Gareth Simpson

I finally managed to find a legitimate place for Emojis at work, so I needed a plug-in to select them. Even though there are plenty of good options out there, I take my emoji very seriously, and I just couldn't find anything that had: A jQuery base - we're old-fashioned at work A small download - no graphics for the emojis please Support for skin-tones  So here we are, I've made a thing.  It doesn't happen often.  It's called  jquery-emoji-chooser .  You can find it via that link to GitHub or you can install it via Bower.  It's a fork of the otherwise excellent jquery-emoji-picker which I also recommend if you don't have the same needs as me. Feel free to try out the demo  and if you also think emojis are serious business, use it as you see fit.

I don't really like to mention my job or where I work, but just this once I'd like to say how pleased I was that ZOO agreed to host Sheffield's 2017 Django Girls event last weekend. We use Django for all our software so it was good to be able to give a little something back to the community. A few of us from the Software Engineering team went along to volunteer as mentors for the day.  It was a lot of fun. I'm impressed with the tutorial we worked through.  If you're looking to learn Python or Django it's a great place to start, even if you can't get to one of the events.

Apple has announced some extensions to RSS to add podcast-specific features.  Of particular interest to me is the ability to group episodes into seasons and specify the play order of those seasons. Users will be able to download full seasons, and the Podcasts app will know if a podcast is intended to be listened to in chronological order—“start at the first episode!”—or if it’s more timely, where the most recent episode is the most important. This sounds great to me and I hope that podcast players other than Apple's embrace it.  Diving into a podcast mid-stream is not handled well by players today.  I got so frustrated by the experience that I made a service to manage my catch-up experience .  I (and a couple of dozen Germans) have been using it for years, and while I'm not ready to retire it just yet, I am hopeful that I might have to use it a bit less soon.

I have always loved RSS. Since way back when, RSS readers are what I have made in my spare time.  You, or rather I, spend so much time reading the internet, you want the be experience to be tailored to you. I have been using the current version of my hand-rolled web-based feed reader FeedThing  for something like 7 years.  After the initial burst of activity to get it working, I haven't touched it much except to fix the occasional bug or annoyance.  I got it going to the point that (and only I) could use it and then just tailed off. During those 7 years, RSS and feeds have become way less popular.  Obviously they were always very niche, but even amongst the small corner of the internet that ever liked them they have fallen by the wayside in favor of Twitter and Facebook and the relentless onslaught of the social. So it was a pleasant surprise to have a post announcing a new feed format pop up. I don't know if JSON Feed will take off.  What I do ...

I have a Media Center PC. For my sins, I really like it. However for the past few (well many) months it has been failing to power manage correctly, never sleeping and running the fan all the time. It has also been running like a dog. Being the clever computer type I am, I immediately diagnosed a bad case of Windows Rot and tried to make time to reinstall it. Then we moved house and I noticed it was filthy. Every vent at the rear was choked with vacuum-cleaner-bagesque dust bunnies. Having administered a quick stiff brushing, it is now running cooler, quieter and faster. Sorry Windows.

So a five minute play with SocialThing makes it seem really promising. Being able to into easily import all your friends from all your social networks (eventually) and then easily alias them together sounds like it would be awesome. Sadly it goes downhill really quickly. Firstly it requires your usernames and passwords. They explain why - to get otherwise unavailable private data (friends only Livejournal posts for example), but it seems unnecessary and phishing-like . What they really need is to do is offer a "publicly viewable information only" option for these services. Secondly there doesn't seem to be any kind of history. New items push old items off the list and then, poof, they're gone. That's kind of limiting. There's also no feed produced so I can't subscribe to this stuff anywhere else, I have to go to their site. Lastly you can only see an aggregate view. Having aliased my friends (when I've been fortunate to have two of their posts ...

Phil finally gave me an excuse to beat lxml into submission . And this is the result: wxVenus on OS X.

lxml is a total nightmare to install on the Mac. For my own future sanity, this is how to do it. Install MacPorts Install libxml2: sudo port install libxml2 Install libxslt: sudo port install libxslt Make sure DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH includes /opt/local/lib (I am a unix n00b and just edit ~/.bash_profile to have the lines: DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/local/lib EXPORT DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH in it and restart the shell) Get the lxml code: svn co http://codespeak.net/svn/lxml/trunk lxml Install Easy_Install (surely you've done this already!) Install Cython: easy_install Cython==0.9.6.12 In the lxml folder run python setup.py build --with-xslt-config=/opt/local/bin/xslt-config Then python setup.py install Look puzzled when python test.py fails utterly Shrug that off quickly when lxml works generally This is for Tiger, it may work on other versions too.

It only took 10 years, but she seemed genuinely impressed when I whipped up a quick Python script to turn the iSight camera on the MacBook into a nanny cam that uploads to a rotating set of private photos on Flickr. It will probably take another 10 years for her to be impressed again.

It's been a while since Phil excoriated lifestreaming for being probably the least interesting thing you could possibly do . . I noted it at the time, but I didn't have a whole lot of interest in lifestreaming or attention data, Digital Lifestyle Aggregation or all that nonsense he blogs about. Lately though I've been playing with a pet project, which while not actually a lifestream, could easily have lifestreaming applications (sshhh it's a secret ). The upshot of this is that, while I tend to concur that the stream itself is kind of useless, over time it builds up into something more interesting - a pool information about what I (or whoever) did and thought at a given instant, and how those things changed over time. So drinking from the lifestream firehouse today might well be rubbish, but I'm not sure that wallowing in the lifestream nostalgia of tomorrow will be. UPDATE: I note that Phil rushed to agree with me several months before I posted this. . T...

I was looking at the demonstration of how socialthing will allow you to alias together your friends various accounts into a single entity. It's a useful enough feature, and probably something I'd want to do were I a socialthing user. However, something about it makes me subtly uncomfortable. I might know that my friend Bob is bob123 on last.fm and bob1974 on Twitter. Does that automatically mean it's OK for me to announce that to the world? Maybe Bob doesn't want that link made public and specifically chose different usernames for that reason. It's not a big thing, but I'm not sure it's my place to aggregate information about someone else. The caveat here is that I am not a socialthing beta user, so it's entirely possible that this aggregation is for personal use only. The video doesn't make it clear.

I finally relented in the face of Scoble's constant exhortations to try Google reader. It looks quite slick but alas there are two show stoppers preventing my migration. 1. I have to reverse the read order to my preferred oldest first individually for each feed! 2. There appears to be no feed level control of how to handle updates to posts. Normally I want updates to be treated as new posts but there are some sites that insist on constantly updating old posts to no effect (Crooks and Liars video play count, I'm looking at you). So, I guess I'm staying put for the time being.

... and its ability to deal with on-line pedophiles. This quote from the Home Office displays an almost total lack of understanding of how the internet works. "The home secretary also wants to look at whether it is technologically feasible to set up a system where if someone enters a chatroom with an identity that was already listed on the [sex offenders] register, it would 'ping' an alert on the relevant people's computers, enabling them to take appropriate action," he added. Which chat rooms? How are the suspect ids being distributed? Should all chat room providers have an extra check box on sign in 'I am am on the sex offenders register'? How many popular chat rooms are run under the jurisdiction of UK law anyway? It's just empty words to make people think something is being done. I don't know if there are any serous and effective technical answers to this problem, but I can tell at a glance that this isn't one.

The breakneck pace of development of Grabbr continues with the release of 1.3 This version includes such astonishing features as permissions and the ability to load the photo page of the image you have just uploaded. I bet you can barely wait.

I realize it's far too late to comment on this, but I rarely if ever crack open the old blogger edit window. Nofollow is good-ish idea. It's perfect for blog comments where you don't have the time to moderate everything but don't want to pass on any benefits to spammers. What it manisfestly won't do is deter the spam in the first place. How can I tell this? Well from the comments I get for a start. They are clearly-auto posted, so there is no reason not to try spam. It takes no effort. They are often not formatted in HTML. Sometimes they are plain text - just a URL, sometimes they are in Forum pseudo tags in square brackets ([url=]http://myspam.com/[/url]) so they aren't even trying to get/checking if they get pagerank. What this means for Wikipedia is that they won't slow their spam onslaught, but what they will do is decrease the quality of search results. Wikipedia has huge pagerank authority. It is also for the most part very well edited. The upsh...

I love Flickr . It gives people like me who have no photography skill and no eye for a picture, something to do with their cameras and phones. I signed up after it was cool but before it was bought by Yahoo! so I am technically, if not actually, old-skool. It has therefore been amusing to watch the unfolding controversy around the dual announcement that they are finally enforcing the long promised Yahoo! logins and that they are also introducing limits on the number of contacts and tags . Naturally this has provoked a shit storm of protest on the forums and in the blogs. I guess they knew that both these things would be unpopular with a vocal minority and decided to get it all out of the way in one go. They probably weren't expecting their corporate bosses at Yahoo! to start using wii tagged photos on a Yahoo! portal advertising page This has been going on for months apparently - it only became an issue when disgruntled punters started looking for things to be angry about ....

"It is critical that we understand that this new form of terrorism carries another more subtle, perhaps equally pernicious, risk. Because it might encourage a fear-driven and inappropriate response. By that I mean it can tempt us to abandon our values. I think it important to understand that this is one of its primary purposes." — Sir Ken Macdonald, Director of Public Prosecutions

Gordon Brown is planning a massive expansion of the ID cards project that would widen surveillance of everyday life by allowing high-street businesses to share confidential information with police databases. A news item so depressing that it made me rediscover both blogging and del.icio.us

It suddenly occured to me that I almost never use delicious any more. I was vaguely aware that they had a refresh some months back that involved splitting out the inbox feeds into constituent parts. Well it turns out that the stuff left in my 'inbox' to which I was subscribed was, in fact, nothing. So del.icio.us went silent. And I barely noticed. And then I stopped posting things and again I barely noticed. Now I loved del.icio.us and got a lot out of it when it was working for me before. I kind of resent the way they implemented the changes. If they wanted to split out the feeds, the logical way to do it would have been to leave 'inbox' as was and then provide the seperate feeds, seperately. So now I'm subscribed to my 'network' instead. I wonder if I can retrain myself to post things. I also wonder how many other people had the same experience and never bothered to rediscover it. Rubbish.

Russell Beattie's whinge about US phone operators sitting back and letting you rack up huge bills reminded me that 02 actually looks out for you in exactly the way he's suggesting. While in the US, I rack up huge (by my standards) bills and there's always a helpful little text halfway through the trip This is a courtesy message from O2 informing you that your spend is now £50 over your line rental for this month. There is no need to for you to take any action. How good is that?