Toluu : Adactio

Adactio

The online journal of Jeremy Keith, an Irish web developer living and working in Brighton, England.

When I bump into someone I haven’t seen for a while, I am often greeted with a remark along the lines “Oh, I’m surprised you’re actually in the country.” Har-dee-har-har. That’s my cue to point out that because going to foreign climes is different and exciting, that’s when I’m more likely to write something here on adactio.com. But I spend most of my time in Brighton, going to the office and building websites; writing about that would be the equivalent of Dog Bites Man. Still, if you keep an eye on my Pownce page and my my Magnolia links, it would become clear that I’m publishing plenty …it just happens to be in short form.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. Working, eating, sleeping, punctuated with the occasional trip out of Brighton up to London.

Last Friday, myself and Andy spent the afternoon in the Big Smoke meeting up with the good people from Last.fm, School of Everything, Moo and Dopplr. It made a change to see my colleagues in their natural habitats rather than the usual meeting place of a conference.

That said, meeting people at a conference is pretty damn great. It’s by far the biggest reason for going to a conference in a f

GeodeOctober 10

There’s been some really interesting stuff coming out of Mozilla Labs lately. The latest toy is a plugin called Geode.

It’s based on the W3C editor’s draft geolocation API. In a nutshell, it allows you to provide your location to a website at the click of a button. You can try it for yourself on Pownce.

Now, I have no idea where it’s getting the location data from—probably a mixture of WiFi and network information a la Plazes—but I don’t need to know or care. What’s important is that it works. It works to such an extent that it’s close to being indistinguishable from magic. Sitting in the Clearleft office at 28 Kensington Street in Brighton, Geode updated my Pownce location as 9 Kensington Street in Brighton. That’s pretty damn close.

Little by little, we’re getting there:

I look forward to the day when geostamps are as ubiquitous as timestamps. If every image, every blog post, every video, every sound file had a longitude and latitude as well as a date and time… I can’t even be

Reading immaterialSeptember 30

In an interview with Rolling Stone last year, William Gibson said:

One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real.

Bear that dying distinction in mind when I tell you that Joe’s new book is out. It’s called Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours (geddit?). It’s all about spelling in Canadian English. If you buy it, you’ll get the book in HTML and PDF with very liberal licensing.

You can print it out if you want a physical artefact but it’s made to be read on-screen. If you fancy reading it on an iPhone or iPod Touch, I recommend getting the FileMagnet app which allows you to transfer files—including PDFs—from your computer to your i(Phone|Pod) over WiFi.

In the future, you’ll probably be able to just transfer the files directly to your brain.

Tagged with book language pdf

AutomataSeptember 30

The Flash on the Beach conference is currently underway here in Brighton. I spoke at the conference two years ago so thanks to organiser John Davey’s commitment to giving past speakers guest passes to future events, I’ve been popping in and out of the Dome over the past couple of days to sit in on some talks.

Yesterday I saw Branden Hall talk about Brilliant Ideas that I’ve Blatantly Stolen. Although his specific examples dealt with ActionScript, his overall message was applicable to any developer: look around at other languages and frameworks and scavenge anything you like the look of.

I wanted to make it to Aral’s talk this morning but as he was on first thing and I’m a lazy bugger, that didn’t really work out. I did, however, make it over in time to hear Carla Diana.

Carla made her name in the Flash world a few years ago with her wonderful site Repercussion where you can play around with sounds through a lovely isometric interface. Lately she’s been working with robots. Or rather, one robot in particular: Leo.

Here’s Leo attempting to become a Universal Turing Machine that can’t be fed after midnight:

Carla’s job was to come up with a skin for Leo that didn’t send children running screaming. Yes, it’s the problem that plagues Japanese robots and Robert Zemeckis CGI movies in equal measure: the uncanny valley.

Want to see something uncanny?

I was at Carla’s talk with Sophie and we were talking about robots afterwards (as you would). She said that watching robots in motion often makes her feel sad. Looking at that video, particularly the bit where the quadruped is kicked to demonstrate its balance, I understand what she means.

Funnily enough, my favourite robot is also a quadruped. All I want for Christmas is a tachikoma.

Anti-pattern recognitionSeptember 25

A new site called My Name Is E launched for beta testing today. Eager geeks rushed to sign up for the contact aggregation service. The second step of the process involved handing over your Twitter username and password. This request was dutifully obeyed by the eager geeks.

Muppets.

This is a classic example of the password anti-pattern. And this time it bit the willing victims on the ass. My Name Is E used the credentials to log in to Twitter as that person and post a spammy message from their account.

This is identity theft. It’s not as extreme as having your credit card used or having somebody get in to your email account but it’s still an unrequested violation of personal details. I’m very interested in hearing how the willing victims felt when they saw the message appear on Twitter with their own name and their own avatar next to it. I imagine adjectives like “outraged” and “shocked” would describe the initial reaction but I wonder if “embarrassed” would be far behind.

The “auto-tweeting feature[sic]” was removed within hours in response to the overwhelming negative reaction, as demonstrated