March 2010 Archives

Available on iTunes and OU Podcasts

This Open University series focusses on the Acropolis in Athens, with special attention paid to its most famous structure, the Parthenon. This is not a series of recorded lectures, instead it is more like a documentary - and would be viewed by Open University students as part of their course. It consists of 6 short videos ranging from around 2 and a half to 6 minutes in length. The whole series combined is under half an hour, so it is just an introduction. The podcasts are well produced, easy to understand. The video is clear and consists mainly of views of the Acropolis in its current form (no CG recreations). There are two versions available: an iPod version recorded in 320×176 ranging in size from 13-32MB and a larger 640×360 version ranging from 26-68MB. Transcripts are also present.

The first video introduces the site through the route of the Panathenaia, the most important festival in ancient Athens. The following podcast shows some of the buildings on the Acropolis other than the Parthenon. Then the next three podcasts detail the Parthenon and its art (metopes, frieze and pediments) much of which now resides in the British Museum in London. The final video concerns how to visualise ancient buildings from conventional plans (here is the Parthenon's plan) - an incongruous but interesting addition.

A professional-level, short, video introduction to the Acropolis and Parthenon.

Java provides a number of methods to run code at scheduled future time, the implementations of ScheduledExecutorService generally being the best way at the moment. ScheduledExecutorService also defines methods to run the code a periodic intervals (scheduleAtFixedRate & scheduleWithFixedDelay). However, what if you have classes that need to be notified at regular discrete intervals and need to know which interval that are in. A timer is required that with a set periodicity fires an event on any listeners and passes the number of times the period has elapsed. What this is doing is breaking up continuous "realtime" into discrete blocks or quantums of time. For example, if the period is 10 seconds, at the start the time quantum is 0 until 10 seconds have elapsed and an event is fired denoting the start of the first time quantum. Ten seconds later another event fires as the 2nd time quantum starts, and so on.

This is a fairly simple bit of Java code. Any experienced Java developer has probably already worked out a good solution, but for me it has come up a couple of times in the last few months so I thought I'd write it down.

It was recently suggested to me that there could be risk-free money to be made crossing Betfair and Betdaq. Betfair and Betdaq are betting exchanges - they allow their users to bet on various events, from the traditional horse races to more unusual fare like netball or the UK general election. Unlike a normal bookmaker, the exchanges don't provide the odds and take the opposing side of the bet. Instead the odds are determined by other users and the other side is another user. So while there may be someone offering 1.15 odds that Labour will win (a back bet) the next UK election, someone else may offer 1.2 that they will lose (a lay bet). When the back and lay odds match then a bet is made. Note, all the odds quoted in this article are decimal odds as this is the type of odds used on the exchanges.