This is the blog. You should also take a look at my main site, ben-ward.co.uk, and follow on Twitter.
FlashCrash — Exploits a Flash bug and crashes your browser… Unless you’re running Snow Leopard and Safari (or, I guess, Chrome), in which just the plugin crashes and everything else carries on as normal.
The Beatles Rock Band Ending Cinematic
Oh my. The Beatles Rock Band cinematics (also the intro) blow my mind.
PvP are running a FourSquare arc. It’s weird, because it’s not really satirical, nor even contain any actual jokes. It’s just the straight, absurd truth. Reading this as a resident of San Francisco, it’s like someone was spying on me through the window of Four Barrel.
Start at Part 1: Grinding Rep
I seem to reference Fever° every day at the moment (usually in the context of reading Tumblr…), but this evening I was hacking in aid of a different service; Twitter.
Fever has fabulous highlights feature called ‘Hot’, an aggregate view of articles and sites blogs you are subscribed to are linking to. The output is a ranked list of the most talked about things on the internet, sourced exclusively from people that you are already interested in. Fever goes further, allowing you to subscribe to feeds but keep them hidden as ‘Sparks’ (regular, visible feeds are ‘Kindling’.) So, whilst I don’t read high-volume feeds like Engadget or Hacker News, I do subscribe to the feeds, so that when someone links to them, or they link to an interesting article of the day, the particular post will surface.
My most valuable sources are friends and colleagues. I subscribe to my Delicious Network; everything that you bookmark contributes to my reading highlights. Forever I wanted to add Twitter to this as well, but Twitter’s RSS feed is both high volume, and doesn’t mark up its links with HTML anchors; Fever doesn’t see the links…
Today’s hack fixes that. TimelineLinks grabs posts from the Twitter API (including retweets), only returns the posts containing links. It’s rough around the edges, but it works well enough. I have it subscribed to in my Sparks. Tomorrow will be interesting, to see how it affects the highlight view.
Google will save Flash, a developer who uses it says
By Robert Scoble
I just recorded a 45 minute conversation on my iPhone while we sat on the desk at the Half moon Bay Ritz with Luke Kilpatrick about Flash, Silverlight, Palm Pre, and a few other topics, but mostly focusing on what will happen to Flash.
[Blue Lego Flash plug-in placeholder image]
Damn it
Heh heh heh heh.
Best chorus of the year so far.
ExpanDrivel » Some Foursquare Badges I’d Like to See - The ExpanDrive Blog
You’re checking into the venue “Phone Booth in front of Whole Foods” from your cell phone?
Notable difference between these ideas and the much maligned ‘Douchebag’ badge? All of these negative traits are algorithmically determined (or based on personal information); they’re not open to trolling by other user factions.
Gorgeous modern world map. Screen printed.
these are things, via Notcot.
If you’re reading this in the Tumblr Dashboard, there’s a good chance this is irrelevant. Bear with me, though.
I’ve written before that I use a feedreader in place of the Dashboard. Tumblr offers RSS feeds for everyone’s blog, and I subscribe to these in Fever°, but, to be blunt, the RSS output from Tumblr stinks. I assume it’s an evil incentive to use the Dashboard.
Quotes, for example, are not marked up as quotes. They just have some punctuation marks and a couple of line-breaks. Post titles are a disaster; entries that don’t have explicit titles have them generated as too-long, concatenated copies of the first paragraph immediately following; so you just read the text twice.
So, I’ve written a feed script. It’s called Tumblfeed, which sounds like tumbleweed… which I suppose is a metaphor for the semantic desolation of the Tumblr RSS feeds… or something. It was an accidental rhyme. (This is why commercial software companies have gigantic marketing departments to name their products “iPad” and “Vista” and “EeePC”.)
Tumblfeed does this:
<audio> element to play back audio that you’re self-hosting (or linking to off-Tumblr.) Tumblr-hosted audio is cockblocked, so you have to play that through the Flash player on the Tumblr page itself (the feed will include a link, though.)<cite> and <q> elements.<blockquote>. Honestly, it’s like there’s some kind of out-of-control genius at work here…In short: Tumblfeed produces legible, properly marked-up feeds for Tumblr blogs. (There’s a bit of work still to do with video posts.)
The codebase is butchered from Tumblr2Wordpress; an export script that I forked from Hao Chen and now maintain. Open source software is awesome.
To use Tumblfeed you’ll need to host it yourself. There are two files, and it throws up a simple form to generate the new feed URL. Bookmarklets and GreaseKit scripts are planned. Feeds are supposed to be reliable, so there’s no way I can offer you my server as a stable, not-going-to-go-away service. If you want to just play with it (or take your chances), contact me and I’ll share a development URL with you.
This was an epiphany. I publish my work in HTML, people primarily read my work in HTML, so it makes sense to write in HTML too. Writing in one format and converting it to HTML is not worth the mental and technical overhead. HTML is not just one output format among many; it is the format of our age.
Emphasis mine.
Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening—really listening—to what people say about your writing. This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and—if you can manage to get anybody’s attention—get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed! And you’re asking me what word processor I use? Just fucking write, then publish, then write some more.
YouTube has shipped their new ‘HTML5 video player’ in beta. Whether it’s just that the beta is for tech geeks, and some differentiation from the Flash version is required, or there’s some greater ulterior marketing at work, the loading screen actually includes the text ‘HTML5’.
Alas, the page uses table to lay out a single row of playback controls. It’s HTML5 in video element and branding only; the spirit of using the mark-up language properly remains elusive.
Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product releases—but we think iPad is really important: important enough to spend some time juggling our plans to figure out how we can introduce five new iPad apps
The Omni Mouth » iPad or Bust!
Very cool in itself, but I think this is also a huge instant reward to Apple for launching the iPad with iWork. They gave over substatial presentation time to highlight the iPad’s capability for productivity and business software, that it goes beyond media and consumer applications that the iPhone is focused on. Without iWork, iPad would be a similar, consumer, media device. With iWork, it’s a computer. It was a very smart exercise in resetting expectations.
We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.
—Official Google Enterprise Blog: Modern browsers for modern applications
My question is how will Google implement this? There are two ways: The right way is to stop serving scripts and complex stylesheets to IE; you let the browser’s default styling handle rendering of the information marked up therein. Your application functionality fails gracefully, the data at the URL does not. The web—that is, this glorious mesh of interlinked, interdependent content—carries on.
The other way, of course, is to put a roadblock in front of users of specific user agents.
As far as I’m concerned, selective serving of CSS and JavaScript is simple enough; the second option should not be acceptable.
I hope that Google do the right thing (and that they open source the code so other sites can just drop the functionality in place.)
If root did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. In a world with only closed systems, commercial success would still be tied to the development of third party apps, but the responsibility to train developers and introduce people to programming would fall to the gatekeeper of each system, rather than it being something that can organically happen. So, Apple, or Microsoft, or whoever, would be shipping programming sandboxes for their devices; maybe scripting tools, maybe programming games, maybe cut-down versions of the professional development environment. Whatever it would be, if there was no open ecosystem to learn in, a closed system to learn would be created. The idea that people would not become programmers in 1995 because they can’t do everything to a single closed system in an otherwise open industry today is a fallacy. If the first computers had been closed, everything would be different, right down to the seeds that inspired our initial passions for software development.
Posted about hacking in closed systems, my favourite Mac OSX hacks, and how in a new, closed world that has reinvented many of the common expectations of computers, we have to rediscover hacking. I’m confident the native parts of iPhone OS won’t be closed forever, but in the interim, this post talks about how the Web, and the bookmarklet mechanism of web browsers, is the first port of call for open scripting on an iPad.
(Also: Importing my posts in full is going to have to wait, Tumblr appears to have designed against what I want to do.)
