Right now, there’s limited information on reputable news sites regarding the earthquake/tsunami that occurred south of Samoa yesterday. To find more, I turned to Twitter (and its open source equivalent identi.ca). Disseminating live news from witnesses, moments after a major event, is the most compelling feature of such services, but both failed me. Not in [...]

OpenID server software needs to be able to detect when it is being used to proxy an attack on another server.

After a year with the iPhone 3G, I upgraded to the 3GS. The upgrade cost me money and as a result, the original iPhone now belongs to me. Consequently I now “own” 2 iPhones – the original one which is mine outright and the 3GS which is in contract for another 12 months, when it [...]

I was tickled to read in Teaching by Lecture of what N. Whitman calls the four levels of competency. The levels advance thus (my paraphrasing in parenthesis): Unconscious incompetence (you don’t know you can’t do it) Conscious incompetence (you know you can’t do it) Conscious competence (you know how to do it) Unconscious competence (you [...]

I couldn’t find a MediaWiki extension for Eventum when I needed one, so this evening I knocked one up. It’s fairly basic, very unoptimised, and probably far from perfect, but it works for me, and someone might use it as the basis for something better. It uses PHPs MySQL library to open a connection to [...]

Last year’s WordCamp UK was a huge success. Around sixty people turned up to the Birmingham gig with backgrounds as diverse as one might hope for and expect, given that WordPress is used by all kinds of people for all sorts of things: bloggers, developers, hackers, journalists, authors, academics, idealists and dreamers were all there, [...]

Every season has it’s harbinger. The first train service disrupted by leaves reminds us that autumn is on the way. Eddying drain pools tell us the leaves are now successfully clogging the sewers, and winter is near. These temporary blockages are swiftly removed, making a terrific compost that nurtures the first daffodils of spring, giving [...]

As a five year old in 1977, punks scared me. In the village where I grew up there were only two bits of graffiti that I can recall, one was the anarchy symbol, daubed large by the shoe shop, and the other was the word “sex pistols” enhancing the wall near the public toilets, just [...]

A quick thanks to www.myvouchercodes.co.uk who just saved me a tenner on a delivery pizza. I’ve used them for a couple of deals and they’ve proved to be well worth a visit. If you’re ordering something online and there’s a special field for the lucky few who have a voucher code, then traditionally, it’s someone [...]

It’s now two weeks since we added a Mac to our arsenal of machinery. After some minor teething issues, mainly to do with finding various characters on the keyboard, we’re both agreed that it works very nicely.

At last. The Velvet Hearts debut album, Into the World, has just been released. It’s currently available exclusively from CDBaby. It is the best of times, and the worst of times, to be trying to build a career as a musician. The online revolution is both generous in its audience and stingy in its fiscal [...]

In every Pixar movie, Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, etc. there is a small yellow ball, with a red star and a blue stripe. You have to look hard to find it, but it’s there. The ball was originally a central prop in the 1986 animated short Luxo Jr. I want one of those [...]

Modern mobile devices (phones, PDAs, laptops, etc) could deter theft by all but the most hardened criminal, and it would only require the simplest of modifications to the firmware in many of the devices already on sale.

Today at lunchtime I was alerted by a colleague, to an uncommon sight: a uniformed officer of the law, smoking. A smoking plod is probably just as likely as a smoking anybody, but I can’t remember ever seeing an officer smoking in uniform. This one wore little blue epaulettes and a bright yellow arm band [...]

The iPhone has a quirk that is starting to become a hindrance. Every time the phone goes through a patch of dead air where there’s no cell signal, it pops up a dialogue box saying “network lost”. This obviously could be useful at times, but it’s bad for two reasons:

My colleague Barrett Abernethy has drunk from the WordPress fountain for the first time and found it to be good. He’s writing at bv2.co.uk on coding for GPUs, games consoles and (I predict) cycling.

I’m buying donuts for software engineers to enjoy. Tests prove that donuts increase productivity in geeks by up to 3.147 percent. If you know a computing professional, buy them donuts today and enjoy better software tomorrow.

One of the coolest future applications that was discussed at WordCamp UK last weekend is the WordPress client for the Apple iPhone. Well, it’s just arrived on the iTunes store (here), and I’m using it to write this short test article.

The very good news on the grapevine is that the first WordCamp UK has, already broken even (through sponsorship and ticket sales) with a full 10 days of ticket sales still to go. This is particularly good news since it pretty much guarantees the success of this years event, and future events. If you’ve been [...]

As the largest food retailer in Britain, what Tesco does has a massive impact on the rest of the British food industry, however, Tesco are not a charity and their primary purpose is to make maximum profit (supposedly within ethical guidelines).  The profit-vs-ethics problem is therefore one of ensuring that the right ethical guidelines are [...]