January 2010
1 post
August 2009
3 posts
July 2009
2 posts
June 2009
5 posts
Paperwork Hacks
marco:
With iPhone OS 3.0, Apple introduced in-app purchasing. The idea is that applications can charge for additional functionality (or game levels), content subscriptions, or pay-per-use features.
There are two interesting caveats, though:
An app can only offer in-app purchasing if the app isn’t free.
…
If you want to charge money for your app, you have to jump through a lot of...
iPhone twitter clients and Push
I guess iPhone push notifications might be annoying. But you can always turn them off. This isn’t what worries me.
The biggest problem with this Twitter/push thing is that we’re not going to get it for Twitter apps any time soon. Obviously, Twitter won’t do it natively, it’ll be left for third parties. So some third party will have to run a server that polls Twitter for...
OpenSocial
Tom: seriously, opensocial is one of those 'can be used to solve any problem _except_ problems caused by too much javascript bogging everything down' solutions.
Tom: you just extend the container API with some verbs that describe your service.
Tom: for instance, dopplr public pages with embeddable widgets written by 3rd parties that can get your trip data and display pretty graphs.
Aaron: every webpage a portal
Aaron: OF QUICKSAND
Aaron: OF TIMESPACE
Tom: Also, once you cam EMBED WIDGETS IN OTHER WIDGETS..
Aaron: the web will eat itself
Tom: Actually, I can't even think of a _bad_ use for that.
Tom: it would be a more ELEGANT DESIGN to implement your entire site _as_ an opensocial widget!
Tom: PERFECT
Tom: I will now go looking for VENTURE CAPITAL
Tom: and maybe SLEEP.
Abuse of Twitter reply behaviour
jerakeen: proposal for twitter bot that public announces position changes from, say dopplr.
jerakeen: it just says '@blech has just landed in SFO'
jerakeen: but flags it as a reply somehow (handwave)
jerakeen: so I only see the travel movements of people who I also follow
blech: if you went to its page, you'd see everything, surely?
blech: so it'd have to be opt-in
blech: although depending on how it's fed it'd have to be opt-in anyway
blech: still, kind of a nice idea
jerakeen: sure, ignore the privacy angle
jerakeen: I'm just wondering about clever things you can do with the twitter limited distribution thing
jerakeen: also, note that its utility would be _totally_ dependant on twitter not randomly changing things again
jerakeen: you can design all sorts of clever things using conceptually very fragile bits of 'API'
jerakeen: which twitter can change at any moment.
jerakeen: TWITTER IS NOT INFRASTRUCTURE
jerakeen: etc etc
blech: indeed
May 2009
3 posts
birthdays
blech: oh, today is the actual birthday? that explains all the cake!
blech: hyvää syntymäpäivää, as someone said on Facebook
blech: I hope they weren't just being rude in Finnish
the future
The: i'm in a taxi on a laptop on irc with broadband. and frankly, i don't see why this is excessive in any way.
April 2009
9 posts
Decoding Geohashes in pure Ruby
Wrote this for work, threw it away again in favour of using an actual gem that someone else will maintain,
but I thought I’d put it here anyway, because it might be useful. Also, the gem is written in C and therefore
hard to deploy sometimes.
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# pure-ruby geohash decoding function
# default is the example from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash
geohash = ARGV[0] ||...
Delicious bookmarks counter in JavaScript
This is a script I use on a few sites to automatically count the number of
delicious links to various urls. There are a few of these that I’ve found, but
I quite like writing JavaScript like this. Also, mine will combine as many
urls as possible into a single request to the delicious API, because it’s
faster that way.
<!-- jquery -->
<script...
Mark: It's the '00s now right?
Tom: yep.
Tom: still.
Mark: Does that mean I can telecomute my flipping out?
Tom: No, that was early '00s.
Tom: now you just outsource it.
Mark: No, that was the mid '00s
Mark: Now you crowdsource it
Mark: you let your users flip out for you
Things my colo does
Been looking into getting rid of my colo. It costs a non-trivial amount of money, and philosophically I rather feel I should be able to exist in the cloud by now.
It hosts my SVN repository and clones of some of my git repositories.
It serves jerakeen.org
I run irssi in a screen session as an IRC client. This will be hard to replace.
I run some perl-based IRC bots from it.
I back up my mail...
Singularity
Don’t be late for the singularity. Once your mates get their brains uploaded, if you wait a week they’ll have experienced years of virtual time, and will have entirely forgotten about you. And you won’t know any of the in-jokes.
Don’t be early, either. I expect we’ll get the ability to upload brains (let’s assume it’s possible) well before we’ve...
July 2008
12 posts
4 tags
volume widgets
The iPhone / iPod music player volume widget behaves like this - you have to start your finger drag on the little round nubbin. You then drag it left or right. Dragging your finger up or down off the slider doesn’t adjust the volume, but doesn’t cancel the adjustment either, and I’ve found this to be a nice way of adjusting the volume a tiny amount - dragging diagonally increases...
Skitch
Have you noticed how elegant yet obvious Skitch screenshots have become? For instance. I see them everywhere, and you can always tell it came from Skitch. Used to be that I’d have to open a blank web browser or something to serve as a backdrop for screenshots. Now I just need to make sure my wallpaper is suffficiently classy. Which is fine, I haven’t seen my desktop wallpaper in...
iPhone 2.0 calendar app
I like the improvements made to the 2.0 iPhone calendar app. Mostly that the calendars are now copied across as individual calendars with their own colours. But Shawn Blank says that they come across with the same colours as their desktop counterparts, and I’m not finding that to be the case - all my phone calendars are different colours. It’s really really confusing to have utterly...
4 tags
3 tags
iPhone applications in Python →
A guide to writing iPhone applications in Python. Seems to apply to the jailbreak SDK rather than the real one (though this isn’t very clear) and is undated (I hate it when people don’t put dates on things) so I have no idea if it’s still relevant. But nevertheless.
On scaling
The key feature of “scalability” that most people care about is actually the ability of a system to efficiently convert money to increased capacity
Almost any small web service could have $10,000 thrown at it and get faster. A new server. More memory! A better load balancer. But you won’t see ten times the benefit if you throw $100,000 at it. What would you get? Lots more...
June 2008
2 posts
3 tags
Velocity
May 2008
1 post
The Mako vs the Big Trak
via http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1811
November 2007
16 posts
Environmentalism
The current dichotomy is not sustainable (ha!), and nor is the system which generates it. Environmentalism prolongs the existence of this system.
— http://interconnected.org/home/2007/11/11/i_read_the_space
Is this UTF-16 in a twitter?
Paul Mison pointed me at this very odd twitter. It’s from a phone, so it seems unlikely that is was supposed to look like this. It contains ‘@s@t@r@a@ @e’ - that was supposed to be ‘Straße’? So this is probably a Windows Mobile phone falling back to UTF-16 / UCS-2 to send non-ascii. Every other phone I’ve ever see falls back to UTF-8 to do this.
Don’t...
Language choice
Why do people writing server-side code, where limited CPU and memory resources much be shared between hundreds of users, use ‘high-level’ scripting language, whereas those writing client-side code, running on a machine where CPU and memory are much cheaper, use C and other lower-level languages?
“In 1999, Germany sold some mobile-phone spectrum by auction, with one rule...”
– http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/11/deregulation-an.html
..the document-centric model was never allowed to bloom as we had hoped, to the point where it would differentiate the Mac user experience.
— Greg Maletic - OpenDoc
Personally, I feel that nowadays the Mac’s obviously application-centric interface (the dock, application-global menus, etc) is the thing that sets it apart from (and above) Windows’ more fluffy ‘some...
mod_perlite →
Another ‘embed Perl in Apache’ module, this one trying to get rid of the thing that makes mod_perl so great and awful at the same time - the persistent run-time. It seems to be that this is an odd time to produce such a thing - the recent trend seems to be towards even small projects having a lightweight front-end server like lighttpd or nginx, and a specialised back-end server like...
Hell - population 968 →
via Mr Hammond.
The iPhone 2
Assume that the iPhone is sim-locked to AT&T (or O2 in this country). When the iPhone 2 arrives, can I move my SIM into one and avoid another 18-month lock-in? Or are Apple going to move beyond mere provider-level locking on this one?
photos
back when nerds were in charge of the internet, you couldn’t use it to find childhood pictures of us.
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Silicon Valley's... →
‘Web 2.0’ is the new ‘dot com’ - the term people nail to things to make them sound hip. Hurrah for easily-hijacked meaningless words!
Requisite OpenSocial post
Facebook invented, and Google have just generalized, an entirely new class of application. Take Dopplr. It’s a social network that does trip tracking and coincidences. This is completely backwards - the social network stuff is overhead that we have to implement so that we can keep trips private and restrict the list of coincidences that you have to manage. Dopplr should really only be about...