2007
- Birthday, five things and a blog resolution
It’s my birthday today, I’m now 27, which is old. It also means I can finally get around to this “five things” meme, because I’ve been tagged by
Published on 10 January in general - Nabaztag
I now have a
Published on 14 January in general - Breaking copy protection for entertainment
I was saving this for Friday, because I thought it might be fun to post to my blog on a Friday, but Mark has just posted, essentially, my content x 10.
Published on 16 January in drm general - True grit
At the weekend we went to see The Last King of Scotland, a film about the reign of Idi Amin in...
Published on 18 January in general - What I like about Ubuntu
I have a new PC, and both my bluetooth dongle and mp3 player no longer work; some problem or other with the USB ports. So I’ve upgraded to Ubuntu. I can no longer recover from standby or hibernate ...
Published on 28 January in general - Videntity imports hCard and FOAF
Published on 29 January in foaf foaf hcard openid openid - Things my rabbit has said to me
My rabbit’s been chatting merrily away now that his chat form is up. Some highlights from the past few weeks: Message from
Published on 02 February in general nabaztag - Oops
Speakers and a microphone: Hm, remind me not to leave my rabbit near my mic. Or to install Vista.
Published on 02 February in nabaztag vista vista - Atom-over-XMPP: 408
The latest Atom-over-XMPP IETF draft expired two months ago.
Published on 05 February in atom atom http xmpp xmpp - 5 buttons? Wireless? *kabloom*
The computer mouse is one of the worst human-computer interaction devices ever invented and I hope it dies a rapid death. Every year or so I explode with fury at the absolute inadequacy of t...
Published on 15 February in general hci rant - Cock it!
Go and see Hot Fuzz.
Published on 15 February in general - Square-bracket hell
There is little wiki syntax interoperability. In fact, it’s so bad that there are
Published on 16 February in usability wiki wiki - Look before you leap
A mental reminder to check first whether a new owner provides RSS feeds
Published on 19 February in rss ruby ruby sigh - The ogg wasteland
Published on 19 February in mp3 mp3 ogg - Conference wifi
Two of my workmates are currently at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. Not only have they had to pay for their wifi (which they were ...
Published on 20 February in fowalondon07 general wifi - OpenID at University
Plenty of people have said in the last few days that there are more OpenID providers than there are OpenID-consuming services. I have some basic code which, ...
Published on 23 February in openid openid shibboleth university - Consuming OpenID
After a few more moments of thought following my last post I imagine what we could do is implement OpenID consumption so t...
Published on 28 February in openid openid - A stream of rubbish
Unlike Jeremy Keith, I couldn’t care less about giving people a nice web interface onto what I’ve been doing. I’d much rather have a view onto what peo...
Published on 04 March in openid openid syndication syndication tedious re-iteration - Digital Lifestyle Aggregation vs. Personal Aggregation
Following up on my Personal Aggregator (lifestream) dissing of the other day, here’s what I’d prefer to see (I should note th...
Published on 07 March in attention planet syndication syndication - IE7, an impartial review
My wife is a computer pragmatist. She’s tech-literate, and thinks that Linux and Firefox can fuck off because they’ll stop...
Published on 11 March in general ie7 usamajility - Big Fat HTML-urrah
Individual
Published on 12 March in general html - Things I can't do in Firefox without using a mouse
turn Greasemonkey on and off tab out of Flash widgets (can tab into them, but then can’t get back out to the page again) Rather astonishingly, for the things I want to ...
Published on 14 March in accessibility firefox general - Post to Twitter from Ubuntu Deskbar
Deskbar is a Gnome widget you can embed in a panel and can be used for opening applications, opening items from your browser history, doing web searches and all sorts. It’s not as good as
Published on 19 March in deskbar general twitter ubuntu - Product of insomnia
My wife’s not been sleeping well recently. Phil Wilson is a geek snob Web app programming is his day job Linux is his OS Firefox and the rest Cos he thinks that Bill ...
Published on 27 March in general insomnia limerick - Florence is baffling, beautiful
Florence is lov...
Published on 25 April in florence general holiday italy - The Odeon are still incompetent
From Odeon: when will they learn?: Let’s make this clear: whoever is in charge of the Odeon...
Published on 27 April in general odeon usamajility - Xtech 2007
I’m going to XTech 2007 in Paris this year. I’ll be trying to attend talks on Jabber, the
Published on 27 April in jabber jabber xtech - What my phone can't do
As I’m frequently reminded by calls asking me to take up a “...
Published on 28 April in 6630 nokia nokia orange phone - Working processes
What we’re trying to do at work: test-driven development pair programming implementation docs on the wiki...
Published on 05 May in agile general work - Firefox location bar doesn't work under Ubuntu
Some of the shortcut keys for Firefox on Ubuntu are different to those on Windows. The most pertinent one for me is that the <backspace> key as a shortcut for clicking the “Back” button has b...
Published on 06 May in firefox general usamajility - XTech is ironic
Subtitled: “The ubiquitous web”. No wifi. Good conference though.
Published on 18 May in general oh the irony xtech xtech2007 - XTech 2007, some highlighted notes
Joost is based on standards all the way and the application forms a single DOM Henri’s
Published on 18 May in general xtech xtech2007 - Making a lifestream useful
A few months ago I slated Jeremy’s lifestream, because it’s a single point-per-person summary of activity – and in particular...
Published on 19 May in attention general lifestream lucene - A Writer's Tale
No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.
Published on 21 May in copyright general ip lessig - Second Life is bobbins
I haven’t really used Second Life that much, and I don’t really intend to, but there seems to have been a real-life conference the other day which ...
Published on 22 May in general secondlife xtech - Galileo is one digit down
I went to Florence in April and saw not only Galileo’s tomb and
Published on 24 May in embalming florence galileo general italy - Music is good
summerburn 2006 cover ©
Published on 03 June in general music summer burn - Buying music is fun and exciting
LastGraph ’05 ©
Published on 11 June in drm last.fm mp3 mp3 - Attention is finite
We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. I tried to write a comm...
Published on 12 June in attention general - Using GAlternatives is fun, tasty
 If you’ve got a raw Ubuntu box...
Published on 24 June in java java ubuntu - Holidays are relaxing, dangerous
Going on holiday is a bad idea. A recent rundown: Paris, September 2004 – Beslan school hostage crisis Cornwall, July 2...
Published on 01 July in coincidence general holiday - Please apply for a job at Jive
At work we’re playing with Openfire, the Java-based Jabber/XMPP server. There are parts that are *cough* sub-optimal so we want...
Published on 10 July in jabber jabber openfire xmpp xmpp - University 2.0 at IWMW 2007
I almost forgot to say that I’ll be in York on Monday at the
Published on 13 July in general iwmw2007 - Shadow marvels
I have a number of blog posts I want to make. About Jabber, about Edinburgh, about wikis, about Venus. I’ve just read this story
Published on 08 August in general presence - IWMW 2007 redux
I’d like to thank everyone who put up with my ‘eternal beta‘ session at IWMW 2007 – it was baking ho...
Published on 14 August in general iwmw2007 - Future Wii games free on Linux and Windows today
If you’re looking forward to Blast Works on the Wii next year then you probably want to spend so...
Published on 18 August in general - Wiki or facebook? Decision decisions.
Loads of people in my office have a Wii. Being British, this is a terribly amusing state of affairs. I was considering setting up a space on ou...
Published on 27 August in facebook usamajility wiki wiki - Accesskeys that aren't
My work webmail is provided by IMP. This bit is wildly wrong but is what I saw for a variety of Grease...
Published on 31 August in accessibility email general usamajility - Personal Unit Tests with a dash of magic
I love this idea of Personal Unit Tests. It’d be easy enough to fill in a piece of paper each day or remember to fill in...
Published on 04 September in testing xmpp xmpp - Google Reader wins for me
Let’s see, they convert everything to Atom and have just added the only two features I was missing:
Published on 06 September in google google syndication syndication - The dangers of relying on others
Since I am too lazy to manage my own subscriptions, I was subscribed to Planet Intertwingly. At 269 feeds though, the signal/noise ratio has taken a bad...
Published on 09 September in syndication syndication - Robot love
Even after Luis Villa’s latest paean, I am genuinely not sure whether I could
Published on 10 September in general robots - Jabber transports and reliability
There is an open letter up on the Cocinella website about why IM clients which come bundled with support for multiple protocols are actually b...
Published on 17 September in jabber jabber xmpp xmpp - What's on telly instead?
What’s on telly instead is a stupid Greasemonkey script that displays what the BBC are broadcasting on TV and radi...
Published on 26 September in bbc bbc greasemonkey - BarcampBristol 12-13th October
BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, ...
Published on 29 September in barcamp bristol bristol - BBC Podcasts list to OPML
This is a stupid Greasemonkey script which looks at a BBC podcast listings page and gener...
Published on 02 October in bbc bbc greasemonkey podcast - Wispas are back!
Limited run of 23 million bars. Well, what are you waiting for? Get the hell out there!
Published on 12 October in general wispa - Barcamp Bristol was brilliant
Published on 14 October in barcamp barcampbristol bristol bristol - Nintendo DS strikes right note for teaching
My wife is a maths teacher, and I ...
Published on 24 October in games games maths nintendo teaching - Guarding online banking
Apparently at the end of this month I’ll be sent a small tool to make my online banking mo...
Published on 09 November in bank general security - Google lockout
Well, I had been about to post about using Android, the new Google thing for mobile devices, but they seem to have disabled my ma...
Published on 11 November in account general google lockout real - Google-be-gone
So, my Google account is still disabled a week later and I still haven’t had a response to the two mails I’ve sent the accounts team. My blog was powered by Blogger. I’ve switched to WordPress and ...
Published on 18 November in general google real - HOWTO download your Google Reader starred items
How to create a backup of your starred items in Google Reader, should the need ever arise:
Published on 22 November in atom general google google reader real - Parsing Atom with libxml2
Whilst trying to parse some Atom (my Blogger backup) with libxml2 I appear to have run into the same problem that Aristotle hit two years ago in XPath vs t...
Published on 26 November in atom blogger general libxml2 python real - Nokia N95 assessment
Published on 27 November in general mobile n95 nokia real - PHPMyID rocks
30 minutes from ssh-ing into my server to having my own (decrufted) OpenID. Many thanks to PHPMyID,
Published on 06 December in general openid real - Digital photo frames
I am very much looking forward to the coming increase in quality and drop in price of digital photo frames. We currently have five photo frames in our living room (three are curved, four are...
Published on 10 December in general junk real - Downloading from the BBC streaming iPlayer is hard
(this was mostly written on Friday 14th December, although no-one else seems to have stepped up to the plate yet) The new Flash-based BBC iPlayer ...
Published on 17 December in bbc general iplayer real red5 - More on the BBC iPlayer and RTMP
There appears to be some work going on to try and get iPlayer working on the XBox Media Center according to this thread on thei...
Published on 30 December in bbc general iplayer real