It simply makes it a lot easier to use: enter your username and password, click the button (I know the enter key doesn’t work, and I hate myself for not being able to fix it). You’ll move to a page where you need to enter three fields (artist, track and length) and click submit. Done. When compared to the old method, it’s several thousand times better.

I feel much happier. I’m trying to do something interesting with it involving Delicious, but we’ll see if I can get the code working or not…

By the way: not including a giant, massive link to the new page is one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. *facepalm*.

Let me give an example to help explain: I’m at the Future of Web Apps conference (as I was last month), and somebody I’ve never met before takes a picture of me and uploads it to Flickr. I’d quite like to keep an eye on all the photos of me that are on Flickr, maybe to read comments, maybe to show somebody else at some point in the future. What can I do to help me keep an eye on this photo?

Answer: tag it. You might think that tagging is perfect for this, and you’d be wrong. To continue with the Flickr example: some people have it set up so that nobody can tag their photos, some people let their friends tag photos, and I’ve got no guarantee that the owner won’t remove the tag in a week, two weeks, three weeks time.

I need a way to edit the photo so that nobody else can change it, basically. At the moment, the way I’m doing it (and the only way I can think of to achieve this) is to “favourite” the photo. That’s crap, as it’s obviously not what the favourite feature was meant to be used for.

You might think I’m being anal about stuff which at the end of the day is just "on the Internet", but I think this example highlights a broader problem. I’m stuck for ideas.

This was prompted by me thinking up ways that they could make the site more useful, primarily in terms of adding more user-generated information while still keeping the original, simple tweet structure. How about a community wiki-esque (oooh, but limited to 140 characters – I just thought of that) system for explaining what the hashtags actually mean. I searched for #pop this morning (it’s a course I’m doing) and it came up with a whole load of results about burgers. I’d love to have been able to hover over #pop in the tweet and see a 140 character explanation of what this place was.

Spam’s an issue, clearly, which is why the system would be community moderated. Once a site has the giant user base that Twitter does, I reckon they could leave a lot up to the users.

Finally, a really, really basic screenshot of the kind of thing I’m thinking about:

There’s an office here that the porters look after the keys for. If you want to get in the office when there’s nobody else around, you have to ask them for a key; they check your university card against a list of people who are authorised to borrow keys.

So here’s the kicker: anyone can give in a new key list, even if you’re not on the old one. They don’t check, they don’t care. If this was a program, it would be the most horribly flawed code.

Shell scripting is really pretty good fun. I’m nowhere near claiming to be an expert (hell, I’ve been doing it for about three weeks now), but I kind of feel like I’m getting somewhere. Here’s some stuff I’ve been messing around with, hopefully accompanied by some clear explanations that, if nothing else, will help me get my head around it a little better. I’m playing with my chat logs because I’m obsessed with stats (hopefully you’ve figured that out by now).

Redirecting output

One of the most simple things, but it bears noting down. You can redirect the output of the bash shell by using the greater than symbol (>). Let’s build it up:

Will list all the files and folders in directory.

Applies the recursive -R switch, which will list all the files and folders, as well as any files inside any folders.

Now we get on to the redirecting output bit: the > part followed by a filename will take the output and put it in the file you named. Here’s the output – not that you care, or anything…

Grep

Grep is something different: a command for searching, basically. I’m going to use it with the file that was created above in order to make it more readable.

Will search for (and print) the lines containing “hello” in the file text file “example”. Clearly this is a pretty basic use of the tool, but it works. To get a bit more complicated:

Will print all the lines in the output_list file that contain the phrase “.chatlog”, and save them to the filtered_list file.

What’s changed? The egrep just tells grep to apply the -e flag, which will make it use regular expressions for searching. I haven’t bothered trying to understand these. For me, it’s only to add the $ sign to the end of the string to indicate it should only search for that at the end of a line. Here’s the output from the second part. Much easier to read, much easier to do stats on/with…

There you go

Hopefully that helps someone understand something a little better. If I’ve got something wrong, let me know please. I might report back if I can find it in me to manipulate the text file a little bit.

This is hardly complicated, but it’s something that’s been bugging me. A few minutes later, tada: a script that will open the Last.fm page of the currently playing iTunes track.

Copy and paste the above into Script Editor (Applications > AppleScript) on the Mac, and hit compile. As the comment in the code says, this is hardly my finest piece of work (at least, I hope it isn’t), so I’m not too bothered what you do with it. Enjoy it, whatever happens…

Conclusion: 47 times. 47 times he did this. I wanted to cry a little.

The newsy-thing that came up today is the flyer that’s displayed to the right – UoY’s Computing Services are asking for people’s opinions on migrating the University email and calendar setup to Google Apps for Education or Microsoft’s Live@Edu. This is huge for me. Not only is it a fairly large (thousands of students) organisation considering migrating to the cloud within the next couple of years, they’re actively soliciting opinions from students. I’m so pleased to see things heading in this direction.

The URL on the flyer requires a University of York login.

Also: Oh God, I hope I don’t piss people off by posting this… ;]

A great talk by Joe Stump (digg) and Blaine Cook (ex Twitter) on why languages don’t scale, it’s *other stuff* that has to. Ron Richards from Revision3 (tongue twisting fun) talked about where online video content is going to go in the future, in what was probably the best speech of the day.

Now to finish my tea and dive back into SixApart, Objective-J, BT and Techcrunch (all in the developer hall), until 7pm and what promises to be a fantastic party at Fox.

You order a couple of meals on their site, book a date and time and come along to Parsons Green. Everything’s all set up for you (we’re talking ingredients, utensils, instructions) and you prepare it with a couple of chefs on hand to help. They package up the food for you, and you take it home to cook. Love the idea. It’s relatively cheap (£20 a week for evening meals?) and much faster than doing the shopping yourself.

The software used on the site is something called EATS, which in itself hasn’t been bad. The UI on the backend is more complicated than it needs to be, but this is a trend that can be seen more and more with new content management systems. I hope I’ll find time to write something more on the design and branding work they’ve had done there, as some gorgeous stuff has been created by a small company in central London.

Bulleted thoughts:

• Networking a printer on a Windows network is harder than it looks. Especially when you have a BT BusinessHub to contend with – yuck.
• Programming a cash register is so much harder than programming a computer.
• Fax machines are still used?!
• Outlook is disgusting, and Access is actually scarily bearable.
• Dell is fantastic. They delivered a machine five days before they said they would, and four days after I ordered it.

In any case: cheers, Natalie & Mark, Thierry & Claudio, Katie & Zuzana, Jhon & Nico and Clare. And Sophia for getting me there in the first place. As well as all the customers I’ve had to talk to over the last 20 days, of course – they have been great too. It’s done great things for my confidence, and I’m going to miss it.

Day One, Thursday 9th October

Obviously I’ll be first second (sorry, she’s ahead of me) in line to see Kevin Rose talk on The Future of News, but the choices for the rest of the day are:

• Matt Webb talking on "What web design brings to products" or Blaine Cook (ex Twitter) and Joe Stump (digg) on how "Languages don’t scale"
• "The future of enterprise web apps" by Kevin Marks of Google or something on Dopplr by Matt Biddulph

After lunch I’m looking forward to seeing Ron Richards from Revision3 talk on how to bring Internet television to the masses. At 5:50 that afternoon Mike Butcher of Techcrunch UK has an interview with three new startups which looks to be fairly good.

Day Two, Friday 10th October

Early morning we’ve got something from Sun Microsystems titled "The Fear Factor: What to be Frightened of in Building A Web Application". After lunch I’ve got a couple of tough ones to pick:

• Something called "Beyond Google Maps" or Jason Calacanis from Mahalo talking about startups
• Cloud computing from Jeff Barr of Amazon Web Services or Meebo on Scaling the Synchronous Web

After a couple more talks, there’s a cosy little (ha, yeah right) chat with Mark Zuckerburg. You might have heard of Mark, he makes some tiny social networking site that nobody uses. And then… we have something a little bit special.

Diggnation!

Kevin and Alex by Andrew (Creative Commons licensed)

Yep, those two jokers are back here again. I am looking forward to this so, so much. Oh, and there’s a party afterwards as well. Smile.

If you’re going to be there, let me know – it would be nice to meet up with some similarly inclined people. If you’re not going to make it along, take a look at the timetable of talks and give me your opinion on what’s hot.

The latest creation comes from a service called map a list, which Lifehacker played with a month ago. I couldn’t think of a decent use for it myself, but someone pointed out that it would be fantastic for mapping customers who have signed up their details with a company. A massive advantage is that a business owner can immediately see whether handing out leaflets or flyers has had the intended effect. It works really nicely: link it to your Google account, select a spreadsheet to pull data from, link columns in the spreadsheet to address fields and… boom!

Here’s the service containing a bit of post code data (and with hindsight, I could have used it for my earlier post on mapping friends). Love it.

As you can see, it’s sort-of kind-of maybe conclusive, but nothing that’s going to wow anyone. The people satisfied with Genius tend to have a less eclectic score (more mainstream taste), if that makes sense.

If you want lend me a hand, and can be bothered, give iTunes Genius an overall "satisfaction score" of between 0 and 1. I’ll compare it against your Last.fm music profile (and please leave a link if I don’t know where to find it). This should really be automated, but I don’t have the time, motivation or know how to put it together right now. Cheers!

I’ll post something more substantial when I have something more substantial to work off. Shockingly.

I’m lucky to be going to the Future of Web Apps conference this October… and unlike last year, I’m there on a proper student ticket this time. That means I get to go see talks from the likes of Digg, Google, Dopplr, Rev3, Twitter, Sun, Amazon, and Facebook (deep breath), as well as some from people you might have heard of before… Calacanis, Rose and Zuckerburg? I need to take a look through the schedule properly and think about which I’m going to go and see.

In a simply fantastic move, Carsonified (the gorgeous people organising it) just put 50 more student tickets up for grabs, so hopefully @avalentine can come along for a bit.