Strawp.net

I had a very nice email from Angela at Wikia this morning, inviting me to move the Beebhack Wiki over to their hosting. I think the only reason Beebhack wasn’t over there in the first place was potential hassle around getting a free wiki approved by their staff. Since they’d been kind enough to email me over there, this was no longer a problem.

So, a good time to take advantage of a better implementation of MediaWiki than we had at BluWiki and hopefully some better uptime. Angela even imported all our existing wiki data for us.

Beebhack.wikia.com

The beeb added a little update to the iPlayer again today, clearly as part of their (admirable) attempts at getting iPlayer working on exotic devices iPlayer is now Wii optimised! How cool! I’ve not tested it out, but this is the first “official” iPlayer version which is actually designed to display TV shows on a TV. We are living in the future!

I’ve written a few technical notes over on the Wiki, but basically they’re using the User-Agent string to serve a Flash 7 compatible stream.

Speaking of User-Agents, I’m hearing that the iPhone version of iPlayer has been tightening down on what User-Agent string you can get away with when you pretend to be an iPhone. No more “iPhone, LOL” strings I’m afraid

I’ve created a new wiki all about using BBC content at beebhack.bluwiki.com

In the first 24 hrs it got 1500 page requests and it’s not looking to slow down just yet. I would have hosted it here at Strawp.net but I wanted this to be more community owned than something I would run.

The downside of course is that I really don’t have any detailed information on where any of those hits are coming from…

A few weeks ago I got a bluetooth GPS module for my iPaq, just to play around with. Since Wififofum collects GPS data if it’s available, I’ve been recording wireless access point data as I’ve been walking about the town, commuting to work or driving.

The data I’ve gotten so far (about 600 access points) isn’t that useful on its own, but what’s really interesting is slicing the data in various ways and seeing what you come up with. To do this I built a new site: wifi.strawp.net into which I can upload the log files from wififofum. For a day or so I had the front page of the site plot location data of access points into Google Maps, searchable by SSID, manufacturer, channel etc, however I was advised by friends that doing so was probably a really bad idea, so this information is now on a login-only basis.

The fun part, which is still publicly available is the stats page. If you’ve got a friend that you’re trying to convince they need to secure their wireless network, link them to that page. You can currently see the most popular manufacturers, the most commonly used SSID and - my favourite - the number of access points that have their default SSID and appear to have no encryption set. This is currently at just over one in six (16.9%), which is quite frankly frightening. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the best place to look if you want to stumble across one of these access points is a suburban area where if Coventry is anything to go by, you’re likely to find an insecure access point on any street you care to walk down.

If you’re still wondering what the issue is, the BBC’s The Real Hustle did a very neat little feature on why you should use WPA encryption on your network.

I have a lot of devices that I’d like to keep the same calendar in sync on: Two phones, an iPaq, my work PC, my home PC and Google Calendar. The smartphone and iPaq played nicely with outlook but there was some “glue” needed to get my Sony Ericsson phone and Google Calendar in on it.

The “glue” is a few pieces of software I found recently. First of all, to sync my Sony Ericsson with GCal I use GCalSync over GPRS, then to sync GCal with Outlook I can use either Companionlink for Google Calendar (a little buggy, doesn’t auto-update, not free) or RemoteCalendars which is Open Source and very flexible. A no brainer which one I picked, really.

More info on using RemoteCalendars with Google Calendars on jakeludington.com

If there’s anything good about Summer ending and Autumn and Winter rolling in it’s a new season of TV the world over. In the UK some shows have already had an entire new series and in the US they’re just warming up.

Here’s what I’ve been watching:

- Dexter. A forensics expert who is also a serial killer. Sounds naff, actually really good.
- Everybody Hates Chris season 2. Same as the last season, hasn’t lost its charm yet
- Family Guy season 6. Unlike the Simpsons, this just gets better and better. Currently on episode 3
- Heroes. A new favourite of mine. This series follows the lives of ordinary people as they discover they have super powers. Brilliant characters, compelling plot.
- My Name Is Earl series 2. Proper feel-good, laugh-out-loud stuff
- Robot Chicken series 2. Pop culture gags animated with action figures with plenty of ultraviolence.
- Freak Show A new surrealist cartoon from David Cross about the most ineffective superhero team in the world
- The Mitchell and Webb Look Sighs all round as Mitchell and Webb transition their show seamlessly from Radio 4 to TV. Not a bad miss at all.
- Extras series 2. Trailed off and got a bit formulaic and then pulled it all back for a brilliant last episode
- Lead Balloon. New comedy from Jack Dee who is basically playing himself. Same sort of uncomfortable deadpan humour as Curb Your Enthusiasm and Extras. Great stuff.

I found a neat little site drift past on the del.icio.us popular links feed: l8tr.org. It’s a simple idea - you enter your email address and the URL of a site that is currently being DDoS’d by Slashdot or Digg and it emails you back when it’s popped onto the internet again.

I thought this would be really cool if there was a Firefox feed or Javascript bookmarklet for it so you could just hit a button when you see an error 500. A few emails with the creator, John and he’s added a bookmarklet to the confirm page. Kudos!

File this under del.icio.us hacks: As you might guess I use my own PHP script, Automated Serendipity to aggregate all my podcast feeds. This squirts them onto the end of my current Winamp playlist. I’ve been using it this way for a little over a year, but now I’m using del.icio.us to manage all my feeds. My podcast feeds (and MP3 blogs) are all tagged with “podcast feeds” so all that’s required is a quick bit of PHP to drop it down into the flat file format the my script expects et voila, I now manage my podcast subscriptions by adding them to del.icio.us, giving me one centralised base to refer to.

If you want the PHP to drop a del.icio.us page into flat text, you’ll want this zip. It’s got a little hack in there to extend the number of records to 100 as the RSS feed limit is 40 and the page limit default is around 25 (I think).

This has just saved me a whole load of keystrokes on some very dull HTML marking up of content pasted into vim from a Word document. I’ll post it here in case anyone else finds it useful:


:map <F2> 0i<p><CR> <Esc>$a<CR></p><Esc>
:map <F3> 0i <li><Esc>$a</li><Esc>
:map <F4> 0i<ul><CR><Esc>
:map <F5> $a<CR></ul><Esc>
:map <F6> 0i<CR><h4><Esc>$a</h4><Esc>
:map <F7> 0i<ol><CR><Esc>
:map <F8> $a<CR></ol><Esc>
:map <F9> 0i<blockquote><CR> <Esc>$a<CR></blockquote><Esc>
:map <F11> bi<strong><Esc>ea</strong><Esc>
:map <F12> :%s/^• \(.*\)$/ <li>\1<\/li>/ge<CR>:%s/^[0-9]\+\. \(.*\)$/ <li>\1<\/li>/ge<CR>:%s/…/\.\.\./ge<CR>


Either run each one of these commands or paste the whole lot into the end of your vimrc file. This will map all the F-keys as follows:

F2 - Wrap line in paragraph tags
F3 - Wrap line in list item tags
F4 - insert unordered list tag before current line
F5 - Insert unordered list close tag after current line
F6 - Insert a new line, then wrap current line in header 4 tags
F7 - Insert ordered list tag before current line
F8 - Insert ordered list close tag after current line
F9 - Wrap current line in blockquotes and indent
F11 - Wrap current word in strong tags
F12 - Perform the following substitutions:
- bullet points into list items
- numbered lists into list items
- Word elipsis character into 3 full stops

Have some useful links on vim to go with that:

- http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/change.html#:s
- http://www.lagmonster.org/docs/vi.html
- And my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged vi

My local arts centre is Warwick. They have loads of great events and shows, however even though I get a “What’s On?” style pamphlet every quarter I always manage to miss great things because I don’t discover they’re on until it’s too late. Probably because it’s made of paper.

So I’ve just thrown together an Atom Feed for monitoring new events, so I can just be notified of them as soon as they’re on the site.

Subscribe to the feed.

On the subject of stealing other sites’ data for my own purposes, the Travel West Midlands site has just in the last week or so updated its online timetables, so my rip-off, mobile-friendly version doesn’t work anymore. The new timetables are an improvement, but it’s still all done with HTTP POSTs, so you still can’t bookmark a timetable. I’ve got a car now anyway, so what the fuck do I care?

A short while ago I mentioned creating custom scaffolds for Rails to cut out all the tweaking you need to do to the layouts for each object in the project. It was pretty easy to do, but I put off uploading the scaffold for a while because there were a few tweaks to do and then that massive bug in Rails was discovered so I’ve just gone through and made sure the code doesn’t clash with anything in 1.1.6

What I’ve done is largely changes on the semantic HTML / code neatness side of things. That is:

- Switched a lot of the tables (semantically fine, but not flexible) for lists
- Added a “confirm” action which replaces “destroy” and provides a seperate page with the confirm form on it
- A lot of things are now list items - navigation etc
- Added some useful class names to elements
- Dropped the H1s at the top of each page to H2s
- Created a layout with header, footer, main. Header contains the H1
- Hidden the flash element unless it’s actually used
- Removed nearly all of the default stylesheet. Styling happens after coding!
- Made forms more semantically correct (labels and fields)

These are all changes I would have done manually after the default scaffold.

To use this, download the custom scaffold archive and unzip it to a folder next to the default scaffold. On my machine, at the time of writing I have it in: C:\\ruby\\lib\\ruby\\gems\\1.8\\gems\\rails-1.1.6\\lib\\rails_generator\\generators\\components\\custom_scaffold.

Then, instead of running script/generate scaffold, you run script/generate custom_scaffold.

You might want to edit the file layout.rhtml as it currently says “Site by Iain” at the bottom of every page.

let me know if this ends up being useful to you. (I’ve really got to get on and add a decent comments system to my site).