So a fringe benefit of the server being down today was I noticed that my blog hasn’t been updating. I’m not sure exactly why yet, I think it’s something to do with a cron job that is mucking about with the database. I’m going to be back posting the missing items, but not all at once. I’m going to do a few today, and over the next couple of days.
Neil and I went to Dorkbot last night. I love Dorkbot but I haven’t been to one in about 8 months. We arrived at a smarter venue than the previous ones I’ve been to. They were having it in an art space near in the East End. We got collared by some from the art space who collected our email addresses (puzzling me) and directed to an art opening on the wrong floor.
After a lot of perplexed wandering around and amusement at some slightly trite banksy-a-likes Neil suggested we try the other floors. We finally found Dorkbot in time to see a presentation by Der_T on building home-grown multi-touch consoles. How very on vogue considering the Microsoft announcement (also on Mac Daily, Daniela Barbosa, Engadget). It was really interesting to see people hack this stuff up. I’d love to see some schematics in the wild from these efforts.
Mike “Dr High Voltage” then did a quick and dirty demo of demo of some kind of flying machine made of tin-foil and other household items. I have some very sucky photos, so I’m going to wait and post my video. He pointed out the experiment was totally useless for anything practical but it was a lot of fun. Of course being Mike it was also very high powered. He explained how we could do this at home by taking apart a monitor for the power supply (yes that’s the kind with massive warning yellow stickers on it).
Finally there was a nice open dork on using an audio jacks port services to allow you to rendering applications to a spectrum analyser to do fun things. The demo was a pretty visualiser that split up and image and did gravitational effects with the tiles. Pretty cool.
Links to the stuff going that happened are available on the Dorkbot London #48 event pagge.
Updated: I’ve published a video of Mike’s Spaceship Dork.
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dorkbot, art, geek, dorkbotlondon,dorkbotlondon48, londonevents, drhighvoltage, multitouch
Simon Willison linked to Feedwhip. I love this idea. It’s very much like a Mac OSX App I’d been using, Changes Meter. The basic idea is that it provides an RSS feed to changes that happen on a web page that doesn’t have a feed. I use my feed reader a lot for all sorts of things. Changes Meter was an OK stop gap, but it’s nice to be able to monitor things with my feed reader again.
There are a couple of caveats, though. I wonder how well it works with pages that have dynamic elements like Ad beacons which are randomly changed. That could easily pollute a feed to the point of uselessness. Feedwhip is also pretty limited with the amount of feeds and the refreshes frequency. A standard user gets 5 feeds which are refreshed every 48 hours. Right now they are giving a free 180 day upgrade to the Pro version which gives 10 feeds refreshed daily. Still not too awesome.
Netnewswire has an option to subscribe to so called special feeds
. These can be a few of things, but particularly a script or a flat file. While you could make cron job to do diff curls against each other and publish the results, I like the idea of a live script better. Being able to cook up scripts which muck about with feeds is another reason why I like local feed readers over web based ones.
Technical limitations aside, what I liked best about Feedwhip was the idea of getting a feed for information from anywhere. I’d like to see something which takes this further and produces a usable interface to page scrape directly into a feed. Something like that which could be thrown at Pipes would be incredible. A user could create a feed of any information they wanted without any coding at all and subscribe to it with any feed reader at all.
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feedwhip, changesmeter, simonwillison, netnewswire, feeds, rss, atom
Telexy have released a beta of SymSMB 2.0. You need to sign the application to your IMIE so you can use. I wrote a guide on how to sign SIS applications because it turned out not to be very obvious.
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mobile, symbian, s603rd, symsmb, telexy, home network, samba, smb
Nokia wants to protect you from all the bad boogymen in internetland. It insists that all fully signed S60 applications go through a QA procedure. I think this is a good thing. The last thing I want is a virus chomping up my expensive data rate on my mobile phone. However it does mean you can’t be a beta tester for a lot of Symbian software houses without self-signing. This is because Nokia also allow you to sign applications for one phone without the hefty QA.
This is a, quick, simple guide to signing stuff. It won’t teach you development. It’s really the basics. It also only works in windows because it requires some of Nokia’s Win32 applications. I did use Windows in Parallels on my Mac though. These apps might work in Cross Over Office, I haven’t tried. You can self-sign using one the guides below, however I recommend following the whole thing because it allows you to sign protected apps for your phone.
The basic steps to make this work are:
The first bit is actually surprisingly easy. The ‘key’ in this case is just an SSL certificate. I’m not going to talk you through creating one. You can copy step 2 from the Nokia guide to self-certification with the tools from this Adobe article on creating SIS files. Otherwise the makekeys.exe application has the usual CLI help by running the command with no parameters.
Once you have a key you need to get Nokia to provide you with a certificate to sign your apps with. You’ll need to make an account on Symbian Signed. You can then download the developer certificate request tool. This program, once installed, makes CSR files that you can upload to Symbian Signed to get a certificate.
If you run the developer certificate request tool, the first thing is to pick a place to save the CSR file. Once that’s done hit next. Select no to the ACS Pub ID, unless you happen to have a Verisign SSL certificate lying around. Since you aren’t using publicly signed key you can only get a certificate for one phone. You can get your IMEI by typing *#06#. Enter this number by hitting the button right next to the IMEIs. Finish up and save you should now have a CSR file wherever you saved it.
Go to Symbian Signed and log-in. In the tab menu at the top select ‘My Symbian Signed’. The next page should have a menu on the left. Select ‘Developer’ then ‘Certificates’ then ‘Request’. Upload the CSR file and fill in the nasty CAPTCHA. Follow the link on the page you get sent to, in order to download your certificate.
Finally go back to the command line and you can run the signsis.exe command to sign your application (but only for the IMEI you entered remember). In order to do it use:
signsis unsigned.sis new_signed.sis certificate.cer your.key password_to_key
You can request more certificates for more IMEIs if you want. Since you didn’t use an ACS signed key a warning will always come up on the phone during with whatever details you used when making your original key.
Thanks to all the articles above to their help piece this together and to GSM Blog for it’s excellent article on this topic.
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sign, symbian, s60, nokia, certificate, ssl, selfsign, sis, mobile
After the talk I gave this week one of my colleagues, Norm recommended ThisService. Similar to Platypus ThisService lets you make services out of scripts. The Daring Fireball blog has a good example of ThisService in action to do Google lucky searches.
Services combined with Menu-master to assign shortcuts are pretty awesome. Although you can also a lot with Quicksilver triggers using proxy objects such as code selections.
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Quicksilver, AppleScript, Mac, ThisService, Platypus
This is a Keynote talk I did at work as a fill-in for our Lightning Talk series. Marco asked me to publish it. It’s reasonably sparse but all these apps were chosen because I think they are useful in some meaningful way. They aren’t in any particular order and this is certainly not an exhaustive list of useful applications (I have 320+ apps installed, this is just 10).
Ukelele is an application that allows you to edit keyboard layouts. For example, I replaced the § key with # on my keyboard because I find opt+3 to be a hassle when I’m coding. Ukelele is free.
Menu-master is a preference pane. It allows you to add or delete keyboard shortcuts from menus. It’s a must have piece of software for me. It costs $10 but it’s very much worth it. Since it’s part of the unsanity framework it may or may not work in Leopard.
Nocturne is the new application from Quicksilver developer alcor. It allows you to change contrast options on your screen. I use it when I’m on the tube to keep my flagging battery alive with a very dim screen. Unlike other things which are just wrappers for ctl+opt+cmd+8 Nocturne adds features like tint and shadow removal to stop the glowing effect. Nocturne is free.
AppFresh is an application that scans your applications folder and finds updates for you. It will download the updates into a folder of your choosing (I don’t recommend Desktop if you have more than a couple of apps) but it doesn’t automagically install updates yet. AppFresh is free.
DiskInventoryX scans you hard disk drive for where you use space. It shows usage by size on a map, with colour to indicate the type of file. It’s great to finding places you aren’t using you disk well (for example bloated logs). It has some nice features like folder zooming. I just like the look of the map it make than the one Grand Perspective makes. DiskInventoryX is free.
iBackUp is a backup solution. It is really a wrapper for two solid UNIX command line apps, ditto and rsync. It allows configuration of the exact command it uses as well as scheduling options. The major selling point is application profiles, though. These are downloadable, autoupdating files that describe where an application keeps its settings and configurations to allow iBackUp to intelligently copy them. This makes iBackUp one of the best backup solutions I’ve seen. iBackup is free for personal use.
R-name is a simple app that lets you batch rename files. It has some basic regular expression support but without back references. You can select a number of files, match what you want to change, and what you want to change it to and preview the changes. A simple button click later and the file are all renamed. Not rocket science but quite convenient. R-name is free.
Spirited Away is one of my all time favourite apps. For the chronically focus impaired, like myself, it hides all applications not being used after a certain amount of time. I use 300 seconds which is 5 minutes. You can set a list of applications not affected, such as video players and the like. It was recently updated to be a universal binary. Spirited Away is free.
Platypus is an application that compiles scripts into actual applications. This is great if you wrote something neat you want to easily package and distribute. I noted some issues with it including the script distribution with each app, but I’ve been told that’s just me. Platypus is free.
Phpfi is an offline reader for the php.net PHP manual. Since it is driven by a local copy of the manual searching is a lot faster than searching php.net, obviously it also works when you aren’t connected to the internet. You can download the comments from php.net with one click on a function call. Phpfi is nag-ware, although it doesn’t nag that much (possibly not at all if you don’t download comments).
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Mac, Productivity, osx, ukelele, menumaster, nocturne, appfresh, diskinventoryx, ibackup, rname, spiritedaway, platypus, phpfi
The lovely Dorward invited me to play Settlers of Catan
It’s a great board game that takes place on an island called Catan. The players complete to become the dominant force on the island. While there is no actual combat in standard game there are several ways to be passively aggressive. This means that players have to trade, luck and negotiate to winning.
The players place their settlements on the edges of the tiles. They get resources every time the number on one of the tiles next to their settlements is rolled using the dice. This means placement is everything.
We played a couple of games and had loads of fun. More games are planned soon. I highly recommend getting a copy of this game. With a quick learning curve it should be a great game for quiet (or not so quiet) nights in with mates.
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neilcrosby, daviddorward, settlersofcatan, boardgames, games
Today everyone’s favourite FOSS project, The Mozilla Foundation, are in my good books.
While tracking down some weird bug at work. I found out the that all those talkbacks you submit when your browser crashes are publicly available. This is super if you are getting reported issues with Firefox on your site. Working with your knowledge of your site’s code and a helpful Firefox hacker it isn’t too hard to quickly pin-point the issue.
This is yet another example of the Open Source model at it’s best. You can bet your bum Microsoft won’t share their crash reports so freely.
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Web Development, talkback, mozilla, opensource, bugs
Big Daddy Stu has posted the podcasts for the last WSG London meeting. Christian has also posted his slides
Stu has more details WSG London on his mini-site.
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webstandardsgroup, wsg, stuartcolville, christianheilmann, steveFaulkner
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