Just been having some fun hacking around with the OpenSocial API using hi5 (some social network that I’d never heard of.) Somewhat embarrassingly for Google, all requests for developer sandbox access for Orkut (which OpenSocial also runs on) are manually approved and therefore couldn’t happen on a Sunday.
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Snowy St Paul’sI’m at Google’s OpenSocial Hackathon at the BT building at St Paul’s. Pretty cool. |
IPA talk 11/03/087pm, Holy Trinity Church, St Andrews. Dr Hans Blix “Time for a Revival of Disarmament?” Best quotations: |
update…The train is wobbling. |
Accepted
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out of exam land (for a while)So, I’m now out of exam land for a little while. I’m now free (in some sense) for the next three weeks, which is nice. Over Christmas I read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow, I really recommend reading it (and buying it!) I’ve accumulated a large amount of links over the time, mainly through reading a lot of BoingBoing. First of all some awesome [citation needed] stickers and some video from the CCC’s winter conference (which I have all of thanks to my sweet JANET connection.) Jaanix is a nicely designed link blog that has some really interesting programming/geekery related things including 10 programming tips not to follow and real life XCKD moments. Finally, I was pretty surprised this week when Sun bought MySQL AP and I still don’t really know what to make of it. Equally mystifying is why the story has barely been covered… |
seminars and road tripsYes, I am still alive. For those who are interested in my latest geekery they can check out my journey (with Fearghas and his iPhone) from St Andrews to London last weekend. The moblog of the roadtrip is here. Additionally, I’ve decided to start posting the abstracts from seminars I’ve been to here (as much for me to remember as any other reason.) |
What I’m up to and some links…So, I’ve been working on some top secret programming at the moment. As a teaser I’ll let you know that it involves Python, a tube map and problems in P. On the links front: a nice user script to take Facebook events and import them into Google Calendar, a nice story about the St Andrews philosophy football match (see the section The Metaphysical Philosophers) and finally a cool app to use your GMail account as a filesystem in Mac OS. More to come on the project at a later date. |
facebook hackingI’m in Oxford at the moment and I’m currently sitting in the Green Cafe on St Giles enjoying free wifi, which is very nice! I’ve also just edited Ali Karbassi’s excellent Greasemonkey script to get rid of applications to also get rid of application invitations. You can download it here and it requires Greasemonkey for Firefox. In other news, I have spent the past week debugging web pages in Joomla!, Plone and Django, I’ve found that although I used to use the web developer extension for Firefox (and there is no doubt it’s a great extension) , Firebug is actually better. It has some really nice highlighting and DOM inspection features that make life a lot easier. It also doesn’t take up as much screen real estate when you’re not using it. Neat. |
Standards?I’ve been working on some webdev stuff over the past few days and I’d forgotten how much XHTML tables suck. I think this forum posting I found exemplifies the problem… |
I am still alive.See above. |
In Berlin…Well, I survived Russia. It was interesting to say the least. I’m not entirely sure I will go back again but it was certainly an experience. St Petersburg was definitely nicer that Moscow and seemed more like a European city than Moscow which felt more like it was trying to be very Western. Unfortunately you can’t drink the water in St Petersburg since some weird things live in there. Now Nick and I are in the Heart of Gold (the hostel not the spaceship) enjoying a beer. Photos will appear at some point in the usual place. To give you an idea what we have been up to look here. |
