blog :: misc

Map Of South Australian Country Fire Service Incidents

Posted on 01 Jan 2010 by Andy

When South Australia’s Country ire Service started to provide an RSS feed of incidents last week, I (along with many other SA geeks) immediately thought:

Map Mashup!

So, slightly hungover after a great New Year’s Eve celebration, I fired up Yahoo Pipes and set to.

It was a pretty straightforward task - strip the suburb name out of the feed title, append "South Australia" to help the location builder module and grab the output as KML. You can see the pipe here so feel free to make a copy and mess around with it.

Here is the finished map (RSS readers will need to click through to the story to view it)


View Larger Map

When government agencies open up their data like this, cool things happen. Hope you like it.

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Raising Awareness Of Australian Internet Censorship With A Silly Twitter Tool

Posted on 19 Dec 2009 by Andy

I try to keep my political views out of this blog but with recent news that the Australian Government is to introduce mandatory internet filtering at the ISP level, I must add my voice to those that are crying out against this massive reduction of freedom of speech.

If you haven’t heard about the Australian Labour Party’s plans, they involve forcing all ISPs to implement a Chinese-style great firewall that will prevent access to domains and URLs that are listed on a secret list.

Adelaide Nocleanfeed protester

NoCleanFeed Elsewhere

A great deal of discussion has centred around this issue and I won’t go into why censorship is bad or why the plan is doomed to failure. Instead here are a bunch of links discussing (well, attacking) the Communications Minister’s position far more eloquently than I can:

For more up-to-date commentary, see the No Clean Feed site from Electronic Frontiers Australia or even see the #nocleanfeed hashtag on twitter.

NoCleanFeed Censored Twitter

I’ve made a (admitedly frivolous) twitter toy to raise some awareness of this issue, that shows the #nocleanfeed twitter stream and Kevin Rudd’s tweets with random words blacked out - unless they contain some swearing.

I hope you enjoy it and it provokes some discussion, so please RT!

The NoCleanFeed Twitter Toy is here.


Creative Commons licensed photo by Tarale.

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Back In Leeds For Hackday North

Posted on 21 Sep 2009 by Andy

First, an apology: it has been far, far too long since my last blog post. Emmigration, moving house and a well-deserved holiday have kept me away from the keyboard. I’ll be getting back up to speed and putting a few projects together in the coming weeks.

I am currently back in Leeds, visiting friends and whilst I’m annoyed that I missed this year’s Think Visibility, organiser Dom has teamed up with mad scientist Tim Nash to put together a hack day and I can make it!

Hack Day Ideas

I need to think of some project ideas to fill my time at Hackday, so here are a few initial thoughts. If any interest you or you think I would make a good addition to your team, do get in touch.

Pizza

SMS

The event is being held in AQ Ltd’s headquarters in Leeds. AQ offer an excellent (and easy) SMS to CGI gateway that I have used before so I’d like some kind of mobile/SMS element to the project. Twitter has shown that integrating SMS technologies with the web can be hugely successful - largely due to simplicity and accessibility of the ideas.

Location

Maps are favourite tool of mashup makers and 24 hour hackers are no exception, so a location element would be a good addition to the project. Getting location data from a mobile phone can be tricky though, any mobile developers going to Hack Day able to offer assistance?

As the YDN are a sponsor, Fire Eagle might also be a good fit for the location data.

Data, Data, Data

A nice big dataset is always useful for a quick mashup (saves a lot of time entering or discovering the data yourself) and there are a lot available on the web if you know where to look. (BTW Wikileaks has the entire UK postcode database avilable, have a search).

Another event sponsor is SUN Startup Essentials who offer (amongst other things) MySql licenses and cheap hardware, so a big, fat RDBMS could be on the cards.

My Skills

I should outline how I can help your team or why you should join up with me for the event: I have over fifteen years of experience developing software across a range of platforms and industries, I can write Perl, PHP, Javascript, C++, SQL and HTML. I have experience of network programming, database design and user interface design too.

So, if you want to discuss project ideas or put a team together then please get in touch or leave a comment below.

There are still tickets left, get yours free now if you haven’t signed up already. See you there!


Creative Commons Licensed Photo by wEnDaLicious.

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Short Domain Names For Sale

Posted on 27 Jun 2009 by Andy

Over the years I’ve amassed a bunch of domain names that I planned to build something with or were just too good a bargain to miss. It’s time for a clear out so I am offering these three and four character domain names for sale.

Short domains are great for domain investors as the number of available character combinations is small and demand is constantly rising, or you could use one of these domains to build your own URL shortener for microblogging services like twitter.

They are all currently parked at sedo and registered with hosts that allow free transfer (like name.com, GoDaddy, etc.) Check the WhoIs data for the full details, including domain age and expiry date.

If a domain catches your eye, then contact me to make an offer, or you can arrange the sale through sedo if you prefer.

Three Character Domain Names

1g1.org

jc7.net

Four Character Domain Names

00gb.com

00mb.com

1kis.com

1xel.com

4dac.com

7cvs.com

7kia.com

ae02.com

dab3.com

dr4g.com

hcs5.com

lez3.com

ses7.com

ssg0.com

If this sale is a success, I’ve got some more domains that I might put on sale. The offer is for the domain name only, no website or email. Payment via PayPal or escrow.com for large sums.

It’s first-come, first-served so get your offer in quickly!


Creative Commons licensed photo by woowoowoo.

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Will April Fools Day Be Cancelled Next Year?

Posted on 31 Mar 2009 by Andy

On the day of the year when it seems like every site on the internet tries to fool its readership, posting false statements to the internet has been officially banned by government leaders. Heads of the G20 nations meeting in London today issued a short but grave statement decrying frivolity during these dire economic times and announcing a global internet censorship program.

During the press conference, Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Barack Obama and President Hu Yoo of China stated that in future every internet post must be held to the highest standards of factual probity.

An international body will be formed to vet every file, blog post, page and comment uploaded to the internet. Formed under the auspices of the United Nations, the body will be known as the International Standard for Truth In Network Communications and will be led a chairman appointed by treaty signatories. Former Vietnamese leader, Saloth Sar has been tipped by insiders to head the organisation.

Successfully pulling off an excellent early April Fools prank yesterday, Smashing Magazine claimed that IE 8 might actually be useful. This is thought to be the last ever hoax to be perpetrated through the internet and the world’s police forces are poised to arrest any merrymakers that might be tempted to ignore the ruling today.

Here is a video of the full press briefing at the G20 summit - check out the disbelief in the reporters’ voices at the end!

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ThinkVisibility Was A Blast!

Posted on 08 Mar 2009 by Andy

It’s the day after ThinkVisibility, Leeds’ first SEO conference. I had a great time, learned a lot and met some great people.

I won’t repeat the content of the talks (most of the speakers are going to publish their slides) but I do want to give out some props. Every single speaker was great - there was not one duff talk - and everyone I spoke with was having fun.

Some of the off-piste discussions were hugely valuable too (sometimes it pays to be a smoker, you meet the most interesting people outside) and the after party was great for networking and exchanging notes.

Thanks to The Hodge for doing a sterling job with the organising, thanks to the speakers for their hard work and hello to everyone who I spoke to during the day.

If you didn’t make it (shame on you), there’s another planned for September so look out for the announcement when tickets go on sale. Hopefully it will coincide with a planned trip back from Australia so I can attend.


Creative Commons licensed photo by marciookabe.

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Leeds Twestival - Hurry Up And Get Your Tickets!

Posted on 11 Feb 2009 by Andy

Twestival Logo

Twestivals are being planned to happen simultaneously in cities all over the world tomorrow (Thursday 12th February) evening and Leeds is not going to miss out.

Charity

A twestival is an event where local twitter users band together to raise money to fight global problems. All the money from tomorrow’s event will be donated to charity : water, a non-profit organisation bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.

From the twestival homepage:

We all know that Twitter can be a powerful communications tool. It can connect, mobilize and inform people around the world instantly.

Those of us on Twitter know of its ability to organically create interesting communities from those people who find and follow each other. It is proven from the first Twestival that bringing the Twittersphere together for a special event is not only a memorable night; it has momentum to bring about social change.

Fun And Prizes

It’s definitely a worthy cause but the evening should be a lot of fun too!

Attendees will get to meet some of the faces behind the avatars and I know from previous events like Barcamp and Ignite there are some clever and funny people that get involved in nights like this.

Get your hands on a load of raffle tickets, because there are some great prizes on offer. I’ve got my eye on the rib eye steaks from @cwildman, yum!

As well as the raffle, there will be Wii tournaments and a chance to play with a FriiSpray but I suspect that the networking opportunities will be most valuable to some. Quite a few of Yorkshire’s top 50 Twitter users are going.

Having SEO problems with your site? Maybe you can bribe The Hodge with a charity donation in exchange for some advice.

Other people attending have expertise in Ruby programming, machine learning, photogrpaphy and food and wine matching. Of course, I’ll be happy to answer questions on web development issues for you.

Tickets

Buy your tickets online for just five quid and raffle tickets at a pound each.

You’ll need to bring your own drinks along too, but if you are coming, let me know and maybe you can have one of my beers!

See you there!


Creative Commons licensed photo by rhosoi.

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Ignite UK North Was A Huge Success

Posted on 22 Jan 2009 by Andy

Ignite took place at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds and was very well attended with OBH staffers commenting that they’d never seen the place so busy.

Ignite Logo

If you’ve never been to an Ignite event before (and I hadn’t) the format is a little unusual, but very effective. Each speaker gets five minutes to present twenty slides with each slide automatically advancing after fifteen seconds. This keeps presenters on their toes, the audience interested and topics fresh.

It also means lots of speakers and not much time to take notes so I’ll only be blogging a couple of key take-aways from each presentation.

Craig Smith from O’Reilly Media’s GMT blog gave the introduction and was giving out some O’Reilly books throughout the evening. I didn’t get one.

Katie Lipps

First to present was Katie Lipps talking about the CoffeeBuzz iPhone application and what her team had learned during its development and subsequent marketing. You can find reports of their findings at theAmazingiPhone.com with two reports tailored for business people and developers released under a Creative Commons license.

  • Paper prototyping paid off
  • Design important for Mac users
  • Field test, localise, be nice to bloggers
  • Pricing is not easy yet

Jeff Allen

A fascinating talk from Doctors Without Borders volunteer Jeff, covering the ways that technology is being used in Africa and the unique challenges faced by techies operating in deprived conditions there.

  • Skills exist in Africa
  • Wifi good for village-village relay
  • Offline wikipedia
  • Kiosk to download content to USB
  • HIV treatment has difficulty with registration. Use a dedicated registrar using a locally made system, powered by windmill & battery.
  • Fix problems as they occur. Not pre-specced, expensive or centralised

Tim Panton

Tim wants us Web 2.0 developers to consider integrating voice into our applications. Thankfully, he didn’t mean to add speech synthesis to websites but to use the telephone as part of the customer funnel.

  • Public thinks phone & web are closely linked
  • First time mobile callers get an SMS back with link to phone-friendly content
  • Use the tel: URI protocol & associate web session with phone call, eg. know what the customer was looking at
  • Open-source PBXs or hosted services

Michael Sparks

Michael came from the BBC’s R&D department to give a talk about embracing concurrency - a tricky (and techie) subject to fit into five minutes.

He argued that because of poor tools, insufficient teaching and language traction, frameworks and design patterns are necessary to effectively apply concurrency to modern architectures. As an ex-real-time developer, I agree but I think a few people’s eyes glazed over.

Dean Vipond

Barcamp veteran Dean covered perfection in design.

In a fun talk, he pointed out that design classics still have problems (often with usability for the disabled) but he had found his own design nirvana:

Boots own brand paracetomol packaging.

Alexandra Dechamps-Sonsino

I hadn’t heard about the Arduino before this talk on hardware hacking, and I suspect that the talk was a thinly disguised plug for Alexandra’s product. But the device looks like it might be fun for someone with a greater interest in hardware than I do.

Ian Pringle

Ian wanted us all to think about what happens to our digital assets after we die - a fairly morbid subject that was presented in an interesting and, at times, light-hearted manner.

  • Digital wills
  • Physical assets are useful for historians etc but digital assets are treated as disposable
  • Personal assets, social assets, public assets
  • Legal issues - Ts & Cs, data protection
  • Digital next of kin? 3rd party key holders?
  • Are people still around? Dead man’s handle

Dom Hodgson

SEO Dominic talked about the future of search, a topic I covered in my predicition for 2009.

  • SEO = Google
  • Personalisation & localisation important
  • Video search inside podcasts
  • 10 blue links work
  • Natural language search

Edward French - Enterprise Ventures

Edward gave us the skinny on funding for tech startups as his company specialises in early stage ventures. Despite powerpoint problems, he delivered an interactive talk asking lots of questions of the audience.

  • Might take a year to finalise the deal

Tom Scott

After a short interval, Tom gave us a funny warm up for part two: My life in 20 graphs.

Stuart Chils & Richard Garside

Describing their project, the FriiSpray which provides a cheap interface to create virtual graffiti. They used Wiimote whiteboard with some Macromedia Flash code they have made a cheap electronic whiteboard.

They ended with an appeal for help from programmers and artists who want to get involved.

Kate Brown

Kate described how Leeds’ mental health professionals are using technology and especially social media to bring information and services where they are needed.

Check out her Tumblr for more.

Arturo Servin

Arturo’s talk covered a topic that I am very interested in - Practical AI & Machine Learning. He gave a good introduction to AI & presented some useful resources, covering a complex discipline well in a five minute talk.

Glenn Smith

Using saddle making to illustrate the concept of mass customisation, Glenn showed how automation can free up resources for product improvement.

  • Customisation = expensive
  • Leave the math to the machines
  • User chooses features, clever tech specs it, machines make item

Guy Dickinson

A surprisingly interesting talk from Guy on his vision for the future of reading. After the hype of Amazon’s Kindle and e-book readers from Sony, he had really considered his subject well.

  • Mobile phones not e-book readers
  • People read in toilet, bed & bath - technology impact
  • Writing will be shorter and easier to consume in short bursts: pamphlets
  • Books can be customised - great for students & Harry Potter fanfic
  • Social media to share annotations & reviews
  • DRM

Philip Hemsted

Start-up founder Philip talked about psychology as it applies to team building.

  • Six facial expressions common to all races/cultures
  • Co-operative instincts benefit mankind
  • Psychometrics measure personality traits so you can predict how your team will perform
  • Bulding teams is essential skill for entrepreneurs

Ian Forrester

Ian gave us a preview of his sex & twitter startup TweetFoxxy.com, to much sniggering. It promises to be very like Mr Tweet but finds people for you to hook up with. Twitter users send DMs stating the attributes of a partner that they’re looking for and eventually TweetFoxxy sends you a DM with a recommendation. Users then chat via an intermediary (so there is no face-to-face rejection) then introduce themselves and chat directly when they feel able.

It will be a free service but advert supported.

James Boardwell

James talked about the politics of patterns as they apply to his work on folksy.com - a UK etsy.

  • Shops have a place in seller’s heart. Their page is “theirs” - owners don’t want links to other sellers
  • Needed ways to promote new sellers - not just old favourites
  • Taste affects sellers - don’t sell plates next to a woolly penis
  • Users of the site imitate each (and other sites) which affects the tech & community
  • Design challenges of managing different stakeholders

Conclusion

As you can see, it was an interested and varied evening and I consider myself a fan of the Ignite format. Hopefully, there will be some Ignite events in Adelaide when I get there, in which case I’ll definitely be attending.

Thanks to the organisers, sponsors, speakers and attendees for an enjoyable evening.

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Two Great Conferences In Leeds Coming Up

Posted on 20 Dec 2008 by Andy

There are two great conferences being held in Leeds next year and I’m very much looking forward to both.

O’Reilly Ignite

First up is Ignite UK North sponsored by O’Reilly media. Held on January 22nd at Old Broadcaasting House, it promises to be a great evening of short talks and presentations in the classic Ignite format.

Many of the usual Leeds crowd will be in attendance so no doubt a few beers afterwards will fuel some shennanigins.

Here is a short video of Tim O’Reilly plugging Ignite UK North:

Think Visibility

Think Visibility is also at Old Broadcasting House, a little later in the year on March 7th.

Some of the biggest names in British SEO will be speaking so grab a ticket before they sell out. No doubt Tim Nash, Patrick Altoft and David Naylor will be delivering a few search engine optimisation secrets as well as pay-per-click and usability advice. It should be well worth the £30 entrance fee.

I will be attending both so if you can make it, please come and say hello. Oh, while I remember, theHodge, you owe me a pint!

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Twitter Serendipity

Posted on 09 Oct 2008 by Andy

Just a short, throw-away post today as I have a good amount of work on at the moment, but this was too good not to share!

Marshall Kirkpatrick, RSS guru and blogger for ReadWriteWeb was pimping his latest post on Twitter which was immediately followed by a tweet from Barry Carlyon from Leeds Student Radio.

The results could not have been scripted...

Marshall: How much do top tier bloggers and social media consultants get paid? Barry: Cookies!

Made me chuckle anyway.

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