Posts Tagged Links
And introducing: “uninot.es” as “My Final Year Project”
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 6 October, 2011
Hurray, I successfully registered a Spanish domain name, which as it turns out is no mean feat. It used to be only Spanish people were allowed to at all, so I guess I should be grateful. But George, you don’t know any Spanish! Que pasa? Well, calm down and I’ll explain.
My new site is http://uninot.es. That’s “uni” as in university, “notes” as in things that you write down, and that last part, “.es”, is short for España, a.k.a. Spain, thus taking the place of the more run-of-the-mill “.co.uk” or “.com”. But that’s not important right now.
Uninot.es will be the web address for my new final year project, which forms a major part of my undergraduate degree programme. I plan to make a site that curates online collaboration sessions, probably taking advantage Google Docs’ existing capabilities, which will be based around university curricula. It will help you connect and share knowledge with your fellow academics, and will help you find the right channels using the places and people you know (read: geo-location and social network integration).
Anyway, check back for more as things progress. Mostly this post is a flag so that Google and co. will pick up the existence of the new site, and work out what it’s about. By the time I get some working stuff up there, search engines should have an idea already of my site and it’ll be easier to gain traction in search results. This is what us nerds like to call Search Engine Optimization. So now you know.
Friendly anti-virus software?!
Posted by George Nixon in Links on 20 January, 2010
I just had something quite good happen, and I thought I’d mention it here. Whenever I’ve had a virus crop up previously, anti-virus software like AVG have tried to make it as jarring an experience as possible: sirens and massive exclamation marks on yellow backgrounds, that kind of thing. I guess maybe it’s the equivalent of hitting a dog on the nose with a newspaper. “Bad boy! Don’t bring viruses in here!”
So it was a very pleasant experience just now when instead of frightening the life out of me, my background AV scanner, Panda Cloud, just popped up a big green tick and a message saying ’1 virus neutralised’, and disappeared again after a few seconds. I didn’t even know there was one, yet it had already been dealt with and I had the all clear! It felt like my computer was being protected by a guardian angel, instead of the usual gruff bouncer.
Basically, I’m very impressed, and I think this would be a good direction for computing and pc-human interaction generally. We should move away from the formality and strictness that has been traditional since computers were only in the hands of businesses, and move towards friendly and helpful ways of presenting information for everyone. It’s so fiddly trying to write error messages in the most formal way possible, when a more colloquial way would be more useful to the user and more natural to write for the programmer.
It’ll take a gradual shift, but I’d like to see computing become genuinely friendly, not just ‘user-friendly’.
Thompedia! – a wiki for the Thomson DTI 6300
Posted by George Nixon in Links on 14 December, 2009
As I’m back home using my Thomson PVR, a Thomson DTI6300-16, and needed to look up some stuff on rejigging the remote control for a new telly, I was reminded of Thompedia (link below). It’s a wiki for the fallible but popular (not with its users!) Tivo-style device written by chris6 from Kafkas’ World, home of an unofficial Thomson support site I’ve frequented whenever the damn thing stops working. Ages ago, I took it and did the formatting to make it a proper wiki site. I’m just giving it a shout-out here in case it boosts its traffic slightly, as it’s a useful guide and doesn’t look like it’s had many updates lately, indicating a lack of visits. Either Thomson finally fixed the thing (unlikely) or it’s not getting the visitors it deserves, so without further ado:
Thompedia – help, support and useful links for the Thomson DTI-6300 Top-Up TV TUTV digibox
PS: This is my first post in six months – I’ve not had much to say as my second year university stuff wouldn’t interest many people. Perhaps when I have free time to work on my own projects, that’ll change. We have all these interesting books in the library on extra-curricular topics like Ajax that I don’t usually get time to read, so I might try some out and have some updates for you over this break, between revising for my exams. No promises though!
Introducing Twistband – read music tweets from Twitter
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 15 March, 2009
Update: Appjet has ceased hosting little projects such as Twistband in order to focus on their runaway hit, Etherpad – an online notepad that people can edit simultaneously and see the results live. I can’t blame them, as it’s a cool and innovative app with a million uses, and apparently business customers want in. As Twistband was just an experiment, I won’t be migrating it to another host.
I was reading an article on TechCrunch about Twitter, or rather how its uniquely opinionated and blunt content combines with a good API to give it a huge potential as a search weapon of the future. Having watched from afar the gold rush as early iPhone apps made massive bundles of cash even for lone developers, I wanted in this time! Er, that is to say, I had an idea for a search-based Twitter app and was in no way tempted by fame and/or fortune. So I introduce <drum roll>… Twistband:
Twistband screenshot
As you can see, my page takes the band or artist name that you are interested in, and searches the latest Twitter posts, or ‘tweets’. If you aren’t aware what Twitter does, try watching the short video, Twitter In Plain English. Done? Good. So, why use Twistband and not just search.twitter.com?
Well, very simply, mine is more specific. Try searching for “the Killers” normally and you’ll get results about murderers as well as musicians. “Bush” will render more tweets about a certain ex(phew!)-president than briefly popular 90s post-grunge band, Bush. I’ve tried to narrow down the results by adding keywords behind the scenes, such as “listening” or “mp3″. It works quite well, though it’s not going to change the world.
No, it doesn’t have any serious applications (I can think of!), and perhaps it won’t make me rich, but maybe someone will get a kick out of it. Try a few bands you really love; it’s kind of nice to see how they fit into the daily lives of strangers too. But I guess I’m going to have to think harder if I want to harness Twitter and be a millionair this time next year…
Hi!
I also make music…
