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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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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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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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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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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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I wanted an easy way of using images from a Zenphoto gallery in MediaWiki pages, and it turned out there wasn’t one. In fact, I had trouble finding a hard way of doing it with satisfactory results. It’s easy enough to embed external images in a MediaWiki page, if you have your MediaWiki config set to allow it, but I wanted thumbnails that clicked through to the real image. Not so easy. Hence MWZenphoto – a very basic MediaWiki extension that lets you do just that by including a simple <zenphoto> tag in the wiki markup.

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It’s less than a year since I wrote about how much I like Gallery. That’s still true, and I’m still running a couple of instances of it, but it’s now gone from this site. In the last year, Gallery has undergone a complete rewrite, with the new 3.0 in beta at the time of writing. In some ways, the rewrite seems like a good thing. It’s fair to say that 2.x was pretty bloated, and definitely ‘legacy code’. The new version is stripped down in many ways, PHP5 only, and built on top of the Kahona framework, making for a much cleaner codebase.

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I inadvertently created a feedback loop where every blog post subscribed to via Planet Ciaran got an instant trackback/pingback as soon as it was posted. Here’s how:

Feedback loop

  1. Blog post is made and picked up via RSS/Atom by my Planet Venus (Sam Ruby’s reworking of Planet) installation
  2. Excerpt of post gets added to Planet Ciaran
  3. Feed2omb picks up the new post via Atom and posts it to the @planetciaran account on my StatusNet installation.
  4. The StatusNet (formerly called Laconica, how long do I keep saying that?) Linkback plugin sends a trackback/pingback notification to the original blog
  5. The blog adds an irritating and pointless trackback link to the original post.

Needless to say I’ve turned off the Linkback plugin until I can hack in a way to exclude that particular account. (Currently the plugin applies linkback logic globally, across the entire StatusNet installation.)

As a side issue, before anyone else asks why I bother with all the above anyway, there are two answers. One – because it’s there. Two, it provides useful ways of reading stuff. Planet Ciaran is subscribed to most of the stuff I read on a regular basis. The above setup gets me a) XMPP notifications, b) a web page to browse if I want to read it that way, and c) an aggregated sanitised Atom feed to subscribe to. If that doesn’t answer your question, and I suspect it probably doesn’t, then nothing will.

I wrote briefly about code_swarm last year – a tool to generate visualisations of a project’s commit history. Today, via Brenda Wallace, I found out about a new variation on the same theme – so new it hasn’t been released or even named yet. Apparently though the author, Andrew Caudwell, is planning to release the source in the very near future.

The following video, also courtesy of Brenda Wallace, shows the output generated from the StatusNet (formerly Laconica) git repository:

Get the Flash Player to see this content.

I think this is really impressive stuff, and not just because I’m in it. There’s a better quality version on YouTube.

Something that’s becoming obvious to me lately is the unintended suitability of a microblog to act as an information hub. To clarify the term microblog here, many may understand that as Twitter, but that would be a bad example because a) it’s both a single public instance of a microblog, and b) it doesn’t have all the capabilities that make this so interesting.

Therefore a good example of what I’m talking about would be a private instance of Laconica running on a local network, or perhaps in a private setup on the public internet. I say private because some of the examples I’m going to give are most appropriate for a private setup.

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