eggbung

Twitter sentiment for Steve Jobs

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 11:18:00 +0000

Managing a distributed coding project with playnice.ly

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 14:02:00 +0000

Recently I've been working on a project which mainly involves web development. It is a small project with only myself and one other person working on it. However, the other developer is located in a different city so it's somewhat challenging to keep up to date with what's going on.

We've been using PlayNice.ly to manage the project. It seems like a nice tool, and I recommend people checking out the free trial at least. The interface allows you to set up multiple projects and assign members of the team to them. As such I have the main project with both of us on, and then some ancillary projects with only myself on. This may sound silly having a collaboration tool with only one person listed, but I find that using this documented and structured approach helps me straighten out my thoughts.

Within a project the tool lets you list Tasks, Bugs & Ideas. Luckily at the moment we are only on Tasks & Ideas, but I'm sure Bugs will pop in soon! :-) We ping these tasks off to each other, picking them up when we're ready. There are loads of stages that a Task can be in, and I must admit I don't fully understand these or follow them particularly well. This may be a reflection of my naivety to management tools, or maybe not.

Incidentally the most useful feature that I find is potentially the most basic feature of the tool: the activity feed. We use subversion to manage our code revisions, and playnice.ly plugs directly into this. Most of the time I want updates on what has been happening in the last few days on the project. By checking the activity feed I can see not only all the changes in the playnice.ly projects, but also all the subversion commit changes.

Go have a look, or pester them on Twitter @playnicelyapp

Top CashBack

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 08:07:00 +0000

This site is pretty cool for cashback. I use it, and they actually do payout, which is nice.

Top CashBack

FlyBe Rewards4All Points Expire

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:47:00 +0000

Just a warning for anyone who has, or is considering getting, a FlyBe credit card. I have one and today I checked my points statement which I hadn't done for a few months (I assumed that I was just accumulating points which I could spend when I was ready). Actually I had been losing 2 points (which is £500 spend on the credit card) every month for 3 months now, that's £1.5k of spending!! I received no email or warning that these would expire.

Clearly it's a good thing for FlyBe because they don't have to honour these points now, but it's just another thing that is super annoying about their scheme. Another is that once you've got the points, you then still have to pay taxes and charges (OK, other airlines do this), pay for bags, and then pay a payment charge for these payments on your reward flights!! When the cost of the flights is sometimes only £5 I'm really not sure it's worth my while.

Setuptools (easy_install) can't find vcvarsall.bat

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Wed, 05 May 2010 12:07:00 +0000

So, using easy_install very regularly ended up with the following error being produced:

error: Setup script exited with error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat

I'd read that I needed to install Visual Studio, so I installed version 10 and set the Path variable. The command prompt could see vcvarsall but not easy_install. grrr!!

The trick seems to be to install mingw from here (http://www.mingw.org/) and make sure you select the base tools, g++ compiler and make stuff. Then add `C:\MinGW\bin' to your Path and create a file called disutils.cfg in C:\Python26\Lib\distutils and put the follow in it:

[build]
compiler=mingw32

Then exit from your command prompt, open it up again and all should be fine! The solution was found in a comment here:

http://code.google.com/p/rdflib/issues/detail?id=104

SPSS Using String Variables in a Binary Logistic Regression

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:45:00 +0000

I recently performed a binary logistic regression using SPSS 18 on Windows. I've discovered a rather annoying bug! One of my independent variables was a rather long String variable, with 33 categories. SPSS only recognised two of them though. SPSS has two internal String variables: long String and short String, which is only 8 chars long.

Despite defining the variables as 100 character Strings in the SPSS variable view, the regression only recognised the first 8 characters, and hence cut the whole lot down to two possibilities!

Nice. Solution: recode as some kind of String that is less than 8 characters!

SPSS (PASW) 18 bug

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:33:00 +0000

SPSS seems to be a very hand application. Great, just button click your way through your stats, this is very good. Well, the application is a little unstable though! I think it's written in Java (which isn't a bad thing). Using my data set, which is fairly large with 608 thousand data points, I would like to copy and paste a column of data from one sheet to another. In Excel this is a fairly lengthy operation, it takes in the region of 4 mins. I did this in SPSS also and it has now been running for somewhere in the region of 18 hours. This is using a full CPU core, so there must be some number crunching going on there!

Let's hope this get's fixed in the next release. If someone were to wish to debug it this has been tested on a Windows 7 computer, based on an Intel 4 core processor. It's also been replicated on a Windows 7 Intel Atom based netbook.

PyDev Fails: No editor descriptor

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:08:00 +0000

This has happen twice now, and it's rather frustrating! I use PyDev for my Python development, it's rather nice.. I like it a lot. However, when I then install a different perspective in eclipse it dies! It happened when I tried to install CDT and now it happens with PHP. This is the error when trying to view a Python file now:

Could not open the editor: No editor descriptor for id org.python.pydev.editor.PythonEditor

org.eclipse.ui.PartInitException: No editor descriptor for id org.python.pydev.editor.PythonEditor
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.EditorReference.createPartHelper(EditorReference.java:598)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.EditorReference.createPart(EditorReference.java:462)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.WorkbenchPartReference.getPart(WorkbenchPartReference.java:595)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.EditorAreaHelper.setVisibleEditor(EditorAreaHelper.java:271)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.EditorManager.setVisibleEditor(EditorManager.java:1417)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.EditorManager$5.runWithException(EditorManager.java:942)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.StartupThreading$StartupRunnable.run(StartupThreading.java:31)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.RunnableLock.run(RunnableLock.java:35)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Synchronizer.runAsyncMessages(Synchronizer.java:134)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.runAsyncMessages(Display.java:3855)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.readAndDispatch(Display.java:3476)
at org.eclipse.ui.application.WorkbenchAdvisor.openWindows(WorkbenchAdvisor.java:803)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench$28.runWithException(Workbench.java:1384)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.StartupThreading$StartupRunnable.run(StartupThreading.java:31)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.RunnableLock.run(RunnableLock.java:35)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Synchronizer.runAsyncMessages(Synchronizer.java:134)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.runAsyncMessages(Display.java:3855)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.readAndDispatch(Display.java:3476)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.runUI(Workbench.java:2316)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.access$4(Workbench.java:2221)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench$5.run(Workbench.java:500)
at org.eclipse.core.databinding.observable.Realm.runWithDefault(Realm.java:332)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.createAndRunWorkbench(Workbench.java:493)
at org.eclipse.ui.PlatformUI.createAndRunWorkbench(PlatformUI.java:149)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.ide.application.IDEApplication.start(IDEApplication.java:113)
at org.eclipse.equinox.internal.app.EclipseAppHandle.run(EclipseAppHandle.java:194)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.runApplication(EclipseAppLauncher.java:110)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.start(EclipseAppLauncher.java:79)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:368)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:179)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.invokeFramework(Main.java:559)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.basicRun(Main.java:514)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.run(Main.java:1311)

The solution last time was to hunt down every trace of eclipse on the computer (thanks for having no uninstaller eclipse) and then to a full reinstall, and rebuild the workspace.

If you know of a better solution please comment to let me know!

Windows 7 - A compatible sound card! Sound Blaster Audigy 2

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:33:00 +0000

So, after installing Windows 7 I found that my on board sound card didn't work. There simply weren't drivers for it. I friend had an old PCI Sound Blaster Audigy 2 kicking about that he was kind enough to give me.

I slapped it in, fired up the computer and once Windows 7 was booted up it found some new hardware. The initial installation failed, but when I ran Windows Update and checked for new updates it found:

Creative Audigy Audio Processor (WDM)

After installing the updates and restarting the computer it worked!

Sorted!

Setting up wifi on Windows 7 (using Belkin USB wifi F5D7050)

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:57:00 +0000

So, I'm currently investigating Windows 7 purely out of interest. I've a spare computer kicking about, based on an ASUS motherboard with something like a 2GHz AMD processor and a gig of RAM.

I downloaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate and installed it without any major problems (I decided to stick the 32 bit version on). However, my onboard network card refused to work, at all.. just nothing! I spent ages working at it, trying to install different drivers, play with the connection settings but nothing. There was no network lights on at the other end of the cable, so it appeared that the card wasn't even switched on. Windows 7 kept telling me that it was an 'Unidentified Network', whatever that meant. A bit of probing also made the network dialogue crash!

So, I got a Belkin USB wifi dongle. I figured this could be handy with other machines or laptops, so for £19.99 it wasn't that bad. The model number is F5D7050 and I think that the chipset is important so it's identification (FCC?) number is K7SF5D7050E. The box said that it's Vista compatible (32 & 64 bit), if that's important? I just stuck the CD in, and ran the installer, then connected the dongle. Everything seemed to install correctly, Windows 7 even listed my wifi network. I entered my WPA password into the dialogue box but Windows 7 told me that there was a 'problem'. The network connection was listed as 'Limited Connectivity'.

I restarted the computer.

When we got back into Windows a box popped up having identified the network that I selected before the reboot. It asked me if it was a Home, Work or Public network then went and did some setting up. It asked me about sharing (Files, Printers, etc etc)... I switched all these things off. Then it gave me a 'passcode' to share with my 'homegroup'.. whatever that is!

After this the network displayed as 'Connected', but with 'No Internet Access'. My network does have internet access, as my Macbook is connected at this time....

I went to the Network and Sharing center and clicked on a bit red X that sat between 'Multiple Networks' and 'Internet' on some form of network type diagram. It kinda whirred around for a bit, then the red X went away! So I cancelled the current dialogue and went over to IE, which connected to the web (I had to switch off Detect Proxy Settings, cause that was quite annoying).

So it's finally online.. I think. I'm currently trying to run Windows update.. but it's been going about 10 mins so far and nothing on the screen has changed!

My thoughts: Well, the interface etc is quite nice.. but all this just to connect to a bloomin network? It still doesn't beat the simplicity of my Mac.. I just click the Airport menu, select my network and enter my password. hmm. Let's see how it goes!

Online Piracy and the Digital Report

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Tue, 12 May 2009 19:58:00 +0000

Before I start this post I should point out that I am in no way an expert in media law (nor either an amateur for that matter) or have fully been following all events surrounding the relevant legal cases. However, I have read a few newspaper articles on the subject, the final one being from the 10th May's edition of the Sunday Times (link here: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article6256570.ece) and had a chat with some friends on the matter.

The current situation, at least apparently to me, is that a 'Digital Report' is being written up with the aim of advising how to tackle online piracy. The big media firms including Universal Music and Sony Pictures are trying to get this report to include legislation to for internet providers to collect and report data on their users' actions. To me, this approach seems to be missing the point completely. The discussion of whether illegally downloading music, films, etc is correct or not is not for now; I am assuming that we need a fix for it.

The fix from the media corporations' perspectives seems to be a 'just don't do it, or we'll get you' solition. However legally justified this perspective is, it simply will not work. Firstly, if the ISPs collect all data from each customer they have they will have a huge, huge amount of data. Think about how much data is moved around the web these days. From this, assuming that they know which traffic is media, how will they determine if it's legitimate or not? It could have been purchased, or it could be a friend's holiday movie; it's just video/audio data after all (isn't it? correct me if I'm wrong). I assume they would need knowledge of purchase information somehow, and the relevant certificates of each download server.

Second to that, the assumption is that there is one user per connection. What about shared households? What about public wifi hot spots? What about people who aren't 'tech savvy' enough to set up their router with the correct security?

These problems don't even mention privacy issues. This is a pertinent topic for the end user, but I will not involve it here as it doesn't necessarily concern the corporations.

The solution is not bully tactics such as those proposed. The solution is to understand the social aspects of internet usage. Why do people download music and films? I very much doubt that it's because they are hardened criminals wearing balaclavas as they steal music. I assume they just want easy access to music. With this understanding a solution that matches these social aspects can be produced that is so desirable that it makes no sense not to use them. People will naturally migrate over to these solutions, massively reducing piracy beyond anything that the heavy handed approach suggested previously could achieve.

And this isn't just an ideology. These solutions are emerging already for music. Take services such as Deezer (www.deezer.com) and Spotify (www.spotify.com). These solutions (Spotify is my personal fav, but others seem to like Deezer) provide a really easy to use interface that is clean and simple, and most importantly address some of the social requirements; people have easy access to music and, with Spotify, can share playlists and recommendations with friends by using the traditional web links provided by the app. These applications are completely legal and are monetized, not by the end user, but by selling advertising space (auditory and on screen) to other corporations. This then covers the costs of paying the media corps for the rights to stream the music. I assume this is much like a traditional radio advertising model. Further to this, for those end users who are willing to pay a small fee they can cut out the advertising and have uninterrupted access to music.

What I would like to see in this Digital Britain report is not the heavy handed controlling approach suggested, but a more innovative (to use an already overly used word) approach which addresses the 'problem' and finds workable solutions. Hey, it could even help the industry. With the heavy handed approach people who can't afford music won't listen to it (for fear of legal action). Under the approach that Spotify and Deezer are taking, the whole market segment will accelerate with people listening to music and watching films much more. A more active market segment can only be good for the industry surely?

Amy in Amsterdam

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:37:00 +0000

Amy
Originally uploaded by blastStu

This is a shot of Amy from our trip to Amsterdam

iTunes RSS Feed Unrecognised Characters (with PHP)

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 15:20:00 +0000

So, I recently wrote a quick PHP script that parses the iTunes store RSS and turns it into some webpages that are easily renderable on a mobile device (see last blog post).

I've written quite a number of RSS parsers in PHP before, it's fairly simple and you just make use of the SimpleXML features built into PHP.

However, this time whenever I opened the feed it returned a whole load of rubbish characters. The feed was read fine in Firefox, Safari etc, but when I opened it with my XML editor (Oxygen) or PHP it was just trash! The root of the problem was in this method:

file_get_contents($rssurl);

(or fopen if that was used instead).

combined with the fact that gzip compression (found by looking at the HTTP headers in Firebug). The solution is to replace either of these methods which can't handle the gzip compression with:

gzopen($rssurl,'r');

and use the gzread method to get the data!

Then you can carry on with the parsing as you wish...

iPhone Applications Directory

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 22:24:00 +0000

I'm currently building a bridge to give a different form of access to the AppStore. This site will basically be a really big directory. I hope to be able to add comments, ratings, etc to it when it's more stable.

For now it is here:

Wickoo - iPhone & iPod Touch Apps / Applications

MGMT - Time to Pretend

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:42:00 +0000

This is the latest track which I think is awesome!!! I heard it on some advert on TV, then heard it in a friend's car and hence managed to find out who it is. The synths are amazing! Check it out here:

MGMT - Time To Pretend

iPhone Application - Google Adsense

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:20:00 +0000

So, it appears that Google Adsense is now being using in iPhone applications to generate revenue. I've just submitted an app which will be using ads supplied from admob.com, however it would be very interested to see how successful the Adsense mobile is. Have a look at this app called AroundMe (it's free to download) at the following link:

AroundMe

Apple Mail HTML Signatures

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 15:48:00 +0000

OK, so apparently you can't have an HTML sig with Apple Mail. This however sucks, cause you need to have links to your stuff in your sig! If you just type the HTML code in, then this code is not rendered and you just end up emailing people code!

What you need to do, is make a HTML page of how you want your sig to be (ensuring that all images etc are online on a server, not on your local machine... only your html can be there). Then open this up in Safari, and save it as a webarchive. Then, copy this archive to ~/Library/Mail/Signatures where you will find all the archives of your sigs.

Goto Apple Mail and make a new sig, call it something useful. Go back to finder and sort the list (which will have names which mean nothing!) by date so that you have the last modified at the top. Don't delete the plist file... you need that! Instead copy the name of the last modified webarchive then move that off to somewhere else on your hard disk. Make the webarchive that you created from Safari to be the name that you just copied. Restart Apple Mail and you should have your lovely HTML file as your sig!

Bingo!

Free Meeting Scheduler and Planning System

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:39:00 +0000

This is a site that I've been building:

ezplan.me - Free Meeting Scheduler and Planning System

Cheap & Reliable Linux Hosting

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:12:00 +0000

I often get asked who I recommend for web hosting. Now, I've never had Windows hosting so I'm afraid I can't answer your question in that case, but for Linux hosting I've always used HostGator. I currently have about 5 sites all running off one of their cheap Linux shared hosting accounts and have no problems with them. I register all my domains with Daily and then simply change the nameservers to point to the hostgator hosting.

Anyways, check out hostgator at the link here:

And Daily here:

Iglu & Harlty - In This City

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:17:00 +0000

OK.. a slightly less informative blog posting now.. but I appear to be addicted to this song! It's quite comical, but definitely worth a listen.... pay attention to how they sing "liiiiife". Makes me chuckle each time!

Find a preview of it here:

iPhone development - Creating an Email with valid text!

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:58:00 +0000

When writing your iPhone application you may wish to send an email using the iPhone's built in mail client. This simple piece of code will do this:

NSURL* mailURL = [NSURL URLWithString: @"mailto:foo@example.com?cc=bar@example.com&subject=My%20Subject&body=bodyStuff"];
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL: mailURL];

However, remember that the string must be correctly URL encoded. This is simple with a small string such as that in the example, but when creating a fairly long email, or constructing one from data in a loop for example.. this isn't so easy! If you replace mailURL in the final line with:

[mailURL stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding]

then you can leave all the original space characters and slash n characters in with no problems!

iPhone Development - Application Verification Failed

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:54:00 +0000

So, you've made your iPhone application and it runs pretty well in the simulator, so now you need to deploy it. Apple's documentation on this is somewhat less than perfect! I thought I did everything perfectly, but I kept on getting an Application Verification Failederror message. After some snooping around the web it appeared that problem was because my Bundle Identifier was not set correctly. One simple change and that was it.. I has even been ready to reset the device!

For an excellent guide to deploying on the iPhone check out this blog post:

http://www.talentgrouplabs.com/blog/archive/2008/08/21/preflightingapplication-errors-0xe8000001-and-others.aspx

IPhone Development - Tab Bar View Controller

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:53:00 +0000

So, I've been learning to play with the Cocoa Touch framework... in all it's wonderful complexities. The first issue that I came along was with a Tab Bar View (Controller). My trouble was once I had created a new tab bar item, I couldn't get it to link to an external Nib file. Here is the solution (I'll point out the bit that I was missing). Let's pretend the new view and controller are called FunnyView and FunnyViewController.

Once you have created your external Nib for Funny View, you need to set the File's Owner to be FunnyViewController (it's in the Class box on the inspector pane). This is where I stopped, and hence nothing worked! This also however needs to be done for the TabBar View Controller. Click on the tab you want, then set the class of that to be FunnyViewController also. Now you should have a working tab... you can go ahead and set outlets and actions as you so wish now...

The Music.je podcast

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:42:00 +0000

So, I got pointed to the music.je podcast the other day, and I can't recommend it enough! Very often you hear some nice mixes from local DJs.. and they're good... but nothing amazing; this is different... especially Colin Moore's session. The first half an hour is a foot tapping frenzy of funk & hip hop layered in with familiar samples that make you wanna get up and dance (even when you're on the tube a rush hour...ahem). The second takes you through breaks and all the way up to some drum & bass!

Anyways, go get it.. the site is Music.je and the podcast itself can be found here (this link only seems to work under Safari.. question the music.je guys!)

Brandstation.tv Sample Widget

noreply@blogger.com (blast) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:47:00 +0000

This is a crafty little widget that I built for brandstation.tv.