General Musing

I needed a way to be able to shamelessly plug the posts I recently bundled into the booklet “Write Something” again.In a similar way to the last time I did it in Proof of Concept: Google Docs Mail Merge Form

As I explained before I have set up a system to automatically mail somebody when the enter their address in the form, my issue was that I wanted to add a unique blogpost which they would only be able to get by signing up. Naturally I wanted to style it in the same way the posts are styled in this blog. Again I turned to the documentation, specifically the Class MailApp which I was using to send the mail. Using this documentation I had a starting point. I wanted three changes to the current script:

1. keep the plain text
2. add HTML message
3. add inline images

Read the rest of this entry »

I needed a way to be able to shamelessly plug the posts I recently bundled into the booklet “Write Something“. I want to build a list, and offering something which adds value for the subscriber is a good way to do this. There is a host of good material which you can use to help, so I won’t elaborate on that in this post.

I have a hosted WordPress.com blog, which means that I can’t run a local script to collect the mail addresses and mail them, so I turned to Google Docs’ Form functionality for the entry form, naturally I give them the option to download the booklet there, and I wanted to send the subscriber a message to thank them. In the Google tutorial: Simple Mail Merge they explain how to do a mail merge using the Script Editor. I wanted to go a little further and have it send a mail with thank you note and a link to each subscriber as soon as they filled in the form.

Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Brogan isn’t reinventing himself, and his project for 2012 Shhh! The Secret Show is certainly not a podcast.

So what is he doing?

Read the rest of this entry »

Stanford’s AI Class has started and am finding it easy and enjoying it. I’m sure that like any other class it will soon become more challenging, and more interesting. I have a similar feeling to when I followed the Game Theory Lectures by Benjamin Polak from Yale.

I will continue to post updates here.

Image source: Stanford AI-Class

I’ve had my new CrackBerry with BES for 2 weeks now, and installed the FourSquare, Gowalla, GMail, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Seesmic applications on the first day. After 2 weeks of using them all I can say is these phone app builders need to talk to interaction designers.

I think it had been said by somebody else some time ago that there should be consistency between the actions that are performed between the applications, scroll down should always be one button and scroll up a different on. I didn’t expect that these consistency issues would have been solved, but it would have been nice. What I find most problematic is that most don’t have any form of statefulness in their application.

Read the rest of this entry »

I remember first using Spotify and needing to create an account using an UK based proxy and setting the proxy in the configuration settings. Since then the service has changed some. Ironically I only got back into Spotify when my father asked me about it – we has set up for him and he wondered why it didn’t work any more. I too had forgotten about the proxy settings. After I ran the update and set it up for him to work I went on to install it on my own laptop.

^{Spotify Adoption Europe}

A couple of weeks earlier a colleague, who is a paid up subscriber, asked a group of colleagues to name artists we thought would not be in Spotify. Naturally having a hipster as a friend paid off and I was able to name a number of artists which Spotify did not have in its collection, a hipster colleague was also able to name a couple. In good hipster/geek fashion we ridiculed him.

Between you and me I like Spotify, and lament the start up issues they have had in the US. Based on the service offered – and from the articles I’ve read in Wired and some other sources – I am positive about the possibilities it has to offer with its Freemium model.

Spotify will launch in the US sometime in July.

Image source: SimplyZesty (logo), International Federation of the Phonographic Industry & Wired (graph)

I use bittorrent, in fact I use bittorrent often enough that I look for methods to gains extra seeders and extra peers so I can get the object of my obsession quicker. I also like sharing items, with torrent that would mean I go to the relevant torrent sites and announce the creation of a download by uploading a torrent file which contains a reference to my file on my computer. As I have often stated I am also lazy, which means that I would like to get things into the hands of others with the minimal amount of effort.

I have taken the time to read some of the specifications of bittorrent – I wouldn’t call myself an expert – and discovered that it is possible to add trackers to a torrent file and even if those trackers didn’t originally contain a reference, in the form of an info_hash key, to the torrent they will be registered with the tracker. Which saves me some time when seeding files.

So I did a little experimentation yesterday and created a list of trackers which would automatically pick up the file. Naturally I searched for existing files, which include well known trackers using various torrent sites, after collating the list and removing the duplicates I created torrent files containing these lists and added the torrent trackers to the files. And waited for the trackers to pick up the file. Which trackers listed below did, you might recognize PRQ which is a free speech haven in Sweden.

To my disappointment the torrents where not listed on the torrent sites who’s trackers picked them up. So the next step is to discover which trackers, not listed below, will pick up and publish the torrent finding it in a web spider. The torrents can be found in trackerlist – 20110618.torrent and trackerlist – 20110619.torrent, the last one being seeded only by this link (private on pastebin).

Pure Trackers: Read the rest of this entry »

I recently made myself a map of terms I had found related to J2EE. Most of these items aren’t completely unknown to me, and this list is far from complete.

– Denotes the definition of the anagram abbreviation

Image source: Java Logo – Wikimedia; J2EE Mind Map – me

You wouldn’t be reading this if it wasn’t for Trumpet Winsock, after my initial use of Bulletin Boards in the early days of the internet it was thanks to the ISP Netland and Trumpet Winsock that I first arrived on the net. Being a snotty nosed kid I quite happily used shareware programs without a thought to the writers, let alone paying for it. I well remember the joy that this tool brought to me, although the rest of the internet may not be too happy about it.

I was sad to hear that Peter Tattam, the writer of Trumpet Winsock, got very little for the most widely used piece of shareware software^[1]. So now is the time to set it right by paying the fee you should have originally paid using PayPal: [email protected]

Thanks all… I had honestly thought the Internet had forgotten about me.
–Peter Tattam

Image source: Imperial College London