Gareth Simpson

I finally scratched my Rendezvous itch with an iChat plug in for Miranda the multi-protocol Instant Messenger for Windows. It's a little rough and ready at the moment, but I'm working on smoothing it out. Download it now and talk to the smug Mac users on your network 1 [1] Unless of course they're using Adium - but I'll get right onto that. Fixed!

God I'm sick of hearing about Google's satellite map overlays. Multimap has been doing better for longer. Here's an aerial shot of my village , it overlays the map at the mouse's hover point. Lovely.

On the basis of my informal conversations with my colleagues, Subversion (abbreviated to SVN) is a better system than all the commercial tools except Perforce. Which I guess makes Perforce the best overall. We use Perforce at work, and I find that very depressing.

I use some javascript to make the citations in my blockquotes clickable. It's all very well but it doesn't exactly help for general browsing. So, with a little more Greasemonkeying, we have Blockquote Citations . It works by adding a link to the citation if it appears to be a url. It will use the blockquote's title as the link text or "source" if there isn't a title. It will not add the link if there is already a visible link to the same URL - the idea being we don't want to make pages unreadable if people already have gone to the trouble of linking to their source either manually or with script. This blog has the blockquote citations script inline, but you can test your installation of the script on this handy test page .

Spurred on by the total pain that was teaching my Girlfriend's sister to fill her mp3 player , I have created a small application that was, erm, "inspired", by the iPod shuffle features in iTunes. Motherload turns your tired old non-iPod mp3 player into a Shuffle of sorts. It still won't be pretty and white, but at least filling it up will be a whole lot easier.

In response to a request on the GreaseMonkey Wiki and with the kind permission of Stuart Langridge I've ported Nice Titles to GreaseMonkey (actually this involves almost no work on my part). They key differences between the original and my version are: No need for browser detection or background pngs - we're always in Firefox. I've added a 1 second delay on the Nice Title appearing since I prefer it that way. Get the script here .

My latest toy is a user script to strike through rel="nofollow" links. I'm curious to see how widely used they are. Update: As it says in the comments, Scott Johnson has corrected an oversight of mine to do with multiple values for the rel attribute. Why not try his updated version .

It's come to my attention that some of my ads are for an anti-EU, "Vote No" website. I've blocked them now, but I'd just like to say "Vote Yes".

Bloglines is growing on me the more I use it. So much so that my own aggregator is falling completely by the wayside. That said though, there are a number of annoyances with it's interface that drive me nuts. The worst of these is Bloglines' complete and utter insistence in opening every link in a new window. Enter Greasemonkey stage right. Five minutes after installation and my first user script was complete. It's not rocket science but it makes the whole Bloglines experience much more pleasant (for me at least) by opening all links in the frame which they originate. If you want to read in a new window or tab, there's always right click isn't there?

So say Apple as an excuse for the stripped down nature of the iPod Shuffle. Except of course, they're right. A random selection of your favorite tracks is mostly all you need. Having reinstalled my home computer, I have yet to get round to replacing all the wiped out music. Turns out it doesn't matter. Instead I've been connecting to my last.fm personal radio station. All my top tunes (no laughing at the back) streamed to my home in random fashion. Does this mean I'll get an iPod shuffle? Well no, I still lust for the full on white iPod goodness and iTunes Audioscrobbler users will be pleased to hear I am > What I would get would be a mobile phone that would stream last.fm to me at an affordable cost. I wonder how far in the future such a device is?

There's not much point in pontificating too much on the Mac Mini and the iPod Shuffle. The world and his wife has done this. Of course I'm still going to do it. Personally I think the shuffle looks like a nice flash player, but it hasn't had me reconsidering my decision to get an iPod. The Mac mini looks fun, and if they're still going in 12 months I'll probably get one to retire my current iMac. With any luck they'll be G5 based by then. The response to the new Apple products has been largely predictable. People are largely hailing them as the affordable Mac/iPod for granny or castigating them for being underpowered / underfeatured and not as cheap as they look. I can't decide which side I'm on. What I am surprised about though, is doom laden predictions that they undermine the Apple brand. I can't believe this is true. The smart luxury brands always have an affordable range as well to keep the aspirational masses happy. I'm strong...

With all the excitement about Six Apart acquiring Livejournal I think it's worth remembering the importance of Livejournal. I hope fervently that there will still be room for posts like this one (from my own Livejournal's friends list) in the SA/LJ era or we will all be poorer.

In theory my home machine should be a completely spyware and virus overrun spam distributing zombie. I've been running anti-virus free Windows XP pro on a broadband connection for about a year which I'd heard was tantamount to suicide, especially when you consider that almost all of that time was pre SP2. In my more paranoid moments, I have taken to running netstat -a to look for unexpected connections whenever my machine slowed down suspiciously. But in the last few days I have installed both Anti Virus software and Microsoft's new Anti-Spyware tool and both report me clean. Hurray for the twin joys of XP's built in firewall and FireFox. I suppose there's always the chance that my problems are so insidious that neither tool could spot them. Hey ho.

At least if you believe these figures from Audioscrobbler: lastscrobplugin | count -----------------+-------- wa2 | 17667 itw | 5518 wmp | 2920 osx | 1846 foo | 1823 xms | 591 ark | 533 qcd | 205 jmc | 74 rbx | 39 slm | 27 tst | 9 shk | 4 mdn | 3 bmp | 3 mpd | 2 noa | 2 pte | 1 123 | 1 The good news for me is that iScrobbler for Windows is the second most popular plugin even if it lags seriously behind Winamp.

I can't decide if 43 Things is pointless or genius. I'm very much hoping that it will turn out to be as inspired as delicious and flickr . In the spirit of discovery and safe in the knowledge that at least it's somewhere to keep my new years resolutions, I've signed up .

I've already mentioned Joel Spolsky's ' Google Suggest raises the bar for web UIs ' essay, and I'm just one small voice in the great blog chorus . What I'd not noticed though, is that Flickr had already raised the bar far further, and with far less popular fanfare. Flickr's your photos page ( here's mine ) uses the XMLHttpRequest technique for actual, practical purposes. When logged into Flickr, you can click on any photo's title or description and edit it inline in the page and submit your change without any tedious page reloading. The effect is quite amazing. In terms of enhancing web usability it's a far greater advance than Google's glitzy but not ever so useful showcase. I would imagine that in eighteen months time we'll all be doing it. Or at least I hope so.

I write an aggregator in a very half hearted sort of way. I do this because I want certain things (chiefly fast start up times and a responsive UI) that other aggregators don't give me. It turns out that this must be pretty much all I want, since I don't seem to be investing much time in improving it. That said, even the current lameness that is FeedThing, is better (for me) than the incredibly mature and popular Bloglines . However, I think I'd really like to use bloglines if I could. The fact that it's centralized means I could happily read at work and home without tedious synchronization issues. What Bloglines really needs is a GMail / Google Suggest style kick up the backside in terms of usability. Joel Spolsky's ' Google Suggest raises the bar for web UIs ' essay seems to have been getting a lot of blogger traction so I guess it's not too much to hope that someone, peferably Bloglines themselves, will bring some of this to bear ...

Note to self. In ADO it is good practice to close your recordsets before they go out of scope but hardly the end of the world if you don’t. In ADO.NET, failing to close your OleDbDataReader causes your next call to ExecuteReader() to come crashing down around your ears. And they call this progress.

So I’m learning C# / .NET Even though my day job is now C++, I’ve been forced into it by a growing need for small RAD projects. My lovingly acquired VB6 skills being obsolete, I’ve taken the plunge with C#. I looked at VB.NET for about 5 minutes but I can’t see a single compelling reason to use it. A few syntax constructs remain but basically it’s a new language and one that does not appear to be as well supported as C#. Whichever language you use, you still have to learn the Winforms way and the .NET API. The extra learning involved in C# syntax is negligible. The multi language aspect of .NET is such a crock, it’s untrue. Whoop de do, I can inherit a C# object from a VB one. Great, until I need to fix a bug in said object and the code looks totally (if superficially) alien. Maybe I’m just bitter that they dropped the Wend keyword. I have to say though that .NET sucks badly. Gripe 1: ADO.NET is almost unrecognizable from COM ADO. Why? ADO was great as i...

iTunes 4.7 has been released and it has 2 minor but significant improvements: Native support for Always On Top Minimize to system tray I’m almost sad that iTunesOnTop is obsolete, but really it should always have been there. Even a cursory look at Winamp would have told them that.