saintbletch

Any idea how Les Reed's honesty might have upset some players?

Two things that I found interesting in analysing what he said in the solent interview. Firstly, his odd comments about Les Reed and "honesty", and secondly the continual mentioning of a "shortcut to European football". I initially thought these references to "shortcuts to European football" were barbed comments aimed at leaving players, who were motivated to join other teams as a "shortcut to European football". But now I think that he is talking about the club, and the fact that we have to achieve European football in way that is sustainable and economically viable for a club like us. i.e. there is no "shortcut to European football" for us. If that is the case, then it suggests that what Cortese was pursuing was an unsustainable, and economically non-viable "shortcut to European football". Secondly, he made an odd, non sequitur comment about Les Reed's character and honesty. Blackmore was pushing him as to whether he still felt that Les Reed was doing an exceptional job, given that a number of players that he, Blackmore, had spoken to had said that they were not happy with their dealings with Reed. Blackmore also cited that a number of players had been left to run their current deals down to a single year with no commitment on extensions. Ralph then leapt into one of his trademarked meandering, uber-positive, bafflingly high-level, strategic-laden responses. (A man after my own heart). He ended by saying something to the effect that Les Reed is full of character and that he has been honest with everyone. From a communication perspective, this seems like such a strange place to head after being asked such a question. The question and the response don't seem to tally. I'm sure that the good Doctor Freud would tell us that it's important. So how would Les being honest with the players have upset them? Perhaps in explaining that we can no longer take a "shortcut to European football", they were told that we can't keep Cortese's promises, and that perhaps new deals are not going to be of the same level of generosity as previously? Oh, and Ralph, please! The Ronald Revolution? This didn't come from the fans, this came from your ex-Apple marketing person....and it's not going to go viral because it's ****e.

Was the commitment that every penny WILL go into transfer fees and wages, or that every penny is AVAILABLE to Ronald? I THINK I heard the latter, but can't remember the exact words used.

Yep, I'm sort of heading in the same direction. Not sure that it would be a schism or power-battle, but I did wonder if someone has said enough is enough. Perhaps Les was left on his own for too long? Perhaps an adult looked at the numbers leaving and divided it by 11 (or a baker's first team as it's known), and realised that the result was worrying close to one. I can't believe that this is the end of it. IF the story that was out there has some legs, then Morgan and Jay would surely have mentally packed their bags. IF that is the case, then I can't see them settling back into a team without their 'star' mates. *I recognise that I'm making lots of assumptions in this hypothesis.

Very interested to see what has happened here. Something doesn't add up. Peach, BBC and others reporting that they likely to be off. Now Ralph gives a copper-bottomed guarantee that they will be here in September. I'm not sure the BBC go public on a likely move unless they feel they have a story. Has there been a change of policy? I wonder how Morgan and Jay feel about this, I suppose it might have been news to them too. Odds on Ralph telling talkSPORT something completely different in 15 minutes?

Says it all really... (Purple trending up, yellow trending down, grey stable). It's been interesting to watch the trends on ZSM over the last 24 hours as various bladders have leaked into the cots of bedwetters and trainer-pants wearers alike. Amazing new feature! ZSM no longer forces you to wait for the counter to hit zero before it refreshes and animates. If it thinks that there is a new word cloud to show, it will spin the counter down from where it currently is to zero - in just three seconds. This means that you can leave the browser tab open and just flick back to it and instead of then waiting for the counter to hit zero, it will automatically refresh with new information. If you see something in the word cloud that you want to investigate within the 3 seconds, simply move the pointer into the cloud and the timer will stop and then behave like normal. WOW! The current zeitgeist of The Saints Forum... Oh, and instead of adding the raw thread title text to the word cloud for TSW forums (which was having a disproportionately significant effect), I now make the thread title text less important. i.e. the text in a post is currently 4 times more important/significant than the text of the title. As you can see above, this has helped to surface more details of the discussions that are happening on here.

Was it a male chicken that you swallowed?

Ok Muppets, I've released another version. If you hover over the timer and click, you will be taken to the settings page. From there you can now change the number of 'words' that the word cloud displays and also change the trending minutes. The maximum number of words is 150, but you can now select from 10 to 150 words in increments of 10. This is the first step to making the transition to support mobiles and tablets. 150 'words' 90 'words' 40 'words' It now also allows you to change the Trending minutes to 2, 5, 15 and 60. Previously this was stuck on 15. This changes how many minutes ZSM should look back to determine which trending colours to use. i.e. it compares the number of times the word has been seen now, to how many times it was seen 2, 5 15 or 60 minutes ago, and that determines the degree of up-, or down-trend colour it uses. It basically allows you to use the colours to highlight shorter-term or longer-term trends. This is more important for the TSW forum monitoring, as I sometimes have to push open a creaking and cobweb-covered door to gain access to TMS and The Arts. So setting the Trending Minutes to 60, gives the best chance of seeing trends. Even then, if there has been no activity then the words will still appear grey. Links... The Saints - http://www.zeitgeistmarys.com/desktop-only/270614/5 The Lounge - http://www.zeitgeistmarys.com/desktop-only/270614/6 The Muppet Show - http://www.zeitgeistmarys.com/desktop-only/270614/7 The Arts - http://www.zeitgeistmarys.com/desktop-only/270614/8 and the familiar #saintfc Twitter monitoring is here: http://www.zeitgeistmarys.com/desktop-only/270614/1. Oh, and I think that I've fixed the bug that meant that the TSW forum monitoring nearly always appeared grey. We'll see. Bletch.

Are you sure it was just your Unix shell skills that made you look like Gandalf? Get your hair cut!

Yes, well spotted Pancake. I've noticed it for a while, but bloody mindedness has stopped me fixing it, as having checked the code it just "shouldn't be there". If I had the arrogance of a proper programmer, I'd tell you that you can't have seen it because the code doesn't allow it to be there! Basically, the & symbol on URL links gets converted to "amp" in certain circumstances (you may also see gt ">" and lt " I'll take another look at the code and see if I can figure out why it's there. If I can't, it's simple to add it to the terms that I'm ignoring. Thanks for taking the time to mention it. Bletch.

Ok Muppets, I've put up a new version that monitors TSW and allows you to click the words to go search TSW. Be warned it will probably be pretty "unstable on the back-end"*. The Twitter stuff seems to be OK, and shouldn't be affected by any bugs, but the stuff I've done to allow ZSM to monitor the forums on The Saints Web needs a bit more TLC still. I'd really appreciate some testing and some feedback. If you've got a moment to read the nonsense below, please do and provide feedback, if not skip to the end and have a play... Things that I know about and plan to address. --- 1) Colours - At the moment the colours you see show what is trending up, down or staying stable. These colours are based on the rate of change in the popularity of the words that I observe over 'n' minutes. Currently the 'n' number that I'm looking back over can be seen at the bottom left of the window: It's 15 minutes in the example above. I will allow the user to change that soon between 2, 5, 15 and 60 minutes. There are two problems. Firstly, and there's little I can do about this, but if the forum has no traffic then it has no 'change' in the word frequencies, so I have to show the words in the neutral colour 'grey' (unless you've changed it). So if little has happened over the last 15 minutes, expect to see a lot of grey. Secondly, there is an insidious bug that I can't figure out that seems to make the words grey even though there have been changes in frequency. I'll get that fixed, but would value some monitoring of that, it will likely mean that you see a lot of grey until I find out what's going on. 2) Update frequency - The back-end processes that monitor TSW are reliant of Tapatalk and that is pretty much a law unto itself. Whereas Twitter simply shovels tweets into the gaping mouth of my program without me doing anything (well other than making sure I can swallow its load without spitting), I have to regularly log into to TSW and search for the latest posts. Half the time when there are new posts, I don't get them and then I get a bunch in one go. I think this is Tapatalk's way of throttling the demand it places on the servers. This all means that I can't rely on checking TSW every minute as I can with Twitter. Plus, if I logged into The Man's servers that often and searched and downloaded posts, then I'd be rightfully infracted. So instead I've had to move the update frequency out to every 5 minutes (I think this may be related to the colour bug I mentioned above). So again you may notice little change from time to time. I might set the time to 300 seconds too, to make it clear how often this is getting updated. 3) Updates stopping - The infamous back-end processes seem to be a little unstable at the moment - especially those connected to getting information via Tapatalk. As a result it's possible that the updates from the forum will stop. The way you will know if they have stalled is that the date and time in the bottom right hand corner will be out of sync with the current time. At the moment this is the GMT time and will therefore be out by roughly an hour with BST. So, if you do an F5 or ZSM updates the word cloud because the counter has reached zero, and you see a time that is significantly out of sync with the then current GMT time, the chances are that the rats have chewed through some ZSM cabling. Please let me know as I will have to restart things on the servers. The new ZSM word clouds... The Saints - http://www.zeitgeistmarys.com/desktop-only/270614/5 The Lounge - http://www.zeitgeistmarys.com/desktop-only/270614/6 The Muppet Show - http://www.zeitgeistmarys.com/desktop-only/270614/7 The Arts - http://www.zeitgeistmarys.com/desktop-only/270614/8 and the #saintfc Twitter monitoring is here: http://www.zeitgeistmarys.com/desktop-only/270614/1 Bletch. *Fnarr, fnarr - this is geek speak for the programs that run on the servers that you don't usually get to see directly. Toke's a ****.

Glad to hear it Halo. BTW regarding your 'muck mystery', it was one of Toke's dogs that walked on your drive. But whilst I can't betray a confidence, if you have the **** DNA tested it'll come back 'human' and will be found to contain an suspiciously high percentage of raw fish for a western diet. If you get my drift.

To further prove that we are kindred spirits Fowllyd, in my post to Plastic I actually started to type about him "waiting for the man". Spooky. I'm now imagining a scene reminiscent of the one played out by Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Woman in Love, (Did I ever tell you that I was in a Ken Russell film?) where you and I are oiled up and wrestling over a scrabble board. Good job I only thought that, and didn't say any of it 'out loud'.

Where've you been Minty? That's what started me on this slippery slope. Have a trawl back through The 'The saintbletch "Hilarious fun with words" thread' thread. You'll see a bunch of word clouds and time charts. However, the 'clever' stuff, if there is any clever stuff in ZSM, is the temporal element - it's seeing the change over time. To do this is quite 'expensive' in terms of computing power and storage. So I wouldn't want to do that just to produce a word cloud for an individual user, as it would overwhelm my servers, but I could allow you to create them on the fly. i.e. you supply the user, I search for their last 500 posts (that's a Tapatalk limitation BTW), and make a word cloud from them. However, if I made that feature freely available then The Man's TSW servers would be taking quite a pounding. So it's possible, but it needs a bit of thought.

Nightmare, papster. Heroku - the cloud platform containing the virtual servers where the ZSM applications are hosted, uses Git as the deployment mechanism. I store my code on Github and I then do a Git push to Heroku. However, as my Github repositories are private, when Heroku goes off to pull the private Git submodule repositories from Github, it needs authentication! Held me up for quite some time I can tell you. I use Git in a very naive way, I must say that the really powerful features confuse the hell out of me. When your Dev Team is comprised of one part time hacker, you don't really need all the features.

Art imitating life, Gay Boot? BTW you do realise that once the TSW-trawling feature is available later today, you will be able to influence the word cloud. Just go into TMS, post the word **** multiple times, then press F5 in ZSM until you align your Nemesis's name with ****. Great game. What's not to love? P.S. Me referring to you as Gay Boot is my effort to keep Gay in the Word Cloud. Oh, did I mention the word "Gay"?

As you've probably found Plastic, it's live again. Well it was live again LATE last night. TSW-trawling update to follow later...

Don't talk to me about the Tapatalk API. It's a ****ing *** bollocky ***in' **** of a tardis jockey. Sorry papster, had to tell someone. The hoops I've had to jump through to get at that lovely, lovely content. It shouldn't happen to a real programmer. But yes, it would be possible in theory to track posting habits. Reaching a definitive conclusion might be more difficult unless each actor quoted or named the other (and didn't use slang names - or stick to a limited set that could be learned). But I'd like to hear your proposal, sounds like fun - well masochistic fun anyway. Anyway, the reason for my attention being here instead of focussing on getting the new version of ZeitgeiStMarys running, is that I was about to issue a formal apology that this will take a little longer than planned. Sorry Plastic et al. Git submodules, eh pap? What's that all about?

Yep, I'm the bloke that hangs around school playgrounds in a dirty raincoat, handing out URLs to the impressionable and gullible free of charge, and then, you when you're totally spacked-out watching word clouds animate, all of a sudden Bam. It's gone. Brahhaaa Brahhaaa. (say that a little bit like an overly hammy Bond villain). It's intentionally down Plastic. A new version going up - now with added Zeit - and as I'm between real-world projects at this moment in time, it had to be now. Give me an hour or so...

The Mighty Bletch? I prefer Bletch Almighty, but I'll take the reciprocal approbationary naming, especially as it makes such a nice change from the critical opprobrium of silence. It metaphorically 'literally' warms the cockles of my heart to wake and read a word like approbationary - in TMS - especially since 'they' killed the hilarious fun with words thread! Thanks for the feedback W D Folly. And yes, they are damned groovy. I've added those additional 'stop' terms and will add more if they are suggested and provide no additional insight. Regarding user names, I'm not sure I completely agree. I like the idea of this creating a community feel, and if people are being quoted or mentioned then they seem, to me, to be important. But I do take your point. I'll have a ponder. The code is getting there, but I'm having problems with getting the colours to reflect the rates of change of the various terms. It's OK in The Saints... But in the Lounge... ...and TMS... ...it's all a bit grey. BTW TMS is perhaps the biggest argument against including user names. BTW2, is the proximity of TOKYO-SAINT and GAY a mere coincidence, or has ZeitgeiStMarys reached the first stage of machine-sentience? Toke's a ****.

I'd agree with the general point you're making, but you do need to do a bit of investigation into what has actually been 'burned' into the phone's firmware - spyware perhaps. And being firmware, it probably means that it is non-removable. On a wider level, governments around the world are concerned by the dominance of Chinese companies such as Huawei who are supplying more and more of the low-level infrastructure upon which the Internet relies. Whether their concerns are valid or not, we should each be aware of the intelligence that we freely sign over to phone companies, network operators or governments when we connect a device to a network.

Muppets, I need a favour. I've sort of hooked up the forum to the word cloud generator. I'm a little way from launching it on the ZeitgeiStMarys site as I need a lot more testing. The images below reflect the most popular terms being discussed on The Saints' forum - over the last hour or so. They are interactive, and embedded behind each of the terms is a link to the search page of this forum. I'd like you to click on one of the images below to open it in a new browser window, and then click on the terms in the word cloud to open a new window allowing you to search TSW for those terms. Please search the forum for the various terms and let me know if the results are what you were expecting. Background and some questions... - The blue text is trending up, green text trending down and grey text is steady. - I know there are some erroneous tokens in the cloud - td, smilies, etc. - I've added the thread title to each of the posts which has made that text more prominent. Is this the right thing to do, or should I not include thread titles? - Short terms (less than 4 characters) are not supported by the forum's search facility, so searching for them doesn't work. - The usernames that appear in the cloud are there because they've been quoted. Is this the right thing to do, or should they be excluded? - Should I add terms like player, players, season, etc. to the list of words I removed from the word cloud - because they don't add any real value? Any other comments? Thanks. Bletch Toke's a ****.

Test post. Please ignore. Font, size, bold, italic, underline. Table. [TABLE=class: reference, width: 492] [TR=bgcolor: #F1F1F1] [TH=bgcolor: #555555]Firstname[/TH] [TH=bgcolor: #555555]Lastname[/TH] [TH=bgcolor: #555555]Points[/TH] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Jill[/TD] [TD]Smith[/TD] [TD]50[/TD] [/TR] [TR=bgcolor: #F1F1F1] [TD]Eve[/TD] [TD]Jackson[/TD] [TD]94[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]John[/TD] [TD]Doe[/TD] [TD]80[/TD] [/TR] [TR=bgcolor: #F1F1F1] [TD]Adam[/TD] [TD]Johnson[/TD] [TD]67[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] Link VideoURL code HTML PHP [sOUNDCLOUD]soundcloud[/sOUNDCLOUD] Align left Align centre Align right Numbered list 1 Numbered list 2 Numbered list 3 Bulleted list 1 Bulleted list 2 Bulleted list 3 Indented text Indented text email@domain.com

Ahh, Deano6...the stateside Len Ganley, the thinking man's Michaela Tabb, the mathematical pedant's go-to mathematical pedant*. Fred to Saints? Well my snooker-refereeing ex-pat, in the words on Mao Tse-tung "I ****ing hope not!" Once the word cloud has been shared, the wonderful terms that it captures for all of posterity are like so many ancient flies caught in amber. All you need do is click on the word, and Twitter will be searched for that word. Clicking is just the cracking of the metaphorical amber, so that Twitter can free the metaphorical insect. With me? Well, this is a rather roundabout way of saying that when I clicked on Fred last night, it was Fred Rutten that came up. Not that it will do you any good to click on Fred now, because a) he's not there anymore, and b) this is the "spirit of the minute" deano6 - like Father Time, Twitter has moved on... *I must credit the excellent Fowllyd for that particular phrase. Isn't it.

Yes thanks suewhistle, I've just re-tested it. The reason that it comes back when you click inside the image, is that it effectively downloads the image from mediacru.sh to your browser, and when it is re-rendered there your browser knows to use the right fonts. I think it's an issue with the way mediacru.sh handles the (SVG) files on FF. You mean, why are they there? Pell seems to be a misspelling (there's a hilarious word pun in there somewhere I feel) of Pelle, and if you click pell, you will see it shows that Pell has appeared erroneously in a couple of #saintsfc tweets. One by a Dutch transfer monitoring user, and the other by the redoubtable Alex Goring Cock. Fred is Fred Rutten the Feyenoord coach that I mentioned below.