2008
- Listening to podcasts
I do not listen to many podcasts. This is mainly because I used to have trouble syncing a subscription list across multiple PCs. Now I have
Published on 03 January in general mobile mp3 syndication - Channel 4 mashup competition (late notice)
It turns out that Channel4 are running a mashup competition. You have to use one of their Film4 feeds and mash it up with anoth...
Published on 07 January in general - A rough transcript of Richard Clayton's BBC interview
Dr. Richard Clayton from the University of Cambridge (who writes for the very good Light Blue Touchpaper
Published on 19 January in general identity real - Safeguarding our data
Danger! Mental dumping ground ahead! Like loads of other IT people in the UK, I’ve been pretty worried about the forthcoming compulsory centralised ID databas...
Published on 20 January in general gov identity - Web Developers continue to pay for IE5
*sigh*
Published on 22 January in general web - Struts2 + Hibernate + Spring
At work we’re playing with creating a personal-homepage application in the style of iGoogle and others. We’re a Java shop, using pretty basic JSP+servlets+Hib...
Published on 22 January in general java - The point of distraction
It turns out that I hate having the mouse cursor visible in my working window. I didn’t really know about this until I used a colleague’s dual-monitor machine. He has set the window focus to follow...
Published on 24 January in general linux - Does the government need to be more beta?
of the £14bn spent on technology in UK government every year (over 50% of all IT spend in the whole of Britain), around 70% of all projects end in failure
Published on 27 January in general gov - Vista sidebar is annoying
The Windows Vista sidebar has two display methods:
Published on 28 January in general ui vista - Joel is old
I almost feel bad about this, but it seems like this sacred cow is more like Shambo. sometimes the elders a...
Published on 29 January in general mobile - USB backups
Published on 12 February in backup general - Things I want to do in 2008
write a new open source application, however small contribute in some way to mySociety find out more about what rights ...
Published on 24 February in general todo - Upgrade Nokia N95 to v20 firmware
After waiting for ages, I have just upgraded my 3-branded N95 (3 are a UK provider) to an ...
Published on 25 February in general mobile n95 nokia - C64 on the Wii
There are at least a dozen I’d love, but if I could make one request:
Published on 26 February in games general - OpenTech 2008 announced
OpenTech 2008 has been announced! an informal, low cost one-day conference on technology, society and low-carbon living (...
Published on 27 February in general opentech - BBC Podcasts as OPML
The BBC make all of their podcast programme information available as an XML file. Literally five minutes of XSLT gives me this:
Published on 29 February in general mp3 syndication - wxVenus
<a href="http://bazaar-vcs.org/">bzr</a> get <a href="http://philwilson.org/code/wxvenus">http://philwilson.org/code/wxvenus</a> wxVe...
Published on 17 March in bzr general python syndication wxvenus - Setting up Trac on Debian Etch with Apache 1.3 (a brief guide)
This is a summary of what I got from the Trac installation instructions here,
Published on 21 March in general linux python tools trac web - Bugtracking
With wxVenus, I wanted to set up a public butracker. I wa...
Published on 27 March in bugtracking general management wxvenus - I need awesomebar everywhere
For the past six months or so I’ve been using the Autocomplete Manager for Firefox. From my perspective, it’s what has inspired
Published on 06 April in general xul - The computer science turing test
I fundamentally don’t understand SQL JOIN clauses. That’s not to say I can’t read and parse them, I just don’t understand them well enou...
Published on 14 April in general sql - code.flickr.com, Flickr Uploadr 3.0 and XUL
Flickr have just launched code.flickr, Your one-stop shop for information, gossip and discussion with the Flickr developer community which I imagine they...
Published on 16 April in flickr general xul - Revisiting Flickr Uploadr v3
It just caused my entire PC to restart. I will be downgrading forthwith.
Published on 19 April in flickr general thisisbroken - Internet contention
My internet usage should not be constrained by other people.
Published on 23 April in broadband general home - Aggregating people
A number of different things have come together for me today, this post titled Is there a need for New Newsreader?,
Published on 28 April in foaf general syndication tools - Personal Arduino failure
So next week is XTech 2008 and I’m not going.
Published on 02 May in arduino general - Context matters
It’s nice to see that the person-centred aggregation meme has surfaced in
Published on 07 May in general syndication - Grouping disparate feeds by a common author
I’ve been thinking about the user interaction of subscribing to feeds and how, and at which point, to identify that a particular feed belongs to a particular person when you already subscribe to an...
Published on 11 May in general - Wanted: Reactive Agent Frank
Agent Frank was super-useful as a personal proxy back in the day, but in the end it introduced too much of a delay into my daily...
Published on 28 May in general xul - Dear Parliament, you will lose
television proceedings and subsequent use on Members’ websites are undertaken subject to a licence issued by the Speaker. The licence stipulates that material must not be hosted on a s...
Published on 01 June in general gov - My wiki is a ghetto
Because it’s on the web so I never go there to actually look for stuff, and it’s not built into my normal search Where’s the “search my shit” button that searches delicious and twitter and f...
Published on 16 June in general search wiki - Preparing for Mashed08
Well, “preparing” might be overstating it, but this weekend I’ll be Mashed 08 so it’s nice to read
Published on 20 June in general mashed08 - Being a good developer
In my last appraisal at work I got asked what I thought makes a good developer. I didn’t give a very good answer, mumbling something about keeping up with current developments, reading around the s...
Published on 24 June in coding general management - Symbian to go open source
Nokia have said that once they own the controlling stake (or all) of Symbian, they’ll
Published on 24 June in general mobile nokia opensource symbian ui - Mashed08 Review - attempt 1
ZOMG! Sylvester McCoy!
Published on 25 June in bbc general mashed08 - All BBC programmes have a QR code
Want an easy way to pass around a long and hard-to-remember URL for a BBC programme?
Published on 26 June in bbc general qrcodes - An Adventure in Technology
Today saw (and in fact still sees, because I left early) An Adventure in Technology in central Bristol – an event for gathering interesting software, har...
Published on 28 June in bristol geek general techadventure - Are pensioners the new revolutionaries?
I realise I’ve probably come to this a little late, but after reading the story of the chap in Bristol who chained himself to a lamppost in...
Published on 29 June in general gov - Opentech 2008
It’s been a long, long day, but at least I got to watch the final episode of Dr Who when I got home. I wasn’t as inspired by the talks as
Published on 06 July in general gov opentech opentech08 - On eating good food
Not that I don’t think that just about every TED talk is great, but this one entitled “What’s wrong w...
Published on 06 July in food general - Wordpress video embedding for the lose
Anyone care to explain why the video embedded in my last post destroys my weblog formatting? Or rather, why WordPress’ parsing o...
Published on 07 July in general wordpress - IWMW 2008: sack your web services team now
Actually, please don’t do that, I’ll have to get off my bum and look for another job. It is, however, part of the conversation I’ll be having in my parallel session titled “
Published on 20 July in general iwmw iwmw2008 - Personal finance tracking
How much money do you have and how do you find out what you’re spending it on?
Published on 28 July in banks general money wesabe - wxVenus, FeedDemon and Vista
I’ve basically done no work on wxVenus for one big reason: FeedDemon. I...
Published on 16 August in general syndication tools - Google Chrome
(because one more whiny blogger’s opinion can’t hurt) nice, fast. I see ad people a single google doc in an application window feels nicer than
Published on 03 September in chrome eeeeevil general google - A bit of politics
It was interesting earlier today to watch Charles Clarke and John Prescott on the ...
Published on 21 September in general gov - Cross-platform browser launcher for Ruby?
In Python, you can do this: import webbrowser webbrowser.open_new(<a href="http://philwilson.org/blog"...
Published on 24 September in general ruby python - Deskbot
Deskbot is a cross-platform desktop-based Jabber client for talking to a single user – normally a bot.
Published on 30 September in general jabber ruby wxruby xmpp - Importing blog posts and comments from Blogger to Wordpress
I t...
Published on 02 October in atom blogger general google oauth wordpress - OpenID usability
People complain a lot that users don’t understand about OpenID logins booting them to another website to authenticate. Don’t Google already do this with Blogger and Yahoo with Flickr? That i...
Published on 05 October in general openid ui - FOWA 2008 first reactions
This was my first time at FOWA. There were some really good talks, but the ...
Published on 12 October in fowa fowaexpo08 general - Tiddlywiki, RippleRap and Confabb
Published on 14 October in fowa general tiddlywiki wiki - Server woes likely
I’ve been having some trouble with my server over the last few months so the blog may be up and down over the next few days as I move to a new hosting provider.
Published on 29 October in general - Mai blog! It is back!
So, I finally finished the move from one host to another. It should not have taken as long as it did but after a frustrating night with the nginx config I spent a few days unwinding and catching up...
Published on 18 November in apache bbc general iplayer ngingx - Joel should stop blogging?
In his latest post, “Anecdotes“, Joel tells us to ignore everything he’s written because it’s a poorly constructed non-scientific o...
Published on 19 November in general joel - Keeping up with the lizards
It used to be the case that I pored over Mozilla (and later Firefox) release notes. But I stopped sometime in 2004, around the point when I accepted that XUL development was too hard to be doing in...
Published on 19 November in css firefox general javascript mozilla xul - A tour of Parliament
A few weeks ago I went on a tour of Parliament (which lest you should think it boring, is also the Palace of Westminster!). In order ...
Published on 19 November in general uk - Java makes me passionate
Seriously. I really like Java, it’s a fundamentally great language. Verbose at times, but great. However, web application development in Java is painful. Additionally, the compilation...
Published on 20 November in apache general grails java play ruby struts2 - A fork in the twitter?
There is some current hullabaloo over twitter’s most recent hires. I agree with the commenters on that post. Shutting do...
Published on 27 November in general twitter - Lighthouse theme for Trac
Lighthouse is “beautifully simple issue tracking” (a hosted bugtracker to you and me). It looks great and is pretty much a joy to use. At work we ...
Published on 22 December in bugtracker general greasemonkey lighthouse trac wiki