Category Archives: Technology

Bad Time for Google

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Since October, Google’s GKBO appears to have been systematically accessing Mocality’s database and attempting to sell their competing product to our business owners. They have been telling untruths about their relationship with us, and about our business practices, in order to do so. As of January 11th, nearly 30% of our database has apparently been contacted.

Via http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-thinking/

Google are having a rough time keeping to their Don’t Be Evil motto:

  • paying bloggers to post a Chrome advert (resulting in Google punishing Google by reducing Google Chrome’s ranking in search results)
  • blatantly favouring Google+ in its new social search results, and causing a shit storm in the process
  • and now this.

It’s a long read, but I found it interesting. The sort of sting they performed on Google is the type I’d expect Google to do to others.

Column/Block Mode in Putty

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I find applications that have column mode extremely useful (eg. UltraEdit).

It wasn’t until I was looking over someone’s shoulder whilst they were working that I realised Putty has a column mode (albeit read only), and it’s elegantly implemented.

Using Column Mode in Putty

It’s really quite simple. Barely worthy of the bullet points in fact:

  • When you have Putty open, hold down the alt key and then using the mouse drag the area of the screen you wish to select.
  • With its default settings, Putty will then copy what you’ve selected to the clipboard.

When could this be useful?

I’ve only recently discovered it, so excuse my list of 1, but I find it useful when selecting a list of file names from an ‘ls –l’ command:

Note: I tried to get a screenshot of it in action. Unfortunately it doesn’t capture the fact you’ve highlighted certain text. So please use your imagination and pretend the items in the blue box above have been highlighted/selected.

Helpfully, it trims the trailing spaces when you then go to insert the clipboard contents into another application.

Of course, there are other ways to achieve this (eg. ls –1 will return just the filenames).

Still, it’s a handy trick to know.

Andy Carvin: the man who tweets revolutions

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Andy Carvin insists that the introduction on his Google Plus profile – “I tweet revolutions” – is a joke, but nevertheless that’s what he’s famous for. Armed with TweetDeck – the power Twitter user’s app of choice – and a thoroughly curated group of reliable, enthusiastic and well-informed Twitter users, the social media strategist for US public service radio broadcaster NPR has become known for his mastery of aggregated and verified real-time news through Twitter. And that’s no mean feat on a platform still dismissed by many as a gimmick that trivialises information into uselessly short sound bites.

via Andy Carvin: the man who tweets revolutions | Media | The Guardian.

Whenever I mention to someone that I’ve started to follow breaking news on Twitter as well as the rolling news channels, I recommend they at least follow this chap if they want to do the same.

The article above focusses on the Arab Spring, but I’ve followed him for the London Riots and the Japan Earthquake also.

SOE Subtlety

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This is very common request recently – How to import CSV file into SQL Server? How to load CSV file into SQL Server Database Table? How to load comma delimited file into SQL Server? Let us see the solution in quick steps.

via SQL SERVER – Import CSV File Into SQL Server Using Bulk Insert – Load Comma Delimited File Into SQL Server « Journey to SQLAuthority.

The paragraph above has clearly been search engine optimised. They don’t even try to hide it. They’re one step short of repeating those lines as white on white text at the bottom of the page.

Feature Request for ifttt.com: Web Hooks

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Around a week ago I wrote about ifttt.com. Before I go any further, the idea of the web service is as follows…

When a certain action takes place (eg. you star a Google Reader item, you send an email to ifttt.com, you save a link to Delicious), it triggers a subsequent action (posts a new tweet, adds a link to Facebook, subscribes to a feed in Google Reader). If this then that. The ifttt.com blog has a good introduction to the concept and their nicely named WTF page explains how it works.

Even in it’s early days (it’s still private beta) ifttt.com has a surprising number of services you can use as the ‘this’ and ‘that’. However, something I’d find really useful – and keeping in the spirit of the APIs it’s built on – is the ability to specify a custom web hook as a ‘that’.

The interface would enable you to choose from the list of data/variables that can be extracted from the ‘this’, and have it call a remote script passing those details using an HTTP Post. What the remote script chooses to do with that call is completely up to its creator – just as long as it replies with a valid HTTP response.

To me this seems like a relatively simple way to offer a great deal of control to those who can program the remote script, and creates many more possible use cases.

if this then that – The Web Service I’ve Been Waiting For

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If This Then That, http://ifttt.com, is a new (currently in limited Beta) task based service that allows you to fully customise your tasks based on channels (think Twitter, Evernote, YouTube, email, Flickr, text message), triggers (if “this” happens) and actions (then do “that”).

via if this then that | craigt44 tech blog.

I was going to write a relatively extensive post regarding if this then that, but “craigt44″ has done a great job explaining it along with some inspiration on how to use it.

Uses

To compliment that post, here are the 3 ways I’m currently using it:

if I send ifttt an email, tagged #grs from <my email address> then add subscription to my Google Reader

I’ve been desperate for this for a while now. I’m forever seeing sites I’d like to subscribe to in Reader whilst using my iPhone, and have wanted to just fire off an email with it’s URL and have the subscription take place (so no need to copy the URL, go to the Reader web site, tap add subscription, paste and tap ok). ifttt will extract the URL from the body of the email (which is handy as most iOS apps when you send a link using email automatically includes the URL in the body) and then subscribe to it, placing it in a predifined folder.

if I send ifttt an email, tagged #fbl from <my email address> then create a link on my Facebook feed

I believe Facebook have a way to email in a status update, but I’m not aware of a way to do it for links. This one will extract the URL from the body along with any comments I wish to include with the link. ifttt and Facebook take care of the rest.

if I send ifttt an email, tagged #share from <my email address> then add a new bookmark to my delicious account

I currently have two Delicious accounts. One is links for future references (which I’ve now had for donkeys of years) and the other has been created especially for sharing links with friends. I want to be logged in at all times with my reference account rather than the sharing one, and so it’s made sharing a pain. Being able to email links to the sharing one has made life much easier.

Getting an Invite

ifttt is currently invite only. I have 5 available (at the time of writing), if you’d like one tweet me @greggannicott.

Instacast

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I’ve recently been using a different podcast player on my iPhone to Apple’s “iPod” app, called Instacast.

I’ve tried a few podcast players on the iPhone, but nothing until now has come close to matching the built-in software (which itself isn’t anything special – it’s just solid).

Instacast (made by Vemedio) feels like a polished product (the other apps’ I’ve tried did not).

Here are what I consider to be the pros and cons of this app, followed by a few feature requests that would for me take this far beyond anything Apple has done to date.

Pros

This isn’t a complete feature list, it’s a list of the features I appreciate.

  • You can lock your phone or exit the app whilst a video is playing and you still hear the audio. I’ve been eager for Apple to do this for some time.
  • You can sync podcasts without the need for iTunes or WiFi (ie. it works over 3G).
  • Of the shows you subscribe to, as well as the shows you’ve downloaded, you’re also able to stream shows straight from the net. There are a few key shows I must hear, and so I download (aka Cache) these when they’re released, but for the rest I’ll just stream there and then, or download just in time for my trip home from work. This helps to free up space on my phone and means I can sub to more shows (including video feeds) without any disk space price to pay.
  • It makes it easy to filter the shows you’ve cached from the shows you’ve simply subscribed to.
  • It includes the show notes when you’re listening/watching a show, including the all important hyperlinks. That’s turned out to be surprisingly useful when listening/watching to a show.
  • It provides a chronological order of the newest shows you’ve subscribed to (a “river of shows”).
  • In-app subscription with a decent selection of podcasts to choose from.
  • It makes it relatively easy to move from iTunes to Instacast via the importing of an OPML file.

Cons

  • I miss being able to subscribe directly via my desktop PC.
  • As the option is there to stream or download on demand, I find myself subscribing to more podcasts ‘just in case’. This has resulted in a longer and messier list of subscribed shows. I’m starting to feel like I’m missing out on some shows because it’s harder to get an overview of what I have available.

Feature Requests

  • There are some shows I want to watch each week, whilst there are others that I could skip a few weeks of and not care. Instacast (like Apple’s own software) treats all podcasts equally. I’d like to be able to tag podcasts/feeds, allowing me to organise my podcasts in a similar way I manage my RSS feeds (most importantly with a “Must Read” tag).
  • You can have the app auto cache (ie. Pre-download) podcasts, but from what I can tell this is all shows or nothing. That would soon fill up my disk space with shows I don’t really care about. It would be nice to have it auto cache only certain shows or certain tags (see above).
  • I’ll sometimes jump from podcast to podcast. One afternoon I’ll be in the mood to listening to The Talk Show, but in the morning I might be more in the mood for The StackExchange Podcast. It would be good to have a timeline of what I’ve been listening to recently so I can easily jump back to a previously incomplete show.
  • And of course, my killer feature (as mentioned a few posts back) would be the ability to start a podcast on my iPhone, stop it and the pickup where I left off using a different device (eg. my media pc).

At the moment I’m a very happy Instacast user, and I think it has great potential. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple have anything to announce at WWDC 2011 this Monday that might bring me back.

Facebook Busted in Clumsy Smear Attempt on Google

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The social network secretly hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about the search giant, The Daily Beast’s Dan Lyons reveals—a caper that is blowing up in their face, and escalating their war.

via Facebook Busted in Clumsy Smear Attempt on Google – The Daily Beast.

I always figured that the press and blogs simply created this idea that company ‘x’ is at “war” with company ‘y’ (replace ‘x’ and ‘y’ with Google, Apple, Micro$oft (huh huh – see what I did there with the $?) and Facebook). That when Google puts down Apple on stage, and weeks later Jobs responds it’s all theatre. But the above story kind of suggests otherwise.

My Ideal Podcast Player

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Sync. That’s the key to my ideal Podcast player.

I’d like it so if I listened to a podcast on one device (eg. my iPhone), stopped it and then started it again on another device (eg. a media PC) it would play from where I stopped it.

I’d say streaming would be ideal for this, but right now the mobile internet isn’t stable enough. So perhaps it’s downloaded on to the device and every x number of seconds (or when ‘stop’ is pressed) it checks in to a central service to notify it of how far into the podcast I am. It also does the same when I’ve finished listening to it.

I realise that having it downloaded AND available on several devices is a push, so it might have to be streaming.

And a web interface (both full and touch) would have to be available (that way you can be sure you can access it from a desktop/laptop/media PC and a mobile device). Although ideally over time you’d have native apps (eg. iPhone app, Android app, Boxee app etc).

Podcast Player Pro is a start, but it appears to be desktop web only (ie. wouldn’t work on the phone).