A New Toy
This is my new Acer Iconia W-500.
Acer Iconia W-500
It’s a tablet computer that runs Windows. When I get my network sorted, I’ll use it to demonstrate Daisy and also to browse on my travels to access my bank account, Zopa and GMail.
I think I might write some stroke-friendly software for the device. Of course, it will be in Visual Basic 6. You might ask why I don’t want an iPad.
The reason is simple. Real programmers don’t use Apple products and anyway, I’d need to learn a whole new set of progrmming tools. As it is virtually all of the software, I’ve written will run on this machine. I won’t need to buy anything else, except possibly a case to protect it. But it does fit my manbag.
Here’s an old joke.
Q: How do you make an Apple go faster?
A: Drop it from a higher building.
Why SMEs Don’t Get a Look In
David Cameron is reported as saying that he will open up more contracts to small and medium sized companies.
But it won’t happen, as these sort of contracts don’t fit bureaucrats thought processes.
As an example, a government agency found that my software Daisy would be ideal for an application. The cost would be a couple of thousand pounds for a special system. But as they were dealing with contracts in millions, they couldn’t find a way to buy the software or pay me for the consultancy. In the end I walked away from it. I suspect that in the end they did nothing or spent several millions with one of the major consultancy firms to do a job that was worth five grand at most.
As a contrary example, a division of a major British company found that Daisy was useful to their researchers. So they put it on their approved software list and allowed those who wanted it to buy it with credit cards and then bill it on expenses. I sold many copies that way, just because the accounts department at this company wanted their people to get the work done.
And then there is the question of bribes. Not actual suitcases of the folding stuff, but big companies can afford to have things like days at sporting events and ask the purchasers along. Small and medium sized companies can’t afford that and anyway they have more important things to do, like keeping their business solvent.
The Shareware Version of Daisy
I have decided to make the shareware version of my software, Daisy, available through this blog.
Download the software from this link!
You’ll need user and registration codes. These are VagueShot2 and 1052621012. Some of the examples don’t work, but I’ll be updating the software to the 2011 version in the first month of 2011, when I get everything setup in the new house.
The only problem is that I’ve been slow to set everything up, as I’ve been removing the work of Jerry the builder from the house.
I’m Programming Again!
I may still have pain in my face, a left hand that doesn’t know its Alt from its Control or Caps Lock, but I have to do something so I’m starting to program again. Or should I say reprogramming again as I’m only updating each of my Daisy Web Tools for 2011!
The first one that I will reprogram is the Presentation Browser. I wrote this a few years ago, to solve the problem of being able to print or capture a clean image of a web page, without the toolbar and all the other things that insist on being printed, when you do this from within Internet Explorer or another browser.
I shall announce the program here when it is ready. All of the Daisy Web Tools, will be available separately and free.
trueCall and Daisy
I couldn’t resist taking my call records from trueCall and putting them in Daisy.
After a minute or so, I was able to draw a simple Daisy chart.
A Daisy Chart of trueCall Data
Obviously, this doesn’t show that much, as only a few records were used to draw the chart.
On the other hand, charts such as this could be used to show perhaps that a particular nuisance call tends to happen between 21:00 and 23:00 on a Wednesday night. Years ago, a chart such as this, drawn of all phone box fraud in Wales, led to the arrest and conviction of one of the Principality’s biggest drug dealers.
Crash Scams – A Job For Daisy
Apparently, according to the BBC, there has been a large increase in crash scams, where crooks get you to run into their vehicles and then claim for damage, injuries and storage that are pure fiction.
This is a classic application for my software, Daisy, as it can show a complete pattern of claims, by car, registration letter, post code etc., so that links and hopefully the crooks can be determined.
Benefit Fraud and Daisy
My software, Daisy, has been used several times to combat mass fraud.
It was used to check winter fuel payments by the DSS. They drew a chart based on Surname and Post Code. In some cases they found severalclaimants at the same place. Some were genuine as they were old peoples’ homes, but others were fraud.
The software was also used to check student loan applications. I’m not saying how, but there was a large amount of multiple applications from people, who were never seen again.
It is possible to set up a system, where a large database of claimants for benefits or grants is analysed and then split down into groups, say based on town, post code or street. These can then be e-mailed as individual Excel spreadsheets to the fraud investigators responsible for that area.
A Classic Analysis for Daisy
Daisy is my software for analysing databases. Some of the most successful analyses has always been to take a series of date/time based events and draw a Date and Time Daisy Chart of them. Patterns in the data are often immediately visible.
Some years ago, one of our clients, a UK county, analysed low birth weight babies, by month, day of the week and post code, to see if there were any patterns. We didn’t find anything immediately, but we did in the end find a peak of twins, nine months after Christmas and the New Year. As the type of twin, identical or fraternal was not known, we could not explain the pattern. I have since told this to an honest man, who used to run fertility clinics in the United States. He felt that there were some times of the year when it was better to have IVF. He left the fertility business, as he felt this was not the sort of service, you should give couples desperate for a child.
But to return to the reason, I have written this post. It is being reported that babies born outside of office hours are more likely to die.
I don’t think the researchers are using Daisy, but it is the classic type of analysis for which the software was designed. All you need to do, is get all the events in an Excel spreadsheet as a table and then run Daisy.
Google Flu Trends
I found reference to Google Flu Trends in The Economist in an article about how Google are searching blogs and other information to find out what is going on.
An interesting graph is shown, but why are the UK, Finland and Denmark left out?
I wonder if the same techniques could be used to check for relationships. For instance, I wonder if my being a coeliac means that I am more likely to have strokes. So what if there are a lot of blog posts, with these two words in them? Obviously, it would need powerful and correct statistical analysis.
As an aside here, some years ago I wrote a program that used Google to deep search the Internet, create a database of all possible results and then display them in a Daisy chart. It showed a lot of promise, but I then had other things to do. That’s my life all over.
The Anonymous Widower 