Mockery for beginners

Moving to Drupal

2008-05-23T09:33:00.004+01:00

I'm moving this from Blogger to Drupal. I am effectively going to be eating my own dog food. I wonder how to move the content???? What about comments? I only really got comments when I offered joost invites. I think I'll be ok without those.

I reckon copy and paste is much faster than trawling for software.

Drupal and winamp!

2008-04-30T12:48:00.002+01:00

I'm writing Drupal websites at the moment and had a big pc crash that needed the power plug pulling. On reloading winamp actually had Drupal code in the playlist window. Naturally I pressed play but it didn't produce a web page.

IIS 6.0 Tracing

2008-04-01T12:21:00.004+01:00

If you want to trace a single files activity this tracing page on microsoft.com. Unless you are patch levels above Service pack one on Server 2003 then the command

adsutil.vbs set w3svc/n/TraceUriPrefix=pathtoURL

won't work.

Just replace the = with a space and it works.

Snakes eating themselves, or at least foxes

2008-02-13T21:17:00.005Z

In general I think it's nice when OS X asks you whether you want to open something you just downloaded but when you are upgrading Firefox the message is particularly weird

Ruby with MySQL on Leopard

2008-02-10T10:44:00.000Z

I have just spent far too long trying to get Scrubyt, rails and MySQL working. Scrubyt is amazing but very particular about the versions of Gems it needs. When and if you install, remember to install with gem install -v ... e.t.c. and you will need to remove some stuff and put older versions in, for instance RubyInline will be too new for scrubyt. That's annoying. However the killer was MySQL, I spent a while just not being able to get Ruby to call it until http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/ruby/wiki/Troubleshooting solved my problems. Now I am scraping pages easily and saving table info into MySQL in erm 5 lines of code...

Commuting

2008-02-03T21:21:00.001Z

I still don't see any tools out there to help me choose where to move to. Why isn't there something that lets me compare train journey times with house prices?

Anil Dash: Blackbird, Rainman, Facebook and the Watery Web

2007-10-11T08:12:00.001+01:00

I just had to link to this. I love trips down memory lane that show patterns in modern life.

http://www.dashes....-facebook-and-the-new-tables.html

The face of the crowd

2007-10-09T08:58:00.000+01:00

I actually feel relieved today after reading TechCrunch's post on the facebook fbFund, a program to give grants to facebook platform developers. Whilst on Project Red Stripe we solicited ideas from the web and we took a bit of a slamming from slashdot and other places over our t&c's. To be fair we also received praise for even trying to do it.

It is plain difficult to be a company that is trying to embrace the power of the crowd without upsetting some people.

After our initial offer to the market asking for ideas we added to the blog a few paragraphs that read like this.

So if you have a flash of genius that you don't mind someone else taking to market then let us know. If you have a flash of genius that you want to take to market then good luck.

This is essentially because most people couldn't start a business with The Economist's customers, content or brand recognition. Ideas are great but execution is everything.

The whole point of this piece is that I feel relieved that facebook have had to put out a huge terms document to it's potential developers who may get funded. I feel proud that we got it right first time round and sent out the t&c's first time.

I'd worry about building a facebook application around a new or non existent brand.

Mario Madness

2007-07-11T12:11:00.000+01:00

Check this guy out playing the Mario theme on two guitars.

For more see this blog post

Intrapreneur videos

2007-07-07T12:45:00.000+01:00

I am an intrapreneur currently so why not post two rap videos about intrapreneur. They are not embeddable booo so here are the links.

Slim shady - Will the real intrapreneurs please stand up

Hollaback intrapreneur

lughenjo

2007-07-06T13:45:00.001+01:00

The lughenjo logo is now available at lughenjo courtesy of the fantastic Zak Youngman.

Work getting you down? Too much to do?

2007-07-05T13:43:00.000+01:00

Facebook toolbar breaks firefox location bar

2007-05-14T09:16:00.000+01:00

The facebook toolbar is available but be careful, installing it on my firefox installation (2.0.0.2) caused the enter key and go arrow to stop working in the location bar. I had to disable the toolbar to get firefox working properly again. Hyperlinks etc still worked but no manual entry.

Of course I have many plugins installed. It could be a compatibility issue with the Dictionary, delicious bookmarks, DOM Inspector, Firebug, MeasureIt, Screen grab!, StumbleUpon, Talkback, User Agent Switcher or Web Developer.

One click award

2007-05-13T10:55:00.000+01:00

I love this Japanese site for making me feel like a god.

998 joost invites for anyone

2007-05-02T23:01:00.000+01:00

I am the only reader so I don't expect a single comment. Still if anyone does want a joost invite. I have lots

twitterfied

2007-05-01T22:26:00.000+01:00

The crowds are annoying. Just as Chelsea went out to Liverpool on penalties, I hate penalties, twitter public timeline went mad with people saying stuff like "john terry is boo hoo hooing! that's made my day". Why aren't the Liverpool fans on it saying Yay. erm that's because they are watching the game. ok I'll be quiet. The crowds are unsurprising.

Linux on Dell machinces

2007-05-01T18:26:00.000+01:00

I think this is bloody important. Dell are to have Linux as an option on machines they sell. This shows the power of the crowd, look at dellideastorm. They will be shipping Ubuntu on particular machines.

Is today the day it changes?

The crowd have argued for Linux. Linux is built by the crowd. Happy days for the crowd.

Toondoo is ace

2007-03-28T14:05:00.001+01:00

The links are beginning to come in (erm to projectredstripe.com)

2007-03-11T19:49:00.000Z

We've been linked to from around the blogosphere. It's getting seriously interesting. Just as a person who is watching as well as taking part I find it fascinating.

These are just a few that are linking. I will definitely try to keep watching these blogs and others that are linking to Project Red Stripe.

http://www.midasoracle.org/2007/03/11/the-economist-seeks-fortune-tellers/

http://open.typepad.com/open/2007/03/more_media_inno.html

http://candide.blogsome.com/ 2007/03/11/yay-the-economist-boo-kleptocracy/

http://www.julianonsoftware.com/?p=1824

http://bloggingrbi.blogspot.com/2007/03/project-red-stripe.html

http://ketcheson.net/2007/03/11/links-for-2007-03-11/

http://exacteditions.blogspot.com/2007/03/project-red-stripe.html

http://citmedia.org/blog/ 2007/03/10/ economist-magazine-tests-open- system-with-tom-sawyer-economics/

http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2007/03/blogger_base_ca.html
(Tom should tell people he was in sales!)

http://jackkonblog.blogspot.com/ 2007/03/why-i-no-longer-read-economist.html

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Project_20Red_20Stripe

http://eoinpurcellsblog.com/2007 /03/09/the-economist-cool-who-saw-that-coming/

http://www.enriquedans.com/2007 /03/project-red-stripe-the-economist-investiga-el-futuro.html (Spanish I think)

http://www.triarchypress.co.uk/blog/2007/02/ assumptions-and-bad-science.html
Our Project Red Stripe publishers blog!

http://nomadlife.org/2007/03/economist-innovation-unit.aspx

http://lenedgerlydotcom.blogspot.com/ 2007/03/web-smart-skunkworks-at-economist.html

I'm using Google Blog Search to track them

Let the chaos begin

2007-03-11T17:37:00.000Z

We've received comments on
http://projectredstripe.com/blog/2007/03/09/going-live/

I think mainly from the slashdot crowd. Oh yes we were slashdotted.

At the same time we received a record day in page views and took tons of ideas on the web site. We were flamed for our terms and conditions and also by those who don't allow Javascript. The JavaScript complaints came from slashdot.org. I've noticed that they tend to attack sites that use anything other than base level technology, in this case a rich text editor, however the site is basically about technology. If I'm to believe that the slashdotters don't want new technologies to be used why do they read a site that basically comments on technology related events. Before I attack my self when reading this back as I am of course the only reader I know the website should degrade correctly to allow non javascript'd people in. I have no real excuse. I'm sorry

Project Red Stripe is accepting ideas

2007-03-09T15:01:00.000Z

GO give some

Genius js thing.

2007-02-25T14:03:00.000Z

Go anywhere on the web, flickr and amazon work really well then paste this into the URL bar

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

Screw this page up

amazon mockery

2007-02-18T17:35:00.000Z

My on time and on target manager book is erm delayed.....

Dear Customer,

We wanted to give you an update on the status of your order.

We are sorry to report that the following items have been delayed.

Kenneth H. Blanchard (Author), Steve Gottry (Author) "The On-time,
On-target Manager (One Minute Manager)" [Hardcover]

We are sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

Yahoo pipes and The Economist

2007-02-11T18:46:00.000Z

Hi,

Yahoo pipes has launched and is an "easy" way to push feeds around and filter them to produce altered output for you. In this simple example I have taken the articles from Economist.com's news analysis section and pushed them through flickr. See my Economist.com thru flickr presentation.
It loses the article detail from Economist.com so if I was to edit this I'd make sure that the flickr pictures get added to each item from Economist.com. I haven't looked or figured out whether that is possible yet or whether pipes is just about tunneling. I suspect it is. I don't know

Lighting fires

2007-02-11T17:50:00.000Z

Charlie Brooker lit a fire on the commentisfree blog on The Guardian. His post attacked mac users more than macs. It is worth a read. At the time of writing the comment count is 778 with 695 blogs linking to that article. It's a touchy subject. I guess this post will be 696. People have very strong opinions on mac vs pc. I think that they both have a place regardless of how smug users of the respective platforms are. I think the argument is flawed. The argument should be Apple v Microsoft or OSX vs Windows especially as they now run on the same hardware. I love that now a contentious article can get a massive response. This morning on Sunday AM I watched Iain Dale describe his blog and blogging in general as a conversation. I think he's on the right track but Yasmin Alibhai-Brown tore into him saying that she has conversations with people who email her regarding the articles she features in her independent column. I think Iain is closer to being correct as Yasmin may reply to her commenter's emails, but they are not in the public eye. Iain's commenter's post publicly and Iain can reply publicly. That is a debate. I think he should have described blogging as a debate rather than a discussion. The Economist does , even if only in the red fly title linking to one of it's three blogs from the homepage and the URL. See the inbox, freeexchange and democracy in america blogs on economist.com