
Think of it as Sin City without the adult content, the gesture and audacity of Shoot'em up combined with the sharpness of Lucky number slevin and your somewhat very close to how good the spirit is. Go watch it… Two thumbs up from me.
Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Think of it as Sin City without the adult content, the gesture and audacity of Shoot'em up combined with the sharpness of Lucky number slevin and your somewhat very close to how good the spirit is. Go watch it… Two thumbs up from me.
That will do for now
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…
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.
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.
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.
Technorati Tags: newyear, resolutions
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.
So now theres support for,
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.
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.
Technorati Tags: gwibber, microblogging, linux, client, stream, flow, eventbox, xmpp, twitter
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
Technorati Tags: security, people, computers, nealpuff, ebooks, ebook, pdf, iphone, ipod, apps
If you didn't receive one in your mailbox, no worries. Here it is for you to print off, make your festive wallpaper or just throw darts at. Thanks to Cristiano for the excellent photograph, I just tweaked the levels and let Plaxo do the rest. Shame Plaxo eCards couldn't send them out too, but thats another story.
Happy Christmas to everyone…
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: green, carbon, footprint, dopplr, ianforrester:dopplr=2008 from companys like Yahoo and Microsoft? Think of the BBC Backstage as your green friendly developer network.