webponce rants

I’ve been walking around the office barefoot for almost ten years – apparantly I’m not mental, but doing myself some favours.

http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/

I don’t know if you’ve been following the ASLEF and RMT protests towards the new Mackenzie Crook film, but this response from the film-makers is pure joy

Awesome! (I know how it feels)

http://leavemealonebox.com

Yes, i’ve checked the date, no it is not an april fool:

Publisher plans printed version of Wikipedia

It has always amazed me why we, as such a wasteful society, are happy to throw away half eaten meals, working electronics, tons and tons of perfectly useful stuff (and money) into landfill sites every year, but are obsessed with getting every last particle of toothpaste out of the tube.

Toothpaste Tube Maximisation Tools

Three more cameras have gone into the wild today – one on the southbank, one in central london’s oxford street, and one handed to Peter from the Fifty Quid Danger Fund so he can put it somewhere of his choosing. You can find their location on the camera tracker.

I was walking along the southbank as my wife and I wanted to go and check out O2’s The Memory Project – nothing to do with our little site, but a really nice idea nonetheless. Basically, they have created a 360 view timelapse of the southbank, which is taking images right now. Inside the installation, you can view old images from the panorama’s last few days of capturing. Walking closer to the screens shows you newer images, further away, older (or vice versa). I’m not sure when its there until, but check it out – its a nice concept.

And finally, we’ve had our first request to make a DIY camera bag – all the way from Boston MA, in the US of A. Woo! Thanks Tom. Hopefully we’ll be seeing his camera location pretty soon.

As twitter increases in users and awareness in the mainstream, more and more people are asking ‘yeah, but why?‘, more so than many other arguably less useful services. I’m not sure why so many people need a definitive answer to use what is such a simple service to join. The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss sums it up best I think:

There are so many possible uses for Twitter. It’s a very functional group messaging service – if your ten closest mates were signed up you could say ‘I’m in the pub’ and would only have to send one message instead of paying for ten. And you could also use it for more creative projects, something I’d like to explore when I clone myself and have some time to do ‘art’ outside of all-consuming work time.

The real point, though, is that we should all be a little more willing to explore these tools without feeling the need to classify it or nail it down to some definite function when it is still so young. So many inventions were born out of a completely different idea; vinyl records were a spin-off (no pun intended) from a project for talking dolls or some such… It’s far easier to dismiss something out of hand than to be open-minded, creative and playful.

Honestly, you wait for a site launch for a couple of months, and three come along at once. Big shout out to the team for the launch of three sites last night (in order of project length and blood/sweat/tears).

Vitra

This project has been a couple of years in the making, and the passion and effort put into the site shows. Chris, the lead developer, has pretty much worked on it single-handed since he started, and its a testiment to his dedication.

adidas Dream Big

A new campaign from the football team with some really nice video content.

adidas Cricket

The new adidas england cricket team shirts.

For those of you not following the disposable memory project blog, we sent the first two camera bags into the wild today. Squeak!

“Flickr users hate video. Digg users don’t want their site to become DiggSpace. Facebook users are sick and tired of application invites. Unfortunately for you, these companies couldn’t care less, and I’ll tell you why.”

There has been plenty of talk recently over whether social networks, or indeed any small loved app or site, which grow in both users and functionality, forget about their core idea which made them so great and loved in the first place. Twitter for instance is still relatively simple and holds true its original idea, whereas Digg are adding social networking tools, Flickr have added video support, amazon sell food, tesco sell insurance – okay maybe i’m over-extending. But the discussion is a valid one. Mashable, from which the quote above comes, propose the ’screw you coefficient’ – one method of deciding whether a new piece of functionality or approach will make improved revenue for your one-time-blog-now-mega-super-app.com, contrasting loss of users against increased wonga.

Personally, whether its a commercial decision or not, I’m not sure adding 100s of new features is always a good thing. In fact, I lie, I’m sure it is not a good thing.

For instance, as i mentioned above, twitter does one thing, and does it extremely (mostly) well. They’ve created a well rounded API which allows others to extend their core functionality, but twitter.com itself is staying true to the central idea. They do need to be a little careful, recent interface changes are adding more and more links, @replies and following topics etc. etc. are neat additions, but much more and it could go the way of Microsoft Word – a 1000 new features, where most people only use a handful.

This is why 37signals tools are loved and arguably hated in equal measure. Their perceived ‘arrogance’ towards developing applications the way they see fit is actually keeping their tools simple and effective, rather than curtailing to pressure to add this, add that. Heck, I still use notepad.exe daily, i love gtalk’s simplicity over any other IM, my favourite colour is whitespace (its actually red but works for making my point), and fit for purpose is always better than bloat for possibility.

In creating the first few pages for disposablememoryproject.org, I had to remind myself of that. i’d started creating page after page after page, one for contact, one for the concept, one for every paragraph in essence, until I stopped myself. This could go on a single page – everything the user needs within one screen – bang! and the dirt is gone! So, I rehashed, and rebuilt into a single page. So much simpler.

Having to write the postcards/instructions was similar. I originally wrote a longer set of instructions, but realising the text limit restrictions on moo.com postcards, I had to sub sub sub, into just a few lines – and for the user – that is SO much better – bang! and the waffle is gone!

Applications are the same – simple fit for purpose tools to enable you to do what you need/want in a super simple, low barrier to entry, way. The problem comes when you find yourself switching between 20 apps to carry out each distinct task, thats when the argument for bloating your product appears – but honestly it shouldn’t need to. Open APIs and data portability aim to allow for interchange of data between all of these apps (that’s the plan anyway), leaving each app’s interface to do what IT does well.

Simple is good, simple is powerful, simple is relaxing.

This has tipped the scales in favour of getting Sky
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2008/04/gladiators_ready.html

This is one of the reasons to leave Hoxton:

American Apparel from Chris Garcia on Vimeo.

Whilst i’m not surprised to see it happen, its great to actually see quantative reports that giving away free music does have a commercial benefit. last.fm, since launching their full length tracks service, have influenced an almost 120% increase in real sales throught their partnership with amazon. Last.fm, who have over five million full length tracks available on their service, reckon existing users are purchasing 66% more music as a result of the free tracks being available via the site.

I’m personally one of those people. I used to discover new music on Pandora and immediately go and buy the albums via amazon – but since its UK closure, I’ve had to rely on last.fm to find new artists, and probably buy two or three albums a month of artists i’ve never heard on the radio – far more music than i ever used to buy before making use of sites such as last.fm and imeem. I just hope the record labels take these figures to heart and realise not all digital consumers are out to ’steal music’.

via [mashable]

Penguin books have recently released http://www.wetellstories.co.uk – six stories, six authors, six weeks – utilising ‘new’ technology to tell the stories. a mix of tools like google maps, user entry, blogs, twitter, live writing are all in use to create new ways of providing a narrative – something very close to my own heart. its a lovely collection of stories and top marks to penguin for getting behind this. Makes me want to pull my finger out and finish off hyperconsequence!

http://disposablememoryproject.org

So, I had this idea at about 5pm today whilst picking up my wife’s drycleaning. They had a disposable camera on the shelves for sale. I don’t think i’ve used a disposable for years – not since i got a digital camera smaller (and arguably better quality) than most disposables – the last time, I think, was at a friend’s wedding, where they’d been left on the tables for guests to take pictures of the day – and hand them back in at the end. The idea being the images taken will be a perhaps more candid and spotaneous collection of images than the official photographer might catch.

With the current spat of immediate update / lifestreaming sites such as twitter, pownce, facebook status updates and just the digital space in general, life is so quick hit these days – instant gratification is everything, or is it? At the same time as these sites are cropping up and hitting the mainstream, I’m also seeing a number of ’slow your life down’ sites – bookcrossing and postcrossing are two examples which I really relate (mostly because I love books and I love receiving snail mail).

So, throw together a disposable camera, the idea of slowing things down, and a little bit of ‘discard interaction’, and you’ve got the disposable memory project: take one (or more) disposable cameras, leave them around london with instructions on how to use, get them back (hopefully), develop the images, and post them for people to see.

I’m hoping that maybe we’ll see visually the journey these cameras take, passing from person to person. I’m not going to put any complicated user profiles in place (ie. now send it to user XYZ at address ABC), its just going to exist completely physically by being passed on hand-to-hand, person-to-person.

I’m sure some will get lost, some will get stolen, some will get just thrown away or destroyed by the security services, but those which make it back to me, you’ll be seeing the images up here as soon as I get them.

Once the images are online, hopefully people who took the images will be watching the site to see if their cameras turn up, and then they will be able to post/label/tag/comment on their pics, and the circle is complete.

So, that’s the basic concept. Like the idea? Watch this space, and I’ll let you know when the first set of cameras are out. Not bad for something inspired by a drycleaning shop.

Don’t forget to watch all new Tek Jansen epiwebisodicnodes at Comedy Central

A team of Interaction design students from Malmö University in Denmark have come up with a simple, but nicely executed, way of creating music from possibly one of the most prolific forms of visibly encoded information in the modern world – barcodes. Scanning any barcode takes the value of the item, converts it into a audio sample, and plays it back on a timeline, creating a realtime piece of music based wholly on the scanned items. As you can see from the video, interested shoppers enjoyed taking part in creating this unique piece of music experience.

http://barcodebeats.hobye.dk/show/english/concept.aspx

well, as you asked nicely..

Whilst it could be argued it isn’t massively secure, to automate some subversion processes, it is often required to skip the username/password authentication process using subversion over SSH – for instance, we’re writing an automation tools which allows our project management team to do an svn update on an externally facing server without using SSH or the terminal. As even a simple

svn update

has a password request, automation becomes difficult. I’ve finally got around to installing the PEAR/PECL SVN libraries for PHP5. Whilst they’re experimental, they do the basics, which is pretty much all we need right now (we’re doing any switching/branching via the terminal still), but you will need to setup SSH keys to streamline the authentication side of things.

First of all, log into the ‘client’ machine (ie. the server with your working copy which needs updates etc.) and generate your private and public keys:

ssh-keygen -t dsa

Make sure you accept the default location and leave the password blank (this is essential).

Then copy your public key (~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub) to the SSH/SVN server. It’s pretty easy to do this via SCP

scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub username@svn.server.com:

Then SSH into the subversion box and add the public key to your authorised keys file

cat id_dsa.pub >>~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Logout of the subversion server, and try ssh’ing back in – it shouldn’t ask you for your password. If you’re in – it worked!

This is also really handy for connecting to Media Temple subversion repositories, which have a bizarre username “user@foobar.com”, and ecaping the @ can be a pain. You can utilise serveraliases to get around this:

Host aliasHostName realservername.comUser user@realservername.com

Enabling you to simply…

ssh alias

Where alias is, of course, the alias you’ve chosen, not an excuse to think about Jennifer Garner – why would you need an excuse?

The Royal Mint have released the new designs for our coinage. The coins have been designed by a 26 year old who entered a competition, and will this year see his work realised. The coins work together to build up a picture of the Shield of Royal Arms. Very cool, i’ll be glad to have this soon-to-be design classic in my pocket.

via [we made this]

If you’re seeing error messages about missing https wrappers when trying to use SOAP (”Unable to find the wrapper “https” – did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?” or “[HTTP] SSL support is not available in this build”), you haven’t installed the SSL libraries to support secure transactions.

1. Uncomment

   extension=php_soap.dll

   in your php.ini

2. Uncomment

   extension=php_openssl.dll

   in your php.ini

3. Copy

   ssleay32.dll

   and

   libeay32.dll

   to your windows system32 directory

4. Reboot apache, et voila!