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I KNEW IT. Bastards. Found in this wonderful London Transport...

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:50:00 +0000

I KNEW IT. Bastards.

Found in this wonderful London Transport film archive, via Chris.

Installation artist Doug Fishbone’s most ambitious...

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:06:44 +0100

Installation artist Doug Fishbone’s most ambitious projects have involved up to 40 000 bananas piled up in public places.

Art MoCo: “20 000 Bananas”

Vegetable Art

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:04:09 +0100

Vegetable Art

Photo

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:20:10 +0100

Tron in frames, for no reason.

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:40:53 +0100

Tron in frames, for no reason.

Terminator in frames, Sarah’s perspective. As opposed to...

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:38:50 +0100

Terminator in frames, Sarah’s perspective. As opposed to the Terminator’s.

Paperwork Hacks

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:33:00 +0100

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 paperwork-shaped hoops with Apple about tax and other very boring things. The same will obviously be the case for apps that want to offer in-app purchasing. But charging money for an app up-front is part of the iTunes Store process, and is hooked into your developer account. Using the ‘paid content download’ API is part of the developer tools, and is probably very hard to detect without using debugging tools, which aren’t part of the iTunes Store process.

This feels like a legal hack. It’s a short-term way to make sure that developers have done the paperwork required to collect money. Once the problem is solved properly, I’d expect this restriction to be relaxed. Maybe even you’ll be allowed to charge money for downloads if you have any paid-for app in the store, that might be easier to implement first.

I’m guessing that Apple got to shave a chunk of time off the release date of a feature by hacking their own license agreement system.

iPhone twitter clients and Push

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:15:55 +0100

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 your updates, and pushes them to your phone.

This will have scaling issues. The first person to launch this will get all the users (because shiny!!1), and their server will melt. Unless it’s huge.

They will have to charge money for this service. Probably monthly.

The leap from ‘I have written a pretty Twitter client’ to ‘I have to run infrastructure and bill monthly for it’ is huge. Push isn’t just a bullet point feature. It’s almost a harder problem than writing the iPhone app in the first place.

Also you’re now polling Twitter for all of your users all the time. and holding auth credentials for them on your central server. So

Twitter API usage lurches upwards again, because now this service is polling them every 5 mins for every user, and all these users are polling Twitter from their phones (unless the phone client is polling your server for updates, in which case now you have to scale for that as well. At least if the only thing you do is poll/push, it doesn’t matter if you fall over for 5 minutes. or indeed for an hour).
This third party server now has usernames/passwords or oauth tokens for all of their users, rather than these tokens staying only on the client apps. yay security!

Now, Twitter seem to be growing some sort of streaming API. Not sure if this helps. If I have 100,000 users, I hope I don’t have to hold 100,000 simultaneous HTTP connections open to my server, that might be tricky.

It’s easy to pick up chicks when you have big ears. Via

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:26:06 +0100

It’s easy to pick up chicks when you have big ears.

Via

OpenSocial

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:34:51 +0100

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

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:51:00 +0100

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

birthdays

Wed, 27 May 2009 16:38:06 +0100

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

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:18:15 +0100

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.

We Made This: Wired

Tue, 05 May 2009 12:29:59 +0100

We Made This: Wired

Decoding Geohashes in pure Ruby

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:06:14 +0100

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] || "ezs42" 

# convert geohash into a bit sequence
map = "0123456789bcdefghjkmnpqrstuvwxyz" # silly custom base32 mapping
bits = geohash.split("").map{|c|
    i = map.index(c) or raise("bad geohash (#{c} not permitted)")
    sprintf("%05s", i.to_s(2)).gsub(" ","0").split("")
}.flatten

# even bits are longitude, odd bits are latitude.
# probably a better way of doing this part, feels non-ruby-like..
lat_bits = []
lng_bits = []
bits.each_with_index{|b,i|
    if i % 2 == 1
        lat_bits << b
    else
        lng_bits << b
    end
}

# subdivide the world according to the bit sequences
def decode(bits, range)
    range = [ range.to_f * -1, range.to_f ]
    for b in bits
        if b == "1"
            range[0] = (range[0] + range[1])/2
        else
            range[1] = (range[0] + range[1])/2
        end
    end
    return range
end

lat_range = decode( lat_bits, 90 )
lng_range = decode( lng_bits, 180 )
puts "lat is range #{ lat_range.inspect }"
puts "lng is range #{ lng_range.inspect }"

Delicious bookmarks counter in JavaScript

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:53:00 +0100

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.

Mark: It's the '00s now right?

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:22:31 +0100

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

Automagic: Love Footage And Tools Demo | Rock, Paper, Shotgun....

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:44:18 +0100

Automagic: Love Footage And Tools Demo | Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Love looks so pretty. And crazy, of course.

Steampunk, eh?

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:16:00 +0100

Steampunk, eh?

Los Colorados - Hot & Cold

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:54:00 +0100

Los Colorados - Hot & Cold