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Some years ago I used to read quite a lot of sci-fi and comic books. My favourite storylines where the ones about parallel universes, alternative realities and in general the what could have happened if somebody had done this instead of that? story type, for example, the Marvel's What if? series.

And today I was having a nice chat with mr. Madgoblin about the prospectives in Spain, the house prices and the possible devaluation of IT workers in the future, and I thought: what if we changed our jobs and switched to a non pure IT field? I mean, a place where computers are a tool, not part of the product, if you understand me.
I don't really know what I would do, and it's hard for me to imagine myself in a what if…? scenario. If it wasn't by the money, I presume I would try to do something artistic like writing or composing stuff; a pity there's too many people doing both types of stuff nowadays and inspiration isn't something which is up and ready every day at 9 o'clock in the morning :-)

So what would you do if IT jobs were to disappear? Would you stay loyal to your beloved computers? or would you just shut them off and search for a better paid job?

Somehow inspired by a question in domestika's forum (I'm going to London, any place to visit, out of the normal?) and also by all the thousands of spaniards taking normal boring pictures of Big Ben and Trafalgar Square these past days (which were Bank Holidays in Spain, hence the big amount of Spanish tourists here), I just want to share with all of you some spots of London which are a bit unusual or are not as highlighted in touristic guides as the ones people tend to visit.

And remember, there can be a hidden spot just round the corner. You only need to set yourself a bit aside, open your eyes and look!

I'll start with East Center London and will continue clockwise :-) And please feel free to add whatever you feel is missing, as usual!

Barbican

This area was severely bombed during the war; if you have you eyes wide open you could even spot some traces of bullets and bombs in certain buildings! It's also home to one big development complex called the Barbican State. It was built for recovering some residential space after the war, trying to look like a medieval city, and thus is quite intrincate and you'll get easily lost the first time you go there.

It features lots of different types of constructions, with or without terraces, balconies, towers and the prestigious Barbican arts centre.

Barbican is in the City, so there are lots of office buildings in the area. While this may not look interesting as it's written, a walk in the night may prove to be at least surprising, just by looking at all the different building structures, their illumination and glass covers and so on.

Very near is Farringdon, which shows its previous industrial character quite often in the form of old warehouses updated to office buildings, surrounding a big construction called the Market, where one of the buildings seems to be near to be declared catastrophic zone, having a look at all the "Do not trespass for your security" warnings. If you pay good attention you'll be able to spot references to Trading Authorities in the facades.
And if you like to feel like sardines in a tin, you could also visit Fabric, one of the most famous clubs in London. Just in front of the old market.

You could also go towards St. Paul's cathedral. Apart of having a big dome, it also has some nice gardens where people sit and relax after a long work day (although they tend to gather lots of mosquitos in the summer as well). And do not go through the evident streets, try to go through the rear and weird places, and you'll find locations like the immaculate (and recently refurbished) Paternoster Square, featuring one big medieval door and a nice piazza, just behind the cathedral.

Tate Modern is 10 minutes walk from St. Paul's, thanks to the Millenium Bridge.

Old Street

Home of trendy designers and alike, you can't find more Bansky's and Bansky's-wannabe by square kilometer in any other place of London (and maybe in Earth!). This area is located in East London. Usually people go here for drinks but there's lots of things to see in daylight, specially urban art (Banksy, Bansky!).

There is also the famous White Cube in Hoxton Square, an art gallery. And there's nothing as funny as trying to spy the work of famous design agencies by looking through the windows!

Pubs are quite varied, ranging from the usual classical english pub, to posh ones and arty ones.
One of our favourites is the Foundry, with a quite weird decoration consisting in lots of old hardware, stickers all around, holes in the ceiling and posters. It has a couple of gallery rooms in the basement, so you can have a beer while watching some unusual exhibition. Occasionally they may feature live music - and it won't leave you untouched. Last time we had the luck of being there for a live act, the guy was playing some kind of distorted music using what seemed to be an old multitrack tape player, while another guy was dancing/having spasms just in front of him, robot style.
There's a funky duet with one pub called 333 which has another one called The Mother upstairs. People go to The Mother to warm up, then they go downstairs for the real dance action at 333. Their home page is horrible but they have decent music and lives for a decent price as well. And one spy told Gael Garcia Bernal used to hang over The Mother for a while.

Finally, if there needs to be a place for live acts in Old Street it needs to be Cargo, which hosts lots of lives during the whole week. It also has a very nice beer garden and food, and if you arrive early, you've got free entry! Beware of some spicy sauces, tho.

And before you go home, don't forget to buy some food from one of the multiple kebab shops around. It's a well established tradition to finish the night eating something from a fast food shop. While it may seem ridiculous to the eyes of the tourists, which may not be used to eating while walking or in the bus, it's actually quite funny to try to coordinate the movements in order to eat your food without a) getting multiple greasy stains in your food or b) losing it because of one sudden turn of the bus. Extra bonus if you manage to eat it while standing in a bus/tube.

On a side note, Old Street tube station becomes a party area in the night and people get involved with the music which buskers play. I was once waiting for the tube to come, and got to be part of one improvised concert featuring all the people on the platform making choruses for Stay By Me.

Are you fed up with Google Analytics not showing the full referrer url and just showing something like http://www.example.com/forum/viewtopic.php? I also do, I love to know who's linking me (yeah I'm curious!).

My hosting compresses access_logs which reach a certain size, so when I downloaded the access logs files I get a bunch of .gz files which I'm not going to manually uncompress… So I went to the terminal and once in the folder where the log files are, I type

find . -name "*.gz" -exec gunzip {} \;

Now I have lots of files like access_log.20060929, access_log.20060930, etc. For searching let's say a referrer called example.com which I see in GA, I do:

cat * | grep example.com

and that will return you the apache log lines where the term appears.

For example:

81.39.91.97 - - [26/Sep/2006:11:27:47 +0000] "GET /index.php HTTP/1.1" 200 9562 "http://example.com/viewtopic.php?t=747" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; es-ES; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7"

It's a bit of brute force approach as it's searching in all the files (now that I realize it's even searching in the compressed files since I didn't remove they yet, haha!). But it's very fast even though!

With a bit more of love this could be a rudimentary stats script but I'm not that much into shell scripting (and I'm trying to force myself into really learning regular expressions to do that stats script with ruby instead).
Oh and I forgot to say this works for any decent shell - linux, mac… I think I also could do it with a windows box with unxutils installed (so that you get the funky stuff like grep, find, cat, etc).

My mind is somehow like a fluctuant pendulum, instead of always oscillate between two sides with some kind of natural deviation, it also gets occasionally a sudden nudge which moves it into an almost completely different and out of context thought.

Now casually I feel like watching. No, not that kind of watching, but watching instead of actually producing anything - whether it is tangible or not; although most of the times it's not. Letting the eyes be treated to shapes, patterns and new ideas which might inspire probably the productive side.

In that mood, I happened to find designerstalk. This is a forum quite similar to spanish forum domestika (even lots of the sections have similar names). I had heard about designerstalk before but never managed to actually visit it. It looks interesting.

Also venerable magma books have also updated their website. It still confuses me that they show products which aren't sellable anymore because they are out of stock, but I must recognize that the new version is lighting fast to navigate and I quite like it. I'll make use of my great work location and probably visit the Covent Garden store to see if there are more new things in the physical stores :)

There's also a couple of interesting websites that I'll recommend for whoever interested in computer generated art aesthetics: Generator.x and Code & Form. Both are maintained by the same author, a guy called Watz, and while the first one covers more generic aspects of generative art, the latter is more focused on the code factor. Processing is an always present element in these blogs, and I will reveal publicly that I'm investigating the possibilities that it can offer to curious people like me which want to do some nice looking stuff without going too deep into language tricks and all of that. Well, actually it can also play and generate sound and do lots more of cool stuff, but I haven't dug into those areas yet.

Ok, this is not serious, it contains high quantities of fine web developer fun. Please do not read it if you don't feel that geekly ironic…

I was trying to update my e-mail address at lastminute when I was treated to a series of consecutive WTF, each one being even more astounding than the previous one. And I wanted to share it with you so we all can enjoy this product of engineering.

As web developer, I expected to find an option for logging in first, and then changing my account details. But not, you choose first "Your account" and then you click on "Manage your personal and site details". Yeah it looks good (but weird). Anyway, when I click on the second link I get to a page like this:

Please note that I had to manually add the input box for current email address, since it wasn't added by the system. Seems they like us to practise the trendy Do-It-Yourself hobby.

The problem is that I can't paint input boxes in the browser, so when I entered my new email addresses, the system gave me this error:

I must confess that I was kind of waiting for this error to appear. It's like, you know, when you want to delete something in Windows and it asks you each time "Are you sure you want to send the file to the recycle bin?".

So I had the hope that the missing input field would appear now, magicly! because they would fix their error of not showing my input field from the beginning. But there's more fun to come!

I tried going back to the first screen and chose the option for checking my Purchase History, as I thought: that one is asking me for my password, so maybe once I check my Purchase History, it will show me an input field because I will be logged in. So I entered my email and password, and…
Tadaaaaaaa!

The best error message I've seen in a long time!

Unsupported keysize or algorithm parameters.

Come in, I'm sure you are counting the minutes till you can use it in your own application. You're secretly desiring to find a good place to trigger this error. Maybe when there are not enough products in stock? When an operation has completed successfully? Just about completing transfers in a banking application? That one looks like a cool new home for this error. Let's read it again:

Unsupported keysize or algorithm parameters.

It's so delicious, so obscure for us the illiterate users, and I'm sure the IT guys know very well what it means. When a user fills in a support ticket with the subject "I'm getting an unsupported keysize or algorithm parameters", they have good laughs. HAH! he's getting The Error! He's fucked! HA! HAHA! =))

But let's not get distracted with this tremendous load of fun. I forgot to tell that the pink circle with an exclamation mark actually is BLINKING. So that it actually shows like this:

Unsupported keysize or algorithm parameters

That looks quite cool but I think it would have improved a lot if everything had been blinking.
So as I saw that there was no way of changing my email from there I just thought: let's go back to the form with the missing input field and let's find out what's going on there.

There's an embedded javascript in the very page, being triggered when the form is submitted. Also, as I guessed, the input for my current email address it's in the form, but it is hidden, as the web developer toolbar's "Forms - Display form details" function (and a view to the page's source) will quickly demonstrate:

There are also a couple of "textfeild" which look very funny too. Extremely funny, indeed!

But again, let's not get distracted with the fun! We can directly input the value of the current login (i.e. my current email address), now that Firefox shows us the hidden fields.

That's cool! With filling this and my new desired e-mail address, I just get to this confirmation page:

So it looks like I changed it! Maybe not, because I didn't fill in all the fields. When I get the next e-mail with stupid travel offers, I'll tell you.
Actually this serves for another purpose, apart of giving tons of fun, which is to remind everybody that javascript validations are baaaad. As you see, they are easy to forge and break even more easily.

And now let's find a place for The Error!!