Trying out blogging by mail.

I've been thinking about it, and the lack of a iPhone app to post to
Blogger has lead me to giving mail based blogging a go.

Well, at least that's the theory.

Ah Momus brilliance....

And there in my feeds this morning, Momus lists the tracks he's doing in a Berlin set. And to top it off, a wonderful bit of Momus on a webcam, performing "The Cheques in the Post"....



Brilliant stuff...

How overegged were the iPhone queue stories?

Some Guy With A Website demonstrates.

Thrift, the other interconnection protocol....

How did I manage to miss Thrift. Released a year ago by Facebook, it's very similar to Google's Protocol Buffers, so this comparison by Stuart Sierra puts meat on those bones.

There's only one way to resolve this... PROTOCOL FIIIIIIIGHT.

Actually, Thrift looks nice with more languages supported too and now Thrift is in incubation as an Apache project.

Foxtrot does....

Foxtrot does Penny Arcade, PvP, xkcd and Joy Of Tech in one.

So close yet....

So our local constabulary are sending out local crime maps by email to people who are interested. This is good.

They are sending out .Doc files embedded as a link in a .rtf file. You can't open this on a Mac or on Linux and I suspect you'd need Office on Windows for it to work. This is not good.

But, it's a start.

Google undoes a dumb....

Google Mail had what someone must have thought was a neat behavior. Exchange mail with people and pow, they are added to your contacts. Of course, in real life, that doesn't work. You get a contact list full of crapola addresses, which devalues your contact list which is dumb. So the good news is that is in a future release, Google is getting rid of the dumb. Now, there's "Suggested Contacts" and the ability to pick and choose who becomes your contacts.

And there's another thing to think about.... Is this the start of more controllable contact management for Google's services, making it social networking without the ninjas and spammers? One can hope.

If you don't read my other blog...

Then you won't know why I've been sighing.

A Coder Sighs....

Well, I had been working away on Pocket Lendery for the iPhone, and it was coming along nicely but what with me getting a proper job and all, it had slipped a bit.

And then the iPhone App Store opened and there was Circulator from the fine chaps at Coding Monkeys. Circulator looks like a fine app and just reminds me of some things I forgot from my spec.

Still, there's plenty of code in the Pocket Lendery code base, and I'll keep on working on it till it scratches my own itch. I will then release it as an open sourced project (unless you are reading this, are an iPhone coder or want to be, and want to help on the project in which case, mail me)...

I can't think of a better way to keep the Coding Monkeys on their toes than having an open source project snapping at their heels.

Google Browser Sync open sourced....

Google Browser Sync, or at least the client part, has been open sourced. I think the idea of porting the server to Google App Engine has potential, but lets see how the community builds around it first.

Google Protocol Buffers

Google squirt a lot of data internally between a lot of different services written in different languages. The data format between these services has been tricky to manage. The default response is "use XML" but XML makes the data bigger and more costly to parse. Google's solution is Google Protocol Buffers. Create a .proto file to describe the data contained by a message you want to pass. Run a compiler and you get the Java, Python or C++ code you need to read and write messages with that protocol. Now go wire up your services. All under an Apache 2.0 License. Worth checking out; and it'll be interesting to see how long before that range of languages supported expands.

BBQ sauce news....

BBQ sauce not as effective as tin foil. (via Digg)

Things that suck - unselectable dialog text...

I think anyone who makes a dialog window pop up with text along the lines of "Something hasn't worked, see http://example.org/blah/blah/blah for more details" and then makes the URL non clickable and also makes the text unselectable so the user can't copy and paste, needs to have control-C/control-V disabled on their computers and see how they like it.

Thing I want in monitors....

Where a monitor has umpteen inputs, and you can switch between the inputs using but a single button to cycle through them, I want a menu which lets me select wether or not I cycle through each input. So on my monitor here which has DVI-1,DVI-2,DisplayPort,HDMI,Component,Svideo,Composite,VGA... I could turn off everything but DVI-1 and HDMI, so rather than 3 and 5 button presses to change input, it would we 1 button press. Come on Mr Monitor maker; I'm really looking at you Mr Dell, make it real eh?

And the "Oh Touché" award goes to....

And the "Oh Touché" award goes to....

Simon Phipps for his masterful "Pot, Kettle and the required EULA" and his pointing out that it's easy to talk the talk, much much harder to walk the walk.

Awesome - What Sys Admin is All About

All change at Codepope Towers....

If you follow my Twittering, you'll know that earlier this week I went to Hannover for a job interview. Well, it appears to have all gone jolly well, and barring hitches, I will be the Open Source Editor for heise-online.co.uk. Well, I say all change; the blogs will still update of course, and I'll still be coding for research (and fun in my off time...) and I'll still be talking about all the things I often talk about.

JSqueak.... Smalltalk in Java

It's small (5000 lines of code), it's MIT licensed, it has a development environment, it runs 10-30 times slower than a C based VM, but hey, it looks like fun. It's JSqueak, a Squeak interpreter written in Java.

All praise the archivists....

Thanks to a friend who did keep the old copies of Personal Computer World from the late 80s and early 90s, I now have scans of the David Evnull columns which were my first writing experience.

Things that have amused me...

My use of the term "freely copyable" because back then there was no term "open source" and the only GPL software of note was GCC and Gnu Emacs. And there was no giving URLs for stuff; I was uploading files to Cix so at least there was somewhere online you could easily download them.

The user interface wars and the arrival of X Windows; Motif vs Open Look... Experience put me off the latter, but Motif never did make it. X Windows on the other hand is firmly ensconced on the Linux desktop and there is really no other alternative.

The Amiga 3000UX... I did give it one heck of a kicking in print for sucking (and being expensive suck).

My column which predicted the ACE initiative would be DOA... which became true faster than the columns went to print.

Oh the memories.... Thanks Adrian!

The Union Jack - Unnecessary noise?

Mac OS X has a rather nifty international keyboard handling input menu, you can make it appear in the menu bar with a little flag showing what locale you are in.

But when you are in one country, and you use the the input menu to only get at the handy keyboard and character palette utilities (one shows you live, what characters the keyboard generates, great for locating the ™ or å or é, the other lets you browse the unicode character set).... then the flag is a bit noisy; overly colourful and depending on taste, possibly jingoistic.

So, for a fix, may I refer you to this Macworld article which shows you how to directly launch the keyboard and character palette utilities without having the input menu on screen.

But wouldn't it be nice if you could have a "Global citizen" mode on the input menu, so you didn't have the little flag (you could make it appear when you mouse over it)...

And now I'm split cos this....

...is equally as clever... Requiem's trailer dialog vs Toy Story 2.

Requiem For A Day Off...

I love messing about with video, the old mashup, one movie to the tune of another, it's fun.

But this... well, take Lux Aeterna from Requiem for a Dream, take Ferris Bullers Day Off... It really shouldn't go together, but Benji Films pulls it off. See for yourself.



Class work.

More Footswitch

Well, they got back to me, with a promise to look into the console logging, but also, news on what they are doing next which sounds like foot switch heaven. I'm already pencilling in my order for it.

My new toy.... A Footswitch?

I just got myself a foot-switch. Well, officially it's a "StealthSwitch" for hiding your pr0n or games or Facilebook pages in the office. But it does come with software which just lets you map it to a keystroke. For me, I've mapped it to [SPACE] so that I can have both hands free and page through things like physical manuals and books. Works great in Google Reader. It actually thinks that it is a keyboard, generating up an "all modifiers+5" keystroke which the standalone app they ship with it intercepts and then does whatever action you map it to.

Why does it look like a keyboard? Well, I assume because that way, no drivers are needed for it and on a reasonably set up office machine, you shouldn't have users installing drivers. It's a cunning workaround for that problem. But, I have to say, if it's really a steathy thing then doesn't having this....



sitting in the menu bar kind of give it away. Full marks though for having a Mac application for it though, and bonus marks for it not looking like a Windows app.

Now I can sit back and pretend I'm controlling the browser.... WITH MY MIND!

Update: And minus marks for logging *every* press of the footswitch to the console. Mail despatched to their support.

Motivation 101

How do you motivate yourself?

My current motivation is Metal Gear Solid 4. My copy of which is firmly in the hands on Nomine, who will only give the game to me when I can show her my code doing what I told her it will do.

Soon, it will be mine.... soon.... um....

Working away....

So I'm not going to be getting any ADAs for my coding efforts, but I have to admit to becoming quite comfortable with [A fruity company]'s SDK for [fruity company]'s phone. In a couple of days, I should have the first working version of [secret codename] ready to roll, or at least start working through the bugs from me not knowing the real workings of this thing. Hey, I'm not used to managing memory by hand.

World of World of....

The Onion has the news on World of World of Warcraft. Wow, I've never played World of Warcraft but this could be the expansion pack for me.

Senor Coconut Da Da Da

Cheesy latin remix of digital classic. Check.
Curious video with the sexy ladies. Check.
Gorilla suits. Check.
Did we check the cheesey. Check.
We have lift off....

(via Boing Boing)

LinkedIn's Architecture....

This slideshow of LinkedIn's JavaOne presentation has some interesting things to take away....

22 million users.

A 12GB JVM heap in "The Cloud" which holds 120 million connections between those users with in memory caching implemented in C++ and accessed through JNI.

99% Java implementation.

And an architecture that has evolved to scale. (Hey Twitter, take a look?)

Nice work LinkedIn.

(via Blogging Roller)

Now that I'd like to see....

"Sony’s Digital Cinema Auto Calibration (DCAC) simplifies surround sound setup with the push of a button by automatically adjusting speaker frequency, distance and level."

Speakers that move on their own. Cracking stuff Sony.

(Original release here)

Link-o-tron

Some links (rpt. previously twittered)

Worst solution for Twitters problems to date...

Great Logos of our time

Squirrelfish's logo rocks... just like Squirrelfish does. Nice work Webkit dudes. Up close on the logo here.

Hopefully, people like this will go away now Obama's the nominee.

And finally, sheer brilliance with a Spectrum, a dot matrix printer, a Finlandia TV, an old Scanjet and an array of noisy hard disks in Big Ideas (Don't Get Any).

Like drawing up your application designs?

If you do, you'll love Yahoo's Design Stencil Kit. Coming in Omnigraffle, Visio, PDF, PNG and SVG formats, it's a whole host of goodies for sketching out your app in your favourite digital notepad. The stencils under a Creative Commons attribution license, but attribution on created diagrams is optional. So, no excuse for dodgy diagrams any more.

Best apology of the day....

In an article on Newsweek, Close but not close enough*, on Clinton's "popular vote" claim, comes the final lines.

"*Changed from "Close--But No Cigar" to avoid the inappropriate (and unintentional, I swear) reference. Apologies to all for my stupid choice of words."

At least it lives on in the URL. Heh.

Epictetus - A Java Database Explorer....

I haven't played with it yet but Epictetus looks like a competent Java based database explorer. It is built on the Netbeans platform, but you don't need Netbeans to run it. Note though it is still early days for this application.

Why the mention? Well, I went and looked at the fuzzy little video there. No strange voice talking over it. Just MC Hammer's Can't Touch This... I was off looking for my big trousers in seconds.

Aggregating...

I'm now aggregated at Friendfeed as codepope.... which includes me on twitter as codepope, on Jaiku as codepope... etc, etc. Find it here, for a complete single feed of all my nonsense.

Smooth Criminal with Fred Astaire

This is a sweet little video mash. I especially like how it credits the movies, directors and choreographers at the end.



(via Boing Boing)

Ok, so some people are thinking about GUIs...

Here's a neat tweak on the scrollbar concept, Popup Scrollbar Concept, though it strikes me as kinda familiar and I can't exactly put my finger on it. I do note that it does lack absolute repositioning though. But then this is the kind of research that we need to do, especially as in the future we won't know if it's a mouse or a finger manipulating the UI.

Been giving Twhirl a twirl....

As Twhirl now supports FriendFeed and Twitter, I thought I'd give it a go. And it got me thinking.

The thing that strikes me is how, back when Java was trying to do cross platform look and feels that matched the target platform, people complained it wasn't exactly like the target platform and QED Java sucked. And now we have Air and Silverlight, where the delivered apps look nothing like the target platform, but go for this generic look and feel and... Well, if people were consistent, QED AIR and Silverlight suck.

But they don't. You know what? Cross platform look and feel consistency is now a big red herring. Web applications showed that you could do 90% of what you needed with buttons, buttons, buttons* (and some text fields and scrollers, but mostly buttons). Prettier the button, prettier the layout was, the slicker the web application was. Big buttons, rounded buttons, what turned up was a new design paradigm for applications, rectangular, rounded, and if you can make it translucent, +5 points. And into this world come AIR and Silverlight... same idea; it won't match the targetted platform, but who cares, it speaks a nice simple visual language. Click something, something happens.

Did we just rewind twenty to thirty years of GUI development?

A thought... Annotated licenses....

When mixing code libraries together, wouldn't it be neat to be able to enumerate all the licenses that applied to the code base.

How about an @License annotation?

@License(name="MyNeatLibrary",type="BSD",author="Blah Blah Inc")
@License(name="IrregularExpression Library",type="CCattrib",attrib="Fred Flintstone",attribemail="fred@example.com",attriburl="http://example.com")

At run time, the "About" dialog then scans the code base for the annotations, which would be set to runtime persist, and then display about information based on what is actually used.

It wouldn't attempt to enforce the licenses, but would allow for automatic visibility of licenses.

Of course, this would have to be done in some coordinated way to standardise the types and attributes, but it has some potential... just as long as we don't end up with per-method licenses.

[ This thought caused by following Matt Gemmell on Twitter ]

And it goes a little something like this....

(via Why Thats Delightful)

Finally, an end of Time (and Date)

Top of the list of things that any Java developer can agree, sucks like a sucky thing from suckington, suckania, it's Date and Time. These have never got better, and like a scab have been picked at with no healing up. Well now there's JSR 310... and here's an interview at Java Lobby with the JSR leaders.

This is going to be a long four years.....

Stanley Johnson (Boris's father) on News 24

"I have been amazingly impressed by the determination which he has shown. Number one, he hasn't had a drink for three months. Now if you give up drink for three months, you have to be serious. I mean you have really to be serious about what you are doing."

Oh, that's so reassuring that is. Let's see how Boris wrapped up his acceptance speech.

"Let's get cracking tomorrow, let's have a drink tonight."

On Climate Change and Feedback

From a conversation with DHM...

DHM: I'm still a bit boggled by the discovery that none of the climate models have any feedback effects in them. They know that raising the temperature of the Siberian permafrost a few degrees will release a LOT of methane, for example, and there are many others associated with melting sea ice and the like but none are included, which I think means we're all about to get a salutory lesson on control theory any year now

Me: I have to say, I wasn't overly boggled by that. The reasoning appears to be that there are no ways of knowing all the feedback effects and counting 'known' ones would leave the model open to being redone every time one was determined. So they go for the baseline...

DHM: The problem to me is that once that's been filtered through the PR dept and the press, the worst-case first-order projection is presented as the worst-possible-case projection

Me: I prefer to think of it as a projection half full of doom than half empty.

An experiment....

Method

Take a friend with kids and a number of crappy PCs running Windows XP. Plaugued with virii, despite AV controls.

Ask them to try "Ubuntu" and install one machine for them and give them a quick guided tour.

Wait.

Result

Phone call the next day. Friend loves it, so does her children. Installed it on all the other machine herself last night. All machines are "Just so much faster and everything is just there".

Conclusion

Ubuntu Linux... it's what a Mac user like me can recommend to someone who has a crufty PC.

Discuss.

A Morning with NetBeans 6.1....

I've been off working on the iPhone SDK, so I wasn't too interrupted when NetBeans 6.1 made an early entrance this week. That was until Nomine said to me "What I'd like is an application which looks up the people you are following on Twitter and the people following you on Twitter and shows who the mutual followed/following are"...

So, I broke out NetBeans 6.1 and gave it a go. First up was the Twitter access. That turned out to be very easy; NB6.1 has precanned code generators for lots of well known web services out there. So I selected Twitter and the appropriate function in the tree and drag it into my code. And pow!, there it is, complete with separate classes generated to handle the result and authentication, including popping up a user name/password authentication dialogue.

Parsing the XML was more interesting. I decided to use the XML Schema design tool in NetBeans 6.1, which I hadn't used before, but after about an hour or so of fiddling, I had a schema file which was automatically generating code for JAXB.

Next up, feeding the result of the Twitter API to create objects... Already in there. The result of the Twitter API call can be parsed into a JAXB object by calling a method on the result and telling it what JAXB class you want it turned into.

The GUI, Matisse as usual, but it's just getting better. Now there's Java Application Framework support in there I made a JAF application, and getting a button to call up Twitter and do all that parsing was a matter of picking the button and doing "Set Action" on it. NetBeans 6.1 can also code generate all the background processing bits, including an animated busy indicator.

And that was an application built. Doesn't actually change anything but boy, it shows how useful NetBeans 6.1 is.

Goodbye Humph....

Here's a compressed burst of ISIHAC from the South Bank Show.



And here's all the South Bank Show.

Part 1



Part 2



Part 3



Part 4



Part 5



Part 6



What a great guy... goodbye Humph.

On a bit of a video roll here....

Oh, and I'd better throw in the Thunderbirds one too



And the Avengers one has emedding disabled so go here for Avengers remix excellence

Ah.... U F O....

Cracking stuff....

Update... and more....



and more....



"Flood cue! Dive Dive Dive!"

All from the wonderful Power Themes 90....

Who's On First: The Movie....

FIRST!

"This" for the day....

I'd like this on my desktop.

I'd rather not think about how awful this is.

I'm not going for dinner on this.... I like to stretch my legs between courses.

"This" for the day....

I must not even consider building this.

This is so not on my Amazon Wishlist.

This has left me abruptly deflated.

And finally this reminds me never to ask for a show of hands if you don't know the result in advance.

Just for fun....

If you read this blog, and have a PS3... do remember to add "codepope" to your PSN friends.

Psystar-k-raving-bonkers....

Well, you'd have to be bonkers to buy anything from a company who's terms of service are 'Well, you are on your own matey..." and thats before all the other shenanigans.

Natoooopsy...

And you thought couriers were bad. NATO accidentally supplied arms and food to the Taliban.

New rule time....

Inspired by this Nokia "concept"*....

Rule: You can't call your whacky rendering a "concept" device if something better designed has appeared in a SciFi TV series.

That is all.

* Rodenberry's Earth Final Conflict had a much nicer device which looked like people could use it.

Inconsolable....

Cross posted from Codepapacy

I was looking for monospaced fonts, after I was reminded that Microsoft had actually made a decent monospaced font with Consola. After some hunting, and a false start finding the original Inconsolas, I found the latest version, with a slashed zero, and my it looks good. Check it out here.

Inconsolable....

I was looking for monospaced fonts, after I was reminded that Microsoft had actually made a decent monospaced font with Consola. After some hunting, and a false start finding the original Inconsolas, I found the latest version, with a slashed zero, and my it looks good. Check it out here.

Selected links....

A tweak on Toshiba's USB... powered when the machine isn't powered up.

An Overheard in New York I'd have loved to overhear.

(Extracted from past twittering)

What's heavier than a dumbbell?

Easy. A box of weights for a dumbbell. Heavier still? Two boxes of weights for a pair of dumbbells. And don't ask me about my enormous pole. Still, that lot will keep Nomine busy...

6 People and their ids....

Playing with the iPhone SDK? If you are working with the addressbook, you might want to know what the default record ids of the simulated addressbook is.

1 - Kate Bell
2 - Daniel Higgins
3 - John Appleseed
4 - Anna Haro
5 - Hank Zakroff
6 - David Taylor

Now you know. This might be handy for testing if nothing else.

Vodafone impressed me....

Sent them my old E70 for unlocking on Thursday. Back today all unlocked. Jolly quick. I'm impressed. Not with them any more, having got O2/iPhone, but if I had an unlocked iPhone, Vodafone wouldn't be out of the question as a carrier.

FAQ intros...

From The Blu-Ray Disc site:

FAQ
These are the questions frequently asked, so please refer to them before getting in contact with the Entity.

Hmmm.... The Entity you say....

Long Photography...

Looks like Flickr has gone for the video thing, which means 90 second long videos. An interesting approach, dodging taking on Gootube head on and playing to the world of cameras with a video option. Quality looks decent enough... let's see how that plays out.

Oooh - Quake3 on an iPod touch....

Sweet work....

McCain (not Oven Fries)

What a nice man. Sounds like he's got the right stuff for the presidency.... sorry, I mean, a residency at a Sweary McSwear Swear's Comedy Club.

And in font news...

Microsoft finally find a use for the font "Comic Blackmail Sans".

When April Fool's leak...

Ok... I got caught... The mobile plasma story turns out to be a late delivered April Fool. Which is quite a pity as we could do with something different in the mobile display space. Hey ho, back to OLEDs and ePaper and LCDs....

Grails and Groovy....

I've done an article on Grails and Groovy, which you can find at here on Heise Online UK. It's an introduction to what Grails is about.

Thinking hard....

Well, I'm doing my usual thing of hacking code and then going into "This isn't right" rethinking, but I'm trying to push forward. The big mind blocker is making "the app" slick in the hand and until I get it in my hand, simulators don't really crack it.

Anyway, let's see what's been distracting me today....

First up, the news that Panasonic are putting plasma screens in phones which I'll admit is a place I hadn't really expected for anyone to do. The new twist, low power, apparently with the magic enabled by AbleComm's work on headsets. It'll be interesting to see how these pan out in practice.

John Cole's Balloon Juice analyse McCain's new ad and have worked out what the foundation of his policies are.

Oh My! SOOO CUTE but I'm still not getting one... unless it's that cute.

And another thanks to Balloon Juice for Mike Gravel's Helter Skelter... But heck.... I kinda like it as art.

Right, that's enough for the day.

Apparently....

The most popular thing I've posted here is... a little thing on Windows Se7en. Who knew. Well, apparently Google Analytics knew after a little bit of a sample. Using Analytics on this blog is like using the Large Hadron Collider to crack a nut. Actually, could you crack a nut with the LHC? Maybe that is its real purpose. You can never tell with these physics types.

Now I've tidied up the kipple that was here, time for me to get down to some steady bloggery. On what I don't know yet.

Anyway, that's my blogging quota for the day.

All Change On T'Blog...

Twittering is now archived on Codepope Tweeting.

Previous twittering has been archived there and removed from this blog.

Carry on. Regardless.

BloglinesMenu 1.6

I completely forgot to mention, but BloglinesMenu 1.6 just lost the RC tag and is now a release. And the source it up on the site too. So get BloglinesMenu 1.6... if you use Bloglines, that is. Or if you want the source for a simple menu notifier app which you can modify for whatever service you want.

Ah... __MyCompanyName__ no more....

XCode is a tad opaque as to where it keeps the company name value it uses when it makes templates into files. So how to change? Quit XCode and start up a terminal and type

defaults write com.apple.xcode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions -dict ORGANIZATIONNAME RunState

Restart XCode and all your code is mine! Bwahahaha... Oh yes, change RunState to your company name.

Interflora Sucks....

Placed order for flowers for yesterday..... nothing turned up. Ring Interflora (numerous times) and it's all engaged tones or dead lines. That's shite. That's shite on a stick with a shite topping.

Update: For a more reasoned reasoning of the reasons that Interflora sucks, see Nomine's Just How Wrong Can You Get It

Update+: Interflora are refunding. Still never going to use them again.

BloglinesMenu 1.6rc

Yes, finally, I updated the BloglinesMenu to be universal. I'm flagging this one a release canidate as I'm not 100% on how this will run in the field*, but it's out there now. If no one flags a problem in the next month or so, I'll just drop the rc from the zip file name.

Enjoy.... I won't because I'm all Google Reader these days.

* When I say that, I've given it a good run and it seems to still stay small and work, it's just this is my first Universal build.

Regular readers may note....

Regular readers may note that I'm using LoudTwitter to preserve those links and bits that I twitter. Good? Bad? Annoying? Let me know. Or not.....

[ Update : The Loudtwittering has been moved to it's own blog ]

Hmmm

Guessing LoudTwitter isn't sending the mail then.

Well, there we go. Above this, my first LoudTwittered autopost. There'll be more links'n'shit in there in the future, but now you can either sniff my twitter (fnarr) or just wait for a daily posting of the tweets of the day.

iPhone Displays in the UK - Good News/Bad News

In the US, AT&T iPhone POS displays use Windows. Cue the pictures of Windows errors on them....

In the UK, it appears O2 use Macs. Yay! Except...



Yes, that's a nice "This Mac was unexpectedly restarted" dialog.

Green Blackmail, New Scientist Style....

So, here's a bit of green blackmail from a New Scientist subscription email.

"Not only will you save hassle later on, but you can also help us reduce the number of letters we send you, contributing towards a greener environment."

Uhuh, so, If I don't renew right now, New Scientist are going to send me paper mailings till I do, and I'm the one supposed to feel guilty about the carbon footprint.



I'm surprised it didn't have "Nice planet, shame if anything.... happened... to it". It also lessens the impact when you note this is an email.

Bah! Basshunter's broken....

Basshunter did a wonderful track called Boten Ana. How many songs do you know about IRC?



And now it arrives in the UK and.... OMG.... It's been... DEGEEKED....



It's almost a crime. Ah well, at least I have the Basshunter album "LOL <(^^,)>"... And I wish Basshunter great bleepy europop success.

Morning links.....

A review of The Rails Way can't wait for my copy to arrive.

iPhone 1.1.3 firmware rumours makes sense, getting ready for the SDK by letting people manage their home screen.

Aw Kitties!

Spooks....

Well, thats another series of Spooks wrapped up. If you haven't watched the last episode, look away now...




















Ok?

Right....

I enjoy Spooks, but there it has now just established itself as utterly misogynistic.

This series ends with the death of Jo, who despite being a solid staunch strong character goes from 0 to wreck in less than two jump cuts and a fade in. And so yet again a Spooks series ends with a female character dead because they were weak. This just keeps happening. The men are strong and get a million second chances (cf Adam, who should have been retired after the last series as he was a wreck, but oh no, he can manage it). The women are 'apparently strong', but always break. The next series, as soon as a new female character walks on, you will find yourself wondering how she's going to end up dead or disgraced. Take Ros this series, she was a strong, possibly too hard, character, and bish bosh, she's broken by torture, she's off helping Yalta (the chaps who torture her) and it's all down hill from there for her and off she's shuffled to a life of hiding... organised by the chaps.

It's not just this series, this has been happening from the start, from the deep fat fryer in episode one, series one. And it just keeps happening.

It's all so bloody infuriating, as the big arc story in Spooks this series worked really well, but when it comes to the character management, there's a big "Spying's a blokes game, watch us break the little ladies" theme running through.

Read XKCD?

Then you may want to watch this.

BBC's iPlayer works* on Mac and Linux

Hussah! (and w00t!)

And the volume control goes to 11.

Class work.

* Streaming only. Now about those downloads........

Pope notes* - Rails - restful_authentication --stateful

* Pope notes - things that I've just worked on, and got halfway, but need to press on with. Like little papal snapshots, mainly for my reference so I can come back to it later.

I like state machines; they make life cycles much easier to manage and acts_as_state_machine is a nice way of expressing state machines. The problem I just hit though was that restful_authentication plugin just added --stateful, which generates up an authentication setup that includes the Stateful authentication setup. It went well enough getting it to work, but there seems to be a mismatch in statefulness and the use of an observer to generate mail. The observer watches save and creates, and then uses the state of the user to decide what should be done. But, it does this for all saves, and because there's no indication of a state change having just occurred, then having the after_save observer mail when the users state is active triggers off multiple "you have signed in mails" and the variant, checking for a pending state, triggers an activation mail. What struck me was it should be better to move the mail generation into the user model, using the same hooks that the state machine uses for when a state is entered. I had a quick hack, and it seems to work, but does generate two activation mails.... this is probably fixable if I understood the acts_as_state_machine plugin better, so I'm going back to another part of the code which does use that.

Oh, and I'm in day two of my "coding rails without an IDE"... it's all TextMate and Terminal here for the next fortnight. No better way to know what an IDE is doing right or wrong than getting back to basics.

Lost By Translation

Lost By Translation.

Bonus link - Why Teller Is So Cool.

Logitech do the right thing...

I've just noticed that Logitech have released Logitech Control Center 2.4. In the past LCC has sucked because it installed APE. Well, now thats changed... "Unsanity's Application Enhancer (APE) is no longer installed and needed". Heck, I might even give it a try.

Update: Eyw, read the comments. I'll wait for 2.4.1....

Busy Busy....

What I find hard? Testing. Doubly hard, TDD. Triply hard, BDD. But dammit, I will do this new code base right for a change. Well, righter.

Busy at the moment working on Lendery. A simple application, I suspect, but I thought I'd mention it.

Lendery replaces my previous Libr project as I realised that Libr was a lot of work for users creating a library which they may only get one use out of per thing loaned. And thus Lendery was inspired. It lets you record who you loaned something to by their email address (initially) and uses email to tell them (after authenticating the account.... a once only event per email address)... sign up and you can create an identity of multiple email addresses (akas) and the ability to manage your loans on the web.

Well, thats the plan.

Twitterific defined

Twitterific: An application designed to display a nice yellow box over one third of it's UI explaining why Twitter isn't working at the moment. Alledgedly, twitters from your followed folk occasionally leak past this yellow box.

What I'd like in a clock/radio....

I like alarm clock/ipod playing/radios. I also like dawn wake-up lamps. But currently my bedside table has both on it. Now this is a tad redundant. I'd prefer just a straight lamp and an alarm clock/radio.

So here's the idea. An alarm clock/radio which had a connection (wired or wireless... I think wireless might be easier, and be easier to make international) to a plug adapter (which would be country specific). You plug your favourite lamp into the adapter and plug it in. You now control your lamps on/off and brightness from the alarm clock/radio. And when the alarm is due to go off, the alarm clock/radio starts ramping up the light brightness half an hour earlier.

Better still, the plug adapters could be sold seperately, and you could "pair" one or two of them to the radio so you could raise the lights on two lamps. And there could be a version for permanant installation in a socket, so you could have a "dawn enabled" socket.

Would you want one?

Touched up

Well, this I'd my first posting here with an iPod Touch via wifi and Safari. Neato.

iChat supports "/me"

iChat now (apparently undocumented) supports "/me"

/me is happy
/me does a little dance

So when you go to the chemists....

You've got a question to ask them... "Are you a Catholic Pharmacist?" because now, there's a good chance your Catholic pharmacist will not be doing their job and instead be trying to apply their "morality" to your life.

"We cannot anesthetize consciences as regards, for example, the effect of certain molecules that have the goal of preventing the implantation of the embryo or shortening a person's life"

On the plus side, at least Pope "But I wasn't a Nazi" Benedict XVI has made it explicit, welcome to the "War On Molecules".

Just a warning for Leopard upgraders.... You may have APE even though you never installed it.

The following appears to be true... APE screws up the Leopard install. What people may not realise is that they may not know they have APE installed. If you have ever installed Logitech Control Center, then this installs APE. If you uninstall Logitech Control Center, it doesn't get removed. It's why I don't install Logitech Control Center any more, and I bet that a metric shit load of the people getting 'blue screens' are people who've installed Logitech's mouse/keyboard support software.

So, if you are going for an upgrade, if you have Logitech Control Center, uninstall it and manually remove APE... This is the FAQ for APE.

I am integral to the project!

That's me, in a whole frame or two of the Pet Shop Boys New video.

No2ID are promoting it, and you can see the whole thing here.

So I'm writing code....

Well, I'm back to writing code, though I'm enjoying working in Ruby on Rails and Netbeans 6.0.

So what am I writing? Well, it's called Libr and the idea is that you can use it to keep track of things that you have loaned to other people. Say you have a book you want to lend to someone, and lets assume that you are 'Adam' and the someone is 'Joe' and you have accounts on Libr already set up. Adam creates a taggle for the book; a taggle has all the essential information about the book and it can generate a taggle code, which you can write/label the physical book with. Adam then goes to his "Borrowers" list which are all the people Adam has a lending relationship with. Adam adds Joe to his list, then goes back to the books taggle and selects lend, and then selects Joe and sets a date when he wants the book back. The taggle is now lent.

When Joe logs in, possibly after being prompted via RSS or email, he can see that Adam has lent him a book. If Joe has the book, then he selects "Confirm", and the book is now a confirmed loan.

A couple of days before the loan period is up, Joe is reminded that the book is due to be returned. He returns the book, and then clicks Return next to the taggle. Adam is notified by email or RSS and can confirm his reciept of the loan.

And that's the basics of Libr.

Lolsocks

How it feels starting to code a project....

Remembering Pavarotti and James Brown...