February 2nd, 2009
Problem:
I’d tried using twitterfeed to hook my Teddington Lock river status Yahoo pipe into Twitter.
It didn’t seem to be seeing any updates; possibily because twitterfeed is looking at the link urls rather than the guids (The Environment Agency actually do something quite clever with the guids on their feed).
Solution:
Write your own rss to twitter bridge. The source code is available here.
Maybe abit of an overkill but doing this did allow twitter specific code to be removed from two other projects. In any case, something which talks to a large group of twitter users automatically is probably something you want to keep control of yourself.
Things I think this version does well:
- Configured from a Mysql table
- Logs all of it’s twittering to the database
- Deals gracefully with Tinyurls
- Allows twitter tags to be added
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January 21st, 2009
The Afganistan casualties feed developed during Guardian Hackday is now live at a permanent location.
The contents of the MOD confirmed fatalities page is available as an RSS feed or can be followed on twitter:
RSS feed: http://cambridge.wellington.gen.nz/feeds/afghanistan
Twitter: @ukcasualties
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October 23rd, 2008
Most interesting usage of the Guardians geotagging feature todate; the geotagged recession tag page.
We implemented the geotagging and map featured to support the US elections road trip blog but quietly made sure the same features would work for any Guardian tag. We then stood back to see if the editors would come up with something interesting.
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September 7th, 2008
Results for the Kent Coastal marathon are in.
2h 10m to the halfway mark and out to 15 miles before stopping running for the first time.
Walked home from the turn at 20 miles for a finishing time on 5h 13m.
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June 17th, 2008
Wellington City Council are doing some really good work with their online petitions.
They even do RSS feeds of the current petitions. There’s a small enhancement they could make to these feeds.
Hello.
I’ve been following the e-petitions section of the WCC site.
First, let me say that it is a really forward looking thing for the council
to be trying and it’s been really well implemented.
I’d like to suggest the following enhancement to the RSS feed of current petitions, if possible.
Currently the petitions RSS feed seems to set the publication date field of all items to some time in November 2007.
If you’ve subscribed to this feed, new petitions don’t show up near the top of the feed reader’s inbox.
Would it be possible for the pubDate field to be populated with each petitions start date?
ie.
http://www.wellington.govt.nz/news/current_petitions.xml
<pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300</pubDate>
Regards, Tony McCrae.
Outcome
This change was made by WCC’s Webcentre team within 24 hours. Thanks guys; that’s a brilliant turn around time.
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April 19th, 2008
Overheard in the boat house this morning while discussing seat assignments:
bisweptual – In rowing (Sweeps, not sculls), it is the ability to row on both the port and starboard side.
ie. Someone who swings both ways.
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March 1st, 2008
So, you’ve just spent the morning pulling apart one of your most expensive possessions and when you’ve finished putting it all back togrther, it doen’t work.
I’d attempted to replace an aluminum G4 Powerbooks’ hard drive, but the new disk wasn’t visible.
When attempting to reinstall Mac OS, the installer can’t see the new disk. It turns out that the disk was working, but wouldn’t show as an install target until it was partitioned. The Disk Utility under Utilities in the menu bar can be used to partition and format the new disk.
Problem solved. Blood pressure returning to normal.
However, two things;
- Isn’t it abit strange to have a menubar on a fullscreen install program; I won’t have thought to look for one.
- Shouldn’t the install target dialog box drop a hint about the shiny new unformatted drive?
The other interesting thing is how long had this disk been in an unbootable state?
It did start making worrying comments in the syslog towards the end of last summer. Powerbooks tend to have uptimes in the months because you just shut the lid when you’re not using it; they hardly ever get booted from cold. Also considering that you probably never touch large portions of the disk from day to day, this could well have been broken for months.
The other slightly worrying thing is that on boot, Mac OS seems to run a fsck -A on the damaged disk.
This is probably why it managed to keep going for as long as it did, but surely performing unprompted write operations on a potentially damaged disk is risking making the situation even worse?
The OS also seems todo this without prompting when you try to attach the extracted disk as a USB device.
If the fcsk fails, you won’t be given the mount. Killing the fsck process did however cause the mount point to come up on one occasion, which was enough time to recover the required files.
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January 19th, 2008
… for they’re cleverer than you think.
Two examples of user’s exceeding expectations this week.
1) Submitting availability from a cellphone
Squadlist is as web based system which allows rowers to share their availability for training sessions.
"POST /rowers_availability.php HTTP/1.1" 200 8381 "-" "Nokia6300/2.0 (05.00) Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1"
That looks like somebody in Wales using a cellphone to confirm their availability for an outing.
In the two years I’ve been involved in maintaining this system the idea that it might be accessed from a cellphone never occured to me.
In hindsight of course that makes perfect sense; the information in the system is most useful at 7am in the morning when everyone is standing around outside a boat shed; not when everyone is in the office in front of a PC.
2) Search Wellington tagging
This new submission for the Wellington City Chorus is correctly tagged with 4 relevant tags; even though the submission form is complete rubbish.
The tag selection form is the quickest, simplest implementation possible; a multiple select box.
It’s terrible for a number of reasons. Firstly, the user has to scroll through a massive list of options looking for possible matches. Secondly, to select more than one tag the user has to know who to perform a multiple select. This involves holding down a button somewhere in the bottom left of the keyboard and carefully clicking on a selection; then having to scroll to your next selection and clicking again (without been able to seen the effect on your first selection).
When this was implemented it was primararly for my own use; I expected no one would ever submit more than one tag through that interface.
In constrast, we’ve NEVER had a submission come through that form which didn’t have multiple, correct selections.
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December 16th, 2007
I’ve been using one of Three’s USB wireless dongles this week.
It’s an E220 modem; the same one that most of the other phone companies are using.
Conclution; it’s a nice piece of kit which is going to be very useful.
At 15 Pounds a month it’s comparable to a wired connection but without the hassle and day off work involved in getting a phone line connected.
Pros.
- It works out of box; it doesn’t take days to get it activated on the network.
- It seems to have pretty good coverage.
- It works on a Mac and the PDF explaining how to set it up was correct.
- It has a pretty light which changes colours.
- It works on the train! You just can’t put a value on that.
Technical Cons.
- Initial connections and DNS lookups are rubbish.
It takes several seconds for DNS queries to complete. New ssh connections take about 5 seconds to come up.
- It’s NATed. You don’t seem to get a real IP number and you can’t make inbound connections.
- It dropped ssh connections like they were going out of fashion. This was becoming a real issue until I realised why it was happening; you’re behind a really agressive NAT gateway which is timing out your connections as fast as it can. You just need to set an ssh keep alive.
- There seems to be a transparent http proxy involved. You can’t access an http svn repository from this connection. Solution; use an https repository.
Three just been silly Cons.
- The Mac instructions say use the Mac driver CD included but the Three stores don’t have any of them to give out.
- The driver download link on the Three website is broken.
You have to google for E220 drivers and then follow the Three instruction sheet.
- To get to your data usage page you need to register online using you SIM number (fine) and your Three phone number. Abit of a problem there as you haven’t got a phone number because you didn’t actually buy a phone. I’m not sure what the resolution to this is yet.
Extra for experts
The modem comes with a SIM card; does anyone know what happens if you put this card into a phone?
Can you make calls; can you use the phone as a bluetooth modem?
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December 16th, 2007
At Twickenham Rowing Club we’ve been tinkering with an online availablity system for the past couple of years. It helps our rowers and coaches co-ordinate the cat herding task of getting 10+ people in the same place, at the same time, four times a week.
It’s a fairly rough and ready system but it’s been working well for us and we havnn’t seen anything simular in the rowing world.
This week, we released our system for use by other clubs. Part of our motive for doing this, was to try and ensure the system’s future by:
a) expanding the number and diversity of users.
b) trying to make contact with people developing simular things elsewhere in the rowing community.
The response has well and truly exceeded my expectations.
I’d thought if we were really lucky we might get 5 clubs using it within the year.
After 3 days, we’ve had over 20 clubs sign up, with a good number of those actively using it.
We’ve also had one contact from a developer working on potentally complimentally system.
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