Fair & Bare – The little shop I run (with a little help from my wife) is having a January Sale right now in celebration of entering the year 2010. Every shirt we’ve made to date is just 10 squid! Hurry up people, it only runs until Sunday.
I’ve just updated my amazon associates plugin to take into account the recent signiture changes which amazon have introduced for their webservices api.
This now also means you’ll have to enter your amazon secret access key in the plugin configuration page.
You can download the updated version over here.
It also means my wishlist has finally been brought back to life. Just in time for Christmas…
Discovering Google
Oct 25
I’ve recently read a post over on the guardians technology site which gave a whistle-stop history of the internet as it turns 40. I thought I’d share here my own experiences of growing up alongside the web, more for my own record than anything.
I remember at school a time at which there was no external connection, nor internal network (which we the pupils used) so the Acorn machines used at our school at the time could communicate with one another. Computers, for me at that point were standalone. I had as much of an interest in computing then as I do now and I can remember early on, staying around after school to use one of the only PC’s in the school (which was bought to run a piece of career piece software called Kudos), in order to attempt to run the demo games from cds found on pc mags at the time (the only one I can remember was a lawnmower man demo). I did this until ofter one time a friend and I accidentally removing the autoexec.bat file which I hadn’t backed up…..oopsy
I of course had to stick around at school because we didn’t have our own pc at home, because they were very, very expensive (When we did finally get one, it was a Crappard Bell 486 DX2 66, 4 MB of RAM, 400MB HD and was over £1000). I felt a little jealous of my friends who both had PC’s and were able to use Microsoft’s Encarta to help them out with their homework at that time. (Interestingly Encarta later also became a website and is to be discontinued later this week).
Bizarrely, I’d opted for A-Levels at 6th Form which didn’t allow me to experiment with pc’s much, not that it would have mattered as although the rest of the world was transitioning toward them, the Gryphon school I attended had a whole computing lab full of RiscPC’s. I think I went there once in the two years of A-Levels I did and kept my nose upturned whilst I was there.
Some point over this time, I’d also got hooked on a magazine called PC Format since the latter years of school, which allowed me to get all the games demos I wanted without spending however many years (and £’s) it would have taken to download them all. (I kept all 4 years worth of magazines I’d bought and cds/dvds right up unto moving in with my wife). At home, even though we were now in the year 1999, my parents hadn’t yet opted to purchase a dial-up modem and make that leap online. I was of course, still jealous of those mates – who now were connected. I got myself a hotmail account, where I eagerly awaited emails from no-one.
I can remember going to college and being scared about the prospect of doing a computing course but never having had any prior experience of using the web. My parents finally got a modem that year, but I still used to use the computing labs after teaching. I could download 1MB samples of music from Juno records much more quickly over the leased line than I ever could waiting on the 56Kbps dialup at home. I also began working at Dixons (for my sins), getting paid a pittance to talk to many clueless customers about “stereos”, “cd players” and “N64’s”. Working at Dixons did at least afford me the opportunity to experience playing Quake in Yeovils one and only internet cafe on a LAN against my friends and the staff that worked there.
My LAN parties moved to the computing labs at the university, outside of working hours (because as their 10 year old posters claim, you’re not allowed to use games on them during working hours…). Over several years of using the web, I’d never once heard of Google until it was mentioned by one of the research students taking our internet computing lectures. “You’ve probably heard of this” he said. “Er, no”, I thought – why did no-one tell me? I’d used a number of search engines such as lycos and later webcrawler, but all were pretty awful in terms of giving me what I wanted – results. Instead they seemed content with a ridiculous number of adverts and making me hunt through a huge number of pages. Their pages now seem to indicate a new direction.
A bit of a trip down memory lane, but that’s how I ended up being introduced to Google. How about you?
Aardman
Sep 26
In order for me to generate this post I’ve created something quite novel on my blog – a new category which I’ve not had a great deal of experience in previously, “work”. For the last couple of months I’ve been working for Aardman features in Bristol on their forthcoming feature film, “Pirates” – building software, which I’ll be doing at least for the next couple of months too.
I’ve been having an amazing experience over this time. Being landed in a fantastic position of working with extremely talented, creative individuals – whom have worked on tons of entertainment that I’ve chuckled away too throughout my life. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been sent to LA in order to read up and fully understand the software I’m working on too and also get to see many exciting elements of the production process. The nature of the work I’m doing has meant I’ve had to talk to everyone from the floor crew, model making, camera assistants and animators to visual effects and editorial. It has been a massive task to take in the huge amount of new information, but I am loving learning about every step in the process. It’s great to see all these steps under one roof working as a massive family unit.
The whole experience is to say the least exciting and quite honestly I am honoured to be involved with it! Here’s to the next couple of months….
PS: Check out some of aardmans wonderful characters on this page.
I don’t particularly like using URL shortening services. I think I first noticed them getting used rather prolificly in the Guardians technology section to include lots of random links to bizarre web content. TinyURL’s own web site wouldn’t particularly inspire me to go ahead and make use of it either. But, because of my own use of services such as twitter, I’m forced to shrink down links to get within those 144 characters.
Herein lies a problem – If said URL shortening service disappears, all my links are broken to all that interesting content I worked so hard to find. Not good.
In order to our bit to help, a number of developers and even services have taken action in order to make sure they provide alternatives for the links over which they’re responsible.
I’ve installed a plugin here which uses the recently puchased domain “woot10.eu” to provide alternative links using the code <link rev="canonical" href="shorter link" />. My full ianwootten.co.uk domain does not lend itself well to be able to provide a shorter URL on the same domain unforunately.
There is a whole huge discussion on the approriateness of using this technique (mainly) due to the rev attribute not being included in the HTML5 spec. See the comments in Chris Shifletts post for more on this.
Anyway, Duncans plugin takes the id of any wordpress post and coverts it to base 36 (instead of 10) and offers up the alternative in the header of each post. I believe the conversion could go all the way up to 62, if php’s base conversion actually supported the use of different cases in conversion.
In my own case, I’ve had to forward the links from woot10.eu across to www.ianwootten.co.uk using a .htaccess file so that the plugin is actually able to pick them up.
Now when you visit:
http://woot10.eu/p8p you’ll be forwarded on to the longer URL such as http://www.ianwootten.co.uk/2009/05/15/my-vicious-circle-of-posting-quality-content.
This isn’t particularly useful if you want to find the alternative for URL, as you’ll have to hunt through the source of a post. For that I’d suggest Simons bookmarklet which looks for an alternative link, or creates one if it doesn’t exist using tinyurl. As an aside, there looks to be an interesting talk on the canonical attribute and link element by Matt Cutts of google here.
I’ve been looking back at the posts on this site and the commitment that I supposedly made (internally) a couple of months ago about posting regular, interesting content. But it seemed to die a death very promptly.
I think that there may be a bit of a vicious circle here (in my own situation at least). I’d love to post regular interesting stuff, but for that to happen I need to feel that it might be read. By far the most commented stuff here is when I link up code. Those posts take a fairly substantial amount of time for me to complete as they are born of the result of my own frustration of hours spent tinkering with code, which I think might be useful for others to be clued up on. I also need time to gather my thoughts and structure what exactly I’m trying to say to people. This all adds up.
If I post more often, I fear the lesser quality of content might be pretty boring for the majority of people and probably not at all worthy of feedback from them. So I end up in a kind of stalemate position – should I post this/shouldn’t I/Oo-er and I don’t do anything. I’m not saying that I have a massive amount of visitors here, I’d just like them to enjoy the experience when they visit.
I’ve been pondering this morning how the use of the internet has (or may have) changed my life. As a child/teen during the web’s infancy, I was blissfully unaware that so many lifes/careers/relationships would be enabled or changed as a result of the interactions it might facilitate. I hadn’t even heard of google prior to arriving at university and two years prior to that had never had internet access anywhere locally.
I am sure my behaviour today would be pretty different if the web wasn’t around due to the massive impact its had in my world view. It seems a far smaller place and more tightly coupled. I feel free to drop messages to strangers and write blog posts into the ether. I won a T4 competition in my early uni years which landed me a car and £4k richer, which I wouldn’t have entered if I’d had to phone – so I’d definitely be poorer. There are however, examples where the use of the web has had a detrimental effect on particular individual lives.
It’s a huge one to think about. Would my life be better as a result of the web having not been so widely adopted in the way it has? Would yours?
Twitter is all over the news at the moment. For the uninitiated, it allows you to list short updates of what you are doing at any time. BBC News seemed to have an all-out assault at the end of January raving about it at every opportunity – the first moments of the Hudson plane landing, an short chat about it by Stephen Fry on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross and this short clip on iPlayer by Stephen Fry again. For Stephen Fry, this has meant an insane amount of new followers, indicated by the stats by twittercounter, which are shown below.
Notice the stats for 27th January – a full 20,978 extra followers in a single day! My own profile has a paltry 38 in comparison for all time!, which is about 30 more friends than I actually have offline…
I guess this huge upsurge is in part due to the fact that Stephen is such a well known comedian in the UK and by no means a stranger to the web. Just yesterday Jason Kottke observed his day as deciding “to start his own reality chat show after becoming stuck in an elevator”. He also has an awesome blog and podcast. He also is a very open advocate of open source and free software. How on earth he finds the time to live both his life virtually and as television celebrity I do not know. But I like the cut of his jib.
It seems micro-blogging is truly being picked up by the masses. I really enjoy it, but ideally I’d love to be using a decentralised open source service, hosted on my own personal webspace. I’d like to suggest the Open Micro Blogging service, laconi.ca as the way forward – but then I also want to be able to reply to my friends on twitter and them to me and I don’t think true two way cross network chat will happen for a while. I see wordpress to blogger as laconi.ca is to twitter. I’m actually surprised that there doesn’t seem to be a concerted effort from any one of the current big blog companies right now to push for a more open alternative. The automatticians have put out prologue but it doesn’t seem to have been touched for over a year and only supports sharing amongst groups (as in a working environment)…that’s no fun for the rest of us.
Bring on a true open web status service, (complete with adopters) where I can update any one of my friends on my activities by them following a status feed on my homepage and vice versa. This requires clients who make use of such services though and right now twitter is stronger in that regard.
I can’t help but feel a little sorry for music blogs as of late. I’m sure you may be familiar with The Hype Machine and may use it on a daily basis. For the uninitiated, it is essentially a music blog aggregator, which takes details of tracks and ranks them based on how often they appear and how popular they are. I’ve found it really interesting to browse around and discover new artists.
However, lately I’ve been wondering if these blogs are getting a raw deal. From my own personal experience, I can say that recommending music takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you decide to go into detail about your choices. Often, the recommendations which the Hype Machine scans are sourced from long detailed blog posts, which I’d say were put together to provide some context for why the author made those choices on any particular day. These aren’t put up quickly without little thought. However, I generally never look at these posts when listening to music from the hype machine, as I’m after that next great track fix. I can’t imagine that these blogs get much traffic that translates into loyal visitors from the machine. I’ve previously also heard that many of these blogs get a huge amount of their bandwidth eaten up from the number of downloads/streaming they get as a result. I don’t know who is to blame here, or if indeed this problem exists, whether the blogs are providing unneccessary background information or getting good results from the machine, but I still feel a little sorry for them all the same.
[Update 2/2/08: One thing I forgot to mention here is that there are alternative services offering a different way of providing music recommendations. I recently discovered the Peoples Music Store which allows users to make music recommendations within their own unique stores. The users get 10% of the sale if people decide to purchase from their stores. I really like the idea, but I'd imagine people might take these recommendations and purchase somewhere cheaper, like amazon.]
It has struck me over the last couple of days and it’s a reflection of my attitude to being interested in geeky things in general. I’m an elitist. When I started my blog back in 2003, I loved the fact that relatively few of them existed. It was a reflection of my day to day life and I felt my voice was being heard (even though I had no analytics tools to back that up and it was not particularly interesting).
Back then, I started out on Movable Type and quickly moved it over to b2/cafelog, which later grew into Wordpress. Fast forward 5 years to now and every manner of blog subject exists, whilst in the meantime my own seems to have fallen into a state of disrepair.
I think my blogs’ own slowdown has occurred because blogging about day to day life is not so much fun now – I’m no longer unique as I was in terms of the technical ability of being able to output my thoughts. Anyone can start a blog, tumblelog, lifestream or twitter account and use it to expose their daily activity online. They need to know nothing, or very little at all about how the back end works. So I’m now left thinking, what do I have to contribute in all this?
My own PhD research has had little exposure here, where if I had chosen to air my thoughts, it might be continuing in new directions from discussion which may have opened up around it. Instead, it is hidden away in research papers and closed forums which an average joe may never come across.
I’m proposing that I push to air my thoughts on all manner of subject here over the coming year, as well as my usual day-to-day activity. Hopefully I’ll be contributing something new, something interesting, something playing on my mind and which I want to discuss with each post.
I’d love it if you’d join me for the ride and I promise I won’t be at all elitist.