SlideType Keyboard and Yak Shaving

March 9, 2010 in Android, Software by CiaranG | 2 comments

Slidetype Keyboard

Something that was bugging me about Android was the touch screen keyboard. I found it impossible to type anything with acceptable speed or accuracy. Unless you have child-sized fingertips, you’re relying on the dictionary guessing to figure out what word you mean, which is crap at the best of times, and useless if you’re not typing dictionary words. A side issue – I’ve noticed that if you *do* have child-sized fingers, it’s hard to get the touch screen to register at all, when you want it to. I don’t have child-sized fingers, of course, but my children do. When they want to press things, they have to hold their finger on the screen for a while, and sometimes it registers, sometimes it doesn’t. On the other hand, if they approach from behind and stab at the screen while you’re in the middle of doing something, it invariably registers straight away.

Anyway, before I got side-tracked by children’s fingers, I was going to say: But then I discovered the SlideType Keyboard!

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Android FTP Server

March 4, 2010 in Android, Software by CiaranG | No comments

Stuart Langridge passed on a great idea that hadn’t occurred to me – running an FTP server on an Android phone. Although my i7500 is pretty much permanently connected via USB when I’m in the house, on account of needing to be sure the battery will be charged when I leave the house, I don’t particularly want to have to mount the USB drive and manually transfer things. Apart from requiring ME to do the work, which defeats the whole object of machines, the computer I connect it to isn’t necessarily the one I want to transfer files to/from. Also, a card can only be mounted to one device at once, so by mounting it to the remote computer, you snatch it away from the Android device, which isn’t always ideal.

Stuart tracked down an Android application called On Air, which he seems mostly happy with. I gave it a quick whirl, and didn’t like it at all. Clearly we’re all different. What didn’t I like?

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Communicating With The Young

March 1, 2010 in Education, Music, Rants by CiaranG | 1 comment

Ed Balls and a miniature gangster

Even at the best of times, there’s nothing more embarrassing than a politician trying to “communicate with the young”. But Ed Balls managed to take this one step further by engaging a bunch of manufactured gangsters to spearhead a ‘beat cyber-bullying’ campaign, as depicted in the artist’s impression opposite. The fake hoodlum standing alongside bully-boy Balls is Dappy, of N-Dubz, who shortly afterwards stole the mobile number of a Radio 1 listener who sent in a less than complimentary message about him, and used it to harass her, culminating in sending her a death threat. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Behind the farce though, lurk more serious problems. How did we reach this sorry state where, in order to try and convince school children to stop bullying each other, it seems like a good idea to enlist the help of dubious role models who make a living pretending to be (or in this case actually being) illiterate thugs?

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New Exercise Regime

February 25, 2010 in Uncategorized by CiaranG | 2 comments

I’ve decided I’m not getting enough exercise. This wasn’t a problem last summer, when was easy to finish work, eat, get the children off to bed and then take the dog for a long walk and still have daylight to spare. It got slightly harder in autumn, with one particularly memorable walk ending up with me stuck in the dark in the middle of some pitch black woods on account of having to go off-piste to avoid some cows that took exception to the dog.

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Complaining to the BBC

February 25, 2010 in Education, Rants by CiaranG | No comments

You know you’re getting old when you start complaining to the BBC about things. I’d like to think I’m not getting that old yet, but even so, this dreadful article made me do this:

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Facebook, XMPP and a privacy leak

February 11, 2010 in Software, XMPP by CiaranG | No comments

It’s been in the works a long time, but Facebook have finally switched on their XMPP functionality. Suddenly something like 400m users inside the Facebook walled garden are contactable from the outside world. I don’t know if this makes it the largest single deployment of XMPP – Google may be in a position to argue there, although I’ve sometimes been inclined to call their implementation almost-but-not-quite-XMPP.

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Lord of Ignorance?

February 10, 2010 in Education by CiaranG | 1 comment

It’s understandable, I suppose, for someone who’s never given home education much thought to bring up the old chestnut of ’socialisation’. Although it’s a ridiculous suggestion in reality, you could forgive someone for having the idea that home educated children spend all day at home in a classroom-style environment, the only difference being nobody else is there. Nothing could be further from the reality, of course. Home educated children have far more opportunity for socialisation (and in a far more appropriate context), as well as the other activities she claims they are missing out on.

But what if that someone is a member of the House of Lords, commenting in public on an issue she is shortly to be charged with scrutinising legislation for? In that case it’s no longer forgiveable, it’s a shameful display of downright ignorance.

The comments on that post do a fine job of rebutting Baroness Deech’s ill-informed assumptions, so I won’t waste my time doing that. One thing did amuse me though. She made these comments in the context of talking about a visit to a “Girls’ School”. The idea that an appropriate way to gain the social skills needed for the real world would be spending all day in the company of only children of the exact same age, while being told to sit down and shut up, is questionable enough in itself. When you also add the ‘only children of the same gender’ restriction it becomes totally preposterous.

I’m thankful Baroness Deech will not be descending on my children to lecture them on how great the Lords are, particularly the “expertise” part. Perhaps though, she was not referring to herself when she talked of expertise, because there are Lords who make the effort to understand before they speak. Just not this one.

More Books

February 8, 2010 in Books by CiaranG | 4 comments

Some books

This is the third list of books I’ve been reading. (One and two). I’m not sure what made me start doing this. Even writing a couple of sometimes sarcastic comments about each book can be hard work. It’s worth doing though, I reckon. To be accurate, the first two of these should have really been included in the last batch, but I forgot about them so they’re here instead. Anyway, without any further ado, here is the list:

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Samsung i7500 Galaxy Re-boxing

February 2, 2010 in Android, Software by CiaranG | No comments

Samsung i7500 Reboxing

If you’re unlucky you’ll have heard of unboxing videos, where someone laboriously unpacks their latest gadget purchase, appreciatively describing each piece of cardboard and polystyrene in excruciating detail, and videoing the whole thing for the ‘benefit’ of the world. Frequently the gadget in question seems to be made by Apple, because who else but a purchaser of Apple products would do such a thing? Anyway, not to be outdone, here is my re-boxing post and photograph.

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Python – Over to the dark side

December 22, 2009 in Software by CiaranG | No comments

There are two things I think are just plain wrong. Actually there are millions, but there are two I have in mind right now. The first is spaces instead of tab characters for indenting code. The second also involves spaces – excessive use of them like 1 + 1 = 2 when 1+1=2 is, to me, far more sensible. I don’t want to argue about either of these things, because a) this is a religious matter, i.e. I’m right and you’re wrong, and b) there’s no point, because you win anyway.

Why? Because in the interests of global harmony, code sharing, encouraging of contributions, etc, all my Python projects will now follow the PEP 8 guidelines. This doesn’t affect my contributions to other projects, since they’re always in the style required by that project (consistency always trumps religion), but it does mean that others can use and contribute to my stuff more easily, and hopefully in time I’ll get so used to seeing 1 + 1 = 2 that it won’t look stupid any more.

So, on the subject of PEP 8, a couple of tips I figured out along the way:

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