Yep, finished – exams, school, and more importantly, properly moving this site over to NearlyFreeSpeech. Hopefully it’s all working fine (seems to be from my end) but if you notice any weirdness, please leave a comment somewhere or send me an email.
Thanks, and have a good Summer,
Alex
I spent an hour this evening sitting on a stationary District line train in West London, so I’ve had a little time to think over what’s wrong with the transport system in London – and I think I’m getting towards understanding something (in my head, at least). The problem with Transport for London is that as they’ve grown since 2000, they’ve forgotten the things that make smaller companies nice. And actually, this isn’t at all specific to TfL - the same could be said for any large company.
The example from today was that there were three District line trains stood still in three consecutive stations. A small company (the Last.fm, Pownce and Twitters of the world) would have decided that the Piccadilly line trains should make an unscheduled stop on the platform next to us so that we could move across and continue our journey at some kind of speed. The large company (Microsoft, Apple, IBM or in this case, TfL) had so much going on that it was impossible to organise and execute – our tube driver admitted that he had asked for another train to stop, but that the District line controller and Piccadilly line controller would have to “discuss” first, by which time it was far too late for us.
The ideal turn of events for this evening would have been for a Piccadilly train driver to notice the massive congestion and just stop his train so that we could all hop on – but of course that’s never actually going to happen. I know that example was convoluted, obscure and totally random, but that’s what most of my thoughts are like.
Actually, be careful what you wish for – the day Twitter goes anywhere near running our tube network will be an interesting one…
Needed a little something to take my mind off everything, so spent the morning messing around with Javascript, trying out Last.fm’s Realtime Submission Protocol. It was my first time playing with any kind of API, Javascript and web forms, so I’m pretty pleased with the result.
Enter your Last.fm username and password on the handshake page – this requires a certain amount of trust, sure… but you can see exactly what the code is doing, and if you know me, you’ll know I’m hardly competent enough to bother storing your credentials. You’ll be taken to a URL beginning http://post.audioscrobbler.com/ which should have 4 lines, the first being "OK". On the second line, there’s an authentication token that you’ll need to submit tracks.
On the submit page, enter the authentication token in the first box, followed by the song information. The timestamp is given at the top (I’m sure there’s an easy way to copy that into the field, but I haven’t figured it out yet). Source should be "P" and all the other boxes should be played with carefully, unless you bother reading the documentation. The result should be a simple "OK".
The client this submits as is set to "tst", but as "client authors should use the tst identifier for clients which are not publicly distributed" please don’t go messing with it too much. This was just meant to be a fun project.
It looks fairly pretty in Firefox 3 RC1 and Safari 3.1.1. The MD5 hashing function in Javascript is BSD licensed from Paj and the time converter is free from Epoch Converter.
This, I had to share… simply because it’s the best explanation for anything to do with Facebook, ever:
You know [he] can actually still see this message despite temporarily deactivating his account. He memorised the source code for this particular website and there’s no privacy for the coding from which the words can be obtained.
♥
I’ve started playing with an app called Screenflow. As always, I’m totally late to the reviewing-brand-new-Mac-software game, but I’ll throw a couple of compliments in their direction anyway.
Wow, this thing is incredible. Really amazing. On first launch, having read absolutely no documentation, I recorded a minute and a half of me on the new Last.fm beta, which you can find on YouTube. It’s simple and flexible, exactly what my impression of a Mac app is. Easy things, like changing the size of the pointer to make it easier to see, or having a "radar" bubble appear every time you click, make it so much nicer. Export to movie, upload to YouTube – just as easy as creating content should be.
Go, play…
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