// get result set with mysql_query
//  check if there are any results
     //  loop through each result
          //  output its data
//  no results?
     //  output message saying so

Once you’ve mastered that you can get hundreds of freelance jobs and securely say you have the prerequisite skills. It’s just so dull after writing it a hundred thousand times. Oh, that and

//  has this form field been set?
     //  yes, update database

That’s everything. I want something more interesting. I expect this is why Rails was made because someone got sick of doing this.

I’m reading ReWork at the moment, which is a business book that seems really agile (in the methodology sense). It’s really smart, and says things that I know will upset a lot of people. Saying things like “planning is guessing” flies in the face of everything I learnt when I was studying business. In fact, that entire course was about making product proposals based on project figures, which people like David Heinemeier Hansson (whose really become a hero of mine over the last few weeks) would say are completely useless.

The 37signals guys do genuinely seem to believe that everyone can achieve what they have though. I agree with them most of the time. But they talk about there being a million to one chance of the next start-up being a Google, or a Facebook, and they don’t really realise that they’re a Google, they’re a Facebook. They’re certainly making enough money to be up in those ranks. They talk about having freedom like anyone can have it, but it’s easy to trust your employees with a credit card for expenses or possibly piss of a customer when you’re already earning millions of dollars a month. You don’t have those liberties as a new business who should be cherishing their customers, not telling them that they’re idiots. (Saying that, I love the “Let your customers outgrow you” essay.)

Reading the book has mostly gotten me excited about being the little guy, again. It talks about all the silver linings, like being able to entirely change my business model in one day, and being able to make mistakes whilst there aren’t millions of customers watching me. Being small means I’m restricted to keeping things simple, which is a key stepping stone to a good application, apparently.

I’m also reading a book on Marx, just to get the views that are opposing mine.

The first thing I’ve realised is that people are really susceptible to opinions. Reading this book I’m coming across ideas that really make me rethink my ideas (even if they don’t change my opinions). It throws out simple phrases like “property is theft”. It barely explains what it means, so you’re left to think about it yourself. If it had been explained, I would have read that paragraph and carried on, but I had to stop and think “what do they mean by this?” It’s a pretty strong way to win someone over, once you have them thinking their own ideas up.

“Property is theft” has really struck a chord with me though. What gives you the right to own the land that your home is on? What gives oil companies the right to take the Earth’s resources and sell them as their own? It’s not fair that the richest man takes the most. An arbitrary currency does not entitle anyone to a finite resource which belongs to me by birth right as much as it does you.

I still strongly believe in my argument against that ideology — you’re entitled to what you earn — but it’s interesting nonetheless to think about these things.

Could be an interesting weekend project.

I think the definite biggest hit to today’s motivation was not getting up on time. It just pushed everything back a few hours, and once your schedule is kicked off course by that much you tend to think “meh, what’s another hour later going to change?” Getting up on time is tomorrows aim in that case. It seems so petty, and childish though. Some people have to get up at four am to get to work on time. My sometimes getting up to eleven o’clock is just horrible.

It would be better if there was some kind of motivation. A website with a Lost input-the-number-every-108-minutes type function. Not every 108 minutes, but rather every morning, before 0830 (and then again at 0900 to make sure you’re actually up). I might do that right now…

There needs to be some kind of reward at the end though. I’m not too sure what that could be. It can’t cost me any money, but must somehow give that minireward feeling that I get from WoW…

Oh, achievements!

This wasn’t going to be a post for my Idea A Day, but I guess I’ll make it so. A website in which you get achievements for things that are to the betterment of your life. “Get up everyday for two weeks before nine am.” (Described above.) “Go camping in the Lake District.” (Tracked by GPS.) “Be sociable! Spend more than an hour in six different places in a week.” (GPS again.)

I’m sure there are others. They don’t have to be provable always; although there’s a tiny competitive part to it, I just like collecting achievements.

Since I ended up playing World of Warcraft this weekend (ugh), I didn’t get much done on it. I’m planning on adding to it during this week though, and releasing the code once it’s in a releasable state.

This ore mine has six thousand tonnes of ore, and once that’s all been mined, it’ll make no more.

Mobs are “born” at the beginning of the world, Creationist styles, and they can mate and produce more. But once they’re all killed, that’s that species extinct. Maybe a talent tree could lead to taming some pets, as fighters, or as live stock where they can be bred. Environmentalists might spring up, protecting habitats of animals.

Players can build things in each sector of land, but they never truly own it. It can be taken away by force just like it can be in real life. Maybe a guild of players will get paid in exchange for defending the land?

There wouldn’t be any leveling, per say. The aim would just be to earn as much as you can, gain as much land as you can. Become King? Or maybe a democracy could happen.

Player death should mean something. Something extreme. Both to inspire people to live, and also to not take life away. When the stakes are high, a person will be less likely to go and attack people randomly just to be a dick. If they stand to die, and lose all their stats, money, items, and property maybe they’ll think twice.

It’ll be a cool experiment in social politics, in a world where your property actually means something. If you lose your unique Amulet of +10 Health, you can’t just go and do another rinse and repeat quest. That was the only one in the game.

I think it’d be fun and useful to recreate the iTunes experience, just for a mobile device in an online environment (browser-based). Different to Spotify because I already own the media, and don’t want to pay a monthly fee. It’d just be my personal use of DRM-free media I have. My library would not be publicly available, or usable by other users.

I’m not too sure on how I could prove that the user owns the song though, and didn’t just illegally download it before uploading it. If this were ever to be a popular service, I’d have to have lawyers and people look into that. Meanwhile, it’ll just be me using it and a few close friends so I can make sure none of them are breaking any copyright.

Not just music media though – podcasts too. They could just be steamed from the server they come from. The service would have to be able to remember where I left off listening to the podcast though, since I rarely finish Geekbox in one sitting for instance.

Update: I found Google Listen! It seems a bit odd at the moment, but I’m sure that’s just me getting used to it. I wish it had a web interface though…

There’s a weird myth about each phone having an email address associated with it for text messages, but I’ve never got that working.

There actually is a way to receive messages, and send messages to a group of users. I use it to get a message whenever a customer emails me. It just takes a little messing around with Twitter. But it shouldn’t have to be that awkward.

On second read, it’s actually a bit stupid. The first time, I remember thinking “heh! well, come tiny server couldn’t possibly handle a brute force attack on it, so I won’t need to spend the cost of using bcrypt.” Reading it this time, who on Earth has a machine that can handle seven-hundred million requests to log in per second?

Google or Facebook, I suppose. But after the first few millions wrong attempts to log into my account, I’d hope they’d be sophisticated enough to catch on that something is a little weird with these requests and just boot the IP address.

All using bcrypt will do is slow your user down by 0.3 seconds each time the log in — which is a noticeable lag.

tl;dr: Use a double hashed MD5 string. It’s fine.

On my not-so-large monitor there’s still a large amount of white space that’s going unused that the content of the site could fill up. The BBC has an obligation to support legacy things for a short while, but they’d still be supported with a variable width design.

The ideal solution to this was if people took more seriously the concept of design and content separation. Blizzard do this amazingly — by just ditching HTML all together. That way I can just disable their CSS, and add my own. I could literally do whatever I want without having to worry about badly formatted or too tailored HTML getting in my way.

So, a class that looks at your table that has the information you which to be displayed on a web site, and it just ahead and formats it for you. I don’t ever want to write that loop again.

I’d really like the ability to do voice commands in my web apps. “Jeeves, send an email to Bob saying I shall be attending lunch today!”

Enough said.

I’ve not run out of ideas just yet though, so there’ll be more next week.

Websites for events could have a feature that tells customers what the best train (specifically) would be to get to the event. Not just “Get off at Kings Cross station”, but “Get the train that arrives at 13:23 at Kings Cross”. The API could even let the provider book and order train tickets for the customer.

My calendar could automatically update times for services changes or cancellations.

I probably won’t be able to do this one myself. But it’s a cool idea.

Essentially, it’ll be cool to make a new website based around the community rather than the videos. Using the YouTube API, and maybe the Disqus API, I think it’d be pretty easy to make a better place. It wouldn’t be a rip of YouTube — that’s against the API terms — but so long as there’s a definite focus on the conversation about videos, I think it’d be okay.

Also, I’d like to pull comments from reddit and other places that have an API for comments on articles onto the page for the video. Maybe news articles if the video has any related stories. A general mashup of information about the video you’re watching.

I don’t mean an MMO. Whilst it could be interesting to see that, what I really want is one storyline (maybe with the occasional sub-quests, a la Fallout 3) that I can play through and ultimately complete the game. Then I can start it over again if  like. Or not, doesn’t really matter.

I’d like actual save game files, so I can save at one point and load it again. Something that we do with PC games and console games all the time but I’ve never seen on a web based game.

The pluses for web based games are that they’re cross platform (baring a hack or two to get the Javascript to work in IE, or whatever), and run on almost every machine in existence. Nothing more to download or install whilst you’re at work on a school computer (don’t play games at school, kids).

So, I need another service that lets me keep a log of what episode I’ve watched up to. I guess somewhat manual at first, but I don’t see why there can’t be plugins to see what you’re watching and then update the site (a Firefox plugin for websites, VLC plugin for downloaded shows). Some things would have to be manual, but you could text in to the site saying what you’re watching and it could update.

Another problem I have with TV is when I’m watching a series that isn’t out in the UK yet. So there’s no media telling me that there’s a new episode of House. I usually find out at least a few days later than I could have watched it from a friend, or from being spoiled online.

It’d be nice to have a global TV guide that told me when new episodes are released.

Essentially it’s a new aggregation tool (because I have a love affair with a lot of topical news on one page) but takes the news from a lot of sources. Twitter especially: taking local trending topics and correlating them pragmatically with articles from other places. Reddit, for the comments. BBC for the information. Guardian and a few other online news places for more opinionated pieces. And maybe even finding independent WordPress.com blogs that are talking about the news item.

It wouldn’t be just listing links to various stories, the articles would all be related to each other for that topic.

With a touch screen (which is why the iPad made me think of this again) it would be a simple app that I could just leave running and occasionally click a few things. Without a touch screen it could just be like a news ticker showing snippets from various sources. I’d show a mock up of how I imagine it, but I’m terrible at designing things so it would look horrendous.

Then, at the weekend I could be spending on one of the more interesting ones and hopefully release at least a working version by Monday. I’ll push all the code to my github as open source projects, so if someone likes something I’ve started they can happily fork it.

This’ll do a number of things that I think will be helpful for me.

It’ll force me to be creative; to constantly be thinking up different (maybe not even better) ways to do things. Being innovative isn’t about doing everything someone does, just better. Being innovative is doing something new. I’m not saying I’ll be creative, just different.

I want to use a different language to PHP too. I know PHP, and maybe a little too well. Like the partner you’ve been with for a few months now, and everything’s fine, you just feel you need something different. I want to randomly pick another language to learn. In fact, why do these apps have to be web-based? Maybe I can throw in a few client based apps.

Even if I don’t do anything with the idea, maybe someone else will and if that makes the internet a better place then I suppose I’ve still been successful.

It’ll also just give me something to do to kill time. I have a fair bit of it.

I’ve realised I don’t deal with stress too well. When I’m asked “what would you say is your biggest weakness?” in a job interview I think I’ll have to reply that I get stressed. I’ve noticed I only get stressed when there’s something I need to do, but there’s something out of my control that’s stopping me doing it.

For instance, I’m working on my Java assignment and get stuck. I couldn’t explain my problem well enough to go and Google it, so I had to contact my tutor who didn’t reply to my email (no big deal), but then I couldn’t track him down either. So I was stuck, staring at this code that I had no idea how to fix, and no one around who was able to help me. That’s really what gets me stressed the most.

The problem I was having, which my tutor told me within seconds of seeing my code, could be fixed by declaring the variable as the super class, and you can still give it the reference to an object that extends that super class. I had no idea you could do that. So now everything’s fixed and going well with my Java assignment now.

I’ve also been working on Leafcanvas, which is a web development company I’ve set up. The app isn’t exactly finished yet. I want to look more into using Tumblr as a sort of cloud service to hold data for a blog I want to put on Leafcanvas, and use the API to nab the content.

I’m working on a game called n0ded, which I expected to be finished by now but I decided to make it object orientated rather than procedural as it started. I’m also going to make it a facebook based game too, so I need to add the facebook API.

Second piece is a database ERD which turned out to be more complicated than I expected. That’s not a bad thing, it was sort of fun realising how we’d made a mistake in reading the scenario and how much one tiny sentence changes the entire diagram. Just have to make a list of assumptions about the scenario that we’ve decided on and that should be done.

Another piece is for OO Software Design. Make a Java class and document it, mostly. Pretty simple and likely boring, so I’m going to pick a ridiculously hard, functional scenario (rather than something ridiculous like a “person” class that does nothing). I don’t think that has to be in for a while, so I think I’ll get the above two pieces of coursework out of the way first.

There might be Agile coursework, but really, who cares.

When Agile methods and Scrum was first explained to me in this module I was told it was a fast paced way of working the delivering what the customer wants at the heart of its philosophy. Unfortunately though, after watching the lecture I just have (Agile Methods and Scrum) I’ve noticed that the uplifting manifesto is actually littered with small print and contradictions all over the place.

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

This is unhelpfully ambiguous. But, not to simply pick on semantics, I’ll discuss both interpretations and explain why I think they’re both ridiculous.

The first way to read it is to release the software early, or rather to release it before it’s finished. This sounds odd, and so I quickly decided that’s not what that sentence meant. However, looking at the general ethos of releasing features incrementally this actually looks like a reasonable thing for the makers of Scrum to have decided.

What are you expecting the customer to do with unfinished software? They can’t phase it into their business, or worse directly switch to it, just to find they can no longer merge records where they want to or something. They can’t even run this software in parallel with their current software if there’s gaping holes in it.

Even here though, at your first step, Scrum has contradicted itself in that another of its principles is not to release work until it’s been tested. That must mean finished. That makes this interpretation either wrong or contradictory.

For that reason the second is more likely; finished early in respect to the deadline you estimated. I’d argue that this is bad too. The few times I have handed over a completed project before my deadline (simple because I’m new to this freelance lark, and so bad at estimating how long it could take me) only once was the customer actually happy with that. On one occasion a customer was incredibly unhappy that I’d completed early, and so messed up his project plan timetable. (I thought he was incredibly out-of-order though, and probably unusual.) Another time a customer remarked that it was just unprofessional to have over estimated how long it would take me. Every other time the customer didn’t notice and probably didn’t recognise it as either an achievement nor disbenefit.

I’ve realised that customers are happy to get the work when you said you would give it them — after all you were both set on that deadline. Anything less is apparently unprofessional.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

The fine print here is that the customer can only talk to you once every thirty days. This makes no sense. What else is the project manager (uhh, sorry, Scrum Master) doing with their time? They’re not coding, so they should be talking with the customers whenever the customer wants to talk to them. After any of those discussions take place, and the manger has decided on any extension of deadline or cost because of the changes, the programmers should be made aware immediately.

It’s the project managers job to decide what features need to be worked on now, and which can wait till later. His backlog should be incredibly flexible to any concerns the customer has to make.

Not only would that benefit the customer, but the programmers don’t have to wait 30 days before realising that that function they’re working on which is ridiculously complex actually isn’t even needed anymore. For a system that promotes its agility in an industry that works at lightning pace, a thirty-day buffer it insulting.

The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

This is completely ignorant to how people work. You should work like a machine, with a constant typing pace of 60 words a minute. There are times where you run into problems that the solution to is incredibly elusive. Problems you’re not even expecting. A customer of mine needed to have an interactive map, with pointers to variable places (according to where the user enters). That seemed pretty easy since I know of the Google API. Oddly though, there’s no “zoom to a view in such a way that I can see all the markers” method in the API, so I  had to spend probably an hour looking for one, before resigning and writing it myself. That was essentially a large chunk of paid time in which I was doing virtually nothing.

Sometimes people are unmotivated and need a few hours, or even a day, to get back into the swing of things.

This fairly communist view of developers is somewhat contradictory to the rest of Scrum though, which makes developers sound fairly demanding and lazy.

Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.

Simplicity and being lazy certainly aren’t interchangeable words. Procedural programming is maximising the amount of work not done (read: lazy), but it certainly isn’t the most simple or elegant. This just screams absurdly lazy.

The laziness of agile programmers is also shown in their language of choice. From the short time I’ve spent with it so far, Ruby is the most vile language I’ve yet come across. No brackets around arguments, no curly bracket encapsulation around methods and classes, (seriously, are you guys boycotting the shift key?). I natively write PHP, and even I’m annoyed with duck typing. Just throwing in white space wherever you want, with no real standards described for it.

Whilst embracing team work, you seem to be hell-bent on the idea of being completely left alone, despite one of the agile ideas being that you should work with the “business people”. The term “business people” is used almost as a derogatory term. None of them must be allowed to speak to any of the developers but through the ambassador Master, else we’ll become horribly infected with their illogical ways.

Slide 28 talks about accept no help at all unless it’s asked for. No developer will unbiasedly judge his own work, and his team mates probably won’t critique them either. An external person must be in the ring to offer that service. Refusing help is just rude, and incredibly unhelpful.

Whilst I do have other points, this is becoming somewhat depressing, so I’ll go and get on with something more uplifting.

Sometimes change is bad. :(

I remember before, I had a post that showed me downloading at like a megabyte a second. *sigh*

I don’t feel stressed at all either. Knowing that there’s a safety net of a few hundred pounds overdraft available if I need it is really calming. I have spent a little more than I wanted to so far this month, but it’s nothing that I can’t afford thanks to the work I’m doing. Also, living with girls has definitely made me start eating more. Especially since Laura continually offers to make food, so I typically eat at least one good meal a day, which is an improvement on snacking when I’m hungry.

All in all, I have a pretty good life at the moment.

This class is Agile Software Development, so it naturally uses Ruby on Rails, which is known for it’s fast pace, don’t-repeat-yourself development cycle. Pretty perfect fit then. I’ve never used it though, but it’s getting more and more popular. All the hot projects on Github are ruby ones, so it looks like the in language at the moment. I remember when Twitter changed from Rails to some other language though, because Rails just wasn’t scalable enough for them.

In the labs we’re using Instant Rails, but I think I’ll likely just install Ruby and Rails myself on my laptop manually, since I already have MySQL and Apache running. Hopefully that won’t be too hard.

We’ve mostly been playing around with the IRB today.

Coming from PHP, it’s pretty obvious how variables are treated differently. Doing something like

$foo = "blah";
var_dump ($foo * 10);

Would output 0; $foo is assumed as an integer, since * is an operator that works with numbers, and it’s assumed 0. 0 * 10 is 0.

But on Rails

foo = "blah"
foo * 10

Here the * is treated as more of a method, than an operand, in that it takes notice of it’s context and has been overloaded, sort of. Because it’s a string in context, it has a different functionality. That code would return “blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah” (“blah” repeated ten times).

It feels like values are treated more as objects can just … values, really. Literal values can have methods too (inherited from their value type, I guess).

PHP:

//  Takes a decimal and rounds up (never down)
function round_up($val, $precision) {
  return round($val + pow(10,-$precision-1), $precision);
}

Javascript:

function round_up (val, precision) {
    power = Math.pow (10, precision);
    poweredVal = Math.ceil (val * power);
    result = poweredVal / power;

    return result;
}

So, using round_up (1.432, 1); would return 1.5. For currency you’d want to set the precision (the number of decimal places you want) to two.

First class was software design and development. Which is a weird way of saying Java. I’ve not used Java, but I’m pretty sure it’s as easy to pick up as every other language. I’m trying to stay enthusiastic about learning more about it, but looking through the list of topics for this module there’s only one or two things I don’t already know about. I’m worried this is going to be another module where we spend a year learning something that should be taught in a week’s worth of lessons.

Really; learning a language once you already know how to program isn’t hard. They don’t change much.

Second lesson was database design and implementation. Which I’m really worried is the exact same module as the database one last year. In fact, I have the course book which I’ll look though later.

Anyway, it’s still nice to have classes to go to now, I guess.

CoolerMaster SILEO 500 Mid-tower Case
Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L Motherboard
Intel Core2 Duo E8400 3GHz Processor
2GB DDR2 800MHz Memory
Western Digital 500GB SATA Drive
DVD-RW Drive
PNY GeForce 9 9500GT 1GB Graphics Card

That’s the best machine I’ve ever owned… I mostly wanted it for gaming, because I really want to be able to play WoW and MMOs in general again, really. Also, awesome games are coming out this and next year, so I figured I could do with getting a machine that can actually run them.

That’s kind of backfired on me a little though; The internet here has so many ports blocked it’s unreal. They apparently really don’t like people playing games and slowing the network down (it’s a shared line for all the few hundred people in the flat, which is a bit dumb), so they’ve banned commonly used ports and just about every other port. Only letting a few obvious ports through.

That means that this expensive machine is essentially useless to me now. All I can do on it is exactly the same as anything I can do on my laptop. I’m going to have to find a way to proxy all these connections, or get a better internet connection.

Virgin Media are apparently doing a few checks for us now to see if they can install a line into the building, and what speeds we’ll get if they can. Even then though, the installation of a whole new cable might take months, and could probably cost me and my flatmates… We don’t really have much money, we’re only students!

Mobile internet is far too slow and way too expensive, so that’s not really possible.

The only other way then is using a proxy. I’m not even sure if that’s possible. If we ignore the technological setting up of a proxy, I’ll still have to suffer the ping times being pretty much doubled. I really don’t know what to do.

Unless I get this fixed, this is a massive waste of money. I’m really regretting it now.

I had a set of markers which needed to be all on screen, and for some reason there’s no .zoomToShow method. Fortunately it’s pretty simple to create yourself.

//  Make an array of the LatLng's of the markers you want to show
var LatLngList = array (new google.maps.LatLng (52.537,-2.061), new google.maps.LatLng (52.564,-2.017));
//  Create a new viewpoint bound
var bounds = new google.maps.LatLngBounds ();
//  Go through each...
for (var i = 0, LtLgLen = LatLngList.count(); i < LtLgLen; i++) {
  //  And increase the bounds to take this point
  bounds.extend (LatLngList[i]);
}
//  Fit these bounds to the map
map.fitBounds (bounds);

And that’s pretty much it. Then, of course, I found that someone had already done this before, but for version two of the API.

1. Start in username field. Type it in. Hit tab.
2. Should now be in the password field. Hit tab.
3. Listen up! This should be the “keep logged in” check box! Hitting tab again…
4. Should take me to the submit button for me to press enter at.

You all keep forgetting step three! Every other website does it, why can’t you, twitter? (And many other random sites.)

It’s pretty simple. There’s an (x)HTML attribute for input fields, a links, textareas, and buttons. ie. tabindex=”1″ would put the cursor in the element when the tab button is first hit. There’s a better explanation here: how to control tab order in html.

I acknowledge that that’s true, but I don’t see why it matters. All languages are essentially frameworks of a lower level language. PHP is basically a framework for a load of C libraries. C is just a framework for assembly code. Assembly is just a framework for binary programming. Yes, by using PHP you lose a lot of functionality of C, but that’s just because PHP is filling a market with no need for hardware manipulation and the like.

Same with jQuery. If you use $.get() you lose the ability to do the request synchronously (I’m aware that you could just use $.ajax(), but I’m making a point), which isn’t really a big loss to most people when compared to the benefits.

Javascript isn’t exactly the most uniform language around, which IE not supporting half the stuff Opera does, and Safari doing things differently to Firefox it’s a really hard language to code for. You spend more of your time finding work-arounds for each browser than actual logic. The frameworks available all do that for you, making sure that there’re no compatibility issues between browsers, and that $(‘#element’).slideUp() does exactly the same on every browser.

I’d go as far as to say don’t even bother learning about document.getElementById means. It’s so clumsy and awkward when compared to $().

Due to those functionality additions though it’s obviously a little bit slower. I’ve not noticed any speed decrease, but in an “every microsecond counts” environment there would be a noticable difference. But Javascript engines are getting faster and faster so does it really matter? The average person doesn’t even notice a difference.

It’s just programming evolution. It happens to every language. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few forward thinking browsers decided to just store a copy of the latest framework versions locally, so they’re instantly available to every website without having to download the same file hundreds of times from different servers.

The “Objectivist Christian” labelled himself as pro-life, in that a foetus has a right to life and shouldn’t be aborted, however the government has no right to make it illegal. That spurred an argument that someone who calls themselves pro-life can’t also hold the opinion that it shouldn’t be regulated upon. A pro-life person must also want abortions to be illegal.

The guy insisted that they were two different arguments, and I agreed with him at first. The moral discussion of aborting is a completely different one to the legality of abortions. Just because you believe abortion is a woman’s prerogative, doesn’t mean you can’t also believe it should be illegal (or any other combination — though, the combination I just gave would be odd).

The countering person didn’t argue against that, and probably agreed with it. However, what they were getting upset about was that the label “pro-life” is socially accepted as “a life must be protected under the law”, a single idea. You can’t take a socially accepted term and  use it as you want, even if the literal sense of the word allows your definition.

Another example I was thinking of was the guy that was kicked out of university for calling himself  “African American”, although he was white but an African living in America. People were outraged that he’d call himself that, which is a name for a black person living in America, some people even thought it was racist.

So it’s clear that social labels need to be avoided whenever you’re talking about anything. Maybe they’re okay for the media to use, or in flippant conversation, but when you’re discussing your views you shouldn’t use terms like “pro-life” or “African American”. You need to say exactly what you mean.

NB: You’ll notice that I’ve not given my views on abortion, or anything really. I don’t intend to do that in this post, nor to discuss it here.

Next year, I’m not sure if I’ll be getting much government grants at all, and I refuse to come back to living at home with my parents. I’ve just grown out of that. Which means, I’ll need at least an income of £80~ a week to pay for rent, plus food costs (damn human weaknesses), as well as bills and other living costs. That £80 a week is only if I’m really lucky to find somewhere. I’ll likely just be renting a room in student accommodation.

I have about nine months to save up enough money to keep me alive for that year. (I’ll obviously be making money during that year too though.)

With that in mind, I’ve decided to start taking a proactive money making approach, rather than a reactive one I’ve current been taking (“I need £50, so I’ll do £50 worth of work.”) with my freelance gigs. I want to actively be advertising my services, and getting in touch with businesses enquiring if they want any help improving their web presence. Though, I’m not too sure about how they’ll react to what effectively amounts to cold calling.

Since I’m most interesting in WordPress customisation though, I figured I’d create a WordPress services minisite, which isn’t finished just yet. I have a few ideas for promotion which are fairly exciting to me, and I really just want to jump into them before I’ve finished the website and proper landing pages.

I really have no desire to have a nine-to-five, working behind a cash register job. If I get to February and realise I have zero money saved, then I’ll have to resort to that, but I’m really trying to push that off. That’s kind of my motivation to earn as much money as I can, I guess.

I still think the largest thing holding me back is confidence in myself though. I see jobs I know I can do and think “but what if I make a mistake, and end up looking incredibly stupid”, or “what if I get in over my head and have to tell the customer I can’t do what I said I could in the time he wants it”. I think I just have to embrace that those situations will happen, and just be prepared for them so I’m not knocked off balance too much when they do.

Stupid test.

I did a political alignment quiz and came out as 70% permissive social liberal, and 81% permissive economic conservative. And that apparently libertarian. I’m sort of okay with that, but I would have rather been placed dead on the capitalist/liberal line.

As always though, some of the questions were dumb and I answered them wrongly. By that I mean one of the questions was:

Being poor and black is an advantage in getting into college.

And I chose “agree”. I realise now that the question was asking “do you think black people get life easier because they’re black?” Which I would have answered “disagree” to. Other questions like that had meanings which weren’t clear, so I answered the question “wrong”.

Anyway, go do the test.

(Please go and read the books.)

I wondered if that was possible today. Could two single people take to the Internet and split the entire populous of the globe into two separate groups. No, was my initial reaction, surely people can’t be that dumb, and sheeplike, that they can’t make their own minds up.

I mentally retracted that thought immediately. Manipulating people to your point of view isn’t that hard.

I’m a fairly intelligent person so figured I wouldn’t be bought around to someone thinking blindly, but I guess I over estimated myself. If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that I’ve been playing with objectivism, and it actually fits into my political philosophy and general ethos really well. And then the whole health care thing kicked off in America and I felt like I had to pick a side. Yaron Brook – head of the Ayn Rand Institute – has so far been the guy I turn to for arguments and ideas which have always nicely fitted into how I feel.

So, this time I just decided to assume his stance without doing much research. National health care would enslave doctors, give substandard care, make patients spend years in queues just to be refused care because the government doesn’t think they’re worth saving. All things I agreed with (and some still do) and just accepted because Brook has always been a good source for me before.

But because it’s been such a large issue over at reddit, I’ve heard hundreds of arguments most of which I could just wave away. But some really hit home, and I couldn’t justify the capitalist system much longer. Only after a few days research into stuff (and a huge push from watching Sicko), I reluctantly started to realise that maybe universal health care isn’t that bad.

But most people won’t bother, or aren’t smart enough, to go and research how I did. They’d have just followed their mentor’s lead unquestioningly, like I almost did.

“I’m voting Labour because my parents voted Labour, and I’m working class, so there’s no one else I can vote for,” is something that I hear all the time. Regardless of their policies, people will stick with the party that’s gained their trust with catchy motos that sound cheery enough. Labour could unleash Three Waters, admit to it after most the population has been killed, and they’d still get votes from those loyalists.

You can get the general principle for this from watching The Real Hustle, or any heist film. You do something that makes your mark trust you, something honest, or even just something they want to hear. Your mark can be one person, or an entire country. Demosthenes did this by reminding the country of the imminent threat from Russia. Using fear to make them trust him. “You have to follow my ideas, because they’re the only way we’re going to avoid another world war in which you’ll probably die.” Locke did the same by being logical, calm, and rational. People ended up trusting both of them.

Shortly afterwards either of the pair could have said literally anything, and their followers would follow.

Today, I don’t think it would work out the way it would in the book. Once someone is hailed as a celebrity, they quickly generate circles in which they’re infamous, where people hate them just because they’re well known. My Chemical Romance aren’t  bad band, but when they blasted to success out of no where people started hating on them. Twilight isn’t an awful book, but it’s hated by people who have never read it for similar reasons.

This is the age of celebrity, where people are fickle. And so a two-party system will never work. There are far too many demographics that need to be heard and, yes, manipulated. So maybe not just Demosthenes and Locke, but throw in a Galiani, and a Lysias and I think it would work.

The moral here is that you need to actively disagree with everything you hear. It’s your moral obligation to question and judge things (there’s a little Rand for you). Find your own views and don’t just sit in labels like “socialist New Labour”, or “Christian”, or “Republican”. When our Shadow Work Secretary says, “Worklessness has become a generational problem” don’t just agree with her and then immediately go out and vote for the Conservatives. Go and research if she’s telling the truth (she obviously is in this quote), and then go and check their other policies.

Gosh, dammit people, think.

That’s analogous to building hundreds of level one pellet towers and hoping you can get to level fifty. It’s quantity over quality and that’s not how I want England’s education to be heading. I don’t care if people have to get up at seven o’clock in the morning to get a fifty minutes bus to school (I had to do that for college and it didn’t harm me, and I had to go up hill both ways). It’s freaking free. They should be happy to be getting it.

I’d rather people be getting a good, well funded education a bus ride away than being taught the difference between meiosis and mitosis from a browning leaflet from a museum, in some shack at the bottom of their street.

But I also think that schools don’t make the most out of their possible revenue avenues. For instance, my old school is a sports college so we had a pretty decent sports suite. I thought they rented it out during the evenings, but every time I pass there there’s clearly no one parked outside. People would pay good money to use the massive field, three good sized sports halls, and a fitness centre.

The school also has hundreds of computers just lying around at night. It’s a computing school too, so their equipment is nothing to sniff at. Why not rent those out during the evening to people doing night courses on how to use Word and whatever?

My school also has compulsory uniform. Why can’t some company has their logo on there? For instance, Adidas could have their logo on the pupils uniform; they’re generating brand loyalty from the kids, making uniform more fashionable (I guess), and hundreds of people will see the kids walking from and to home each day with the logo. It’s pretty good advertising. So long as the advertisers knew that they could have no control over what was being taught in the school, I don’t see a problem in that. The school could earn a hefty sum from that.

Schools need to quit looking for money from the government and start looking for ways they can make money for themselves.

I decided to add Hashmask as a plugin to the WordPress login form, mostly because I hated the problem that arc90 fixed. Wasn’t really that complicated, nor is it world stopping, but it’s totally my first submitted plugin!

• The plugin page
• I made it a github page too if anyone wants to pull and edit it

Screenshot of Hashmask in WordPress

Ah, I remember it well.

I decided to look around my house to find my Game Boy and my Link’s Awakening cartridge so I could just count the pixels, but apparently my sister is holding them hostage somewhere. I had to settle for a screen shot and found the image to the right.

That’s pretty much how I remember it, to scale and everything. But the resolution of 320 x 288 doesn’t fit any of the resolutions for any figures I can find. And even then each pseudo-pixel is 4 x 4.

That must mean that developers were able to set the resolution they wanted to work with, and the Game Boy just scaled it up or down to fit the screen.

Come to think of it, that makes absolute sense, being as we don’t have four different versions of the game for four different consoles. Although, I’m not exactly sure how at the moment, since by just looking at the numbers I can’t see how they’d all factor to the same scale. Maybe some games just have a border around them. I can’t remember that though.

My sleep schedule isn’t why I’m here.

I’m doing some tests with the canvas element, and decided to make a class for it. You can see it over at the GBCanvas github I set up for it. (I’ve never used github. Just heard a lot about it.) The code is kinda broken at the moment though.

The class is based on the idea of pseudo-pixels, where you have a 300×300 canvas, and can set it to have ten rows and twelve columns. Then you can manipulate each of those segments, which I’ve decided to call pixels. The “GB” comes from Gameboy, because I figured it’d be cool to remake Zelda with canvas.

I want to add an edit mode so the user could do something like

$(document).ready (function () {
  var canvas = new gbCanvas ('canvasid1');
  canvas.editModeOn (true);
});

Which would allow clicking of a pixel and it fills it with a chosen colour. I  mostly want this feature so I can create pixel art, and then get the raw data:image/png data, which I can import into the project whenever. I’m aware I could just create sprites in Paint or something and import the file, but I don’t want to. I’m fond of imposing restrictions stubbornly unto myself.

After a few rethinks, I figured it would be fair simple to just bind a click event to the canvas

//  Turns on edit mode so onclicks are registered and bubbled
this.editModeOn = function (mode) {
  if (mode) {
    //  .click is a jquery thing
    this.canvasDiv.click (this.editModeClick);
  }
}

And then working out which pixel was clicked, and filling it with colour

  this.editModeClick = function (event) {
  //  getSelectPoint just returns an array with the X and Y coord of the click
  //  relative to the top left of the image (to avoid problems with scrolling)
  clickPoints = getSelectionPoint (event, this.canvasID);
  console.log (clickPoints);
  //  Work out which "pixel" they just clicked
  var coordWidth = parseInt (clickPoints[0] / pixelWidth);
  var coordLength = parseInt (clickPoints[1] / pixelHeight);
  console.log (coordWidth + ', ' + coordLength);
  this.colourPixel (coordWidth, corrdLength);
}

This doesn’t seem to work because the event is rarely passed. It is sometimes, but hardly ever. The function is bound correctly. It’s entirely a problem with the event being passed – something I’ve always had trouble with if I’m honest…

Update: Ladies and gents, do yourself a favour and check all your variables before you go bitching on your blog about your code not working. The event was being passed fine. The problem with my code is that since it’s a function that’s being bound to an event, it effectively loses it’s place in the instance of the class, so it no longer has access to the this variable.

My problem was that this.cavasID was undefined.

So, I fix that by simply passing it “this”. Changing the bound event function to something like this:

this.editModeClick = function (event, _this) {
  console.log (event);
  console.log (_this);
  clickPoints = getSelectionPoint (event, _this.canvasID);
  console.log (clickPoints);
  //  Work out which "pixel" they just clicked
  var coordWidth = parseInt (clickPoints[0] / _this.pixelWidth);
  var coordLength = parseInt (clickPoints[1] / _this.pixelHeight);
  console.log (coordWidth + ', ' + coordLength);
  _this.colourPixel (coordWidth, corrdLength);
}

That’s all well and good, but now I’m confused as to how to bind it…

this.canvasDiv.click (this.editModeClick (event, this));

The event needs to be the first argument, but I’ve no idea how to pass the event here… That obviously doesn’t work (event is undeclared).

Edit: Of course it was something ridiculously simple.

var self = this;
this.canvasDiv.click (function (event) { self.editModeClick (event, self) } );

I decided to come update here because it’s mine to update, even if I have nothing to say. And because I have nothing else to do till nine o’clock, when I want to start work. I’ve not decided what work I want to do though. I do have two “you really should get these done” projects though – a secret one, and a WordPress landing page – so probably those first.

I decided to do a night project (in which I see how far into a project I can do in one night), and I got my facebook people to give me the idea for it. Ended up being “porn”, so I started making a porn reddit. To be honest though, after an hour I got distracted by Alias or Greek or some other show and only got a bit done, but I still plan on continuing it.

As always, tonnes of other ideas. Mostly being stopped by my not spending enough time with OAuth though.

I’ve not really updated this blog in a while because I’ve been lazy. I’ve really improved on my politics which I really could write  about. I figured I’ll actually start vlogging, from my YouTube account, and I’ll embed the videos here. I make a lot of political arguments on reddit too, and at some point I’ll link to some of my important ones. Although, they mostly get downmodded.

I think this small company has a point. The two offer pretty much exactly the same services to businesses, only Google does it for free. Google’s able to do it for free because they’re okay with making a loss, even massive losses if necessary. Bottin Cartographes, the guys suing, say that Google just wants to kick everyone else out of the market and then maybe they’ll start charging once there are no alternatives. Which’ll give them a monopoly.

Much like if Asda decided to give away all their products for free, paying for it out of their past profits and reserves, until every other supermarket decides they just can’t compete and go under. Then Asda could start charging £100 for a can of beans to start making their money back. You’d pay it because there’d be no where else.

Of course, they’d never do that because they’d just lose too much money far too quickly. But for Google giving away their data in an API only costs them a bit of bandwidth. For a company that makes billions of pounds a year from advertising, Google could probably go forever before they’d run out of money and have to start charging for their services.

That’s not a possibility though. There are other companies that too can give away their maps and data for free. Yahoo, although faltering, can still offer the same service. Bing maps, Maps.com, Mapquest. I’d say there’s enough competition in these waters. All of them giving the same service and all of them embracing revolutionary business models.

So, once again, I guess an unregulated market seems to stand on its feet. And it looks like Bottin Cartographes are going to go the way of every other business that refuses to innovate.

Another problem though is exactly that, how do the innovate? You need fresh blood that isn’t afraid to try quirky things. No discredit to the people at Bottin, I’m sure they’re good at what they do, but maybe they just don’t understand how things work around these parts. So they have to go job hunting for those people, and the prime place to get their from is universities.

Therein lies the problem… It’s no secret that Google and Microsoft, and more and more so Apple, try to get as many graduates as they can. Google especially, with them hiring more engineers than they actually even need, just so they have the whole ‘class of 2009′ set, I guess. Students know that when they actually get to Google they’ll probably get mundane customer service jobs, and maybe not see any code for a good few months, but who cares? It’s fucking Google! The enticement is just too much for them.

And that leaves none left for the smaller start-ups, or people like Bottin that really need a new a revitalising wave.

My first though to combat that was that maybe businesses that need the graduates could sponsor them, paying for their tuition fees on condition that when they graduate they come to work for them for a reasonable rate (considering they just paid for your schooling) for a certain number of years or something. Free tuition and a definite job at the end of the course would be something I’d snap at.

But at $38,925 a year, I doubt a start-up could afford that much for one kid, who could fail horribly and not be able to work for you or even pay the money back. It’d be a huge risk that no one but these big companies could afford – and they’re exactly the opposite of the people that should be getting these graduates.

A lesser investment could be something strongly advertising jobs around campuses. Or even just being in close contact with the university’s employment centre. I don’t imagine that a cool company like Twitter or Tumblr, even though they’re not big high rollers, would have a problem getting the right employees. But not all businesses can be that cool. There needs to be professional businesses that maybe just inherit a boring reputation. How would they entice students to work for them when they’re competing for them with Google?

One of the comments to his article was

Yeah, more empty sloganeering is exactly what the country needs.

–thaumaturge

And I can see their point. The example that Prescott gave – “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” – was a bad one. That’s not really the use of twitter.

Cameron apologises for saying offensive 4 letter word on radio – TORY? http://tinyurl.com/mtd6sj

–@johnprescott

That’s more like a twitter usage. It’s not a party policy message because there’re better places for those to go. The limited characters really isn’t enough for those. But a quick quip, off the cuff, makes the politician more human. Someone we can relate to better and get to know on a more personal level.

I want more politicians to be using the Internet like this. You can have an actual conversation with them on twitter and sometimes they even reply. People have to remember, and respect, that you’re voting for an actual person, not a party. Just because a person is a member of the Labour party, it doesn’t mean they back national ID cards, for instance. Voters need to know who the person is, not just what party they’re in.

As always where politics is concerned, people are idiots. The comments to that article could have been a nice debate about the uses of the Internet within our executive, but instead they turned mostly into people complaining about Labour. The damn article had nothing to do with Labour. STFU.

High points included:

• More pizza than was really necessary
• Discovering they do Southern Comfort in a can
• Rediscovering lemon slices
• Making that egg in bread thing in frying pans that were clearly too small
• Being enraged by Dr Robotnic!
• Getting zeros for the first few sets of bowling, and then half strike it all the way home (and still losing)
• Being able to tick off Clockwork Orange from my list of films to see — fucked. up.
• Chris kicking a hedgehog so hard even the RSPCA would be impressed
• Finding out Dagny Taggart likes it rough
• Deciding to want to become a professional laser tag player, and becoming very hot whilst deciding.
• Meeting Charlie!
• Battling with Laura to keep her clothes on
• Being yelled at in a forest, and fleeing for our lives

Good times. :D

But anyway, my idea is this. Africa is surrounded by water. Like a farmer bringing water to his land from a near by river, why not do that for the centre of the country, where they’re dying of thirst? The idea is stupidly simple, and I’m sure there’s a glaringly obvious problem with this idea, but no one has been able to point one out to me yet.

Basically, dig a huge river (I suppose that would be called a canal) ultimately from one side of Africa to the other. Right along the equator. It’ll fill with sea water. They obviously can’t drink sea water though. But I’ve thought of that too!

Along side this new canal build a bus stop like building over the top of it. The water will evaporate and condense on the plastic of the cover and run down the sides into some sort of container or pipe, which will lead the water to a water well. It’ll now be fresh water and clean enough to drink.

The biggest barrier I guess would be funding it, but I can’t imagine that a plastic sheet and a few pipes could be that expensive. Some company could just donate them. And I’m sure the Africans would happily work for free to build the river – after all, they’re getting fresh water at the end of it.

So, tell me why this is a dumb idea?

If you’d rather hear about this from someone that knows what they’re talking about, rather than someone who’s building up their knowledge as a lone wolf and possibly going in the wrong direction, then you’ll want this post on security architecture.

OAuth wants to let one website access a user’s private data on another website, using HTTP. That basically means that all requests are made through URLs (either which get parameters, or through post data). That kind of data can be snooped on by malicious people through a man in the middle attack where the data can actually be changed before being sent to the server, or someone could just store it by watching wireless communication, or if you have a virus on your computer/router/access point which is relaying traffic to someone.

For instance, a customer could click the URL:

http://www.orderadrink.com/drink_order.php?drink=tea&customerid=1234

But then an attacker could see the request, and before it gets to the server where the order would be processed, they could change it to:

http://www.orderadrink.com/drink_order.php?drink=coffee&customerid=1234

And then the customer gets coffee for some reason unknown to them… OAuth fixes that problem by hashing the parameters with a salt (passphrase) that only the consumer (the person sending the request) and the service provider (the person receiving the request) knows. For instance, when I signed up for a developer API account with Google they gave me a phrase that I keep secret. Only Google and I know it.

For instance, the consumer and service provider could both decide that they want to do rot13 on all the parameters. So we take “drink=coffee&customerid=1234” and rot13 it making “qevax%3Dgrn%26phfgbzrevq%3D1234″ (we need to do a urlencode() on it too, since it’s a GET parameter). Then we send this URL to make our order:

http://www.orderadrink.com/drink_order.php?drink=tea&customerid=1234&hashed=qevax%3Dgrn%26phfgbzrevq%3D1234

Now, if the hacker decided to change “tea” to “coffee”, orderadrink.com would notice because the parameters no longer match the hashed version, so they wouldn’t allow the action to happen.

Any hacker worth is salt (pun unintended) would immediately notice that that’s just rot13 and would change the hash accordingly. So we use a more sophisticated method of scrambling the parameters. One of those methods offered by OAuth is HMAC-SHA1.

This encrypts the data you give it using a sort of cypher. Damn near impossible to guess, or even to work out. Whilst, it’s not impossible to crack, it’s rarely worth the cracker’s CPU time (which could take years if we’re lucky). So I send the parameters hashed using HMAC-SHA1, using the secret phrase Google gave me, and they just decrypt it to check if the values match up.

I was planning on doing public/private key explanation too, but I really don’t understand it… I’ll go and do more research and maybe do another post on it. I think that’s the problem I’m running into with OAuth; I’ve chosen the signature method that is “more complex and requires key generation and a longer learning curve”. That’ll show me for jumping in at the deep end. I’ll just work with HMAC-SHA1 for a while, which I do understand.

I’ve been trying to figure out OAuth, so I can use the YouTube API on a project I’m working on. It’s had a fair bit of coverage too; it was talked about at i/o last year, twitter has made it fairly popular, and so a lot of others have joined in too. It doesn’t look like it has much of a developer community though… The freenode room has 13 people in it, compared to #linux, #wordpress or #php’s usually maxed out rooms.

Because of the apparent lack of individual interest though, I’ve literally been able to count the number of resources I’ve seen on one hand. There’s this developer’s guide by Google, the oauth spec, there’s some code examples and a library – but I wouldn’t really say they’re for new comers to this scene, and then there’s a pretty comprehensive documentation.

I’ve not really been helped much by any of that, though.

I was mostly just told to use the library to do what I needed, but there’s not much documentation, and the examples given aren’t really explained. Maybe I’m just not as smart as I need to be… And I think that’s what annoys me so much. I’ve really tried hard – and it’s not like I’m a help vampire or anything – I’ve actually put a lot of work in before asking in the #oauth channel. I’ve read, and reread, that spec, but I’m still a littlelot confused.

I wrote a function to nab a request token (pastebin link should stick around for a month – it’s broken anyway, you’re not missing much if you don’t get to see it), which essentially creates a URL. But that’s not correct. I was just told to use the library but I don’t even know where to start with it…

I’m not complaining about the current work that’s being done; I think it’s awesome that the current developers are working on it and at least some people are benefiting. I really don’t mean to be offended anyone. I guess I just felt like moaning; the entry barrier to this stuff just feels too high.

Sigh.

So I made this RSS quilt type thing, and it’s pretty perfect for me at the moment. By default it uses data from the combined RSS feeds of Reddit, BBC, the Guardian, and Ars so it’s a pretty nice pool of information for me. It only shows the headlines too, and that’s all wanted. Putting the body of the articles on would take up way too much space.

Dark items are newer items, whilst lighter items are older. Eventually they get so old they’re barely visible – but you can mouse over them to see it clearly again. Not that I’d want to, if it’s that old I’ve probably already read it. It checks for updates to the feeds every four minutes too, and then inserts them nicely into the page (in an element that you can see, so it’s not inserting elements at the bottom of the page where you won’t notice). It adds new elements in italics too, just to make them extra prominent.

Article order is always randomised

You can change the feed by clicking the modulo symbol in the navigation bar. You’ve got to put the actual RSS feed URL into that though. You can also nab the bookmarklette (click the question mark in the navigation bar) and that will hopefully find the RSS feed for the website you’re looking at when you click it.

Using it in full screen mode is cool. 100% filled with information, pretty much.

Not quite finished yet though, still a couple extra things I want to add: some option (without adding more text to the page) to say “I’m tired of seeing this story, get rid of it” and have that data locally stored in the browser. If the article is a picture post, or at least has a prominent picture in it, then show the picture rather than the headline. Add options to change the gradient from black to lighter to other colours. Dynamically insert an entire new feed (this shouldn’t be that hard, just need to rejig some logic around).

Intellectual heights known only to YouTube

YouTube’s comments really suck. In fact, most of the videos suck too, but every comment is pretty much awful. This is problem most likely came around because of the size of the community just exploded, there’s no reason to be held with any respect.

Places like reddit are still in that point where they don’t have too many users, so the quality of comments is still pretty high. Talk in text speak and you’ll be down voted to oblivion. Whereas on YouTube that seems an okay thing to do.

Each video – even really obscure videos – always seems to have a new comment thread made within the last day or so, making it impossible to have an actual, productive conversation.

There’s also a problem with threads… If you click “reply” to most threads, you just start another thread… Sometimes it works as a nested comment, like expected.

So, to fix the problems we need a smaller community, with more power for each user to vote on the smarts of each comment… We obviously can’t get rid of 90% of the YouTube community, but why can’t we just ignore it?

I was thinking someone should make a Greasemonkey script which removes all the comments on videos, and replaces it with comments maintained by someone else’s service. The new service obviously won’t be adopted by 99% of the current YouTube raff so we’ll get a smaller, more sophisticated society of people commenting on videos.

I like this idea. Someone should do it, or maybe I should.

Edit: Looking into this more, you can probably use the Disqus API.

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.domain.com with your actual domain name.

The website’s a little out of date though; it no longer has to be a Linux server (did it ever have to be..?), so long as you have mod-rewrite enabled in your Apache conf file, you’ll be fine. Like the quote says, this just makes sure that anyone that comes to your website is using the www subdomain. (Sidenote, if you have  a choice of no sub-domain vs. “www.”, go without the sub-domain.) So, someone going to “neopets.com” will instantly (without them even seeing a page refresh) be taken to “www.neopets.com”.

That page doesn’t give much of an example of what all that code is doing though, so I’ll go through it here so that you can modify it better for your own use.

The “Options” line is an options directive, allowing you to set pretty much all of the options you can set in Apache conf files (so long as you have the right permissions; also, higher up directories override subdirectories). Here, we’re telling Apache that we want to follow system links (links to other directories, even though they’re no physical, like a shortcut). Your redirects most likely won’t fall apart if you don’t have that line.

The rewrite engine is where the awesome happens. The next line just turns it on.

The “rewritecond” is the evaluative part of the redirect. It checks to see if the URL that the user is looking at is the same as it’s argument. You can get the syntax for that evaluation from the rewrite engine’s man page, but essentially it’s just:

rewritecond %{variable_name} patterntocheckagainst

It uses a regex argument. If you don’t know regex, you’ll probably want to go and look at some tutorials first.

The [nc] at the end just makes the URL case insensitive. You can have multiple possible rewriteconds by using [or], and having another condition on the next line.

Last is the rewriterule, syntax here. Again though, it’s regex. It’s a useful skill for any one that codes in anyway, so you may as well learn it.

Again, there are flags, wrapped in square brackets. The [r=301] is telling the browser (and more importantly search engines) what type of redirect it’s doing; 301 is a permanent redirect. It’s just a HTTP status code, make sure you pick the right one. 307 is a temporary redirect.

If it’s still a bit over your head though, you could always contact me and get me to do it.

That’s why it’s refreshing to bump around the Internet and find people who not only seem to exist, but live pretty damn close to me. I found these strangers through total serendipity. I was looking at the Fizzpop event page for today (which I can’t go to – I wouldn’t be able to get back home), and then ended up at the Digital Brum site.

They’re listing web related events around Birmingham, some of which I’d love to go to, if only to give me something really interesting to do, maybe meet a few more interesting people. Then I found out about Digital Brum which lists a whole load of other events happening around Birmingham.

Ultimately I ended up at the Birmingham Social Media Cafe website, where they were listing past attendees. An entire list of people in interesting positions, most of them with links to their products and blogs. There are some people like Rob Day who’re 16 years old and have two projects that are looking really awesome in the pipe line. Kind of makes me feel like I’ve wasted my teenage years. This is totally the age of the teenage entrepreneur, and so I’m disappointed in myself for not doing anything amazing. Still though, it’s inspiring for me to do something now.

Found Calum Brannan’s blog too. He has a meeting table. A meeting table! It’s weird how small things like that really get me excited about eventually working for a company. Hopefully a small company. He’s working on Youmeo, which really looks interesting. I was thinking the other day how annoying it is to have both my Facebook and Twitter to update. (A few people who attended that event are working on Youmeo on second glance. I’d love to work on a team project…)

All in all, I’m mad hyped about eventually having a career. At the moment (well, especially at the moment, whilst university is finished till October) my work load isn’t that big. Heck, I sleep in till one o’clock most days just because I have nothing to do. It’d be really nice to get a job at a web start up or something. Places like arc90 who have amazing ideas in their lab (but they’re American).

I guess I could actually full time start freelance work; looking for new clients from nine to five, rather than taking on the clients that come to me (which is only a small number really). When I’m not looking (I’d probably get bored with eight hours of cold-emailing people from job boards), I should be developing my knowledge on general stuff. There still stuff about WordPress I’d be interested in poking around more with.

I’m going to make tomorrow busy.