2006
- Structured Blogging opens up
OK so this is old news because I’ve not been the blogging mood, but I think it’s important enough to cover anyway. In November 2005 I posted that: by far the weakest poin...
Published on 08 January in general - Using JSPWiki in the enterprise
I’m quite a fan of JSPWiki. I first came across it when I rolled it out at my last place of work, as an experiment. It worked out quite well, being used by ...
Published on 10 January in general - vingt six
You can wish me happy birthday if you like. 🙂
Published on 10 January in general - Battlestar Galactica kicking ass
The new television series of Battlestar Galatica has started; or rather, the concluding episode of the last series has been aired, and the new series ...
Published on 13 January in general - If you know a criminal, are you a criminal?
One of my old colleagues, Adam Smith, has written a very interesting post called If you know a crimi...
Published on 17 January in general - Why poll for changes?
Two things I’ve come across today have talked about the integration of external RSS feeds into a site or application:
Published on 17 January in general - Google Talk flips the switch
I flipped the switch to connect the Google Talk Service to the public XMPP network this morning. Google Talk users can now chat with users on other XMPP services and vice versa.
Published on 17 January in general - Apple's photocasting arse
Thanks to Mark Pilgrim for yet again daring to step where mortals fear to tread: Unofficial documentation of iPhoto ...
Published on 18 January in general - Podcast quandary
I like the idea of podcasts. There are some I even subscribe to: LugRadio,
Published on 20 January in general - Deploying Jabber in the workplace
Oktay Altunergil has written an article called Company-Wide Instant Messaging wit...
Published on 23 January in general - Kinja's new look and new features
In December 2004, I wrote that, despite really liking it, and despite it being part of Gawker Media (have they been taken over by News Corp. or not? I can’t tell) “
Published on 23 January in general - Gmail's new delete button
Gmail has rolled out a delete button, so that users can now easily delete their mail instead of just archiving it (...
Published on 23 January in general - Tello extends presence to SIP
Presence has been gradually seeping out from IM over the past few years into other applications, notably in the XMPP/Jabber community where presence is a key (it’s the first ‘P’ in XMPP!). The bene...
Published on 24 January in general - Why would I want to edit in OPML?
I don’t get all Dave Winer’s fuss about OPML. Now he’s trying to get his OPML Editor tool
Published on 25 January in general - Web-search sellouts
So, Google’s censoring its results in China, Yahoo helps get Chin...
Published on 25 January in general - del.icio.us greasemonkey script
A couple of weeks ago, Tom Coates was moaning about a UI aspect of
Published on 30 January in general - Running a CMS on Atom
At work I have the need to very quickly design and roll out an insanely basic CMS for a website. There is no official workflow, all content will be in XHTML, people need to be able to create...
Published on 31 January in general - Internet Explorer 7 beta 2
IE7 beta 2 is out, and all the MS bloggers are pimping it, so I thought I’d actually check out the site (I might install it at work, but there’s no chance I’m installing it at home). So you ...
Published on 31 January in general - Java library for handling Atom 1.0
Rome 0.8 came out this morning, and now has support for Atom 1.0, rather timely given ...
Published on 02 February in general - Google Talk conversations now searchable in Gmail
Published on 07 February in general - Blog for cash at the Torygraph
Published on 07 February in general - Borland stops its IDE business
Borland plans separate company for Delphi, JBuilder, C++Builder, InterBase, JDataStore and other developer products… ...
Published on 11 February in general - Magnificent copycats
I’ve just watched The Magnificent Seven for the first time. I’d always known that it was a cowboy version of the
Published on 11 February in general - Use an elastic layout on your weblog, web "professionals"!
I’ve had a couple of several-hundred-word posts hanging around on this topic for months now, but my frustration has finally got to the point where the technical stuff can wait – if you have a weblo...
Published on 13 February in general - Jabber clients coming to Nokia handsets
Well, not quite yet, but soon anyway.
Published on 18 February in general - Browse the web from your Nintendo DS
Opera have announced that they’re going to release a browser for the DS in Japan. Frankly, this is brilliant. The browser on t...
Published on 18 February in general - Using Places in Firefox for exporting browser history
Ages ago I wrote a post bringing light to a bookmarkl...
Published on 19 February in general - XUL Runner
I’ve been interested in XUL for a long time. Or, since 2002 at least. In fact, although I’d forgotten all about it, man...
Published on 19 February in general - Internet fridges
I was reading the other day about how futurologists get it wrong and how we’re never going to see an Internet Fridge. Well goddamn if I don’t want some variation on that. How much would I gi...
Published on 19 February in general - Palm adopts Linux
Not that PalmSource aren’t entirely dead anyway, but they recently announced a “commercial-grade Linux-based platform designed for smartphones and mobile devices” called the ACCESS Linux Platform (...
Published on 21 February in general - My subscriptions list in OPML, XOXO and Atom
For a larf, I added two quick hacks so that my Feed On Feeds installation now outputs my feed list in three formats: My sub...
Published on 22 February in general - Is there a C++ library for Atom handling?
FeedThing is a desktop aggregator written in C++ by Gareth Simpson. The internals are split into several parts, incl...
Published on 23 February in general - RSS wars are back!
The RSS wars are back and if someone’s not careful, with the resignation of Dave Sifry (and potentially others) from the does-it/doesn’t-it exist RSS advisory board, they’ll be in full swing in jus...
Published on 25 February in general - Commenting on other blogs
Anyone who wants their vis...
Published on 26 February in general - Ben Hammersley hates the internet
Ben Hammersley now uses iWeb for publishing and claims that
Published on 26 February in general - OPML2HTML from 2003
In 2003 I wrote some really bad JavaScript to convert an OPML document into an HTML list. Everything old is new again.
Published on 27 February in general - Channel 4 goes tech crazy
All next week, Jon Snow will be reporting from Iran. According to Krishnan Gur...
Published on 01 March in general - The return of the 1990s
It’s been brewing for a good twelve months, but all the Britpoppers can finally celebrate: the mid-1990s are back in force. Whilst walking around the shops the other day I heard Elastica, Oasis, Bl...
Published on 03 March in general - Atom extensions and FOAF
James Snell has posted a new Internet Draft for expanding the details of an atom:author called Atom Syndic...
Published on 03 March in general - Moving from FeedOnFeeds to Gregarius
After a mail from Rod Begbie I’ve finally decided to move to a free, open-source aggregator which actually has active development:
Published on 03 March in general - My first conference conflict!
I really really wanted to go to @Media 2006 (15th-16th June, upcomin...
Published on 06 March in general - JavaScript slides, Yahoo! JavaScript and Microsoft JavaScript web stitching
ETech 2006 has kicked off and of the presentations I’ve looked at so far today, two have stood out in particular: Simon Willison’s
Published on 08 March in general - Flock you, Ninger!
Lately, I’ve been saying Ninged a lot. It’s shorthand for a chasm in usability. Though you’ve created new market space, the share of that marke...
Published on 09 March in general - JTextile still in use!
In the last couple of weeks, there have been three separate reports of JTextile being used in the wild!...
Published on 15 March in general - I know nothing about Windows installers
I don’t know anything about configuring or using Windows installers. Seriously. From January to February, my contact form was broken, since I fix...
Published on 19 March in general - Ambient wifi rabbits
Nine months ago I was looking for a good ambient presence display, which could also be used for things like build stat...
Published on 22 March in general - Shocking NHS HTML
I’ve just applied for my European Health Insurance Card (no more E-111s!), and thought “gosh, isn’t this font small? and isn’t the menu highlight poorly written? that’s some bad CSS there I reckon ...
Published on 23 March in general - Leverage my attention predictably
Kathy Sierra is right, our attention is badly used and unfocussed and it’s not just our own fault – ...
Published on 27 March in general - Presence-driven interruptions
As well as only being interrupted at regular, predictable times, I want any interrupt-driven tools (like aggregator and email toaster alerts) to respect my calendar and presence status. In fact, it...
Published on 30 March in general - Resources for writing a WxWidgets, XMPP-aware Python aggregator
From scratch: Python 2.3 (although I normally use ActiveState’s
Published on 31 March in general - Berlin '06
On Monday I’ll be off to Berlin for a few days. Despite having lived in Germany for twelve months in 2000-2001 in a small town in the south-east, I’ve only had flying trips to the capital, so it’ll...
Published on 31 March in general - The easy way to convert BBC RealAudio files to mp3 on Windows
After a couple of years of using uncountable tools, and despite their ever-expanding list of podcast...
Published on 12 April in general - Shared vocabularies on the web
Ryan King says: See, one of the problems with XML-on-the-web...
Published on 20 April in general - Microformat authoring complexity and validation
There’s a little bit going around at the moment about microformat validation; for example Norm Walsh on Validating microformats
Published on 20 April in general - Serendipity
I appear to have timed my WxWidgets/XM...
Published on 24 April in general - Dive Into Legibility
Remove Mark Pilgrim‘s sidebars and make the content full-width. Not perfect, but it works:
Published on 25 April in general - Places moved from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3
Places is the new and exciting part of Firefox 2. Except that now it’s the new and exciting part o...
Published on 25 April in general - Project management and time tracking
How much time is it sensible to track? Who needs this information? At work we use
Published on 26 April in general - University of Bath hCalendar usage
After a bit of discussion with a chap at work, individual items featured at the University of Bath’s What’s On now sport
Published on 03 May in general - Opera web browser on the Nintendo Wii
Along with all the other news coming out at E3 2006, Opera have announced that their web browser will run on the...
Published on 10 May in general - Mouse gestures for real on the Nintendo DS browser
I love using the Optimoz mouse gestures extension for Firefox: hold down the right-mouse button and drag left or right to move backwards or forward...
Published on 10 May in general - Blogging from University
When I blog about things at work, it’s normally stuff that’s already been done. Completed tasks. In the past, as it were. This is some discussion about things that haven’t been decided, and reflect...
Published on 15 May in general - Word 2007 as your CMS editor
Word 2007 will support ‘blogging’. What this means in the real world is that it is an
Published on 17 May in general - Instant Textile, mk2
Back in November, Tiago Silveira updated the JavaScript Textile implementation that powers my Textile Greasemonkey scri...
Published on 22 May in general - Make me stay with WikidPad
I drop in and out of using WikidPad. I’ve just picked it up again after a lengthy absence. What would make me adopt it full time? Some extension ideas from the top of my head: a...
Published on 07 June in general - Profiles (and thus RDF) from University of Bath Person Finder
Work’s staff and student directory has just had an overhaul, and I finally got the change in to add the hCard profile to the <head> of the page.
Published on 08 June in general - Creative Zen regrets?
A few months ago I bo...
Published on 09 June in general - Moving forward with Thunderbird
Although I’ve been using Thunderbird at work now for almost a year, the only extension I’ve had installed has been Lightning to display my w...
Published on 23 June in general - Off to Apachecon EU 2006
I still haven’t written up my notes from presenting at IWMW2006 last week, but today I’m jetting off to Dublin for
Published on 25 June in general - I need a new aggregator
I’ve not used a desktop aggregator for close to a year now, getting my information instead from these strange and archaic webpages, some of which are mini-aggregators like
Published on 08 July in general - IWMW 2006 postscript
I gave two seminar talks at IWMW 2006, “Sharing and Exploring Team...
Published on 08 July in general - LibrariesWest
LibrariesWest is a partnership between Bath and North East Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset. Somerset and South Gloucestershire public l...
Published on 10 July in general - LiveJournal Jabber support
LiveJournal have announced that they are now running an XMPP server, with users’ rosters auto-populated with their LJ friends. ...
Published on 12 July in general - Bristol adopts ODF
Bristol City Council has joined the ODF Alliance, furthering the city’s work as a member of the Gov...
Published on 13 July in general - PDF reading and CoComment starts being useful
It’s really nice to see Foxit PDF Reader get a bit more recognition (
Published on 20 July in general - Onward! Fjord-ward!
I’ll be getting married in a weeks’ time and we’re then headed off for fourteen days touring the fjords in Norway. I was rather hoping that I’d be able to use
Published on 23 July in general - Memory card disaster
I’m still on honeymoon in Norway (and very nice it is too – the wife, as well as Norway ;), at a quick terminal to see if I can collect some advice. Shortly before we left, I bought a new 1G...
Published on 09 August in general - A Python rant
Whilst wedding and Norway posts are forthcoming, a small rant about installing extra libraries into Python on Windows. How hard can they make it? I mean, ...
Published on 22 August in general - BBC now using common feed icon
Published on 23 August in general - Firefox and Thunderbird UI
There’s an excellent article by rakaz on the new themes in Firefox and Thunderbird 2.0. I agree with the whole thing, in pa...
Published on 24 August in general - Comment captcha enabled
With great reluctance I am temporarily enabling captchas for comments. Although it’s normally excellent at blocking spam comments, Blogger has let 300 spam comments through to
Published on 25 August in general - Storing Atom
So then, the Atom Syndication Format is a great standard for storing data but once you start getting a large number of entries (even if it...
Published on 04 September in general - Ripping last.fm radio to separate mp3 files on Windows
(And if that’s not a title to reel them in from Google, I don’t know what is.) Step 1) Install and download the last.fm proxy (requires Pytho...
Published on 06 September in general - Load fast, help me blog
This blog is currently powered by Blogger. The only two desktop posting tools I’ve used and liked are w.bloggar and
Published on 10 September in general - Hiring and recruiters
The recent posts by Joel Spolsky on recruiters (you can start here and work backwards) are spot on. Recruit...
Published on 10 September in general - From the UK, Amazon Unbox is shiny, exciting and cheap
It’s pretty funny reading comments like this Wired comme...
Published on 11 September in general - Help, feedreading hits back
I’m currently highly distressed – it turns out that the latest version of FeedReader is really good (that is to say, it’s not a Java or .Net app and so actu...
Published on 18 September in general - Feedreader bug
Trying to render
Published on 28 September in general - Evaluating Wikis: A Case Study
I’ll be delivering a talk on Evaluating Wikis: A Case Study at the
Published on 28 September in general - Watching the BBC online
Last night my wife and I sat down to watch the programme about the recent drugs trials disaster in the UK (she used to work in the industry) when we suddenly realised that we were going to miss Ext...
Published on 29 September in general - Listening to OPML changes
At work we’re putting together a wiki page which lists which feeds we should probably all be subscribed to. This mirrors...
Published on 03 October in general - Encouraging wiki usage in your team
Anthony just asked a great question in one of my recent blog posts, and I th...
Published on 03 October in general - Dreamhost as a backup provider
The more I read, the more tempted I am to bite the bullet,
Published on 10 October in general - Wiki Comparison Matrix
Initial wiki comparison table. Some notes: Can’t be Windows-platform, otherwise technology-neutral Er, some other things.
Published on 13 October in general - TV gets lazy
Published on 23 October in general - Atom slugs
9.6 The Slug: Header Slug is a HTTP entity-header whose value is a “slug” – a short name that can be used as part of the URI for a Member Resource. When posting an entity...
Published on 25 October in general - Real ads - probably not worth it
2lmc comment on the current hatred of the new Sony Bravia advert, and link to
Published on 31 October in general - Google aquires JotSpot, JotSpot Server product dropped
Google has acquired JotSpot (coverage also on the Google Blog) I’ve been ev...
Published on 31 October in general - Fixing the WAG54G
I’ve had my Linkssys WAG54G (a wifi router and four-port switch) for about eighteen months, but ove...
Published on 01 November in general - XHTML hilarity
It’s funny to watch this Sending XHTML as text/html not-considerd-harmful after all (which is wrong, of course) post get a load of co...
Published on 02 November in general - Wikis in the public sector
One of my colleagues, Marieke Guy, has just written a puntastically-titled article entitled W...
Published on 02 November in general - Things that annoy me about Firefox 2 UI
No close button on every tab No close button at the right of the tab bar highlight text, right-click, search uses the selected Search Box engine, not Google scrolli...
Published on 05 November in general - Opensearch in Firefox 2 and IE7
We recently rolled out the Google Search Appliance at work, replacing the ageing (and dreadful) htdig (wikipedia link since the website appears to b...
Published on 06 November in general - War (on XML), what is it good for?
Were switching to XML a requirement for reaping compelling benefits, the public would indubitably have moved. So would the majority browser engine. So if the major...
Published on 07 November in general - Automating web testing
We’re just starting to ramp up the amount of testing we do on our web apps at work, mostly via the use of JUnit and some ...
Published on 10 November in general - Web application uptime
Is it better for a web app to be up and broken (parts working, others not), or for the whole thing to be down when something is broken? Is there more of a case for leaving an app up and brok...
Published on 13 November in general - Trains forever
I’m sure that if I added up all the time I spent waiting on train platforms, I’d have plenty of time to get all my work done. I know, that’s it! The reason my project is behind is because it’s the ...
Published on 13 November in general - Mobile Teletext
I q...
Published on 14 November in general - Teaching website shambles
The...
Published on 16 November in general - Sony Ericsson W950i - better than the Nokia N91?
I like Symbian, and I can write code for it. This has mostly limited me to the Nokia brand of phones so far. I am interested in getting a new phone, but am slightly out of touch on the lates...
Published on 16 November in general - UK Biometric Passports cracked
I hope that you’re not putting a lot of faith in the new biometric passports (my wife just got one) because any half-capable pro...
Published on 17 November in general - REST vs WS-*
I think that James Snell’s post on this pretty much covers my thoughts on
Published on 17 November in general - XBox 360 advertising splurge
I thought I was going mad this morning as I was reading the metro (a free daily newspaper in the UK) – there seemed to be ads for games *everywhere*. I realise...
Published on 17 November in general - Twittering
I’ve finally signed up to twitter now I realise that it’s not SMS-only (because what fool pays for that?) and I can update via IM. It seems cute. The IM ...
Published on 21 November in general - Dumping BlogBridge
I was doing OK with BlogBridge, but in the last month it’s dropped all my data twice and then prevented me from re-importing all my feeds by disabling all t...
Published on 22 November in general - Google Books inaccessibility
I know that the accessibility is somewhat of an old topic, but still: <span class="pseudolink">Fu...
Published on 23 November in general - Calling Yahoo REST web services with Ruby query parameter problems
I’m an idiot and req = Net::HTTP::Get.new(url.path+'?'+url.query) is my friend.
Published on 29 November in general - Wiki impedence
There is an International Symposium on Wikis. Its “Welcome” page ...
Published on 01 December in general - SOAP Security
At my last workplace, where I was employed between 2003 and 2005, we had a web services system which used SOAP across two different programming languages (Java and C++) and had a potential future i...
Published on 02 December in general - Wii code
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Published on 09 December in general - Torchwood tragedy
Torchwood has just had a second series commissioned (via 2lmc). What a tragedy. I’m reasonably...
Published on 13 December in general - Downtime for a global service? Tell me when in UTC!
If a service with an allegedly global audience, say one run by Yahoo or by Google has some scheduled downtime, they always gi...
Published on 17 December in del.icio.us google google thisisbroken thisisbroken yahoo - Huge tech t-shirts suck
Kathy Sierra, user experience supremo, has written a lovely post on why Tech t-shirts aren’t sexy enough...
Published on 18 December in general