digitalsean's blog

digitalsean's blog http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk Most recent posts at digitalsean's blog posterous.com Wed, 29 Sep 2010 01:34:00 -0700 Moodle and overlib 4.10 http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/moodle-and-overlib-410 http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/moodle-and-overlib-410

There's an odd bug with our installation of Moodle 1.9.x which comes up occasionally.

"overLIB 4.10 or later is required for the CSS style plugin"

This seems to be caused when one of the javascript files fails to load properly, and then gets stuck in the users browser cache.

Clearing the users browser cache normally fixes the problem. In one case last year, it was simpler to to force to to refresh from the server side, and so I temporarily added a dummy version parameter to the end of the line in lib/javascript.php which loads overlib.js to become eg. overlib.js?update=1. A cleaner way to do this, depending on how your etags are configured, might be to update the last modified date on the file in question - so "touch lib/overlib/overlib.js" might also help.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Mon, 27 Sep 2010 06:40:00 -0700 Debugging a Promethian ActivBoard http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/debugging-a-promethian-activboard http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/debugging-a-promethian-activboard

Learned a few tricks today while trying to debug problems with a Promethian ActiveBoard 2+. The board was not responding to any pens. After a short time discovered that the "pen" was a Wacom digitiser stylus, so tracked down a real Promethian pen.

The board was being recognised in the ActivManager hardware section, but the pen movement and touch was having no effect.

Restarted the PC.

Updated to the latest version of ActivInspire, and also separately updated to latest ActivDriver.

Turned off the projector, waited for cool down red light to stop flashing. Power cycled the board by unplugging, waiting 20 seconds and plugging back in again.

Disconnected the USB cable, waited for one minute and plugging back in again.

Two useful tricks learned:

1. To escape from the calibration when pen is not working, right click on your mouse.

2. Our ActivBoard 2+ works after a fashion while in standby mode (button is red). The pen works, but the tracking is erratic and lines are a bit jaggy when the power button is on red/standby. Make sure that the board is turned on with green light showing.

Activboard-standby-secret

Knowledgebase:

http://uk.prometheankb.com/display/4/kb/article.aspx?aid=313911&n=1&docid=16844&tab=search

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:51:04 -0700 Deleting pages from books and other Drupal gotchas http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/deleting-pages-from-books-and-other-drupal-go http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/deleting-pages-from-books-and-other-drupal-go

There is a significant differance between the behaviour of the drupal edit books admin pages and the drupal menus admin pages. Specifically the delete link does very different things.

Drupal -> Admin -> Menus -> Menuname (edit)

Drupal -> Admin -> Books -> Bookname (edit order and titles)

The delete buttons on the lists of items in these two core drupal module do very different things. Clicking delete in the edit list in the book module deletes the node, whereas clicking on delete in the menu module just deletes the menu item and leaves the node in place.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:01:00 -0700 Update on Blackboard and Firefox 3.6 - Badly formatted request issue http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/update-on-blackboard-and-firefox-36-badly-for http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/update-on-blackboard-and-firefox-36-badly-for

I posted earlier on a problem with Firefox 3.5/6, caching and etags headers and Blackboard 7.3.

The issue appears the second time they click on the xid-9999 redirect which is shown when a file resource appears in a content list. The message is

400 BADLY FORMATTED REQUEST, Tomcat / Apache error message

Possble solution - have apache intercept and rewrite the headers for urls in this format. Check that mod_headers is enabled in apache and add the following to the apache config file.

<LocationMatch "/bbcswebdav/xid-*"> Header unset If-Modified-Since Header unset If-None-Match </LocationMatch>

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Fri, 12 Mar 2010 07:57:00 -0800 Blackboard and Firefox 3.6 - Badly formatted request http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/blackboard-and-firefox-36-badly-formatted-req http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/blackboard-and-firefox-36-badly-formatted-req

Came across an odd problem with Blackboard 7.3 server and Firefox 3.6. It seems that our users who have upgraded to Firefox 3.6 are encountering a problem when they view web resource linked using xid-9999 type urls.

The first time someone clicks on an item linked to a file resource in a content list it appears normally.

But the second time they try to click on the link to the resource, they see:

400 BADLY FORMATTED REQUEST, Tomcat / Apache error message

It appers that the crux of the problem is how Firefox 3.6 responds to caching and etags headers.

One workaround for now is to clear your cache using Firefox / Preferences / Advanced / Network / Clear Now

Update: posted a proposed solution using apache to clean up the requests

Here's the long version......

We're using Blackboard v7.3.230.0 running on Tomcat 5.5.26 on Apache 1.3.

The linked items use a perminant url in the formal /xid-98788. Requests for this page are then redirected to the current version of the file in the content collection. I notice that the server returns an etag and expires header even on the 302 temporary redirect responses. It does not include nocache headers and it uses the same dummy etag for every response, and an expires header in +24 hours.

When Firefox 3.6 requests the /xid-99999 resource it includes the etag and an if-modified-since header based on the previous last modified date.

The Blackboard / Tomcat server doesn't seem to like these headers and throws a 400 Badly formatted request error.

The first time Firefox 3.6 requests the page

GET http://vision.hw.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/xid-310314_2

The response is:

302 Moved Temporarily

Response headers include:

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:33:41 GMT X-Blackboard-product: Blackboard Academic Suite™ 7.3.230.0 Cache-Control: public <strong>Etag: bb-cache-1</strong> <strong>Last-Modified: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:16:31 GMT</strong> <strong>Expires: Sat, 12 Mar 2011 14:33:41 GMT</strong> Content-Disposition: filename="index.htm", filename="index.htm", filename="index.htm", filename="index.htm", filename="index .htm" Location: http://vision.hw.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/courses/COURSENAME/somedir/ufp1/index.htm Content-Length: 0 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=96 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: application/octet-stream;charset=UTF-8

The second time Firefox requests the page:

GET http://vision.hw.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/xid-310314_2

Unlike previous versiosn of Firefox eg. 3.0.17, in firefox 3.6, two extra request headers are sent -

<strong>If-Modified-Since: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:16:31 GMT</strong> <strong>If-None-Match: bb-cache-1</strong>

Reponse is:

400_BADLY_FORMATTED_REQUEST

and includes these headers:

X-Blackboard-product: Blackboard Academic Suite™ 7.3.230.0 Cache-Control: public Etag: bb-cache-1 Last-Modified: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:16:31 GMT Expires: Sat, 12 Mar 2011 14:49:32 GMT

Regular files in content collection as opposed to xid refereces are served up to Firefox 3.6 normally, so you may reload a page several times once you have been redirected, but using the link from the list of resources twice causes the problem.

GET http://vision.hw.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/courses/COURSENAME/somedir/index.html

Response 200 OK

Request headers include:

http://vision.hw.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/courses/B21UF_2009-2010/ultrafast/index.html

If-Modified-Since: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:31:17 GMT If-None-Match: "227921-219620"

Response headers include

Pragma no-cache Cache-Control no-cache Etag "227921-219620" X-Blackboard-product Blackboard Academic Suite™ 7.3.230.0

Reposne headers include:

Pragma: no-cache Cache-Control: private Etag: "227921-219620" Last-Modified: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:23:27 GMT Expires: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:49:25 GMT

Workaround for now - use another browser? Chrome, Safari. Or in Firefox clear the cache when you see this issue.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:17:09 -0800 Re-inventing my blog http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/re-inventing-my-blog http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/re-inventing-my-blog

So I've decided to dust off the blog, and migrate all my old typepad posts over to blog.seanfarrell.co.uk. Promised to do some more blogging and write up some of the things that I have been up to recently.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:52:38 -0800 Public courses from a noguest moodle http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/public-courses-from-a-noguest-moodle http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/public-courses-from-a-noguest-moodle Our VLE is set.up primarily to give our students access to course resources, however it has been taken on by some research groups as collaboration space. Some of the groups are interested in making their areas public and allowing people without accounts access. The difficulty arrises because we want to be able to quickly change courses between 3 levels of access - closed : enrolled students and staff only preview : any student or staff has read only access public : open to external visitors as guest We presently use the 'guest' faculity to provide the preview access within a closed (no guest/google) moodle. Couple of options come to mind: 1. Close all courses to guest access, and then enable preview access using role overrides at category or course level. The enable public guest access. 2. Pinhole for specific courses by tweaking login and require_login() function. (If only there was a hook, or I was confident enough to install php pecl runkit) 3. Create a paralled networked moodle, where public courses can be hosted with different permissions Number 3 looks like the way we are going - a networked moodle means that we can give our internal users permissions to manage their courses, and also permit guest access or self registered users in a more public space.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:07:32 -0800 Moodle and Mediafilter - disabling inline flash http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/moodle-and-mediafilter-disabling-inline-flash http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/moodle-and-mediafilter-disabling-inline-flash So among the small things I've found out today is that moodle does some interesting things when you upload html pages and try to serve them through a moodle course. If the filter files configuration is on then the moodle text filters may rewrite things in the file, making smilies appear or adding the theme css and moodle javascripts eg. Ufo.js to the header of the file. It also means that if mediafilter is turned on, links like a href="something.swf" are automatically rewritten into an embedded flash object. Quick tip to disable this is to add a question mark onto the end of the filename. A href="something.swf?" will not be rewritten.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:02:59 -0800 date/time value reaches 1234567890 tonight http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/datetime-value-reaches-1234567890-tonight http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/datetime-value-reaches-1234567890-tonight

Many computer systems represent date and time values by counting the number of seconds since a specific date and time. The commonly used UNIX date time value counts from 1 January 1970 00:00 GMT.

At 23:31:30 GMT today (Friday 13 February 2009) the unix datetime value reaches the integer number 1234567890.

Frequently asked questions

Q1: Is there a website where I can see a countdown?

A: Why yes, visit : http://www.1234567890day.com or also http://coolepochcountdown.com

Q2: Will anything bad happen?

A: Probably not. We have another 29 years before we reach the maximum 32 bit value for this time, see wikipedia on the 2k38 problem

Q3: Is this important?

A: Not really^[1], just a cool number.

Q4: How do I turn a number into a local date/time?

A: date -r 1234567890

Q5: How do I find out what time it is in this form

A: date +%s

Q6: But I don't have a unix machine?

A: javascript:d=new Date;alert('it is now '+d.getTime()+' seconds since UNIX epoch');

--

[1]: Unless you wrote some code in the 80's or 90's and never imagined we'd still run your program, or have working computers after y2k and decided that 1234567890 was a nice number to represent something like 'end of file', or 'initiate self destruct sequence'.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:00:56 -0800 Telescopic Text story http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/telescopic-text-story http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/telescopic-text-story

A nice little story about making a cup of tea by Joe Davis which uses javascript to expand and re-wite the story word by word.

Telescopic Text is a short story by Joe Davis. ...
Telescopic Text is a short story by Joe Davis. The story expands word by word. ....

I wonder if something similar might be a nice starter or exercise from writing in English?

My first thought was some kind of programming project to write a telescopic text editor.

On second thought though, perhaps it is simpler to use a bit of paper. Start with a sentence at the top of the page, and progressively rewrite adding or replacing words to make the story longer and longer, as exercise in drafting and rewriting.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Sat, 20 Dec 2008 09:39:34 -0800 passing time with android phone http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/passing-time-with-android-phone http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/passing-time-with-android-phone We've excused ourselves from part of a family get together in theWe've excused ourselves from part of a family get together in the pre-Christmas weekend. Having a baby is a great excuse for afternoon naps. Having exhausted all of the hotel room TV and radio options, we turned to the G1 phone for entertainment. Loaded up the Last.FM player (aLastFM) and searched for the word "christmas". We now have our own personal christmas-musak. (You can also listen to this from the Last.FM website on a real computer. Even better, the android phone is letting me carry on web browsing, twittering and now writing a blog post with almost no skips or halts in the music. You can see the track name by sliding down the notification area, and also to quickly go back to the player and skip or ban an unwanted song. Feeling a bit more Christmas-y now.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Sun, 02 Nov 2008 08:52:19 -0800 Baby Changing Aerobics http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/baby-changing-aerobics http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/baby-changing-aerobics There are meny things that I'll try doing in order to keep the baby entertained. He often starts to get upset when being changed, or getting ready for bed.

One of our early tricks was just to stop freeze, or pretend to be a tree. Drama classes come in handy for something. We've now moved on and playing peel-a-boo is a favorite at the moment.

Silliest thing so far has been playing out part of the film Monstors Inc. "scarry feet, scary feet - kid's awake", Jumping up and down and hiding under by lying flat on the floor.

This is aso how I noticed the strange feeling that I get in my wrists if I jump up and down while my hands are raised in the air (I get a rebounding pulse-like feeling in my wrists when I do this).

I feel a Doctor Doctor joke coming on : "Doctor, Doctor ... I get a funny feeling when I jump up and down, with my arms in the air"

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Mon, 27 Oct 2008 02:08:46 -0700 Site specific CSS overrides in Opera 9.5 mobile http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/site-specific-css-overrides-in-opera-95-mobil http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/site-specific-css-overrides-in-opera-95-mobil I was pleasently surprised to find that Opera 9.5 beta2 for Windows Mobile has a lot of the features of the full browser. In fact it can be difficult at times to persuade websites to provide their mobile friendly version. There's a probem with the layout in Bloglines, which is ignored by PocketIE, but Opera shows up. There's an unclosed (center) tag which leaves all of the content centred. m.beta.bloglines.com/feedtree So a little work with Opera, it's big brother allows site specific CSS overrides. So created a file called override.ini in /Application Date/Opera 9.5 Beta/ Opera Preferences version 2.1 ; Do not edit this file while Opera is running ; This file is stored in UTF-8 encoding [Overrides] bloglines.com [bloglines.com] User Prefs|Local CSS File=\Application Data\Opera 9.5 Beta\mystyles\bloglines.css Created a subfolder mystyles and bloglines.css @charset "utf-8"; /* Stylesheet for bogines.com */ center { text-align: right; !important } /* the yellow background was a test to see if this realy works */ body { background: yellow; } Relaunch Opera, and we have bloglines with our custom styles. More examples of style overrides at http://userstyles.org I think the syntax of the override.ini file allows many of Opera's settings to be customised on a site by site basis. Not experimented with this yet, but I would not be surprised if you could turn off javascript, or stop downloading images for specific sites using this override file too.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Fri, 05 Sep 2008 03:19:52 -0700 Interactive Screen Experiments for Physics piCETL http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/interactive-screen-experiments-for-physics-pi http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/interactive-screen-experiments-for-physics-pi Interesting talk and workshop from piCETL. (Physics Innovations Cene for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Open University) They have developed a series of interactive screen experiments in Physics. These differ from interactive computers simulations, in that they are based on highly interactive videos and photos of real experiments. This means students take real measurements from photos of a real experiments They are being used by OU to help students prepare for residential courses, to teach skills and introduce new equipment. They have been funded as part of a UK Higher Education Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, so they are enthusiastic to have people trying out the resources with their students, and to get feedback http://www.open.ac.uk/picetl/activities/details/detail.php?itemId=4612203073f3a They also reported positive expeience of students using a virtual oscilloscope simulation to learn about and practice using lab equipment. http://www.virtual-oscilloscope.com/

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Fri, 09 May 2008 10:11:53 -0700 posts to do http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/posts-to-do http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/posts-to-do Some headings to write and expand on later * remembering to develop services for the loosely connected world * repurposing twitter and jaku : formal and informal tools for near real time response and feedback in education * text messaging services - bridging the instant-message-vs-email generational gap) * rss in moodle, for providing offline-able services * e-portfolios vs myspace and facebook. Teaching about positive profile creation

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:25:22 -0700 Filtering your facebook feeds http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/filtering-your-facebook-feeds http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/filtering-your-facebook-feeds

Here's a quick guide on creating your own filtered view of facebook status updates for your news reader.

I got an email from a friend of digitalkatie about facebook and twitter. Apparently the constant stream of status updates via twitter into facebook is overwhelming his use of the facebook status RSS feed. There is a nice solution using yahoo pipes without needing any real programming.

You might want to take a look at pipes.yahoo.com. They provide a nice gui based

process building tool which allows you to set up a chain of processes to take action on combinations of RSS feeds and web pages.

Login using a yahoo id, create a new pipe.
Copy the the address[1] of the facebook RSS feed into a new 'fetch feed' block.
Add a new 'filter block' and connect the fetch feed to the filter block by drawing a line between the bottom connector on the fetch and the top one on the filter block.
You could enter some text in the filter block - choose to block ANY items with ' is twittering: ' in them.
Now connect the bottom of the filter up to the 'pipe output' block.
Save and 'run feed' to view the results. (No need to 'publish it' or to rename the feed)

Buttons on the results page will allow you to add it to My Yahoo, Google Reader or other feed readers using the orange RSS 'more options' link.

I'm using the filtered feed in Bloglines and finding it quite useful. There is no point in seeing the same messages twice as I read twitter on my phone or on the website.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:29:01 -0700 Going offline for travel with Window Mobile http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/going-offline-for-travel-with-window-mobile http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/going-offline-for-travel-with-window-mobile Holidays always make me think about packing online media. It's a time to copy across working files, email, and new music to the laptop. I have become a bit of a fan of services which store data and make it accessible through a browser. * Google for email and calendar * del.icio.us for bookmarks * Bloglines for blog reading At home I can switch between desktop machines and mobile devices both at home and work and know that I will have access as long as I have a browser with an internet connection. Packing for holiday means that I might have to manage without. How can I prepare my windows mobile phone for the prospect of only having an intermittent connection? In theory Google Mail now has imap, a mail protocol designed with exactly this sort of scenario - keeping folders and emails on a sever in sync with an intermittently connected client. Unfortunately window mobile mail client isn't quite up to the job, and deals with imap slowly with timeouts. Fortunately WebIS have FlexMail 2007 which does the trick nicely. For blog reading I am using Egress by Karl Hessinger (GarishKernels). This picks up my subscription list and unread items from Bloglines. I've brought over calendar information using OggSync. And I am currently typing this using a commercial blog service Typepad, because of it's nice offline mobile client. And for some reassurance that the PCs at home and work will still work when we return, some backups were needed. Carbon Copy clones the complete Mac hard disk, and Cobain Backup to selectively backup the important bits on each of the windows boxes.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:15:22 -0700 Tracking posts from many places using friendfeed http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/tracking-posts-from-many-places-using-friendf http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/tracking-posts-from-many-places-using-friendf

Ewan recently mentioned finding friendfeed useful, if occasionally overwhelmed by twitter posts. Usefully it does roll up multiple posts into one entry where appropriate.

Friendfeed offers a nice way to provide a composite feed which summarises a list of when and where your friends have posted new content elsewhere on the web. It is sort of like an outward facing Facebook newsfeed. Instead of just providing a list of actions within the facebook service, this draws on any web2.0 services which you post. It can provide a composite list of what you or your friends have been up to and where they have been posting recently. There are so many places where people may be posting that it can be difficult to keep up, and spot and add new feeds for everyone.

Bother, I had spent a long time programming and linking up a cunning sequence of yahoo pipes to do exactly this job

EDIT: fixed the link to my friend feed and also posted a new item about filtering facebook to remove twitter. Wonder if this will help ewan's problem?

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:09:48 -0700 Twitter and other unwanted messages http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/twitter-and-other-unwanted-messages http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/twitter-and-other-unwanted-messages

It would be nice to have a bit more control over which messages are forwarded to my phone using twitter. Spam is fairy easy to avoid, but other kind of unwanted message come from a probem with twitter only having one stream of messages per user.

I can see the use for clients like twhirl and other desktop clients to allow you to post and read in more flexible ways. It would be nice to be able to do some more filtering and selecting online. I can see an idea for an automated filter and repost tool, create a filtered or composite twitter feed to add to your friends to stay in touch if their usual feed is a bit busy.

It would be nice to be able to be a bit more selective about what you read and send using text messages. I find the text based interface the most useful one, but lacking in some selectivity. You can follow or nofollow - that's it. What if I want to follow everything except 'new blog post' twitters for example. I hope paying for text message quotas may drive some development in this area.

It may be useful to look at other microblogging services like jaku, following their acquisition by google

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:08:05 -0700 Twitter, microblogs and spam http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/twitter-microblogs-and-spam http://blog.seanfarrell.co.uk/twitter-microblogs-and-spam

Enjoying being able to stay in touch while travelling (although trying to avoid the urge to download my work emails). Bit of blogging, photos and twittering.

I'm really enjoying being able to post and track microblogs using twitter, sending small quick updates to people by web, text message and status messages. Kate seems to be having fun doing this too.

Also heard from Kal this morning that he has just finished his exams, and was waiting expectantly for answers - so we got in touch to cheer him up Tried to get Louis to giggle down the phone. Not sure what else he got back from the request for a distraction via twitter.

EDIT: Congratulations Kal on passing the exams

On the sighty more annoying side are the start of the spam twitter accounts. An account called googlenoticias started following lots of people yesterday. Of course the spamming only works if I reciprocate and choose to follow it in return. Mildly irritating.

Also previously have had a more targeted approach from companies using Twitter. One of which was writing about and promoting training 'courses' for schools including brain gym!

On the other hand, seeing how twitter can be used socially in zefrank's colorwars has reminded me how much more fun it is to use it socially. (On our way down to centreparks we joined in playing Bingo over twitter - Kate for c0ff00team and myself for redteam. Colo(u)r wars has already divided the family.

It really seems that twitter is more interesting when used as part of a conversation rather then just a one way stream of consciousness. Ask a question, or comment back to someone. It's much more than just a way to update your Facebook status.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/418326/sean-side.jpg http://posterous.com/users/37lnxNI4s0qR Sean Farrell digitalsean Sean Farrell