Following some feedback from the wider world, as well as Elgg’s decision some time ago to move over to github I’ve tidied up the archive and moved it over to github as well.

I have taken the opportunity to perform a provisional migration to support Elgg 1.8, although there are bound to be some outstanding issues. Hopefully this github archive will make collaboration a little bit easier!

Have a play!

» Github Project Page

Aside from the few things I buy offline which are business related (as an IT consultant most physical things I buy are bought off the internet) these receipts invariably end up in the bin.

What a waste of paper.

Given that now, in the UK at least, we are largely a cashless society – how hard would it be for these receipts to simply be emailed?

When you sign up for a credit card you could optionally give an email address to which to send the receipts. For individuals this could be your home email address (but of course doesn’t have to be), and for business accounts this could be the address of your accountant – bam, no more hunting down lost till stubs on tax day!

For simple PDQ machines the receipt could be emailed by your card company so there won’t be anything extra to do. All that would be required is to suppress the printing of the customer copy and a little bit of education.

Itemised receipts like the ones you get at Tescos would require a little more work as it’d be the store’s back end process that would do the actual mailing. The email address itself however can easily be stored on the card’s chip and saved along with the receipt in the shop’s back end system for later mailing.

Apple, typically ahead of the curve (not unsurprising given their industry) do this already, but this requires an in store registration process – impractical for anything other than purchasing the occasional big ticket item.

Its now 2012 – why do I still have pockets full of useless bits of paper?

Just a thought.

Image “Receipts galore” by Smaku

Using lists, tags and smart searches I’ve managed to not only never lose track of a task. I estimate this has made me about a billion times more efficient, and has reduced stress levels a thousand fold.

Additionally, I use the new and increasingly indispensable ifttt beta to automate a bunch of tasks around the internet; e.g. to grab a copy of Facebook pictures I get tagged in, send me an SMS when the there’s a problem on my girlfriend’s route to work, etc.

Every so often something happens on the internet and, rather than undertaking a specific action, you want to be prompted to undertake some appropriate action. Wouldn’t it be sweet if when these things happened you could have a virtual PA drop a note on your daily todo list?

Twitter to the rescue!

Sadly, Ifttt doesn’t have a Remember the milk channel (yet) but, like many web apps, Remember the milk has a twitter bot. If you add this bot as a friend and associate your RTM account with your twitter account you are able to add things to your task list by sending the bot a direct message.

Ifttt has a twitter task, so all you need to do to add something to your task list when an action is triggered is begin the twitter message with “d rtm”, e.g.

d rtm Write about Latakoo’s latest blog ^today #work

You can use RTM markup in your message to control what list it goes to, set due dates etc.

My standard use case is to prompt me to write a blog post in response to a client updating their blog, or to tell me cover my car’s windscreen when it’s forecast to snow the next day. I’m sure there’s much more you can do with it!

The blurb:

You have something you want to share time on, perhaps a holiday home or a car.

You want to manage who has access to it and when.

Simple!

Using schedulabl.es you can create a time share, send it with your friends and manage bookings both at your desk and on the move using your smart phone.

Hopefully this will be of use to you!

» Sign up for early access…

It is hierarchical and to a large extent centralised. You will be the master of *.foo.com, but you have to buy foo.com off the .com registrar.

These top level domain registrars, if not owned by national governments, are at least strongly influenced and increasingly regulated by them.

This of course makes these registrars a tempting target for oppressive governments like China, UK and the USA, and for insane laws like SOPA and the Digital Economy Act which seek to control information, and shut down sites which say things the government doesn’t like.

Replacing this system with a less centralised model is therefore a high priority for anyone wanting to ensure the protection of the free internet.

Turning text into numbers isn’t the real problem

It may not be an entirely new observation here; the problem of turning a bit of text into a set of numbers is, from a user’s perspective, not what they’re after. They want to view facebook, or a photo album on flickr.

So finding relevant information is what we’re really trying to solve, and the entire DNS system is really just a factor of search not being good enough when the system was designed.

Consider…

• Virtually all modern browsers have auto complete search as you type query bars.
• Browsers like Chrome only have a search bar
• My mum types domain names, or partial domain names, or something like the domain name (depending on recollection) into Google

For most cases, using the web has become synonymous with search.

Baked in search

So, what if search was baked in? Could this be done, and what would the web look like if it was?

What you’re really asking when you visit Facebook, or Amazon or any other site is “find me this thing called xxxx on the web”.

Similarly when a browser tries to load an image, what it’s really saying is “load me this resource called yyyy which is hosted on web server xxxx on the web”, which is really a specialisation of the previous query.

You’d need to have searches done in some sort of peer to peer way, and distributed using an open protocol, since you’d not want to have to search the entire web every time you looked for something. Neither would you want to maintain a local copy of the Entire World.

It’d probably eat a lot of bandwidth, and until computers and networks get fast enough, you’d probably still have to rely on having large search entities (google etc) do most of the donkey work, so this may not be something we can really do right now.

But consider, most of us now have computers in our pockets with more processing power than existed on the entire planet a few decades ago; at the beginning of the last century the speed of a communication network was limited by how fast a manual operator could open and close a circuit relay.

What will future networks (and personally I don’t think we’re that far off) be capable of? Discuss.

Initially, it was built for a single project but I’ve ended up using it for many other things, and I thought it might be useful to the Open Source community.

Features

• Pluggable
• Light weight
• Sophisticated events system
• Abstracted database layer
• MVC architecture
• Virtual pages
• Object/Metadata based data model

Its designed to have much of its functionality carried in plugins, many of which I will release a little bit later just as soon I’ve had the time to tidy them up a bit!

Anywho, its available under the MIT licence and hopefully it’ll be useful to you!

» Github Project Page (Core Plugins, Extra Plugins)

So here is a WordPress plugin that simplifies embedding latakoo video on your blog by adding a latakoo shortcode. Simply install it and you will be able to link to videos directly on your account without the need to cut and paste the embed codes.

Later, when I have time, I plan to add some other cool stuff to it.. but that may have to wait for now.

Please note that this is in no way an “official” plugin.

» Plugin page on Github

This plugin adds open graph headers to posts and pages on a per post basis.

It has no native interface, instead it listens out for og:* headers as input in the Custom Fields section of WordPress’ edit page and adds the ones it recognises to the page header as meta tags.

Once installed you will be able to add the following tags to posts:

• og:title (defaults to page title)
• og:type (defaults to “article”)
• og:image (URL, no default)
• og:url is also used, but this is automatically filled in

I wrote this in about an hour so it isn’t all that fancy, and was designed to solve a specific problem for me. Hopefully it’ll be useful to someone else out there.

Feel free to leave comments and send in any patches!

» Plugin page on Github

…not to mention eating all the delightful food, whose impact on my waistline I shall no doubt be tackling well into February!

Its been a busy year both in my personal and professional life (my traditional new years post will no doubt follow sometime in March), but I would like to take the opportunity to point out that I am available to hire for project work.

Give me a nudge if you would like to talk!

Anyway… nothing more remains but to wish you all a very merry Christmas and an awesome 2012!

So without further ado, I’d like to introduce the Really Simple Test Framework!

This is a PHP command line application, so you’ll need the php5-cli module installed.

Usage

php test.php [-p path/to/tests] [-t HelloWorldTest]

So for example, to run all the tests in the sub directory /tests/

php test.php

To specify another directory to look in for tests

php test.php -p /path/to/my/tests

To run a specific test only, specify it by its CLASS NAME

php test.php -t MyClassTest

You can specify multiple tests to run…

php test.php -t MyClassTest -t AnotherTest

Have a butchers at the README.txt for more details on writing your own tests!

» Github Project Page