As I mentioned in my last post about VoteUK, I found the TheyWorkForYou API to be a little lacking when it came to image sizing. I posted a request asking if there was a pattern to the image sizes and, if not, was it possible to have the sizes returned in the API. The "standard" open source reply - "fix it yerself" - was predictably swift. So I did. The source code is remarkably accessible - although a few more comments wouldn't go amiss. This was my first experience with GIT and Github. I…
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This is one of the longest and geekiest posts I've done. It's a work in progress. All comments and abuse welcome. #hashtag – As long has there has been a way to search Tweets* people have been adding information to make the easy to find. The #hashtag syntax has become the standard for attaching a succinct tag to Tweets. The Twitter Engineering Blog That's all well and good, but as I discovered yesterday, without standardisation the ability to search falls apart. I'm not talking about w…
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It's always a thrill to hear an author read their work aloud. It's even more of an honour to be at the author's début. Last night, 100 people crammed into the function room of Canal 125 for the launch event of Girl With A One Track Mind Exposed by Abby Lee aka Zoe Margolis. Sitting around her in a semicircle, it was like Jackanory for adults. Despite never having read her work in public before, Zoe's voice rang out loud and clear. She relished the innuendo and succeeded in making her …
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What is "Implicit Knowledge"? Essentially it's stuff that everyone knows, but no one has written down. Usually it's something that people have worked out through their own experiences. This sort of knowledge is common in life - but is fatal in computing and design. Take the following tweet I received. Mark Hawkins @Mawkins Replying to @edent …
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Well, we're post Mobile World Congress, so let's see what's caught the eye of the web's best mobile bloggers. Here's Carnival of the Mobilists #212! The 25 Biggest Companies in Mobile. The inimitable Tommi Ahonen pores over the statistics and shows the size of companies according to the money they make in mobile - and only mobile. I may query the use of USD rather than € in the calculations, but the data are still highly interesting. This is my post of the week! Mob4Hire launches. There ar…
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There are many "rules" when it comes to User Interface / User Experience design. One that I try to stick to is "Don't let users do things they can't do." It's one of my gripes with Linux. If you're editing a configuration file, you are relying on yourself to sanity check your input - often without knowing what the limits are. Take these two different examples. In a text file, we might have: #Maximum Widgets to fidget maxW_to-F = 0 Whereas a GUI would show How many Widgets do you want t…
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WordPress is only for people rich enough to buy a smartphone and cool enough to choose the right brand. Right? From the WordPress Blog: I like to moderate comments when I’m waiting for something: a checkout clerk to help me, the dentist to call me back to the office, a soy chai to be made. I don’t lug my laptop everywhere I go,* so I love it that we have mobile apps that make this possible. I don’t know of any other blogging platform that has mobile apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. D…
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Blah blah Twitter.... Blah Blah BlackBerry... Blah Blah.... http://www.blackberry.com/twitter NB1: I primarily use SocialScope on my BlackBerry. SocialScope's terms of use prohibit me from showing screenshots of their beta. Hey, guys, I want to show everyone how great you are! NB2: Screenshots taken on a BlackBerry 9000 running OS 5.0 First Impressions I've never understood the need for a EULA. They're long, confusing, boring and a terrible way to make a first impression on your customers. …
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As any student of computer science knows, line breaks are confusing. There are styles of line breaks unique to Unix, Mac and Windows - so what should a web renderer do when faced with a newline command? In HTML, it's simple, they should be ignored. But what when it is user generated text, not HTML? This was a problem I faced when trying to get Dabr to render the ASCII* art produced by Aral Balkan's Feathers App. Feathers uses line breaks to achieve images like... 〰❀❃ Introducing ❃❀〰 My new i…
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After the tragic death of Ernest Marples, I'm sorry to say that the site fell in to a bit of disrepair. With no postcode data and no new boundary data, it looked like VoteUK was going to be permanantly out of business. Thanks - once again - to the clever-clogs at TheyWorkForYou, at least half of the problem has been solved. The API call getConstituency now has a future parameter. Adding future=1 to the call will return the constituency the Postcode will be in for the 2010 General Election. …
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Twitter have announced that all third party site will have to use OAuth. You will no longer be able to just type in your username and password to get access to Twitter via your favourite web client. Usually, I would be a big fan of this move - especially if it forces password anti-pattern sites like TwitPic to implement the new, secure standard. This means that you won't be able to log in to a third party site by giving them your username and password. You will have to use OAuth to se…
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Today is the European 112 Day! Because the date is 11/2 - just like the number - see! 112 is the European wide emergency services number. Wherever you are in the EU, dialling 112 will get you through to the local emergency services. In fact, most GSM networks outside of the EU will also route your call correctly. This is an important day. Dialling 112 could save your life. Sadly, the UK isn't doing anything to promote it. So, what better way to celebrate than by designing a JIL widget to …
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