foomandoonian

06/01/2009

» del.icio.us: SuperGenPass

Remember just one password (your “master password”) to generate unique, complex passwords for the Web sites you visit. SuperGenPass is a bookmarklet, so there’s no software to install.

Link posted at 14:50

» listening to "Bohemian Like You - The Dandy Warhols"

So what do you do? Oh yeah, I wait tables too. No I havent heard your band.

Link posted at 11:57

» listening to "Gimmie Some Salt - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah"

I was in the kitchen; Cooking up a shark; Sally’s out preparing; Witty remarks

Link posted at 11:19

» del.icio.us: Picol: Pictorial Communication Language

PICOL stands for Pictorial Communication Language
and is a project to find a standard and reduced sign
system for electronic communication. PICOL is free
to use and open to alter.

Link posted at 10:49

05/01/2009

Fast Dial: A great Firefox add-on goes bad

Fast Dial is a great little Firefox add-on that gives you the speed dial functionality found in Opera. Rather, I should say it was a great add-on. I have just this minute updated to the latest version (2.15) and been greeted by some rather unwelcome modifications:

An unwanted searchbox has found its way to the top of the page
A sponsored link has been added in place of one of my shortcuts
Another tab has been taken up to take me to the User Logos website
The User Logos search engine has been added, as default, to my search bar

I followed the link from the Firefox add-on page to the official homepage of the project, only to be redirected and have pop-ups thrown at me (blocked, naturally). It seems reasonable to conclude that this add-on has been monetized by a team that didn’t know how to do it tastefully and respectfully (or the project was co-opted by the spam mafia!)

Speed Dial is an alternative that I have used before. I prefered Fast Dial for its simplicity, but I guess I will give Speed Dial another look.

Posted via email from foomandoonian’s halfblog | Comment »

Text posted at 21:17

» listening to "Seven Nation Army (white stripes) - The Flaming Lips"

I love it when the Lips cover a song that is already aces bells :D

Link posted at 17:07

Matt Smith, the new Doctor

Much has already been said about the casting of Matt Smith as the new Doctor. Watch a short interview with him and see what you think. A few highlights excerpted below. I hope my transcribing skills haven’t done him any injustice.

On the significance of the role:

‘It sort of has the… ummm … the iconic kind of status that Robin Hood or Sherlock Holmes or … and I’m sort of … taking that on. That’s my responsibility. That’s exciting … nervewracking … exciting … exciting!’

On keeping his new role a secret:

‘It’s like a giant secret. It’s hugely significant. Yeah… yeah.’

On the future:

I’ve got this wonderful sort of journey in front of me where I’ve got this kind of six months in front of me to build this… this… this Timelord. And that’s such an exciting prospect because I love that part of being an actor, I love the discovery of it and, uh, the detective bit.

I’m trying to reserve judgement until I see him in action as the Doctor. Hopefully Stephen Moffat and the other producers really can see something in the young actor that I’m missing. I’ll tell you this much though - if they give him an emo or ‘gofic’ costume, I’m out!

Posted via web from foomandoonian’s halfblog | Comment »

Text posted at 16:41

» listening to "I Fought The Law - Green Day"

So, is Blip legal? I mean, if you were a big company, would you be happy to use the service?

Link posted at 12:11

04/01/2009

Posterous: Analytics (yay) - Tag RSS (boo)

Posterous has recently added support for Google Analytics, making the service instantly more valuable. Not that I strictly need this myself, but I do find the stats fascinating.

Sadly though, I just discovered that the blog does lack one important feature I had assumed it would have: RSS feeds for each tag.

Being able to filter content by tag is tremendously useful, and I can already see from my analytics that people do filter my content. The Torchwood tag seems the most popular. I also like being able to filter just the photos. It would be nice to syndicate content in this way.

Posted via email from foomandoonian’s halfblog | Comment »

Text posted at 13:38

01/01/2009

Last photos of 2008

Taken from the tops of two different ‘mountains’ near Caerphilly, these are the last pictures taken by me in 2008 (and my first post for 2009). I’d have taken a picture of the first sunrise too, but I actually completely missed the first morning of the year!

Happy 2009…

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from foomandoonian’s halfblog | Comment »

Text posted at 18:38

30/12/2008

Easy Peasy Linux, logo submissions

As I’ve mentioned here before, Ubuntu Eee, the first OS that I installed on my then-new Asus Eee PC, is having to rebrand itself so it no longer mimics the Ubuntu identity. They kicked off a competition to design a logo and win a snazzy netbook, and now the submissions are all in.

I hope they have the good taste to pick one of the more polished and original concepts. It’s obvious which entries are good and which are bad, but some have more subtle problems. For example, many of the logos incorperate a tiny ‘e’, which instantly makes me think of Internet Explorer - not a positive association! There are others which are quite appealing, but fall very much into web 2.0 cliches, with rounded corners, a glossy plastic sheen and vivid colours.

Many others play with variations on the Ubuntu logo and/or lemons. Some of these are quite clever, but if it’s too obvious it seems inappropriate.

I’ve picked a few of my favourites below:

Posted via email from foomandoonian’s halfblog | Comment »

Text posted at 11:45

Interactive fiction (and my ongoing love/hate relationship with Linux)

Today a discussion on the CrunchBang Linux forums started me off exploring the fascinating world of interactive fiction.

Initially I just wanted to get a local copy of the Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy text adventure up and running. The download is a ZIP containing a .z3 file. All I needed was Frotz (or another interpreter) and I was up and running. But my investigation had piqued my interest. How do they make these games? Must be easy, right?

Wikipedia lists a few development systems, and I really liked the look of Inform7. The website seemed very up to date and full of good information. Also there were .deb files available, which usually makes installation a complete breeze. Finally, I found a good tutorial on the Linux Journal website (pt1, pt2) which would walk me through the installation and then give me basic tutorial. Sold!

Installation seemed to go smoothly, despite me using a more recent package than the tutorial. Then I launched gnome-inform7, and was greeted by the intro dialog, inviting me to start a new project, reopen the last one, or open an existing one. I optimistically clicked on ‘Start a new project’, the dialog vanished and…

…Nothing. Bugger.

Turning to The Google soon turned up a bug that seems to be the same, but the ‘fix’ was to change a line of code in a file that doesn’t seem to be on my machine. The other ‘solution’ seems to be to compile from a later version myself. Of course, it is assumed one should know how to do this. Some more Googling convinces me that I’m in over my head.

I guess my point, if I have one, is that I feel this stuff should be easier. Do I need to be the kind of person who wants to solve this kind of technical problem, constantly, to use Linux succesfully? Because I’d rather have spent the last few hours working on my first interactive masterpiece. Or watching telly.

—-

Still, at least I discovered the excellent Slingshot!

Posted via email from foomandoonian’s halfblog | Comment »

Text posted at 01:56

29/12/2008

» claimID: Ma.gnolia bookmarks

Used exclusively to bookmark Linux or other open source pages for reference.

Link posted at 02:03

28/12/2008

The Virgin Media Twitter account saga

I was finally able to access the Gmail account that I used for my @virginmedia Twitter profile that Virgin Media ‘stole’ from me earlier this month. I now know that I received only one email from Twitter on the subject. They then gave me four days (only two working days!) to change my account name before they changed it. They also stripped the avatar, background image and bio (presumably because these reinforced the ‘impersonation’), leaving me with @notvirginmedia. I’ve copied the email from Twitter below.

Hi There,

We’ve received a complaint from Virgin Media, UK. It has come to our attention that your Twitter account:

http://twitter.com/virginmedia

is in violation of our basic Terms of Service, speciﬁcally article 4 which mentions impersonation:

You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.

In this case “impersonation” is the issue. Impersonation is against our terms of service unless it’s parody. The standard for deﬁning parody is, “Would a reasonable person be aware that it’s a joke.”

To settle this issue we’ve changed the user name to “notvirginmedia” in the full name and username ﬁelds in order to eliminate confusion. You can change your real and user names to something else if you’d like:

Visit Twitter.com/settings

Edit the Full Name and Username ﬁelds

Click “Save”

but please honor Twitterʼs Terms of Service accordingly. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

Thanks,

Twitter Support

However you define parody or impersonation in legal terms, I’d imagine my Twitter profile was in a pretty grey area. I had copied the branding and used their company name, but the bio line (‘We’re Virgin Media, you’re just a customer’) and the tweeted content was pretty clearly parody and not produced or endorsed by Virgin Media.

I have reconfigured Twitterfeed and tweaked the design of the page to make it a clearer parody. I’m not interested in fighting this in any way, but I think a lot less of Twitter as a result.

One unexpected angle on all this is the Virgin Media Twitter profile itself. Although they only have five updates, despite launching a major new service, the are at least @ replying to some users. Hopefully they will use Twitter as a positive force. I originally set up the account out of frustration through shitty service. Twitter is an excellent way to provide a small amount of technical support (that you don’t have to pay for!) or to provide service level updates, etc.

Let’s hope they use it for good!