An interesting post by Simon Willison on the possible applications of OpenID. Its well worth a read. If you don’t know what OpenID is try this primer. From the post:
OpenID lets you create accounts for people without e-mailing them a password, or even talking to them before you sign them up. There are lots of useful things you can do with this ability:
Let your trusted friends delete spam comments from your blog, or fix your typos.
Google Operating System blog reports how Google now shows traffic data for certain US cities. This would be especially useful if they could use it to generate better estimates for journeys as well as providing routes for times of day.
I’m still waiting for Google to follow Ask.com’s example and provide routes and journey times for walking distances.
Since the blog is run on PHP, it is easy to selectively show ads. Depending on the “http referrer” and the “user agent” I choose what ads to show. For example the following code allows me to only show the Firefox Referral to those whose browser reports them as not having a Gecko based browser.
<?php
$strGecko = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], “Gecko”);
if ($strGecko == ”){ ?>
…….. put HTML code here …………
<?php } ?>
I’m not sure what user agents different browsers report so this is just experimental at this stage. I know that some users used to change their user agent to Internet Explorer so that websites that didn’t recognise Firefox would treat them the same, but I think that practice has now ceased due to the increased awareness of Firefox.
Another variable on which to base what ads to show is the HTTP REFERER (spelt with 3 R’s for some reason). Currently if the referrer contains Google, Yahoo, etc in the link then for a single blog post I show Google Ads. Of course it is important to make sure that the referrer does actually come from Google or Yahoo sites and not just any URL containing google in it.
To check who sent the user to you, use the following code:
<?php $referrer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] ?>
Then you can manipulate the $referrer String how and when you want. Often a good strategy is to give regular readers an ad free page but show ads to other readers who perhaps come from other sites, more often than not looking for something in particular. The following criteria could be used:
In general it is a good idea to try not to annoy regular readers but use ads as a way of helping users find what they are looking for.
One of the features that I like about Yahoo is the fact that when choosing to forward mail, you can choose to include even the emails that go to the Junk folder. This is especially useful since it means that I can forward all incoming email to my Gmail account without ever having to check for false positives.
When forwarding in Gmail you cannot do this directly through the settings interface. However, there is a workaround. To allow Gmail to forward ALL incoming email you need to set up a filter that includes ALL email regardless of the folder it is in.
Set up a filter with the “Has the words” field containing the following text:
In:all
This should include all email regardless whether or not it has gone to the Spam folder or not. The next set of filter options should contain an option to forward any email that meets this filter, to another email address. Put in the account you wish to forward your email to and you’re done.
When applying the update Firefox installs the latest bugfixes and then restarts the browser. At this point it then checks what extensions are compatible with the new update.
Surely there should be an option to check in advance of applying the update since certain extensions may well be of paramount importance such that it would be better to wait for them to be compatible than to update.
On a related note, Mozilla’s start page seems to be broken. Their links for images, news, etc. seem to be pointing to *.mozilla.com and not *.google.com resulting in “Server Not Found” messages from the browser.
I’ve finally made the move across to Wordpress and a dedicated server. In the end I opted for a company called “Web Hosting UK” who do a plan for £30 a year that gives you 300mb storage and 3gb bandwidth/month. In the coming weeks I hope to start filling the site with non-blog related stuff such as a showcase of my past work as well as details of my Final Year Project and my CV for potential employers.
I’m still trying to figure out how best to organise everything. Currently I have gone for a theme I found on the net by a group known as Nunodesign. Eventually I think its best to go for a uniform look over the whole site across all areas. For the time being this should be good enough while I look for a nice design in which I can showcase my Java/BPEL work.
Since I last posted in October I’ve been job hunting. Got through a couple of rounds for one company and waiting for replies from another. The process I find is too slow with too many rounds of tests and interviews. Hope I can get some offers on the table before april at least.
Update: I’ve noticed that some people may be subscribed to my old feed. My new feed can be found here.
Wired has an article on "Building a Better Battery". They mainly discuss Laptops but at the end of the day everyone wants their gadgets to have an unlimited supply of power. Whether it be a digital camera, a mobile phone or the iPod, no length of time is enough. What I’m surprised about is the fact that many of the devices we have are not very energy effecient. Laptops have a great deal of software built in and now have, with centrino, a hardware piece too, but phones for example have no need to display the screen at all when they are in your pocket.
We need some sort of clever system to put all of our apps on standby when they are idle but without waiting long for bootup. Consumers will always go for ease and comfort than energy saving measures so this system needs a balance of the two. Most mobiles I think have got it right with periods going into days before the battery runs out. Laptops, digital cameras, and other gadgets need to start becoming smarter about battery usage.
A distributed approach to the problem of flooding. "During dry times sensors conserve power, but when the water starts flowing, they crank up their data stream. This involves waking up a bridge-mounted digital camera and shifting from Bluetooth to higher-bandwidth Wi-Fi so GridStix can take part in processing photos of the rising river.
By tracking ripples and flotsam, the network can estimate flow rates — an economical alternative to ultrasound flow sensors — and relay a single number back to Met along with an update to local residents."
Not made for human eyes yet! This device only masks microwaves for the time being. Why can’t they have a camera that just takes a snapshot of the place it is occupying and then have a high res screen to mask it like a gecko does. [gecko 1, 2, 3]
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