I heard some pundits on the radio jostling about sports players with the best surnames for Scabble (ignoring the proper nouns rule). The best they came up with was Wayne Gretzky with 24. Unfortunately for the world, this made me think this would be a pretty nifty short programming task to do (src, tests). Doesn’t everyone hobby code over the weekend?

Scrabble has rules to abide by, such as no hypenated words (good bye Eric Djemba-Djemba) and due to the English character set we can’t have any accentated letters (goodbye the otherwise similarly fantasticly named winner Francisco Jiménez Tejada)

So here goes, the official best scrabble surnames for any player ever to have played in the English Premier League (one player allowed per letter for better distribution/bad code):

1. Kuszczak -> 36
2. Mazzarelli -> 30
3. Tramezzani -> 30

But wait! None of those names can be created using the letters available in the Scrabble set. So ignoring these heathens we are given:

1. Khizanishvili -> 35
2. Bozinovski-> 28
2. Warzycha -> 28
4. Djorkaeff -> 27

So there you have it folks, all hail ex-Ger Zurab Khizanishvili, a Scrabble scoring god.

I went along to the Java Users Group of Scotland on Wednesday to hear a talk by a colleague about the latest Java web framework. It was through in Edinburgh in the spiffy CIVIC office.

It was good to meet other people outside of the financial world who are using Java. In Glasgow the 3 big financial services probably employ over 2000 devs. So a substantial mindshare is dedicated to Trader focused development (glorified Excel). I often find myself wishing I could work on something which is available to the outside world.

After the talk a few prizes were up for grabs. Personal IntelliJ liceneses were the top prize (I’m lucky enough to already have one) though I managed to swag a free tshirt and a USB stick. JUGS also give you the opportunity to review O’Reilly books before they hit print. I would have quickly taken them up on this offer if I didn’t already have millions of books to read already!

I’ve been playing the guitar for a while now. This usually involves you liking a song and then googling the guitar tab so you can play it. One (dark) day my Internet connection was down so I thought I’d play random notes. After a while the notes formed a song.

Vocals are by my brother Sam, and the song is called Brother:

Well it’s been over a year since I last blogged and a lot has happened. In May last year Alison was elected to serve as a councilor in Glasgow. This prompted us to move from the West End to live in Dennistoun near her ward.

I’ve always previously rented accommodation and it made sense for us to buy our first flat as we were moving out. This was just before house prices dropped by over 10%! I’m slowly getting used to living in the East End and within a month of my moving here a Dominos has opened to try and recoup some of their lost profits since I moved.

The huge news that I have is that in August this year Alison and I got married in the Trades Hall in Glasgow. We had an awesome day that wethoroughly enjoyed. We went to Florence for our honeymoon and drank many espressos.

Now I’ve updated my blog and gave it a shiny new skin I’m planning to update it more often again (this is the 10 millionth time this has been said on a blog).

It’s good to be back!

I spent this last weekend at the SECC and numerous parties to watch/celebrate the election results. Most importantly because my girlfriend (and now blogger) was elected to represent the SNP for Glasgow council.

The story you probably heard the election being declared a shambles, mainly by the same media outlets that were calling for a Labour victory. However, as I was actually at the count I was able to create my own opinion on how the proceedings went.

The main issue here is the amount of spoiled ballots. Leading up the election every single newspaper in Scotland had a supplement or article saying how the voting system works, tv programmes including the news had stories on how the voting system works. There’s even people at the polling station asking you if you understand how it works, failing that the top of the ballot paper itself tells you how it works. The case is that if you don’t understand how it works then you can cast an eye over at Darwin and see his natural selection working again. If you are too stupid to figure out how to vote or ask then you don’t deserve a vote as your opinions are probably as incompetent as you are.

Just for you readers who aren’t in Scotland, here’s how in works. You are voting for 3 different types of system. One First Past the Post, One Proportional Representation and One Single Transferable Vote. Understanding the underling mechanics of these systems is optional (Parliament here, Council here). All you need to know is what to tick. For the first 2 you put an ‘X’ next to your favourite candidate. For STV you number them in order from 1..n in order of your preference.

Behold the Parliment complexity!
Behold the Council complexity!

Despite all this education in the media you still got people messing it up in comedy ways. Some people just put numbers all across everything messing up all there ballot papers (remember 100,000 ballot papers divided by 3 is actually 33,000 people not 100,000). Some people put ‘X’s next to their candidates on the STV sheet (so over voting). Some people wrote the candidates number positionally on the STV sheet instead of by number of preference.

Everyone who was at the ballot counting at the SECC thought the system was shit hot. It worked by taking your normal paper ballots and scanning them all. Anything which the system isn’t 100% sure on gets put over to a team of people who then manually view the problem vote and decide what course of action to take. The best part is that it’s setup so you are encouraged to debate with them what the hell the person was thinking at the time.

This allows you to see some comedy attempts at voting. My favourite ballots had something written on them such as:

• Wrote a new box saying “Peace and Happiness Party”
• Put a Vote next to Conservative then put a smiley face next to it saying “only joking”, then spoilt their ballot
• Comedy Spelling mistakes such as “None Wortie of my vote” and “Waisted Vote”

I must of seen over a 1,000 spolit papers and every single one of them was someone who couldn’t figure out how to vote properly. This was no fiasco; just natural selection applied to votes.