API documentation up-to-date through collaborative action.
- Be Groovy
- Zeta News covering the news around yT's offering.
- Totally Be, a new Be site - even in these troubled times.
- FrizBe.net have died, but their hardware compatibility list lives on thanks to the folk at BeDrivers
- Tip Server
- Haiku News
- IsComputerOn
- BeForever
- BeBits
- OpenTracker - Be opened the source for this key element of BeOS
Apple rumours
Vaio C1 pages, people getting assorted clever stuff working on these little beasties, mainly under GNU/Linux - BeOS info to follow but it basically just works. I have a little info about my C1-VFK, a.k.a. porter
- C1 Files, no longer being updated, but still handy info about making things work under GNU/Linux
- C1 Picturebook Project on sourceforge.
- Steve Barr's C1VN pages
- Linux on the C1VE by Moray Allen at cam.ac.uk. Handy dmesg output of getting everything working.
- Kryz's C1MHP Page, including some good shots of the C1 in films (xXx and Charlie's Angels) and a handy XFree86 4 config
- Florian Lohoff's page - including some nice scripts to get software suspend and bluetooth working on his PCG-C1MHP
P2P
- BitTorrent - official site. A peer-to-peer load-balancing system. Especially good for current, popular files.
  - BeOS port, now with a passable GUI
  - Pretty comprehensive FAQ by Brian Dessent
  - TVTorrents.com, a useful source of TV episode hashes
Tech Shopping
- PC Heaven
- Maplin
- Scan
- Dabs
- QuietPC
Other tech
- digg
- slashdot
- Ars Technica
- The Register
- The Inquirer
- OSNews
- GrepLaw - good techno-legal coverage
- NTKnow
- The Onion
- Netcraft - glob-matching within hostnames running Web servers, "what's that site running" and uptime statistics for an awful lot of hosts.
Entertainment
- Tv
  - News / yak
    - digital spy
    - TV without pity - fun (& obsessive) recaps of various shows
  - Listings
    - Calendar for Tv
    - Bleb's listings, which are graciously available in a structured form too
    - DigiGuide
    - RadioTimes
    - Cable Guide
    - Scene One
    - Freeserve listings
    - Ananova - including a fairly structured feed
    - Ed Avis' XMLTV - a co-ordinated effort to get listings into a common format. There are grabbers/sources for various countries now. (Cheers to Ed for acquiring the structured feed link from Ananova too)
  - Episode guides - from epguides.com now that TV.com have buried TvTome's more useful features.
    - Smallville
    - Buffy
    - Angel
    - Tru Calling
    - Battlestar Galactica (the new one, not the original)
    - Stargate SG-1
    - Stargate Atlantis
    - Star Trek: Enterprise
    - Star Wars : Clone Wars
    - The X Files
    - Alias
    - Jeremiah
    - ER
    - 24
    - The Sopranos
    - Six Feet Under
    - Desperate Housewives
    - Sex and the City
    - Ally McBeal
    - Will and Grace
    - Friends, plus transcripts on theCFSI [UK Mirror]
- Film
  - Cinema listings (Cineworld-heavy because I have one of their Unlimited cards)
    - Cineworld Fulham Road
    - Cineworld King's Road
    - Cineworld Trocadero
    - Cineworld Haymarket
    - Cineworld West India Key - shiny
    - Cineworld Bexleyheath - near Z and co.
    - Cineworld Wandsworth - down the way
    - Screen on the Hill - because it's run by great folk
    - Curzon Cinemas - because the Mayfair one is great
    - National Film Theatre - because it's good
    - BFI IMAX - because it's funky
  - Sky is Falling, handy UK movie site with news, stats and most usefully release dates.
  - DVDCompare.net do a good line in comparing which is the best edition of a film to buy (extras, cut of the film &c). Not that we've all got multi-region DVD players, of course. Or that the whole region scheme is entirely unworkable and invasive.
  - Ain't it cool news
  - Another personal pet - films·future-i·com.
- Music
  - Current folk
    - Amos Lee
    - Eric Bibb
    - Jewel
    - Mishka Adams
    - Amy Winehouse
    - Bellissima^{[myspace warning]}
    - Oliver Darley
Toons
- User Friendly
- Dilbert
Family
- Zarina Katwala, my niece
- Sunder Katwala
- Mary Argent-Katwala
- Mary Argent, Mary's Mum; my mother-in-law
Friends about the place, pretty much all really smart technically with extra friendly goodness
- Chris Jackson
- Ongar Towers, (ex-)home to the rich and famous
- Dave Turner's figroll.com
- Tom & co. lead somewhat pointless lives, they claim
- Gef Howie
- James Bywater
- Paddy Atherstone
- Etienne Pollard
- Jeff Davis
- Martin Coxall, pretty ranty, but all good fun.
Travel
- Flights
  - SkyScanner - flight price comparison with funky whole-month-cheapest-fares bar graph
- Friendly places to stay
  - Forwood Family Villas, Moraira, Costa Blanca, Spain.
  - Casa Almendras, Moraira.
  - Amberley Hotel, Andover, Hampshire (urgh to the flash-tastic site; but it's a friendly place to stay).
News
Funny stuff
- A random joke from the 'Best of' rec.humor.funny.