OAuth was designed to combat an anti-pattern. Typing your username and password into a third party site is bad idea. A really bad idea. I mean, you may think it's a bad idea to give your bank details to a Nigerian prince but that's just peanuts compared to giving away your password to an untrusted site! So, that's why we use OAuth. Rather than handing details to a random site, we authenticate…
Continue reading →
My good friend Richard Brent has often complained that my blog has very little Shakespeare content. Despite the domain name, I don't think I've ever blogged about The Big S. For shame! Fear not, my Brentish-Boy, this post is all about Shakespeare. And MySQL.... Ahem... When I first started shkspr.mobi it was intended to be an easy way to get Shakespeare on your phone. At that time, there…
Continue reading →
…
Continue reading →
We live in a world of our own creation. This means we can find it inconceivable that outsiders don't know the acronyms we use daily. How can anyone possibly live without understanding what we do? Customers don't understand your company's acronyms, processes, or business model. It's worse than that, though - most users don't even recognise your company's name! Here's a great example. In Zinio's …
Continue reading →
Here's a simple way to copy files to and from your BlackBerry PlayBook when you're using Ubuntu. This should work with any form of Linux. This is a step-by-step tutorial with screenshots. On The PlayBook Plug your PlayBook into your Linux computer using a USB cable. You may see this screen (or similar) you can dismiss it. In the Settings menu, scroll down to "Storage & Sharing". Ensure…
Continue reading →
In a mixed paradigm environment, how do you ensure content is surfaced which is context specific? By which I mean - how do you make your content serve the user's time-bound constraints? What I'm trying to say is - serendipitous discovery must be restricted based on temporal imperatives. Or, to break it down further, a user may only have a specific amount of time to dedicate to your app; how do …
Continue reading →
On Thursday, I attended my first TeaCamp. It's a mini-meetup for UK Gov folk doing interesting digital things. These are some random jotterings based on the discussions both at the event and at BeerCamp afterwards. All conversations were under Chatham House Rule. Social Media is a problem for all organisations - whether public or private. Rightly or wrongly, the "public" see an organisation…
Continue reading →
Image adaptation and resizing is a hot topic at the moment. With devices of varying screensize accessing your site, how do you ensure that the crappy 240*240 phone gets a reasonable experience while still making everything look gorgeous on the retina-busting iPad? One of the very first things we're taught in HTML school is that we should separate content and style. <span font="comic sans"…
Continue reading →
At the start of 2012, I revealed how many scans TfL's QR campaign was getting. A lot of comments on Twitter & Google+ dismissed these results as a success. A typical response was: 70 scans a day? In a city of millions? Rubbish! This fails to address something that advertisers are conspicuously loathe to reveal - the true "response rate" of any advert is hard to calculate. How many phone…
Continue reading →
I am an evil, capitalist, unfair bastard of a landlord. At least, that's what my worry is. I try really hard to be honest, fair, and uncuntlike as possible. I never wanted to be a landlord, I wanted to be a lumberjack! but somehow I ended up as one. Let me roll back a few years to see how this sorry mess began... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ < to indicate wavy lines. January 2008 was a…
Continue reading →
An email from FourSquare this morning reminded me what I was doing a year ago today. I spent the morning at The British Museum doing the first public experiments with QRpedia. This is a video of the historic occaision. So, here's a quick run down of what this volunteer-lead project has acheived in a single year, in no particular order: Derby Museum installation UK National…
Continue reading →
Having sex is pretty good fun, isn't it? I enjoy it. I dare say you enjoy it. But, tell me, is it really appropriate for me to associate your products with having an erect penis? You see, being a heterosexual male, I'm biologically predisposed to be sexually stimulated by images and videos of women in various states of undress. When I'm sexually stimulated my penis has this tendency to…
Continue reading →
