All Geekness Great and Small

Archive for the ‘Home’ Category

So, it’s been over a month since I last posted, but things have got busy. Here’s what I’ve been up to: Read the rest of this entry »

I saw @mhat‘s tweet today about ‘What language should I learn‘  and it got me thinking about the times I’ve asked that question and how I might answer it. So, @mhat, I’m taking your tweet to be a challenge to write an unbiased and ‘unwrong’ post. To do this, I’m going to give you a history of the languages I have learned.
Read the rest of this entry »

Like a fair number of people, I have a number of Twitter identities. I have my personal identity (@dancrumb) as well as a number of shared identities that represent events or organizations in which I’m involved.

I use a number of clients to send out tweets, but all of these clients limit you to a single identity. If you want to user twitter.com to send out messages, you need to log in with the appropriate identity before you perform any Twitter functions.

Herein lies the problem. When you’re logged in to Twitter and you navigate to somebody’s Twitter page, there is no indication as to who you’re logged in as. The risk is that you could elect to follow or message someone, thinking you’re logged in as one identity, only to find that you’re logged in as another identity. I did precisely this, yesterday. As luck would have it, the person was my sister and I quickly spotted my mistake, but if  you’re using Twitter as a major communication channel, you need to be very aware of which identity you’re tweeting with.

In order to address this, I’ve written a small Greasemonkey script. You can access it here. You’ll need to have the Greasemonkey plugin installed, of course.

Once the script is installed, you will be able to see who you’re logged on as, in the Twitter navigation bar at the top right-hand corner of the screen, at all times.

I hope you find it useful; I know from experience that I will…

On Monday, I announced the launch of preDevCamp. There has been a fantastic global response and today I’d like to announce the fanclub that we’ve set up on Facebook.

Palm are taking some real interest in this camp and a Facebook fanclub is a great way to demonstrate the level of interest. Please show some support for preDevCamp by signing up.

While you’re at it, swing over to http://predevcamp.org and sign up to one of the events. Coding the Palm Pre is going to be a dream if you have any experience with developing with AJAX, so get involved! If there isn’t an event in your city, let us know and we’ll guide you through the process of setting one up.

As part of the preDevCamp 2009 site, I created a JavaScript TwitterFeed today.

A sample can be seen here. If you leave this page open, it will constantly update with all Twitter tweets that contain the word ‘twitter’. It will update once every 5 seconds and will contain no more than the 25 most recent tweets.

Installing this code into a page of your own is very simple. You will need the following:

• jQuery must be installed and you must include it in your webpage
• tweetFeed.js must be included in your webpage
• tweetFeed.css should be included, although the function will work without this file
• A <div> with an id of ‘tweets’ somewhere on the page

With all of those in place, it’s a simple case of instantiating the feed:

var tf = new TweetFeed(searchString,feedPeriod,feedLength);

searchString

This is the string that is used to generate the feed. The feed will contain all tweets containing this word

feedPeriod

Number of seconds between each refresh of the feed

feedLength

Maximum number of tweets to show. At the moment, this must be > 15 or else the feed doesn’t work properly.

All of the relevant code can be found by looking at the example, linked to above. Feel free to use this in any way you like. Comments are welcome

I’ve been playing with technology for nearly 25 years, ever since my parents bought a ZX Spectrum 48K for my siblings and me. My brother and I would faithfully copy program listings from books, play the games that those listings created and then merrily modify them to our own ends. We also had a huge disorganised box of Lego and whiled away many a Saturday building models from plans and imagination (for British readers: many of these models were inspired by ‘Chock-A-Block’).

As time passed, my interest in technology evolved. At school, I was developing an interest in Physics, at home I was writing my own programs on a 286s, 386s and 486s. By the time I got to university, I was majoring in Physics and working for Milford Instruments in my vacations. During that time I learnt all about writing microcode and getting chips to talk to one another.

I now work for IBM. I started in their development laboratory and, although my primary role is more customer facing at the moment, I’m still writing plenty of code.

So, why the name and what’s the aim of this blog? Well, my interest in technology is both parallel and orthogonal to my job in technology. However, I’ll be writing about both and so some of the discussions will be about ‘great’ things like Storage subsystems and Automation frameworks and other broad topics; others will be about ‘small’ things, like rotary encoders and relays and my latest home project. By keeping the lines between my home technology and work technology blurred, I can transfer my experiences from one to the other and both will benefit. I encourage you to do the same.