Tag Archives: sort

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PyAIM-t 0.6 Released!

2012/02/17 – 12:43

PyAIM-t 0.6 is now available. Please note that it is sort of a stop-gap release that includes some important fixes, but also includes some very lightly tested groupchat code. I am releasing it pre-heavy testing per request of folk on the py-transports list. Major features are listed in the release notes. Enjoy! =)

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WordPress point oh

2011/08/09 – 12:42

Attack by flies on some Australian beach

After being hassled about updating Wordpress packages to 2.0 I did.

Though I sort of regret it now as I wanted to wait for a bug fix release. “Point oh” software keeps me the creeps.

Now a 2.0.1 release is in the works that will fix at least one (long standing) minor security issue.

Personally I am reluctant to update Wordpress to 2.0 on my blog natalian.

  • I don’t like the look of the new edit form.
  • I’m afraid the plugins I use are going to break.
  • I don’t need any more features except perhaps the plugins I use being part of the main trunk and perhaps a Captcha
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Brendan Taylor: Programming Pedagogy

2007/11/17 – 17:48

A friend of mine finishing up his education degree at the University of Alberta is taking an introductory computer science course.

Right now he's learning how to implement bubble sort in C++. How much more frustrating and pointless can you get?

If they're teaching algorithms, then C++ is a terrible choice of language. If they're teaching practical programming skills, then implementing a bubble sort is a complete waste of time. It makes me wonder how much uselessness I'm being taught.

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San Francisco

2007/10/02 – 21:32

San Francisco harbour

Last week I was in the USA for the first time. It was great. My employers Aplix sent me out to an Ajax conference.

My first impression was the yellow colour scheme that the place seem to have. 3 investigators country. :) The place is a bit more Asian than I expected. McDonalds sign just in Chinese…

If you’re wondering why I was so slow with 2.3 release of Wordpress, it was because I was at the release party. Awesome to meet Matt and surprisingly Mark Pilgrim and Tantek Celik. Geek paradise! The conversations seemed much “higher bandwidth” or perhaps more stimulating than conversing before.

I also met with some other excellent friends that I’ve met on my travels. I even bumped into my old Professor from school!

The troubling thing I found with the place was the homeless/beggars. I took a moment or two to chat with a couple and I was amazed to find them so articulate. One guy had some pretty good poetry. I didn’t probe further, except I did read through the “Street spirit” paper. Bit depressing. My Californian friends says there are so many homeless people here, because California has the best homeless policies and the best weather. Probably some truth in that.

I like a croissant in the morning and I found the croissants a bit gross really. Yes I randomly sampled a couple of places. Had some great meals at “House of Nanking” and heavy breakfasts at “Sears fine foods”. They seem really popular tourist hits, though they were good. Bit disappointed by the Clam chowder and seafood on offer really. Guess you need to splash out. Coffee is good & smooth, though I am not used to it and it really felt painful after a couple of refills.

Jet lag sucked. Now I am back in the UK, I feel much better. Though I still have some sort of chest infection to work through.

Let me think. The highlights were absorbing the view from my hotel window on the 29th level. Riding across the Golden gate bridge and surrounds. AWESOME. Super friendly and helpful people. Shopping was also a great experience.

I found Mountain View and that sort of “campus culture” really really boring. Reminds me of Bath University. I couldn’t live there or in the suburbs. It either has to be city or proper country for me. I know I now live in Woking, though Woking is only 30mins from London. That’s London and a bit of green. ;)

Darn I miss the weather in California…

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OpenID on mobiles

2007/08/08 – 00:41

So I run an openID enabled wiki site based on the excellent ikiwiki software called webconverger.org. So how do they work with the mobile browsers on my Nokia E65?

Cert check on Nokia Web browser

I have four browsers on my mobile and they all worked with myopenid.com:

  1. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Symbian OS; Series 60/0633.18.02; 9730) Opera 8.65 [en]
  2. Opera/8.01 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/3.1.7196/1684; en; U; ssr)
  3. Opera/9.50 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.0.8462/20; U; en)
  4. SymbianOS/9.1; U; en-us) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413 es65

1&4 incidentally asked for confirmation with the myopenid.com’s certificate.

I think there is an usability bug by having to type in one’s openid url, as none of the browsers seem to cache previous form fills for quick auto completion. Also it would be nice if I could have some sort of shortcut to submit the form like [Enter] does on my desktop browser.

For example my openid URL is http://hendry.myopenid.com/, an insane 27 characters to key in. hendry.myopenid.com alone would be 19 characters and should also work. However you could use the open id delegate trick and hopefully you have access to a really short domain name. I use the trick on natalian.org (see the HTML header source of this blog) and hence it’s 12 characters to type in…

Once logged in and the cookie session magic is are all there, OpenID is a dream. However I am wondering how the SIM or hardware of the mobile phone could perhaps skip the step of entering the password in and make it more secure. I assume the mobile browser needs some sort of interface to the SIM. I wonder how to realise this.

Do check out the screenshots I took of my testing session.

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Mobile business ideas

2007/07/01 – 12:36

Opera Mini 4 Beta

In the spirit of open business, I’ll entertain you with a couple of business ideas I’ve had of late.

  • Mister Tea – a tea stall/shop that makes English tea properly. I had to visit cafes around East London for Internet to find the way most places serve English tea is deplorable. First they think you’re an idiot for ordering tea (instead of a trendy cappuccino), then they charge you 1.50GBP for some hot water and give you a choice from some stupid stale organic tea bag collection of brands you’ve never heard of. I am looking to setup “Mister Tea” from a tea stall around Liverpool Street Station with perhaps a Vicrtorian Tea Urn if I can find one.
  • On site Bicycle repair – for those that have had to repair a bicycle tire puncture, you’ll know that it is not easy! I propose a business that acts like the AA or RAC for cyclists around a populated area like East London. I think female cyclists would especially enjoy this service. I should just advertise this service with my mobile number in some magazine and see how it goes.
  • The ‘Mobile Web’ NoAds output and leveraging voice input – Since the iPhone will hopefully concrete the Web platform on mobiles, I was thinking of a suitable Web application without an (annoying) ad supported revenue model. Some sort of syndicate where one pays 5GBP a month for a set of managed Web applications that accomplish important use cases very well on mobile UAs. Another angle to this is tying this into voice calls. For example, the customer wants to change the weather widget to Paris and get another calendar feed into his schedule widget. Ring customer services and they’ll sort out the customer’s configuration, so the customer does not have to input any text on his/her mobile device.
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Debconf7

2007/06/10 – 12:17

Tech team

Trip involved a lot of waiting. I arrived too early at London City Airport. It was really easy to get to from Tower Hamlets, so there are some advantages living in East London. Since I am of Scottish ancestry and it is the first time I am in Scotland, I was almost hoping for some welcoming party. Sadly, nothing of the sort and I ended up waiting at Edinburgh Airport for another DD, however his plane was late. Thankfully I discovered the multi-denominational “Prayer room”.

After visiting some amazing mosques on my travels, I know it is quite permissible to go in a Islamic mosque and take a little nap, which I did. I wish they made Christian churches a little more comfortable in that respect. Laying down on the floor of a typical Western church and admiring the architecture would probably be bad for one’s health.

Ok, I’ve started tagging debconf7 on my flickr uploads during my time here. I wonder if Aigars will do the same. ;)

Edinburgh reminds me a little like Calcutta, with the soot stained buildings. Teviot house where the debcampers are is a great building. Up the road near a mosque was a cheap Indian eatery. I had a great chicken curry, nan and pakora. Fantastic.

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Peter Saint-Andre: Why Bother With Standards?

2007/04/11 – 18:08

The good folks at VON have posted video of a recent panel discussion in which I participated at Spring VON 2007, entitled "My Mother Uses Skype -- Why Bother With Standards?" I had fun playing devil's advocate, so the video may be somewhat entertaining in a geeky sort of way. :-)

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Flickr fecked tags

2007/03/27 – 00:50

Best breakfast

I really don’t like the way Flickr is going.

I’ve really only wanted some sort of md5sum for my images. I’ve asked them to implement this and gave a good suggestion how to do this years ago. With tags, for example md5:db0afcce66c98e6bcbf1168e8eae629e.

Instead we have stupid things like collections. Collections are sets of sets. “Sets” in themselves are daft, because they can be implemented as tags. Yes, collections, sets, md5sum and any other image property could have all done been implemented as tags. sigh

What a mess.

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WordPress-MU

2006/12/11 – 02:12

Thought I should mention I am wondering whether or not to package wordpress-mu.

It has stabilised and request has been made for it almost a month ago.

Trouble is I have been very busy travelling and I have not found time to find out how it complements the existing wordpress packaging, that also support “multi-users”, though with a different sort of hack.

Around the Christmas holidays expect something more concrete.

Greetings from Argentina!

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Mikael Hallendal: A must for all Thunderbird users

2006/11/02 – 12:51

After looking a bit for a text based email client to get good and fast keybindings for operations like moving emails or moving to a certain folder I found the Thunderbird addon Nostalgy.

This is a truly great addon to Thunderbird as it let’s you quickly sort through your emails with a few keystrokes.

A while back, I decided to drop my email filters and have all mails go to my inbox where I manually sort them. For this I made four special folders, 1_ACTION, 2_TO_READ, 3_PENDING and X9_SPAM. These names will ensure that my three folders I visit frequently will show up before my regular archives and that the spam box ends up last in the list. With the Nostalgy plugin it also lets me do “s 1 ” to move a mail to my Actions folder and a “s 9 ” to move it to the spam folder.

It can also be setup to have a default folder for certain incoming addresses (for example, default gtk-devel-list to /Archives/GNOME/Gtk+ Devel) so that I can just click “shift-s” to move it there. Otherwise it defaults to the folder I last used so that you can quickly move several mails to the same folder.

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Daniel Henninger: Wildfire plugin updates, and the Py's

2006/08/14 – 22:08
The Wildfire gateway plugin is coming along. Not as fast as I'd like at the moment, but I keep running into minor stumbling blocks outside the context of the actual plugin (read: getting sick, that sort of thing). That said, I'm switching internal libraries for MSN. The one I was using does not behave well in a multi-user environment. Furthermore, it had some kind of annoying debugging that there wasn't an easy way to turn off. I've switched to a more recent looking library. It was between that and another one whose documentation was all in... I believe Korean. All things considered, the function call names were in english, so I could have muddled through, but if both look good, why not choose the one I can read. We'll see how that goes. This one requires a little more knowledge of the underlying concepts of MSN's IM. It'll be fine. =)

As for the Py's, I've done nothing with them for a bit now. The pubsub stuff I was working on was causing some file system problems and, on top of that, the recent updates to pep makes my work semi-useless. No worries, I'm glad to see it doable in a much nicer fashion. James is working hard on some wonderful new revampings to the underlying code for PyMSNt that I'm looking forward to pulling on over to PyICQt and PyAIMt. I will, however, watch and wait until things look like they're good to go. I don't have a gauge for this, so I'll just post it aloud here... do people want me to put out a PyICQ-t and PyAIM-t with all of my current updates that's an actual release? (underlying code will be cleaned up to lose the pubsub stuff first if I do that) Otherwise, I'll be waiting for some bigger updates.

It's interesting to note that looking at code in one language sometimes helps you clarify concepts in your head in another. Just the way joscar does a few things made me go "oohhhh yeah I could do that with pyaim as well". shrug I thought it was neat...
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Wildfire plugin updates, and the Py's

2006/08/14 – 21:36

The Wildfire gateway plugin is coming along. Not as fast as I’d like at the moment, but I keep running into minor stumbling blocks outside the context of the actual plugin (read: getting sick, that sort of thing). That said, I’m switching internal libraries for MSN. The one I was using does not behave well in a multi-user environment. Furthermore, it had some kind of annoying debugging that there wasn’t an easy way to turn off. I’ve switched to a more recent looking library. It was between that and another one whose documentation was all in… I believe Korean. All things considered, the function call names were in english, so I could have muddled through, but if both look good, why not choose the one I can read. We’ll see how that goes. This one requires a little more knowledge of the underlying concepts of MSN’s IM. It’ll be fine. =)

As for the Py’s, I’ve done nothing with them for a bit now. The pubsub stuff I was working on was causing some file system problems and, on top of that, the recent updates to pep makes my work semi-useless. No worries, I’m glad to see it doable in a much nicer fashion. James is working hard on some wonderful new revampings to the underlying code for PyMSNt that I’m looking forward to pulling on over to PyICQt and PyAIMt. I will, however, watch and wait until things look like they’re good to go. I don’t have a gauge for this, so I’ll just post it aloud here… do people want me to put out a PyICQ-t and PyAIM-t with all of my current updates that’s an actual release? (underlying code will be cleaned up to lose the pubsub stuff first if I do that) Otherwise, I’ll be waiting for some bigger updates.

It’s interesting to note that looking at code in one language sometimes helps you clarify concepts in your head in another. Just the way joscar does a few things made me go “oohhhh yeah I could do that with pyaim as well”. *shrug* I thought it was neat…

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Quick client reviews =D

2006/07/05 – 17:36

Spark 2.0.0beta

Very pretty, works well, still has some mild issues connecting from Mac OS X. Has sort of become my client of choice at home because Adium X has been very very slow for me lately. Not sure why.

Things I wish it had:
- Better disco interface. (I was working on one at one point but got sidetracked)
- Ability to register with/interact with components (see previous as it’s related)
- Integration with apple address book for names and meta-contacts
- Meta contacts ;D
- Apple-W to close a chat tab/window.
- More intelligent Growl support. (right now it gives you a growl notification for every message, whereas other clients tend to only give you notifications on conversations that you are not currently looking at)

Adium X 1.0b1

My typical client of choice because I adore it’s look and feel. This version has so many things done under the surface that I like, but I won’t go into them. On the surface, the interface looks a tad cleaner and it supports Jabber icons now!!! WOOOO! Unfortunately, it’s rather crashy at the moment, but it’s beta. =) I’ve been sending off the reports that come from the reporter tool, but I really don’t have anything useful to add to the reports as I’m not sure what’s causing the crashes.

Things I wish it had:
- Better Jabber support. (things like disco, in-band registration, etc)

Psi (private build from SVN tree)

Psi continues and will likely always be my chosen test client. I believe it supports many things well and is typically the best to test transport changes with (IMO). Likewise, those guys are going plum crazy with features lately! =) Color me very impressed.

Things I wish it had:
- Integration with Apple address book for meta contacts and names.
- Meta-contacts. ;D (this is on the roadmap)

Other Stuff

On an unrelated note, this will cause my other posts to actually come through to Planet Jabber. (I had two pending…. I think serendipity’s Atom feed support is not very good, and RSS 2.0 support seems to be good, so I’ve asked that my feed at planet jabber be switched to RSS 2.0)

Also, due to a project I’m working on that I don’t really want to discuss in my blog right now, the python transports and jwgc are in a sort of statis for a little bit. Shouldn’t be long, but just in case you were wondering why there hasn’t been more development or a release lately.

Also note that I need to do a few improvements to BlatherCore (see www.blathersource.org) to deal with spam (sigh) and also integrate a couple of other interesting features. Likewise, need to knock out ScriptRepo and get that bad boy up and running for people to use. Need to silence the back and forth conversation in my head about how to deal with the various projects and “just do something”, you know? I like the way the interface came out, so hopefully that will encourage me to get it done sooner rather than later.

Incoming search terms:

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Quick client reviews =D

2006/07/05 – 17:36

Spark 2.0.0beta

Very pretty, works well, still has some mild issues connecting from Mac OS X. Has sort of become my client of choice at home because Adium X has been very very slow for me lately. Not sure why.

Things I wish it had:
- Better disco interface. (I was working on one at one point but got sidetracked)
- Ability to register with/interact with components (see previous as it’s related)
- Integration with apple address book for names and meta-contacts
- Meta contacts ;D
- Apple-W to close a chat tab/window.
- More intelligent Growl support. (right now it gives you a growl notification for every message, whereas other clients tend to only give you notifications on conversations that you are not currently looking at)

Adium X 1.0b1

My typical client of choice because I adore it’s look and feel. This version has so many things done under the surface that I like, but I won’t go into them. On the surface, the interface looks a tad cleaner and it supports Jabber icons now!!! WOOOO! Unfortunately, it’s rather crashy at the moment, but it’s beta. =) I’ve been sending off the reports that come from the reporter tool, but I really don’t have anything useful to add to the reports as I’m not sure what’s causing the crashes.

Things I wish it had:
- Better Jabber support. (things like disco, in-band registration, etc)

Psi (private build from SVN tree)

Psi continues and will likely always be my chosen test client. I believe it supports many things well and is typically the best to test transport changes with (IMO). Likewise, those guys are going plum crazy with features lately! =) Color me very impressed.

Things I wish it had:
- Integration with Apple address book for meta contacts and names.
- Meta-contacts. ;D (this is on the roadmap)

Other Stuff

On an unrelated note, this will cause my other posts to actually come through to Planet Jabber. (I had two pending…. I think serendipity’s Atom feed support is not very good, and RSS 2.0 support seems to be good, so I’ve asked that my feed at planet jabber be switched to RSS 2.0)

Also, due to a project I’m working on that I don’t really want to discuss in my blog right now, the python transports and jwgc are in a sort of statis for a little bit. Shouldn’t be long, but just in case you were wondering why there hasn’t been more development or a release lately.

Also note that I need to do a few improvements to BlatherCore (see www.blathersource.org) to deal with spam (sigh) and also integrate a couple of other interesting features. Likewise, need to knock out ScriptRepo and get that bad boy up and running for people to use. Need to silence the back and forth conversation in my head about how to deal with the various projects and “just do something”, you know? I like the way the interface came out, so hopefully that will encourage me to get it done sooner rather than later.

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Daniel Henninger: Quick client reviews =D

2006/07/05 – 12:36
Spark 2.0.0beta

Very pretty, works well, still has some mild issues connecting from Mac OS X. Has sort of become my client of choice at home because Adium X has been very very slow for me lately. Not sure why.

Things I wish it had:
- Better disco interface. (I was working on one at one point but got sidetracked)
- Ability to register with/interact with components (see previous as it's related)
- Integration with apple address book for names and meta-contacts
- Meta contacts ;D
- Apple-W to close a chat tab/window.
- More intelligent Growl support. (right now it gives you a growl notification for every message, whereas other clients tend to only give you notifications on conversations that you are not currently looking at)


Adium X 1.0b1

My typical client of choice because I adore it's look and feel. This version has so many things done under the surface that I like, but I won't go into them. On the surface, the interface looks a tad cleaner and it supports Jabber icons now!!! WOOOO! Unfortunately, it's rather crashy at the moment, but it's beta. =) I've been sending off the reports that come from the reporter tool, but I really don't have anything useful to add to the reports as I'm not sure what's causing the crashes.

Things I wish it had:
- Better Jabber support. (things like disco, in-band registration, etc)


Psi (private build from SVN tree)

Psi continues and will likely always be my chosen test client. I believe it supports many things well and is typically the best to test transport changes with (IMO). Likewise, those guys are going plum crazy with features lately! =) Color me very impressed.

Things I wish it had:
- Integration with Apple address book for meta contacts and names.
- Meta-contacts. ;D (this is on the roadmap)



Other Stuff

On an unrelated note, this will cause my other posts to actually come through to Planet Jabber. (I had two pending.... I think serendipity's Atom feed support is not very good, and RSS 2.0 support seems to be good, so I've asked that my feed at planet jabber be switched to RSS 2.0)

Also, due to a project I'm working on that I don't really want to discuss in my blog right now, the python transports and jwgc are in a sort of statis for a little bit. Shouldn't be long, but just in case you were wondering why there hasn't been more development or a release lately.

Also note that I need to do a few improvements to BlatherCore (see www.blathersource.org) to deal with spam (sigh) and also integrate a couple of other interesting features. Likewise, need to knock out ScriptRepo and get that bad boy up and running for people to use. Need to silence the back and forth conversation in my head about how to deal with the various projects and "just do something", you know? I like the way the interface came out, so hopefully that will encourage me to get it done sooner rather than later.
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