Neil Hopcroft

(Inspired somewhat by Robert Kiyosakis Cashflow, Tribal Wars and Inselkampf)

It strikes me there is a place for a massively multiplayer online educational finance game. This could take one of two forms, a limited time game or an open-ended world where players join and 'complete' their mission, it would avoid the 'superpower' endstate of IK & TW by setting individual goals for players, so that the strong players are the ones that get knocked out, not the weak ones.

Cashflow focusses mostly on property, since thats where Kiyosaki made his money, but there are a number of markets that could be included. The important part is creating a realistic scenario from which it is possible to learn about financial behaviour, what works and what doesn't.

What I'm envisaging at the moment is a 'long' running game world, based around a (game world) turn length of one month which could happen daily in realworld time.

Some thoughts

Damn, I hate the internet sometimes. I was going to go to sleep about an hour ago but then I thought I'd just do one more tweak and now its an hour later and I'm just about to call it a day having put together another piece of the livejournal meets geolocation puzzle - this is very much a work in progress, as you can see by the fact I accidentally posted from the middle of the indian ocean (maybe the upness and alongness are the wrong way around somewhere along the way?). I'm not going to worry myself deeply about this since theres hardly a lot of people actually using geotagging on livejournal at the moment.

Flickr have managed to get a bunch of people using geotagging, and, in some ways, it makes more sense there, photos are by their nature very much tied to locations. That could also be true of journal entries, but it is unlikely to happen until there are some sensible mobile clients out there with access to location information....ah, now theres a thought...but I must go to sleep before I start another all-nighter on this.

I've now added a 'track' button to view links - this will show the distribution of peoples linking to the URL you give it.

Its now getting to be both a (semi)useful tool and in great need of some tidying up and explanation on the pages themselves.

I updated my Livejournal link tracker to make it a bit more useful. It now searches for links over the last minute, hour or day, and you can give it a term to search for. The search isn't very clever at the moment but it should be clever enough to find URLs if you know the sort of thing you are looking for. As an example, you could find most popular youtube videos of the last day. All times are relative to now.

There are, of course, a number of things that I could do with this next - I'm interested in how information travels around Livejournal and how timely links are, news stories for instance will travel fairly fast but only be relevant for a short period of time while quiz memes will travel slower but further and stay relevant for longer. Let me know if you can think of other things that you would like it to do, and, of course, pass it on to anyone you think might appreciate it.

I didn't really mean to do this, its just a displacement activity to avoid doing my tax return. Yesterday I wrote some thoughts about possibilities for tracking links as they propagated through livejournal.

I've put together a quick hack demo - obviously this is only a small window onto the data being collected, my main interest is finding entry points into the LJ culture and watching the propagation of information through the ecosystem, but there isn't anything like enough data for that kind of mining yet.

Also notice that some of these links are required by the use of image hosting and other external service providers, so they don't really mean anything.

I've just run the first end-to-end using a real phone/gps setup - you can see the results at the bottom of the Location Log, the emulator is, I think, using locations in Finland while the real unit uses real coordinates, which are where I am in Surrey at the moment.

This clearly needs a lot more work, but the principle is clear now. Its just a question of adding a bit of icing around the edges and making it all look pretty.

Still to do before its a vaguely usable system:
- use a real journey id, its hard coded to use '7' at the moment which is unsatisfactory
- add some better management interface
- security
- battery life, it'll be a killer at the moment

Finally, after what seems forever working on other peoples projects I get a chance to progress some of my own work.

Some more defintion added to "Wheres Neil?", along with a bit of Perl and MySQL Database backend, which is not particularly functional yet but it's going in the right direction. Connecting the two seems remarkably easy, I must have overlooked something. Performance I'm guessing, but that is hardly likely to be an issue for a while.

Wiki now created - if you would like a login let me know and I'll set one up, I'm not convinced the auto signup process is working yet.

This new journal is intended to be a log of development ideas and actualities, if you're looking for general whitterings about my life you might be able to find them on my livejournal.