Gareth Simpson

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?

The "html" that iWeb produces is an abomination. The worst bit being that it is possible to produce entries that are big images and not actually text. This is a total pain cause you can't adjust the font size, and you can't cut and paste. That said, I am a strong believer that you shouldn't just whinge and whine about something, but should try and fix it. So here we are: iWebTextify , a Greasemonkey script that adds a little 'Textify' button to the top of iWeb blogs with image entries. Push the button and the image vanishes to be replaced by the equivalent text. Unfortunately because of the gratuitous use of image maps to make links work in iWeb, it's not possible to preserve them when dropping the text version in (this is why the script doesn't automatically create a text version which is what I'd really like). It's better than nothing though. Go try it out on Ben Hammersley's site now!

The process of porting Grabbr to the new Flickr login mechanism has taken longer to complete than writing version 1. However, it's done now and can be downloaded from the project page . If you're a Yahoo!-ite or just a Flickerer tricked into merging your accounts, you can now get Grabbr to work.

Flickr has updated the authentication method used for 3rd party applications. "OK" I thought, "I'll just get Grabbr working correctly." Then I saw the spec . It's a joke right? They don't really expect you to do all that do they? All those bright people at Flickr who made the most fun, usable photo sharing service ever, and this is what they came up with? It's a complete and utter pain in the arse. Maybe I should go and join the tinfoil hat brigade in Flick Off and blame Yahoo! for the end of civilization as we know it.

Leaving aside the lack of CSS stuff which I know is coming in the next beta, IE 7 is still just lame. There are many things I dislike about it but the thing that offends me most is the total disregard for UI standards that has been employed in what will (tragically) become the most used application in Windows. The prime example is that Microsoft have taken the single most annoying "feature" they introduced to Windows - the ability to tear off the menu bar and move it and taken it to the next level. They have moved the menu bar below the tabs, and then just to spit in your eye a little more, they have reverted to it being non movable, so you can't even put it back where it belongs. Rubbish.

I'd been meaning to do this for a while, but prodding from various people in comments and email has prompted me to actually start. This post will document how iChat makes use of the XMPP protocol for its local Rendezvous/Bonjour/Zeroconf/whatever messaging. It is by no means complete, and based purely on my observations while trying to make the iChat plugin for Miranda. If you have any corrections or want to fill in one of the many gaps, then please add comment here and I'll get it up to date. Introduction iChat is in most respects a pretty standard jabber client. You should be able to talk to it very quickly by modifying any existing Jabber library and building in the Zeroconf stuff. For example I modified the Jabber plugin for Miranda. There is absolutely no need to start from scratch. Just to be clear, I personally use the Apple Bonjour SDK in C for Windows, but any Zeroconf library will do. In my Zeroconf examples I refer to the Apple SDK functions here and there, it's ...