I use twitter’s web interface more than anything and I hate the fact that I have to scroll down the page to go to search.twitter.com to do a search on a hashtag or on a user or even myself. I’ve seen the experimental twitter search box on other accounts but it’s not appearing for mine yet so tonight with the help of a few friends, I modified an old greasemonkey script to add a twitter and google search box on the top right of the main twitter homepage. Suddenly my twitter experience is so much better. If you have firefox and greasemonkey installed, you can try the script here or if not, download and install greasemonkey then try the script. Let me know if you like it or if I can change it in any way. In the next version I plan to add a feature that will turn all hashtags into url’s pointing to their respective twitter search url’s. I’m also hoping to include the latest treding topics under the search boxes.

Here’s a great video about Web 2.0, the social / semantic web (4 minutes)

The internet generation is here and many children from as young as about three years are spending more and more time online. This holds both risks and benefits and so needs to be carefully managed so that children are protected from the risks while still being permitted to enjoy the benefits of the internet.

The internet holds great possibilities for early childhood education and for teaching children many new things, but what happens when your innocent little four year old accidentally clicks through to a porn or adult-only website?

Fortunately there are ways to ensure that little James stays on Thomas the Tank Engine website and does not mistakenly click through to visit any adult websites while playing around on the internet and this is done with parental control software.

Continue Reading »

I say coincidentally because, I went by their offices today and complained about their site not being available for the past year or so. I’ve recently moved to Zografou and have often needed to talk to someone at the council for various things. Naturally, being a geek, I would look to their website to provide a telephone number but there has not been a website live for over a year.

So, today I went to the council offices to make an inquiry about something and right near the entrance I notice a sign pointing to the I.T. Dept. Naturally, I walk in. “Could you kindly tell me what the council website address is please”, I ask. I notice some bare stares from the three geeks in the room. One brave soul comes up for air from his session of bejeweled and says “Oh I think it’s www.zografou.gr” seeking confirmation from his cohorts. I respond like any unknowing citizen would. “Are you sure, because I don’t think it is. Could you show me?”

More blank stares, then a hint of terror. They now know I know there is no site at that address but he perseveres, fingers to the keyboard – DNS error. Not Found.

“See, thats what I get too” I say innocently. Another geek comes up for air. Google to the rescue. A couple of seconds later he calls out, “Found it!”

“Oh good I say”, what’s the address. “84.205.225.48” – before I can say anything the third geek jumps in. “We need to make that address known !!”

“No,” I say, “You need to fix the Nameserver entry to point to your domain”, Cat’s out the bag. They realise I’m a geek too.

The traditional “We’re not responsible for the site, we’re only temporary, I’m only on Stage (work experience) employment” conversation ensues to which I respond. “You’re geeks like me and even if it has been given to a contractor, a bad or non-existent website is a bad representation of you as geeks. So fix it or call someone to fix it.” You’ll have to talk to our manager, she’s not here now but we can give you the name of the person in charge of the contract.”

I go about the rest of my business and a few minutes later, I’m back in their offices, the manager has returned. She’s been told about my little complaint and immediately tells me to take my complaint to the mayor’s office. “Superb!! I’ll see the mayor, I have some other things to tell him too.” I say and off to the mayors office I go.

The mayor was busy. But I made my point and coincidentally, the site is live. Literally 2 hours later. It looks like it was built by Atcom They’re a great company – It’s a good site. I like it. I just hope they feed it before it dies.

Too many tweets again today. I’m beginning to realise the benefits of this platform. Twitter is fast becoming defacto goodness for all. Guys, it seems youcant handle the load more often than not. Either sell to Google who can handle the load or take the platform peer-to-peer and let everyone share the burden.

I think the most used web app for me is probably my Gmail. I use GoogleDocs quite a bit as well. One thing that is missing is a full text search across a users GoogleDocs folder directly from the Gmail interface. Gmail search is brilliant but adding an option to add Docs search would be really great.

“The population of the world, currently six and a a half billion, is due to rise to nine billion by the middle of the century.

The developing world, by definition, aspires to western standards of living. Some economists suggest that nine billion people all consuming resources at peak developed world rates would be equivalent to a population of 72 billion consuming resources at current rates: this is not economically, environmentally or politically feasible.” from the residence sustainable development seminar to be held on 29 Feb 08. Follow proceedings during Live! coverage on the day via the website and U-Stream.

One full month into my Linux@Home adventure, the experience has been generally positive. While there have been quite significant problems over the last week with browsing, today I attempted a reinstall of the whole OS. Being an old hat at this, I’ve had no data loss since I’ve long made a distinct separation between data and OS files. The re-install confirms there was something going wrong on Ubuntu. Pinning down exactly what was wrong is difficult but it may be an Azureus install I did a week or two ago which might have screwed things up. Anyway, Linux@Home is back up and the speed is up. This thing has become usable once again.

I am doing everything I used to do through the window. I miss nothing. My Ipod XPerience is better. My PC boots faster. My Skype phone works. I am developing. I love it.

I should have done it ages ago.

Go ahead – Just do it.

Dissolution of our marriage as of yesterday.

You displayed continuous neglect for me. Total disinterest for my happiness or wellbeing, my basic human rights (internet and email) and most of all my self respect and patience.

It could have been beautiful. Yet, it will never be so.

GOODBYE and GOOD RIDDANCE

I am now a recently divorced single subscriber, I carry no baggage – hey there all you sexy ISP’s come and woo me.

I had forgotten I had done this, A bot, My Bot –

she did some important work at the time when I needed to remote into a customers PC and asking them to do an IPConfig to get the IP was rocket science for them. MSN messenger to the rescue, a little VB app that reports back various things such as IP, UPtime and who is king and master of the universe. AppName was SSNMSNIP

I use outlook tasks and categories to organise my workload. Sometimes successfully, most times not.
Outlook of course doesn’t call them Tags but Categories. This must be one of the most underused features in Outlook but one that is just so useful for producing historical stats.
So when the beancounters and headchoppers come around soon, I’ll pop open Outlook and prove my worth.

I’m about to write some VBA to pull stats from the categories/tags. I’ll post the code when Im done.

Started playing with the great software that is Mathcad for another child project I’m getting into. I’m considering trying both MatLab and Mathematica too. They say these two are far more complicated but far more powerful. At this stage Mathcad is just perfect for what I need. The project has to do with Image Processing and a little bit of AI.

 

Stay Tuned.

More and more staff are streaming audio (music and news) into their offices, sucking up bandwidth and Quality of Service from others. One idea (N!) was to try and bring in one copy of a stream and then run a streaming server from within the network where users can connect to. Then, we won’t need to bring down multiple copies of BBC or CNN or whatever at +32Kbps each time for each user.

After some research this evening/morning, I came up with Peercast which seems to do the trick, allowing multiple “Re-Broadcasts” or  “Streaming Relays”. I’m going to suggest we run a couple of experiments with it next week to see how it holds up and if QoS gets any better while using it.

Last week I began playing with RubyOnRails

Although there is a single click install package called InstantRails that I have been using, I prefer something more robust.
So, this weekend, feeling rather masochistic, I decided to do a fresh Ubuntu install with Apache, PHP, mySQL, phpMyAdmin, Ruby, Rails, SSH, FTP.
Now my previous experience with linux has been simply to put in the Linux CD and wait for the pretty windows but this time I decided to forego the prettyness of Gnome and do it totally in shell. Well, it’s been a long day but it’s finally running !!! See? Here’s proof !!

Resources I used :
Ubuntu.com Starter guide
Howtoforge.com Ubuntu 5.10 ISP setup
Claudios’ How to install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 5.10
phpMyAdmin Docs

Baby Panos loves the PC. He just can’t keep away from it.

So today, I whipped up a little vb app for him that shows pictures of animals and plays the sound that animal makes when he clicks on the picture. He LOVES it !!

I must admit, he hasn’t got the hang of the mouse just yet but he’s almost there, managing to click on a few pics and hearing the sounds. I think his favourites are the dog and cat.

Maria has some tips on improving the app so I’ll get them into version 2 pretty soon.

NasLite is something I aim to try over the weekend. It may be something I can use for a number of people asking for online backup solutions. An old PC and some HDD’s and a floppy is all thats needed. Plus, it’s free ! I’ll do a review when I’m done testing it.

Theo did a great article on VOIP over at NewsAgent.gr tonight.

You have all probably heard of Skype and its call2landline service SkypeOut but have you heard of VoipBuster ?

If you haven’t heard of it yet, here’s a really useful download that’s a great deal too. VoipBuster allows you to make free calls to land lines in selected countries for a minute each time. You can subscribe and get unlimited calls to those countries by buying €10 worth of credit for calls to other destinations. Greece is of course covered in the Superdeal Free!!! Category. Gotta love this one. I’ve been using it for quite some time.

Ubuntu has gotta be the coolest Linux out there. The 30min install has everything a PC will need, Firefox as the default browser and some cool server stuff too. It’s free, and supported by Spaceman Mark Shuttleworth. Of course I’ve downloaded ubuntu !! A couple of times in fact. I’ve burned quite a few CD’s too. Still, there’s nothing like an original CD so a couple of weeks ago I ordered 5 (the minimum) just to check it out. Suprise, suprise. Yesterday a small parcel came from Switzerland containing my 5. Super excited, I gave away the 4 immediately to non-linuxers, pushing them to try it, then did a fresh install of 5.10 and immediately proceeded to order 40 more. I have absolutely no doubt I’ll get them. Hey, they’re free and I’m going to give them away at the F.I.T. meetup which will happen sometime in January. I will probably order more before then anyway.

I’ve tinkered with Java ever since taking the SL110 and SL275 courses at New Horizons earlier this year. I can’t say I was happy with how much code it took to build a GUI. This is just so cool though. I’m downloading it now and will do a write up once I start my first JSP web app.

No bullshit – I ordered 4 x Maxtor 120Gb backup devices at, wait for it !!!!!!! €3.50!!!!!! each this morning from www.edirect.gr

Needless to say, they called me a couple of hours later saying they had made a mistake on their site and that the price was wrong. I insisted that they should fulfill the order as advertised. They insisted they were cancelling my order.

I then called EKPOIZO – the Greek Consumer Council – got some good advice, thanks. They suggested I write a letter. Well, in the modern spirit of blogging, no letter, just blog.

Now I’m no legal eagle but, a price advertised as far as I am concerned constitutes contract. However, in the spirit of good netizenship, I admit I thought that e-direct made a mistake when palcing the order but thought it wouldn’t hurt to place the order anyway. Because in commerce, both sides need to be honest for a transaction to be successful, and because e-direct took the trouble to admit to thier mistake, I’m happy to let this one go.

Pity, I could have used the disks Edirect

I’ve been using Maxthon as my primary browser for some months. It really is a power users browser.

Although not striclty a browser but rather a browser shell based on IE, its’ pretty damn powerful and makes IE a usable product. Given all the IE vulnerabilities out there I wouldn’t suggest using it without running regular windws update patching by default as well as Windows Antispyware and Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool.

Still it has tabbed browsing and what I think is the coolest feature, closing tabs with a double click. Other cool features include “Mouse Gestures” which allows you to navigate using the mouse and also “super drag & drop” that lets you open a link simply by dragging it upwards (almost like throwing a link to open a new tab)

Try close Maxthon down completely and you’re handed a window asking if you’d like to save the session of open tabs for next time – very cool indeed.

Maxthon has a facilty for plugins too, checkout the cool plugins site
Once you try it you probably won’t go back to anything else any time soon.