Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

A few points about going clubbing

I love going clubbing, everytime I go, I remember what I'm missing in this weekend world. Anyway, there's a few things which do bug me about the experience. And seeing how I just got back from Gatecrasher NYE in Bristol's Syndicate Club, I thought I'd share a few of them before going to sleep for most of New Years day.

  1. I don't like it when I go to a club and the bouncer/door person looks at me and asks if I know what's on tonight. This has happened at a few places including Gatecrasher, where the door man asked me and without letting me answer started jumping side to side clicking his fingers saying something about it being a hard house night. I replied with “ummm no its a trance night.” And he says “all the same to me…”
  2. I don't understand why the door people make a big fuss about whats in my little bag but fail to check my pockets or even do a quick body search. If I was carrying drugs why would I put it in my bag? And a weapon could be tied into the lining of my motorcycle jacket easily.
  3. I don't understand why I MUST check my bag into the cloakroom but woman are allowed to carry huge handbags around with them?
  4. I don't like being followed through a club like I'm public enemy number one. And if your going to watch me, don't stand beside me or just behind me, its too obvious and surely a hour or so of doing must be boring, even if you swap now and then with another.
  5. Plastic bottles are good, they stop people killing each on the dancefloor, woman can wear baare feet and club generally. But they make a terriable mess on the dancefloor because they get slidey when crushed
  6. What is it with Lazers, there amazing but only on for 2mins max at a time and there no longer pointed towars the crowd. Even from a safe distance. And whats with the lack of programmes?
  7. The guy who stands in the toilet all night. I don't like it, there always usually african and get abuse from drunk people. I also sometimes just want to get out of the stinking mens toilet as fast as possible but can't because I can't dry my hands till the guy gives me a paper towel and then I need to leave a tip or be rude. In actual fact, that exchange is a influencing trick, where someone does something small for you and then you reicplicate at a much higher cost that the first action.
  8. I don't expect to get the piss taken out of me on a new years eve when getting a taxi back home. They wanted 40 pounds for a journey (town to Fishponds) which is shorter that the journey I took 2 days ago (Clifton to Fishponds) which cost about 15 pounds. In the end I walked from town to Eastville because I also missed the night bus which only came once every hour
  9. What stupid rule is it it that you can't use a dayrider (all day all buses faire) on a night bus, the following morning. Bristol sort out the public transport
  10. Why make a back door exit into a smoking area in a club? The cold air blows into the club and it starts to smell smokey again. This is not good, at least put something between the outside and inside. I've gotten so use to going clubbing and coming home smelling slightly sweaty but not like I've just walked through a forest fire.

That will do for now

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Symmetric Follow and Second Twitter Accounts

Getting a load of blog posts out before I go out on the town tonight it would seem.

So my thoughts on Symmetric Follow and Second Twitter Accounts. Well I don't own a second Twitter account unless you maybe count the Geekdinner one I setup ages ago and the BBC backstage one, I'm still considering setting up. But I also don't believe in this idea of symmetric following, aka following the people who follow you. I actually think it breaks the usefulness of Twitter if you follow everyone back and Twitter already has another ways to see people who you are not following.

I remember at FOWA 2007, someone came up to me and said they followed me. I was very flattered as such but then they started to rip into me about not following them back. Well I was gobsmacked. I mean I'm only human, why would I follow everyone and anyone who followed me? Strange stuff…

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Why you should use Twitter…

Its New years eve, and I'm already getting messages via text saying “Happy New Year, thought I'd send this out before the networks jam up or fall over.” Oh how different things would be if most of my friends used Twitter or to be fair some other microblogging service. The notion of sending out a Happy new year to the world would be so easy and not require 200+ text messages to each of your friends phone. Yes microblogging solves this problem totally. So maybe save us all the heart ache and sign up to Twitter tonight, hey even if you get to stage 2, the mobile phone company will love you tonight.

Twitter stages of acceptance

Picture taken from Steve Clayton's blog.)

I'm not doing a good enough job on my friends on why they should dump Facebook and use Twitter instead, so I thought I'd post up this excellent guide to Twitter from weaverluke, found via [The Obvious]

What shocked me when flicking through the pages was the fact I was quoted. It all leads back to this tweet ages ago.

See I was on a train to Manchester at the time and had just bought the Pacemaker. I was using it on the train up and it crashed and I had no idea how to restart it. The instructions didn't say and the website was so full of Flash that I couldn't navigate it well enough to find how to restart it. I twittered it asking for help, but everyones taken it as if my heart pacemaker. Well sorry to say its not that, just a Dj Tool.

Maybe this will go down in Twitter fiction/folktales as a tale for ever more. Eitherway, its another reason to dump facebook and switch to Twitter.

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My New Year Resolutions 2008 reviewed

So its the very eve of 2009 and I've been thinking what should I be doing for 2009. But before that a review of how well I've done in 2008 seems like a good idea. You can find the full post from Jan 2008 here.

  1. Finally go to Tokyo

    Well this never happened, but only partly due to the divorce and moving to Manchester
  2. Not to do another BarCampLondon unless the BBC is the venue

    Ah I remember this, I had just finished the amazing barcamp at Google and vowed not to do one again. To be fair, I've helped with 4 others but not actually done or organised them. Even better other people have stepped up and done barcamp in there own way. Which was one of my aims for 2008. Will there be a BBC BarCamp? Well there's been a internal mini BeebCamp but full BarCamp? We shall see, maybe it might make the 2009 list.
  3. Work on something very different but cutting edge this year
    So this did happen, I worked on a ARG with a variety of people but the project fell through when core parts of the team had a professional disagreement. We tried to carry on regardless but it was not possible to move forward as planned. We still have a excellent idea and story, plus I've been talking to new people about joining some of the original team. So I think this might get picked up in 2009.
  4. Dataportability
    Well I've almost cut myself off from the data portability group all together. Not out of choice or anything like that, I just didn't have the time and as things started to change and shift over the year, it became apparent that people were thinking about data portability more that ever before due to the efforts earlier on. I'm not saying its over, theres tons more to be done but also theres a bunch of other issues which need addressing. I'm hoping i'll get the time to pull some of this stuff into work, where I can have the most impact.
  5. Small Routines
    So actually this did happen, but not in a ideal way. Currently I'm sleeping very late and getting up late. During the night is when I do most of my blogging and reading. I don't know what it is but I seem to be more open to learning and taking it all in at 1am. I do still listen to podcasts while around the flat including in the shower. But what I need to do now is shift the time back by 3-4 hours. So I go to bed by 1am but get all my blogging and reading done between 9pm – 1am. Then I'd get up about 9am and not feel so tired. In regards to the RSS reading for example, the ipod is helping a lot (i should write a blog about it).
  6. Play a team sport
    Yep I started playing Handball in Manchester, but it was a ton of running about and seriously my body couldn't handle the dynamic pace of the students I was playing with. So I gave it up when I learned about a Volleyball team in Manchester. Its still very energetic and I'm playing with students and people in there prime years but my previous experience helps a lot and i'm not a bad setter at all. Theres a few tournaments coming up including a few beach ones in summer, so who knows what might happen.
  7. Geekdinners and Geekvenues
    Well I got to the bottom of geekdinner.co.uk. It was hosted on Photo Matt's server somewhere and he wiped it or something and now its all gone! Yes I know crazy but don't worry we have flickr pictures, blog posts and our memories to remind us of the good times. I also handed over the job of organising geekdinners to Cristiano Betta who I believed would take it forward while I move to Manchester. And I wasn't wrong, he's done a great job, scoping out a new venue and new speakers for the events. He's also tied the geekdinners closer to the girl geekdinners which is great. Geekvenues is still floating on somewhere, should think about that some more.
  8. Start learning Python
    Yep started, setup my environment and done Hello world and a couple other tiny projects. Micheal Sparks has leant me a couple books which are really useful including the Joel Spolsky book who I listen to on the Stack overflow podcast anyway. I also started playing with PovRay again and dropped learning AIR for now.
  9. Use the technologies around me better
    Yep this is happening, I'm also becoming more choosy and selling stuff which doesn't fit. So for example this year the Wii and Netbook went, not because I don't like them, but because they didn't quite fit into my life. I'm also switching some of my services. So I still use plaxo and now I have two Windows mobile phones, its become even more essential that I can sync between them over the air not just when I get to a Windows PC. I'm going to stop using delicious and switch to evernote. The lack of Linux support is frustrating but on the other hand its supported on my ipod touch and windows mobiles.
  10. Go to more comedy clubs
    This has happened, I'm 5mins walk from the Comedy Store in Manchester and I have been a few times on off nights. I plan to go more often and actually if I had been a bit quicker recently. Would have been off to Jesters in Bristol tonight for a night of comedy over new years instead clubbing it. So yes comedy is happening more often. Maybe I should spend less time in the cinema and more time in the comedy clubs?

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Gwibber the dashboard for streams and flow?

I partly talked about this before but theres been a series of updates which I couldn't help but blog about.

So I was talking to Miles about a client which could support much more that Microblogging and we were suprised that no ones actually built a clever client app which supports Microblogging + RSS + XMPP? Well the closes we can find to that idea is a OSX application called Eventbox. Actually this blog entry does a much better job explaining what it can do, and what a difference it means for advanced users.

If you imagine the dashboard of Facebook (credit to Stowe Boyd) but under your control using the services you prefer. Fan of Flickr, just add them and the RSS feed. Prefer photobucket use that instead. Its a bit like the life streaming services such as Plaxo, Mybloglog and Friendfeed. The application/client should be clever enough to look at the service and work out through maybe some discovery service/xml whats possible with the service. So for example adding Twitter will allow you to post and read, while a flickr feed won't. It would be cool to also finally start adding some of those comment services into the mix, so for example allow backtype comments if you start adding stuff to a RSS feed from a blog. Hell why not add a proper metaweblog/atom Blog editor too maybe?

Anyway, Eventbox is close and seems to be on the right track and I was starting to get worried that once again the linux platform would be left behind in this area. But I was wrong actually deadly wrong because under my own nose was Gwibber.

I've been using it for a while now and its actually fended off competition from Air apps like Twitterdeck (far too twitterfied) and Twirl (crashes a lot) for my ubuntu desktop. But what shocked me today when talking to Miles was the new supported protocals it has. I had done updates and never knew about the new features.

Gwibber 0.72 Screenshot by you.

So now theres support for,

  • RSS/Atom
  • Digg
  • La.conica
  • Twitter
  • Pidgin
  • Ping.fm
  • Facebook
  • Jaiku
  • Pownce
  • Flickr
  • Indenti.ca

So most of the Microblogging services including the recently defunked Pownce and open source La.conica. RSS including automatic discovery for Digg and Flickr. Then some of the interesting ones, Facebook with the ability to also send messages into the Facebook paywall. Ping.FM support, means you can send from Gwibber to all those other services such as Brightkite, Rejaw, etc, etc. But the one which is strange and most exciting is Pidgin support. The problem is, there is no documentation for the Pidgin part and the account says you can send only. So after some playing around, I worked out that when you send a message on Gwibber, it will also set the status of Pidgin. This is cool, but I also want the ability to recieve XMPP messages straight into Gwibber.

Gwibber 0.72 Screenshot by you.

Actually Gwibber has the structure to really move forward. I've already seen multiple types of authentication from username/password to a Oauth like facebook auth. Each protocal gets its own colour which you can set and you can enable recieve, send and search on each one (protocal supporting). Search works well, but I'll like to see some kind of watch or a pounce system like you get in Pidgin or Specto. Finally it would be useful to support the Newsgator API (yep I switched from bloglines to newsgator) for RSS, so you can properly manage the RSS and not end up reading the same news over and over again.

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Security for People and Computers by Neal Puff

creepy guy looking over a application form

I've been reading this fantastic ebook on my ipod called Security for People and Computers by Neal Puff. I had assumed because the cocoa application (what do you call ipod/iphone apps?) was free it would be available somewhere else as a PDF or another free format. However it seems like you can only get it free on iTunes, which really sucks. Because I really want to send all my computer literal friends this book. Its the kind of book I could give to my parents and they might actually make sense of. Its written as a refresher for people like myself and a overview for people who care less about computer security. I have a list ranging from my sister to friends who are still using Windows in a bad way, who NEED to read this very short book.

I noticed you can buy it too but its not cheap at 19 pounds plus shipping. But it might be worth buying a few copies for friends and family next time its there birthday. Its a shame because turning ebooks into ipod/iphone applications is almost like a DRM of its own. I totally get what Tom Peck is doing turning books into apps but I would much prefer he write a app which reads PDFs/RTF/Text files well instead. Anyhow, here's the description of the book…

This book is meant as general knowledge for people who want to live a safer and more secure existence in today's environment, covering both basic Internet safety and general advice for non-technical parts of our life. While this book was previously sold commercially, it is offered here at no charge in the hope that it will be of some benefit to help people in their daily lives.

Actually just going back to the ebook application as a DRM a second. I also saw, Project Gutenberg will be releasing Mobile eBooks. Great I thought till I found out there going to create *.jar files (java apps) which play the book rather that mobile versions of the books in pdf, text, etc. So once again, this sucks because I'm constrained to one player and the player is attached to the book. This means my ipod can't read it and my older ebook reader on my phone can't be used either. Can someone please just create a Ebook reader for most platforms including Windows Mobile, Symbian, Java, Blackberry and Apple which is open source and reads all types of free/open textual format

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Have you been thinking green all year?

My carbon footprint in 2008

Well I like to think I have. As you can see I've done a lot of trips every month this year but its Manchester to London and back again, which I'm doing frequently. The most costly on Carbon was my trip to Berlin, even more so that my crazy trip to Paris via Amsterdam. I wonder how this stacks up against other community managers/evangelistsTechnorati Tags: , , , , from companys like Yahoo and Microsoft? Think of the BBC Backstage as your green friendly developer network.

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