Sometimes your problems are not caused by Windows
Friday, June 20, 2008
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.
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Five minutes with SocialThing
Saturday, May 17, 2008
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 from separate sites appear on the list at the same time), I can't then drill down to view the activity of just one friend at a time.
Nice idea, but must try harder.
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wxVenus
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Phil finally gave me an excuse to
beat lxml into submission.
And this is the result:
wxVenus on OS X.
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HOWTO: Install lxml on Mac OSX
Thursday, March 20, 2008
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.
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Finally! My wife is impressed by my nerdery
Friday, February 29, 2008
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.
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Stream of rubbish or a pool of something more interesting?
Saturday, February 23, 2008
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.. Typical.
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Is there a subtle privacy problem here?
Saturday, February 23, 2008
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.
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Can I migrate to Google Reader?
Saturday, February 17, 2007
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.
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Something to give you confidence in the Government ...
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
... 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.
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