Gareth Simpson's Notes

Sometimes your problems are not caused by Windows

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:27:00 +0000

I have a Media Center PC. For my sins, I really like it.

However for the past few (well many) months it has been failing to power manage correctly, never sleeping and running the fan all the time. It has also been running like a dog.

Being the clever computer type I am, I immediately diagnosed a bad case of Windows Rot and tried to make time to reinstall it.

Then we moved house and I noticed it was filthy. Every vent at the rear was choked with vacuum-cleaner-bagesque dust bunnies.

Having administered a quick stiff brushing, it is now running cooler, quieter and faster.

Sorry Windows.

Five minutes with SocialThing

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Sat, 17 May 2008 17:36:00 +0000

So a five minute play with SocialThing makes it seem really promising.

Being able to into easily import all your friends from all your social networks (eventually) and then easily alias them together sounds like it would be awesome.

Sadly it goes downhill really quickly.

Firstly it requires your usernames and passwords. They explain why - to get otherwise unavailable private data (friends only Livejournal posts for example), but it seems unnecessary and phishing-like. What they really need is to do is offer a "publicly viewable information only" option for these services.

Secondly there doesn't seem to be any kind of history. New items push old items off the list and then, poof, they're gone. That's kind of limiting. There's also no feed produced so I can't subscribe to this stuff anywhere else, I have to go to their site.

Lastly you can only see an aggregate view. Having aliased my friends (when I've been fortunate to have two of their posts from separate sites appear on the list at the same time), I can't then drill down to view the activity of just one friend at a time.

Nice idea, but must try harder.

wxVenus

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:47:00 +0000

Phil finally gave me an excuse to beat lxml into submission.

And this is the result: wxVenus on OS X.

HOWTO: Install lxml on Mac OSX

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:29:00 +0000

lxml is a total nightmare to install on the Mac. For my own future sanity, this is how to do it.

Install MacPorts
Install libxml2: sudo port install libxml2
Install libxslt: sudo port install libxslt
Make sure DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH includes /opt/local/lib (I am a unix n00b and just edit ~/.bash_profile to have the lines:
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/local/lib EXPORT DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
in it and restart the shell)
Get the lxml code: svn co http://codespeak.net/svn/lxml/trunk lxml
Install Easy_Install (surely you've done this already!)
Install Cython: easy_install Cython==0.9.6.12
In the lxml folder run python setup.py build --with-xslt-config=/opt/local/bin/xslt-config
Then python setup.py install
Look puzzled when python test.py fails utterly
Shrug that off quickly when lxml works generally

This is for Tiger, it may work on other versions too.

Finally! My wife is impressed by my nerdery

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:37:00 +0000

It only took 10 years, but she seemed genuinely impressed when I whipped up a quick Python script to turn the iSight camera on the MacBook into a nanny cam that uploads to a rotating set of private photos on Flickr.

It will probably take another 10 years for her to be impressed again.

Stream of rubbish or a pool of something more interesting?

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 00:30:00 +0000

It's been a while since Phil excoriated lifestreaming for being probably the least interesting thing you could possibly do.. I noted it at the time, but I didn't have a whole lot of interest in lifestreaming or attention data, Digital Lifestyle Aggregation or all that nonsense he blogs about.

Lately though I've been playing with a pet project, which while not actually a lifestream, could easily have lifestreaming applications (sshhh it's a secret).

The upshot of this is that, while I tend to concur that the stream itself is kind of useless, over time it builds up into something more interesting - a pool information about what I (or whoever) did and thought at a given instant, and how those things changed over time. So drinking from the lifestream firehouse today might well be rubbish, but I'm not sure that wallowing in the lifestream nostalgia of tomorrow will be.

UPDATE: I note that Phil rushed to agree with me several months before I posted this.. Typical.

Is there a subtle privacy problem here?

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 00:07:00 +0000

I was looking at the demonstration of how socialthing will allow you to alias together your friends various accounts into a single entity. It's a useful enough feature, and probably something I'd want to do were I a socialthing user.

However, something about it makes me subtly uncomfortable. I might know that my friend Bob is bob123 on last.fm and bob1974 on Twitter. Does that automatically mean it's OK for me to announce that to the world? Maybe Bob doesn't want that link made public and specifically chose different usernames for that reason.

It's not a big thing, but I'm not sure it's my place to aggregate information about someone else.

The caveat here is that I am not a socialthing beta user, so it's entirely possible that this aggregation is for personal use only. The video doesn't make it clear.

Can I migrate to Google Reader?

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 19:21:00 +0000

I finally relented in the face of Scoble's constant exhortations to try Google reader.

It looks quite slick but alas there are two show stoppers preventing my migration.

1. I have to reverse the read order to my preferred oldest first individually for each feed!

2. There appears to be no feed level control of how to handle updates to posts. Normally I want updates to be treated as new posts but there are some sites that insist on constantly updating old posts to no effect (Crooks and Liars video play count, I'm looking at you).

So, I guess I'm staying put for the time being.

Something to give you confidence in the Government ...

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 18:35:00 +0000

... and its ability to deal with on line pedophiles. This quote from the Home Office displays an almost total lack of understanding of how the internet works.

"The home secretary also wants to look at whether it is technologically feasible to set up a system where if someone enters a chatroom with an identity that was already listed on the [sex offenders] register, it would 'ping' an alert on the relevant people's computers, enabling them to take appropriate action," he added.

Which chat rooms? How are the suspect ids being distributed? Should all chat room providers have an extra check box on sign in 'I am am on the sex offenders register'? How many popular chat rooms are run under the jurisdiction of UK law anyway?

It's just empty words to make people think something is being done.

I don't know if there are any serous and effective technical answers to this problem, but I can tell at a glance that this isn't one.

Grabbr 1.3

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 08:02:00 +0000

The breakneck pace of development of Grabbr continues with the release of 1.3

This version includes such astonishing features as permissions and the ability to load the photo page of the image you have just uploaded.

I bet you can barely wait.

Why Wikipedia are wrong to nofollow their links

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 19:24:00 +0000

I realize it's far too late to comment on this, but I rarely if ever crack open the old blogger edit window.

Nofollow is good-ish idea. It's perfect for blog comments where you don't have the time to moderate everything but don't want to pass on any benefits to spammers.

What it manisfestly won't do is deter the spam in the first place. How can I tell this?

Well from the comments I get for a start.

They are clearly-auto posted, so there is no reason not to try spam. It takes no effort.
They are often not formatted in HTML. Sometimes they are plain text - just a URL, sometimes they are in Forum pseudo tags in square brackets ([url=]http://myspam.com/[/url]) so they aren't even trying to get/checking if they get pagerank.

What this means for Wikipedia is that they won't slow their spam onslaught, but what they will do is decrease the quality of search results. Wikipedia has huge pagerank authority. It is also for the most part very well edited. The upshot of this is that a link from Wikipedia passes on some of that huge pagerank because it should. It will make search results better as a whole.

Google should make Wikipedia a special case and disregard their nofollows.

Flickr's Bad Day

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:13:00 +0000

I love Flickr. It gives people like me who have no photography skill and no eye for a picture, something to do with their cameras and phones.

I signed up after it was cool but before it was bought by Yahoo! so I am technically, if not actually, old-skool.

It has therefore been amusing to watch the unfolding controversy around the dual announcement that they are finally enforcing the long promised Yahoo! logins and that they are also introducing limits on the number of contacts and tags.

Naturally this has provoked a shit storm of protest on the forums and in the blogs. I guess they knew that both these things would be unpopular with a vocal minority and decided to get it all out of the way in one go. ~~They probably weren't expecting their corporate bosses at Yahoo! to start using wii tagged photos on a Yahoo! portal advertising page~~ This has been going on for months apparently - it only became an issue when disgruntled punters started looking for things to be angry about.

The "controversy" is still raging. I don't really know why I posted to the forums, or indeed why I'm wasting my time expanding, my thoughts here. I guess it' just another example of how the anonymity of the internets makes it too easy to argue in a way that you just wouldn't in real life.

Still, in for a penny in for a pound.

Merging with Yahoo!

Yeah, it's a pain, but dear God it's not the end of the world. Signing up for a Yahoo! account asks lots of intrusive questions. But you can just lie in your answers, heaven knows I did. My one teeny, tiny, almost issue with this is that I don't tend to invite people to Flickr since I don't want to put that Yahoo! reg page in front of them.

What absolutely isn't an issue is that Yahoo! are corporate scum who kill babies in China or whatever. I mean that is an issue, if you are that way inclined, but the time to jump ship was at the time of acquisition. You don't somehow have cleaner hands because you don't have a Yahoo! ID. Your Pro subscription money and the advertising generated around your pics goes to Yahoo! no matter how you login.

Shit or get off the pot. Either you care that Y! are the devil and you should go to Zoomr or you don't and should Shut The Hell Up. Pleading for old-skool login to remain makes you look like a tit.

But I want 3000+ contacts dammit!

Flickr say they have a technical problem with large contact lists. Specifically they have conflated contacts into 'people whose photos I monitor' with 'people who can see my private photos' They say this leads to load issues when people view the photo pages of people with large contact lists (that's a lot of permissions to check).

Now a lot of people have called Bullshit on this and I can't understand why. I cannot in my wildest tinfoil hat moments, think of a reason for them to make this restriction if it weren't a genuine problem. Some very vocal people are saying dumb things like 'with all Yahoo!'s money you'd think they could sort this out'

Now maybe with huge investment they could fix this, maybe they couldn't. What is a reasonably safe bet is that they couldn't fix it in a cost effective way. It doesn't matter how big Y!'s coffers are, fixing this won't make them more money, or in fact make very many people happy. Deep pockets are an advantage in the sense that you can 'speculate to accumulate' not in the sense that you can invest limitless resources into features with very limited or non-existent benefits.

The people who want to keep most of their pictures 'private' but still have a big audience can do that by creating a private group and inviting people to that instead of 'friending' them (group membership trumps privateness). I bet they don't do that because deep down they know no bastard would take them up on it.

The people who track 3000+ photostreams aren't really tracking them in any meaningful sense. They're deluding themselves, or they are obsessive and need to get out more.

In any case, investing effort to fix this 'issue' will just slow down the delivery of new features for the huge majority of users who are not as lame as the 300 or so put out by this. I don't care how old-skool you are, your displeasure is not any more important than the people who post real issues to the bugs and ideas forums.

Yahoo! stole a tiny thumbnail of my hugely important copyrighted work!

Oh Jesus Christ! Call a lawyer! Quit Flickr and take your photos with you! Except of course you won't.

It probably wasn't the most clueful thing of Yahoo! to do, particularly on this particular day, but God Damn what a storm in a teacup. The people posting wii tagged photos that insulted Yahoo! were amusing, but you can see from the fact that the debate continues to rage long after Flickr posted an exceptionally reasonable response (that they would change the criteria to appropriately licensed CC content and that they'd "like to operate at a slightly higher level than mere compliance with the law". ), that people on the internet just like a fight.

Assholes.

Special mention for Thomas Hawke

One of the chief fuelers of the fire is also the CEO of Zoomr, a Flickr competitor. And while he has a long history with Flickr and is clearly a genuine user, it is very disingenuous of him to weigh in on what's possible for Flickr and compare it with Zoomr. Zoomr's user base is a fraction of that of Flickr and the engineering problems associated with (say) unlimited contacts are that much easier. He's made a rod for Zoomr's back assuming they ever hit the user population of Flickr.

Special mention for Me

Look, I'm an internet asshole too! I can't keep my opinion to myself. It's too tempting when the topic at hand is something you have genuine affection for.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe Flickr really are the assholes for not realizing this.

I should go and do something more productive.

Uncommon sense.

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 03:52:00 +0000

"It is critical that we understand that this new form of terrorism carries another more subtle, perhaps equally pernicious, risk. Because it might encourage a fear-driven and inappropriate response. By that I mean it can tempt us to abandon our values. I think it important to understand that this is one of its primary purposes."

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse.

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 14:58:00 +0000

Gordon Brown is planning a massive expansion of the ID cards project that would widen surveillance of everyday life by allowing high-street businesses to share confidential information with police databases.

A news item so depressing that it made me rediscover both blogging and del.icio.us

What happened to del.icio.us?

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 14:43:00 +0000

It suddenly occured to me that I almost never use delicious any more.

I was vaguely aware that they had a refresh some months back that involved splitting out the inbox feeds into constituent parts.

Well it turns out that the stuff left in my 'inbox' to which I was subscribed was, in fact, nothing.

So del.icio.us went silent. And I barely noticed. And then I stopped posting things and again I barely noticed.

Now I loved del.icio.us and got a lot out of it when it was working for me before. I kind of resent the way they implemented the changes. If they wanted to split out the feeds, the logical way to do it would have been to leave 'inbox' as was and then provide the seperate feeds, seperately.

So now I'm subscribed to my 'network' instead. I wonder if I can retrain myself to post things. I also wonder how many other people had the same experience and never bothered to rediscover it.

Rubbish.

Actual customer service

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 07:27:00 +0000

Russell Beattie's whinge about US phone operators sitting back and letting you rack up huge bills reminded me that 02 actually looks out for you in exactly the way he's suggesting.

While in the US, I rack up huge (by my standards) bills and there's always a helpful little text halfway through the trip

This is a courtesy message from O2 informing you that your spend is now £50 over your line rental for this month. There is no need to for you to take any action.

How good is that?

Textify!

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 10:42:00 +0000

The "html" that iWeb produces is an abomination. The worst bit being that it is possible to produce entries that are big images and not actually text. This is a total pain cause you can't adjust the font size, and you can't cut and paste.

That said, I am a strong believer that you shouldn't just whinge and whine about something, but should try and fix it.

So here we are: iWebTextify, a Greasemonkey script that adds a little 'Textify' button to the top of iWeb blogs with image entries. Push the button and the image vanishes to be replaced by the equivalent text.

Unfortunately because of the gratuitous use of image maps to make links work in iWeb, it's not possible to preserve them when dropping the text version in (this is why the script doesn't automatically create a text version which is what I'd really like). It's better than nothing though.

Go try it out on Ben Hammersley's site now!

Scoble thinks Grabbr is a lame name

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 23:22:00 +0000

Ah well, all publicity is good publicity.

Thing that uploads screenshots to Flickr.

ID card smoke screen

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 10:00:00 +0000

All this time I've been worrying about ID cards and I should have been worrying about the routine tracking of all UK drivers via a vast network of cameras and a big ass database.

What a fucked up nasty Big Brother state we live in. Between this and the retention of mobile phone records, the Government will broadly know where I am at all times now.

I may as well get my ID card and be done with it.

Nice of the Independant to mention civil liberties in one small paragraph in the article. That'll make people sit up and take notice.

Hurray.

Compare and Contrast

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 13:31:00 +0000

Bug reporting in Fogbugz (the tracker we use at work) is very simple. There aren't many fields and you can't customize it much. QA are sometimes frustrated by this but on the whole most people agree that Fogbugz got instant and widespread buy in precisely because it was simple and has been a great success. Joel himself summarizes the principal like so:

People add so many fields to their bug databases to capture everything they think might be important that entering a bug is like applying to Harvard. End result: people don't enter bugs, which is much, much worse than not capturing all that information.

So far so groovy.

The other day I spotted what I consider to be a bug in Firefox, the posterchild Open Source browser.

Being the good citizen I am, I thought I'd report it so I went to the Firefox Bug Reporting Page.

Are they having a laugh? Have you seen the steps I am expected to go to before a I register a bug?

Use the latest nightly build of Firefox with a new profile

Check if you can reproduce the bug in Mozilla (Application Suite)

Check if the bug is already filed

Finally, read the official Bug Writing Guidelines

Even if I jumped through these hoops, I know for a fact that when I get to make the report I would be presented with Bugzilla which is, to all intents and purposes, the anti-fogbugz.

It's like they don't want to know about these things. Even in Open Source land, a bug is not the user's fault. If you want to know about it then you might want to treat them gently, cause chances are you are catching them at the point when they are least disposed to be charitable to you.

My issue remains unreported.

Grabbr 1.2

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 11:37:00 +0000

The process of porting Grabbr to the new Flickr login mechanism has taken longer to complete than writing version 1.

However, it's done now and can be downloaded from the project page.

If you're a Yahoo!-ite or just a Flickerer tricked into merging your accounts, you can now get Grabbr to work.

This is a joke right?

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 12:42:00 +0000

Flickr has updated the authentication method used for 3rd party applications.

"OK" I thought, "I'll just get Grabbr working correctly."

Then I saw the spec.

It's a joke right? They don't really expect you to do all that do they?

All those bright people at Flickr who made the most fun, usable photo sharing service ever, and this is what they came up with? It's a complete and utter pain in the arse.

Maybe I should go and join the tinfoil hat brigade in Flick Off and blame Yahoo! for the end of civilization as we know it.

IE Se7en

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 08:53:00 +0000

Leaving aside the lack of CSS stuff which I know is coming in the next beta, IE 7 is still just lame.

There are many things I dislike about it but the thing that offends me most is the total disregard for UI standards that has been employed in what will (tragically) become the most used application in Windows.

The prime example is that Microsoft have taken the single most annoying "feature" they introduced to Windows - the ability to tear off the menu bar and move it and taken it to the next level.

They have moved the menu bar below the tabs, and then just to spit in your eye a little more, they have reverted to it being non movable, so you can't even put it back where it belongs.

Rubbish.

Bonjour iChat's use of XMPP (Jabber)

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 11:43:00 +0000

I'd been meaning to do this for a while, but prodding from various people in comments and email has prompted me to actually start.

This post will document how iChat makes use of the XMPP protocol for its local Rendezvous/Bonjour/Zeroconf/whatever messaging. It is by no means complete, and based purely on my observations while trying to make the iChat plugin for Miranda.

If you have any corrections or want to fill in one of the many gaps, then please add comment here and I'll get it up to date.

Introduction

iChat is in most respects a pretty standard jabber client. You should be able to talk to it very quickly by modifying any existing Jabber library and building in the Zeroconf stuff. For example I modified the Jabber plugin for Miranda. There is absolutely no need to start from scratch.

Just to be clear, I personally use the Apple Bonjour SDK in C for Windows, but any Zeroconf library will do. In my Zeroconf examples I refer to the Apple SDK functions here and there, it's left as an exercise for the reader to translate those bits to their own platform.

Connections

This is the biggest deviation from the Jabber spec. There is no central server, so your client has to act as both client and server (depending on who initiates the conversation).

When you become available, your client will have to open a server socket and listen for incoming connections.

The default port that iChat listens on is 5298 so that's a pretty good starting point.

Each conversation with a remote user is it's own socket connection which is maintained until the conversation is over.

Presence

Presence in iChat is handled entirely by Zeroconf. To register on the network, you simply need to publish a Zeroconf record with appropriate fields. All the clients on the network are looking for these records, and as soon as you publish one, you will appear on all their rosters.

You need to create a number of text records (using TXTRecordCreate and TXTRecordSetValue).

There are a number of records in iChat but these ones are the minimum to get a conversation going:

Record	Value
txtvers	1
version	1
status	avail / dnd / away
1st	User's first name
last	User's surname
port.p2pj	The port you are listening on (typically 5298)

You now need to register your Zeroconf service (using DNDServiceRegister).

You must pass "_presence._tcp" as the name, domain and host can be null, the port is 5298 (or whatever) and you must also provide your text record. See the documentation of your Zeroconf library for more details.

To build up your own roster, you need to browse for _presence._tcp records (using DNSServiceBrowse).

Starting a Conversation

iChat's use of jabber is pretty straightforward. Regardless of whether you are initiating a conversation or responding you should being by sending an xml declaration like this:


<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

This should be immediately by followed by on open stream tag


<stream:stream to='1.2.3.4' xmlns='jabber:client' stream='http://etherx.jabber.org/streams'>

You should put the target's correct ip address in the "to" attribute.

The person on the other end should send you the same stuff.

This is a slight deviation from what my jabber client library expected. That had a "from" attribute as well which iChat omits. I needed to remove the check for this otherwise the library crashed. Your mileage may vary.

Having sent this opening packet, and received one from the other side, you just need to sit there polling your socket waiting for further messages. If you're modifying an existing jabber library, you should find that all of this code already present in the library and easily modified.

Sending a message

Messages are standard jabber message packets in the following format:


<message to='1.2.3.4' type='chat' id='uniquemessageid'>
  <body>message text</body>
  <html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
    <body ichatballooncolor='#7BB5EE' ichattextcolor='#000000'>
      <font face='Helvetica' ABSZ='12' color='#000000'>message text
      </font>
    </body>
  </html>
  <x xmlns='jabber:x:event'>
    <offline/>
    <delivered/>
    <composing/>
  </x>
</message>

The id field is a jabber thing which needs to be unique for each message. Your client library should handle it itself.

The extra html version of the message is an iChat addition. iChat itself does not require it but some other clients (such as Adium) do.

Terminating the conversation

If you want to close the conversation, just send the closing


</stream>

tag that you opened at the start, and then close the socket. Your client library should be able to handle this.

File Transfer

Coming soon

Avatars

I have no idea how these work. There is a zeroconf record that appears to contain the hash of the image but that's as far as I've got. Any further information gratefully received.

Just another reason to hate RealPlayer

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Simpson) — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 08:45:00 +0000

This popped up the first time that I plugged in my iPod after installing RealPlayer.

Are they insane? What makes them think I would possibly want to manage it with that POS?