finding my feet - a sort of blog/wiki hybrid thingy from the head of Jon Robson

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AboutBox

<html>
<img src='http://jonrobson.me.uk/static/images/jonrobson_small.jpg'/>
Welcome to the homepage of Jon Robson, one of those web developer hippie types. I currently live in London, work for <a href='http://www.osmosoft.com'>Osmosoft</a> and make things like the <a href='http://new.ilga.org'>new ILGA website</a>.  Here is the 
place to find the majority of my contributions to the big thing we call the web.
</html>
This is a blog and an RSS aggregator of all my feeds. I don't like IE6 but I like [[coffee]]. I believe [[Programming is an art]].

Hope you enjoy your stay.

Catch up on what I've been blogging about in the [[BlogArchive]]

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links: IE6 coffee Programming is an art BlogArchive

I just had an awful ordeal attempting to book a ticket with eurostar.com to organise my Christmas holidays. It was a painful experience and echoed the book I am currently reading "The Inmates are running the asylum" by Alan Cooper.

The website seemed to completely ignore my goals and cemented my thoughts that Alan Cooper is on to something in his book. In the book he says that bad systems make us feel stupid, and right now I feel stupid. I have been through an order process 3 times. It has taken me 40 minutes, and I have now given up without achieving my goal and will have to go through this ordeal tomorrow. And the sad fact is I will go through this ordeal tomorrow as no one else can offer me a return ticket to Lille in France on Eurostar for £55.

The sad bit about this ordeal, is many of the bits on the website that made me feel stupid would be small things to fix. For instance the nice box that has saved my details from a previous order turns out to in fact be quite nasty. When I click the box saying that it will auto-fill the box below for me, I am expecting a nice javascript function to do its work, but instead the whole page refreshes and I lose the details of passenger number 2. Also I quite clearly at the beginning of the process set my goal: to get a cheap ticket. It didn't make this easy for me (maybe this is its intention) but my goal still remains and I painfully have to go through about 5 page refreshes just to see all of the options I have with relative prices and times. Then to top it all of when I have finally seen through the chaos and worked out which trains I plan to get, and want to pay, after filling in my details it tells me payment has failed... but doesn't say why. I try again with the card again, but payment fails again. I try a different card and this also fails. Each time I am having to re-enter details, check boxes I've already checked, and it is just infuriating. I am now clearly thinking problem with the website, which has been unsually slow today, but still, if it has a problem internally why not tell me I am wasting my time, and even better save my order till it is in a situation it can cope with.

The sad fact of the IT world is the world is littered with much worse pieces of software than this.

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Bali

Fly to Kuala Lumpar with Ethiad.
Fly on to Bali with AirAsia from Kuala Lumpar (>99.08 GBP )
approx  516 GBP total

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Best backpacking hostels in the World

Here are a list of hostels I have been to around the world and recommend as some of the best places to stay on a budget in the world

![[Backpack Budapest|http://www.backpackbudapest.hu/]], Budapest, Hungary
This place is awesome. Ever wanted to sleep in a hammock in a ger? Relax on a Thai gazebo? Sleep in the Bob Marley room with as much shisha as you want. This place although a bit far out of town has a great atmosphere and is really different from the norm.

!Smiley Guesthouse Siem Reap, Cambodia
There are not many places that can ruin a memory card with priceless photos on it and still be loved by me. With lizards running up walls and a lovely pond courtyard this place is awesome.

!Porn Resort, Ko Lipe, Thailand
Awesome location. Bungalows right on a secluded beach, a relaxing paradise.

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Billericay

The place I grew up. Made famous by that tv show Gavin and Stacey.

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Bletchley Park

I was lucky enough to be able to visit Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes last Friday ("home of the codebreakers"). It was a fascinating insight into the history of computing and really put things in to perspective about how far we have come in just 50 years. It was incredible to hear about how in the times where the feat of breaking Enigma was carried out how they were using pens and paper and mechanical devices just to get some bits of the puzzle. What truly interested me though was the museum of computing - a library of what I would consider ancient machines that the public are free to play with. I had a play with an Acorn with my fond memories from school time and had a go at some retro programming paying homage to the show "Look around you" armed with the manual placed beside the machine. 

Here is the lovely program I wrote - 4 lines of code - 3 to get it up and running and 1 to execute it. And no those are not line numbers you include them in your code!
{{{
>0 FOR X=0 TO 999999
>10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU"
>20 NEXT
>RUN
}}}

I'm not really going anywhere with this - It was just a bit of fun and something to seriously reflect on but it reminded me of the simplicity of interfaces and the simplicity of programming languages back in the day. It took me a day recently to get Eclipse setup with the right Java environment and here I had a simple program running in no more than 5 minutes from nothing.

{http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3009/3032534712_1ab75b0fa3.jpg?v=0}

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BlogArchive

Here is a list of my blog posts with the most recent first.
<<list filter [tag[myblog]][sort[-created]] template:MakeBlogLinkTemplate>>

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Blogging with TiddlyWeb

Ben Gillies has created a pretty damn cool plugin which is great for users like myself who use TiddlyWiki as a blog. Up until now I have been quite lazy and without realising it have been missing out on one key feature of a blog - which is shortened posts. Most blogs allow you to see the X most recent posts, however to cope with potentially huge previous posts and allow a user to read a summarised version of the blog post before continuing on reading they provide a handy "Read more" button as soon as the post gets too long. 

Ben's plugin works quite nicely. Just install his [[CollapseThisTiddler plugin|http://bengillies.net/.a/#BlogLayout]] and add this line to your [[ViewTemplate]] tiddler to initiate the macro.
{{{
<div macro='collapseThisTiddler'></div>
}}}

I'm keeping an eye on Ben's work.. he seems to be the first user (at least that I know of) to be turning TiddlyWeb into a blogging platform. I am hoping one day I'll be able to follow his lead...

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Bringing performance improvements to ExplorerCanvas

The last two days I've been looking alot closer at Googles [[ExplorerCanvas]] which uses vml to replicate the canvas object which is so tragically not supported by Internet Explorer. It's a good solution for small drawings but as soon as you begin dealing with lots of polygons (like I am in [[GeoTiddlyWiki]]) the performance takes a big hit, and many people therefore technology like Flash I feel just because it's too much hassle to improve that performance in canvas. I'm starting to see a solution of sorts.

Several weeks ago Jeremy Ruston made one of his predictions that I would end up tearing away ExplorerCanvas from the GeoTiddlyWiki plugin I am developing and create my own... and I must say I'm starting to believe him.

So this was the thinking... ExplorerCanvas creates vml shapes to represent canvas drawings. Creating vml shapes seems to take a long time and it is this reason why when you draw something in ExplorerCanvas on Internet Explorer you will notice a huge loading time difference. Users I believe can put up with this slower loading time. However the big pain point comes when you want to do animations in canvas. In canvas you usually do this by clearing the canvas and redrawing all over again with a new transformation. In ExplorerCanvas the result of this is you get that slow loading time as all the vml objects are created and put into place. This is when the user is going to get really irritated with your application.

There's another way, albeit is slightly limited. If you want to just to translations and scaling you can do this by simply working with the vml objects that have already been created. Instead of destroying them and recreating them where you can it seems a good idea to use the style property associated with each of those shapes.

ExplorerCanvas creates a div element inside the canvas element  and this div element contains shape elements. Therefore by just iterating through these shape elements and altering the top, left, width and height properties you can perform your transformation operations much quicker in some cases (still not as fast as in normal canvas but much closer!).

To give some ideas I'll give you an insight into my experiment - I produced x amount of square shapes in two instances of a canvas. One performed scaling/translation operations in the same way as it does for standardised browsers with ExplorerCanvas dealing with them. A second canvas below this alters the style properties of the objects to mimic the action of scaling/translating.

Here are some results...
|Number of Shapes| Action| ExplorerCanvas Time (ms) |CSS Transforming Time (ms)|
|25|Scale|141|78|
|25|Translate|156|63|
|50|Scale|297|141|
|50|Translate|297|110|
|100|Scale|609|328|
|100|Translate|563|250|
|200|Scale|1484|657|
|200|Translate|1235|656|

The results get closer the more shapes you have. I would include higher test results but it was just too slow in both cases! Hope that's as interesting as I found it..! 
If you want to see for yourself try out the demo here : http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/JonRobson/plugins/WorldMaps/canvastest.html or an online link [[here|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/tests/canvastest.html]] (note this is made for Internet Explorer so css transformations will not work in Firefox).

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Bristol

As part of my Computer Science degree I did a year long placement at Airbus which required a move to Bristol. Great place!

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Britain loves bad beer?

I went to a beer festival the Saturday gone and I began to ponder how did Britain get itself into such a state where we enjoy such boring beers. Go into any pub in Britain and you'll get the same old 5 offerings - Kronenberg, Stella, Fosters, Carling, Carlsberg and if and only if you're lucky you might get some sort of ale offering. I'm more an ale man myself. Living up North in [[York]] for 3 years and opposite a Fullers pub in Bristol for 1 year has educated me to how beer can be more interesting, and now I am being educated on the wonders of Belgian beers. So it was good to go to a beer festival with just English ale and Belgian beers. What I don't understand however is those same old 5 offerings are not even good lagers from those countries. If you go to Belgium and ask for a Stella I am informed you will be thrown out the pub (seriously you will). We in Britain however are led to believe that Stella is reassuringly expensive, however I promise you in France it's a reassuringly cheap price for the reassuringly awful taste. The same goes for Kronenberg. French beer apparently, but I've not seen it in any French bars! I can't comment on Carling and Carlsberg apart from I'm not a big fan, but Fosters is advertised as an Australian drink, however go to Australia and you will find them drinking Coopers Ale. For a country with so many genetic links with ours, why is it that they've maintained their love of ale, and in Britain ours is dying out in favour of a lager country. We now have to rely on organisations like [[CAMRA]] to keep the ale industry here alive.

Is lager popular just because it's cheap and can get you drunk OR do Britains actually prefer it to ale OR are we just a bunch of uneducated chaps who need to go outside our drinking comfort zone for a change? Whatever the reason it worries me.

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links: York CAMRA

Budget Airlines

A list of budget airlines I have used.

!Americas
Haven't used any yet.

!Europe
Ryanair (aka the devil)
[[Easyjet|http://www.easyjet.com/]]
[[WizzAir|http://wizzair.com/]]

!Asia
[[AirAsia|http://www.airasia.com/]]
[[Tiger Airways|http://www.tigerairways.com/]]
[[Firefly|http://www.fireflyz.com.my/]]
[[Air Malaysia|http://www.malaysiaairlines.com/]]

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Business Bullshit

It's everywhere. It creates completely unnecessary barriers. One of my challenge in life is to wade through it.

You know what I'm talking about. You're at work, someone asks you for your "bridge", later on a call they say how they will "get it to you by cop tonight" and that it might be a "showstopper" - why don't they just ask you for your number, tell you they'll get it done by the end of the day and if it really is going to bring everything in your project crumbling to a halt (which I doubt it will as this is usually the case) explain why in simplistic terms. If your not sure "how we can take this forward", why not just say "I'm not sure what to do". If we need to "demonstrate to the users the viability of this solution" why not just "show the people who will be using this thing what it can do and see whether it's useful". These are just harmless examples I can think of off the top of my head, but I've seen so many needless confusions in my workplace which have sprouted just from the need for some people to sound like they are doing something more important than it really is. Same goes for job titles... most are meaningless. Even if you know what the job title stands for - it isn't necessarily the case that is the job they do.

It's dangerous as it has potential to cause huge misunderstandings. It can relay the wrong message to people who then go on relaying that message to others - it can hinder our learning process. It's hard enough for people to collaborate in this world already without this business bulls**t flying around. Would you tell your child that their homework needs to be in my close of play tonight. No you'd just say make sure that work's done before bedtime. Why use a different language at work to that you use at home?

When I'm making baked beans on toast I don't announce I am going to spend some time in the food making facility using the bread browning device and incubating a can of beans hardened by subjecting to intense heat in order for me to neutralise my need for speedy nourishment... I just say I'm making beans on toast. Why should work be any different....?

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CAMRA

Campaign for Real Ale
website: www.camra.org.uk

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CSS

Really useful simple tutorial of CSS positioning: http://www.barelyfitz.com/screencast/html-training/css/positioning/

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CVs in the world of today

I have the pleasure of assisting my girlfriend with the writing of [[CVs|cv]] and application forms tonight. I'm not a big fan of them. It's very hard to sell yourself on 2 sheets of paper (sometimes one... I'm not sure what the ISO standard length for CVs is today). The other problem with them is you can twist your words on a CV. To take an example, lets say I was the project manager of the creation of the new Wembley. This is a high profile example of a project that went over budget and was late in delivery. Most projects however are not high profile. Say Wembley wasn't. I could talk in my CV about how I was responsible of the delivery of a huge project. I could say it was £750 million pound project, I was in charge of it, and I could carefully omit the "bad" aspects of my experience as the project manager. According to [[this reference|http://news.uk.msn.com/the_curse_of_the_new_wembley_stadium.aspx]] Wembley actually cost £975 million so was therefore £225 million over budget... my potential employer doesn't need to know that. They don't even need to know that it was delayed by about a year.

On the other hand, say you are not good at expressing yourself in words. You could be Einstein but not be able to get a job because you can't get across how clever you are.

That's what I like about social networking websites. I feel through videos, photos, interests, employer history etc.. I can paint a much better picture of who I really am, which works for me and my employer. I'm not just talking [[Facebook]].. back in March I acquired a new house in [[Colchester]] through a website called [[Spare Room|http://www.spareroom.co.uk]]. It was great.. I could add photos, a bit about myself and equally potential landlords could see that I was a nice guy, I worked for a respectable company that would help me pay my rent, and likewise I made sure I got the right landlord and housemates for me that wouldn't bore me to death.

When are we going to move away from this ISO standard of CV being the primary way of getting a job, it's old fashioned and not as effective as it should be..

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links: Facebook Colchester

Cambodia

I went to Cambodia for the first time July 2007. I look forward to telling you more about my trip!

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Carbon Footprint Calculator

Climate change and carbon footprints are getting more and more important for businesses. This is quite a topical subject as today is the start of the [[United Nations Climate Change Conference|http://en.cop15.dk/]].

In BT a few weeks ago an opportunity came to us to explore ways that we could try to change behaviour of employees who have lots of face to face meetings, by showing them the impact their travel and employees travel have on the environment in the hope they would start having more meetings through the mediums of the telephone and/or the internet.

[img[/images/CarbonTool/cp.jpg]]
{{footer{Captain Planet is equally interested in the planet}}}

Most carbon footprint calculators tend to just give you a number and let you offset it by planting some trees or some other green activity. This seems wrong. The measurement of a carbon footprint with respect to carbon emissions is kilograms of carbon dioxide (kg co2). So say your latest holiday cost you 3000kg of co2 emissions. If a carbon footprint calculator tells you that number, it probably won't mean anything to you. What most calculators do is then say 'well you can get someone to plant X amount of trees to offset that'. So what? It doesn't stop you going on holiday or even repeating that holiday, as you can offset it (not to mention most people won't offset it anyway). All it seems to be offsetting is your guilt. It's not going you to change your behaviour.

What I thought would be a more effective method is to put that number into perspective. In the above example say we could map that 3000kg of co2 number to a number we could understand - such as number of tree deaths, deaths of fairies per square mile or to a global temperature increase in degrees celcius. The world would be shocked and appalled about the amount of fairy deaths and maybe just maybe as a result of that change their behaviour. The problem is these numbers don't seem to exist. No one really knows the real impact of co2 emissions, we just know the more co2 we produce the more we are contributing to global warming. So the next best thing seems to be to map this number to other activities such as how much co2 we create through breathing or computer usage.

So what I have is a first version of a Carbon Footprint tool for measuring travel in an understandable way with the hope that it will be greatly improved by feedback. You can download a copy from [[here|/development/CarbonTool/index.html]] (right click and save locally). Open the html file into a web browser (IE users will have to enable Active X) and the tool will appear.

Now lets take an example where a face to face meeting is being arranged for 5 people in London. Out of those 5 people, Martin is from Ipswich, Jon is from Bristol, Paul is from Edinburgh and Jeremy and Ben are from Sevenoaks (a realistic prospect in BT as we have offices in all of these places). Lets say everyone is getting a train to the meeting except Paul from Edinburgh who is flying down. We fill in the form like so, clicking add participant to add new people to the meeting.

[img[/images/CarbonTool/1.png]]
{{footer{(Note there is also an 'add details' button which allows you
to describe journeys where you might use a variety of transport, eg. plane to London Heathrow, train to Paddington London and then the tube to office).}}}

Then we hit the 'calculate' button in the top right. You will need to hit the allow button in the security message (and tick the box remember this decision) if you are using Firefox or Safari. It will then using a google api to work out where the places are you have entered and work out the distance in kilometres between that location and the meeting. These can they be mapped to kg of co2 emitted. In this particular example the carbon footprint is calculated to be just over 111kg. Owch. In addition to this figure it will give a few examples of what this number is equivalent to. It also shows that Paul from Edinburgh is responsible for most of this figure so it might result in the questions "Does Paul really need to come?" or "Should Paul take the train instead?"

So please download my tool, have a play with it and suggest more ways we can use it to save the planet. If you have any other useful figures that could be incorporated into the tool your comments are most most most welcome. For the developer geeks who are interested in the code check out my [[subversion account|svn.tiddlywiki.org]].

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Coding made easy with jquery and classes

Now jQuery has been placed in the [[TiddlyWiki]] core, I took the opportunity to look at the advantages it could bring me as a developer. I came across several plugins and functions that looked of interest and came up with [[VismoWiki|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/projects/VismoWiki/index.html]] - a TiddlyWiki vertical designed for users who's brains seem to work better with visualisations.

The features I focused on was code that allowed me to easily make a given dom element a toggle function, an easy method for creating tabs, and an easy method to make elements resizable or moveable - functionality provided by the delightful [[jqDnr plugin|http://dev.iceburg.net/jquery/jqDnR/]].

What struck me was how easy using jQuery I got thse quite useful bits of functionality into it. I decided it would be quite nice to be able to use class names as the means of giving elements the right behaviour and I decided to focus on the [[PageTemplate]], [[EditTemplate]] and [[ViewTemplate]] tiddlers that are quite useful in laying out a tiddlywiki.

I made it so that every time the displayTiddler or refreshDisplay functions were called (the main ones for making drastic changes to the layout) a set of functions would be called that would scan the document for elements with a given class name and then power them up with some nice new functionality.

So to make a dom element resizeable, I simply add a class resizeable to that dom element - something that even those with limited html knowledge should be able to handle. Then the code below would give the resizeable functionality.
{{{
function  makeresizeables(){
        var els = jQuery(".resizable"); //get all elements with this classs
        for(var i=0; i < els.length; i++){
                var element = els[i];
                var newdiv = document.createElement("div"); //create a div which will be the resizer
                newdiv.className = "jqHandle jqResize";
                element.appendChild(newdiv);//place resizer in element.
                jQuery(element).jqResize('.jqResize');  //execute the plugin with one line
        }     
}
}}}

I did similar things for the other features - and it's all bundled up in [[jQueryHandyTweaksPlugin]] if you fancy playing with it yourself. The toggle buttons in the top right menu use this plugin.

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Colchester

I moved here at the end of March 2008 into a houseshare where I met a lovely girl. We got evicted by our landlord and ended up in a temporary home for 1 month before thinking in October - what the hell lets move to [[London]].

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ColorPalette

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Customer Support for the Techy

There is nothing i hate more than calling customer support. I tend to spend hours trying to diagnose a problem- fiddling with settings, googling, asking friends. Calling customer support as far as i am concerned is the last resort. So imagine my frustration today having to phone my employers about a problem I was having with one of our products.

I had done all my diagnosis and as far as i was concerned all I needed was to talk about it with a service rep check i hadnt missed anything obvious verify my suspicions (my diagnosis had led me to believe my device was faulty and needed replacing) and then replace the device if i was correct. Instead i was treated like a technophobe... my work colleague ignored me when i said i had done all the obvious things and just didnt seem to understand that he wasnt the only technical person on the phone. I asked him just to replace my device which wouldnt have been much of a hassle however he kept telling me indirectly about his process he had to follow before he would be able to do this...

Lets take an analogy, if a doctor turns up at a hospital and says he is having a heart attack another doctor will take action immediately. He wont sit for 20 mins running pointless tests to determine the guy is having a heart attack. Thank god my employer doesnt run a hospital or we'd be in deep trouble!!

So what can we learn from this? Understand your customer. Listen and act on what they say. Value their opinion and use them to follow a process quicker and only follow said processes if the customer needs it...

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Data Visualisation Elsewhere and the importance of folksonomy

I came across this today: [[link|http://www.bestiario.org/harvard/b10/]] and found it incredibly interesting.

Essentially what it is doing is displaying relationships between different types of data and tags that tag it. What I find interesting is the way it merges lots of different types of data - twitter, video, photos, documents and shows them in one screen. I also liked how you could select a group of tags (on the left) and expose relationships.

However this data doesn't make sense to me and the user interface for some reason isn't clear enough... it reminds me a bit of [[MetaCrap]]. It could also do with a search engine. I think half the problem here however is that it is based on the content creators tagging system and this differs from the tagging system the other creators of content are using. As a result you get a mess of tags that are maybe too loose in their meaning or irrelevant to the things they are near by. However I can see that it's a mess..

In the right context however this would be amazing. I'd love to see this hooked into some data I understand and see what it is like.

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links: MetaCrap

DefaultTiddlers

[tag[myblog]][sort[-created]][limit[2]]

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Definition of a TagMindMap

Carrying on from my previous post [[Tagging and Mindmaps]] I am now at a place where I can share more. After much playing around with code within the open source project [[TiddlyWiki|http://www.TiddlyWiki.com]] which gave me a great platform to try this out on and with usage of the [[hypergraph open source project|http://hypergraph.sourceforge.net/]], I have created a "proof of concept" for a concept I refer to as "tag mind maps". This "tag mind map" is at the top of the page, and if you have just opened this post/tiddler (whatever you want to call it) "Definition of a TagMindMap" should be a node at the centre of the graph/map with all the tags associated around it as other nodes connected by edges.

What's the point?

Right, so say you read this and you are interested in one of the concepts I have mentioned but not so much the rest, you now click on the tag representing that concept and see where it takes you. It will attempt to open the tag to see if there is a post is associated with it. At time of writing, it doesn't it simply says "this tiddler doesn't exist" but that's fine, it might do later, and eventually with a bit more tweaking of this proof of concept it will probably see there isn't any tiddlers associated with that tag so it won't even bother trying to open it. Anyway, I digress... so you've opened that tag, the map changes. You now see all blog posts, all keywords associated with that concept and it becomes clearer how they are linked... or not.. I guess that's what I'm trying to explore.

The important aspect of this is you never see the full picture. If you could see all tags and all information, it gets messy and hard to read. You should only ever focus on a sub-graph of the graph of all tags for it to be useful.

Right now this blog is in it's infancy so it's hard to prove anything. We will see what will happen with time.

But essentially in a nutshell that is what a "tag mind map" is. I've seen similar concepts around the web ([[Tag Graph|http://taggraph.com/]] being the closest, but even this seems to focus on the whole graph rather than the current aspect of that graph you are looking at. I'm yet to see anything on a blog used in the same way I envision... if I'm wrong let me know.

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links: Tagging and Mindmaps

Design- I have been doing it wrong

On Thursday I went to the [[Future of Web Design|http://events.carsonified.com/fowd/2009/london/content]] conference. It made me reflect a lot about who I was and what I was trying to achieve, and first things first it made me realise my website was a mess and I needed to fix it.

It made me realise I needed to redo it. It needed to look nicer (I've never ever bothered too much with the design side of my websites) and I needed to make my messages clearer, and make the website easier to navigate. I realised I had focused a lot on showcasing my visualisation plugins which although is an important part of this website, I was showing them out of context and probably confusing a lot of people.

So I now promise to focus more on the design aspects of my sites. I'm doing a lot of graphic design in the canvas tag realm but haven't been doing so much in the css/html space. So I pulled out a copy of the opensource product inkscape (for creating svg files) and got a bit arty which has created my new website header, and background. I've paid attention to my css for once in my life and have condensed much of my content. I've added "older posts" and "newer posts" links to the bottom of the page to make this blog more readable. I've added key links at the top of the page to areas of interest, including an [[Explore|Explore My Data]] link which allows you to try out my visualisations.. but only if you want to. I've also outlined what my current work is in the [[My Work]] section.

The only issues I had was with getting transparent pngs to work in Internet Explorer but luckily I found a lovely the jQuery ([[supersleight plugin|http://allinthehead.com/retro/338/supersleight-jquery-plugin]] to solve that one.

So the result in a nutshell, is a more interesting to look at, hopefully clearer to read and navigate around website, and hopefully the start of a few cooler websites designed by myself. Would be really interested in feedback....!

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links: Explore My Data My Work

Directed Edges

I've been playing around with TiddlyTagMindMap recently and I thought I'd give you a sneak peek of where it is as of now. There are still a few little bugs in it, but I've improved performance and added directional arrows. You will also notice you will now have to double click on a tiddler in the map to get it to display - something I've been considering for a while but wasn't too sure of whether to do or not (however dsjolie in the [[tiddlywiki google group|http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki/browse_thread/thread/831e59b9c87189b]] confirmed it wasn't just me who thought this might be better.

The next thing on my radar is deleting of edges and pulling in rss feeds into the graph, however I have been working on a separate project with JayFresh which we shall be sharing soon.

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Dopplr

<html><iframe src='http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/jonrobson/public/header' border="0" width='550' height='250' scrolling="no"></iframe></html>

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Editing GeoTiddlyWiki

I've been putting some editing mechanisms into GeoTiddlyWiki to allow easy map editing and just wanting to share my work.
[img[images/geotweditor.png]]
I've created an adaption of GeoTiddlyWiki which changes the mouse clicking behaviour to allow colouring of countries as well as geotagging by clicking on specific locations in the map or by searching using the google local search api. It's a bit immature but you can see this in action in [[this TiddlyTravel map|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/pages/myTravelMap/jonsTravelMap.html]]. Feel free to save the page and play with the copy yourself or to import the tiddlers into a local tiddlywiki.  As always here is the [[geotiddlywiki svn code|http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/JonRobson/verticals/GeoTiddlyWiki/]].

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links: GeoTiddlyWiki

Egypt

flights with swiss air
7th
Depart:  	 11:20   	London City (LCY)  	 1 Stop incl. transfer in Geneva (GVA)  	
Arrive: 	19:00 	Cairo (CAI) 	Duration: 6hr 40min 
Inbound: 	14-Apr-2009 		available
Depart: 	15:05 	Cairo (CAI) 	1 Stop incl. transfer in Zurich (ZRH) 	
Arrive: 	21:15 	London Heathrow (LHR) 	Duration: 7hr 10min 
GBP 308.45

7-16 GBP 312.85


!shorter trips
EgyptAir £350.70
Outbound:   	09-Apr-2009  	   	 available   	Select your flight  	
Depart: 	15:00 	London Heathrow (LHR) 	0 Stops 	
Arrive: 	20:45 	Cairo (CAI) 	Duration: 4hr 45min 
Inbound: 	14-Apr-2009 		available
Depart: 	09:30 	Cairo (CAI) 	0 Stops 	
Arrive: 	13:35 	London Heathrow (LHR) 	Duration: 5hr 5min 
Depart: 	16:00 	Cairo (CAI) 	0 Stops 	
Arrive: 	20:25 	London Heathrow (LHR) 	Duration: 5hr 25min 

8th-14th: GBP 309.35
Depart:  	 11:20   	London City (LCY)  	 1 Stop incl. transfer in Geneva (GVA)  	
Arrive: 	19:00 	Cairo (CAI) 	Duration: 6hr 40min 
Inbound: 	14-Apr-2009 		available
Depart: 	09:45 	Cairo (CAI) 	1 Stop incl. transfer in Geneva (GVA) 	
Arrive: 	15:25 	London City (LCY) 	Duration: 6hr 40min

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Finally a Family Tree Vertical

Today I am launching what I believe is to be the first TiddlyWiki vertical made for family trees. Quite a few years ago my Grandpa (Ian) showed me the quite extensive family tree he had built it up, and with the power of the web I improved it a bit more and more importantly digitised it (which he was unable to do). Originally I made a quite pathetic application using php/sql to do this which I blame due to my age at the time. It did the job anyway and my Grandpa liked it (but he's quite the technophobe so take that with a pinch of salt).

Any how since then a lot has happened to me. I've joined BT and then Osmosoft where I have discovered and worked on TiddlyWiki and it seemed perfect for family tree construction. I also went into the realms of mind maps and graph visualizations and in the back of the mind I also thought the work I was doing there would be useful for Family trees. However due to time it's taken me a while to get anywhere near that dream of a TiddlyWiki with the purpose of maintaining family trees.

Recently I was reminded that I needed to get off my arse and get this done by my good old Grandpa again (remember him from earlier). He'd been reading the [[news recently|http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/other_sports/horse_racing/8289990.stm]] and had been reminded of John Oxx the famous horse trainer. It so happens he's somehow distantly related to my family (my great great great great grandmother was an Oxx) and my Grandpa wanted to remember what this link was (he's getting on a bit) and hadn't because of cause I'd let my family tree break. It so happens that this particular John Oxx isn't digitised in the family tree as my Grandpa could never clarify the link but that's another story...

Anyway I digress I think I've come close with this new development. I have reused code I've written in the [[VismoLibrary]] and using two plugins I have made during my time constructing the ILGA project - the AdvancedEditTemplate plugin and the NicerTagging plugin I blogged about previously (see [[Nicer Tagging]]). The result (I believe) is a good starting point for what could be a great TiddlyWiki vertical in the field of genealogy (although it still needs a lot of work - has not even been fully tested in IE :))

Anyway I believe seeing does better than words in this case. Checkout the example ([[my family tree|/familytree/]]) - there is a link here to get your own copy as well. Let me know your thoughts by commenting below.

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links: VismoLibrary Nicer Tagging

Flickr

<html>

For those who are interested here is my Flickr slideshow.
<iframe align="center" src="http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=24701860@N05&nsid24701860@N05" frameBorder="0" width="500" scrolling="no" height="400"></iframe>

</html>

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Frederick Dohr

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Future of TV

With internet speeds becoming faster and on-demand TV services becoming more ubiquitous in my opinion it is only a matter of time before the walls put up by the owners of media content collapse and the TV world and internet world merge to become one.

It has already happened with radio. Most of the stuff you get from an FM radio box you can find and listen to online. The technology for this exists and many big stations have embraced it. The beauty of this is you can listen to old shows that under conventional listening methods you may have missed, the quality is much better and you can pick up a signal wherever you are as long as you have internet. Now obviously with TV the major factor that is preventing us being at this stage we are with radio is the video and the bandwidth costs associated with it, but as I said earlier internet speeds are becoming faster, and now I believe the only thing that is standing in the way of traditional broadcasting collapsing is the broadcasters themselves and.

I am an irregular TV viewer, the video I do watch is either on DVD or over the internet. The reason, I hate being dictated to that to watch show X I must tune in at time Y. I have to see adverts at time W and Z and if I forget to set a recorder I will have to wait till the following week to see it. I want to sit down when I feel like it and watch a show when I feel like it. So on-demand TV excites me. It’s halfway there. It’s nice to be able to watch a show at any given time, the only barrier standing in my way is the cost of it, and the content available. Half the time I sit down to watch something I usually have something in mind, and when I search for it on BT Vision or Virgin Media there are only older series or there is a hefty price tag on a 40 minute episode. Don’t get me wrong I don’t expect it for free, I just feel that there could be more reasonably paying schemes on downloading video content. What if I get bored halfway through? Will I lose that content altogether and have to pay for it again later? Or will it expire in 24 hrs meaning I have to make sure I sit down and watch it before the expiration time? Again I’m being dictated to. I want total freedom in my TV viewing. Now, if I was to pay a subscription fee for unlimited downloads I’m a happy man. If the content is there I’m a happy man.

I don’t think I’m alone here, I feel a lot of our population given the choice would prefer on-demand TV viewing to normal viewing, and when that is truly realised it will be interesting to see what happens to conventional viewing schedules. Will they be destroyed completely? If a football game is available will it be part of a TV schedule in a TV guide or will it just “become available”?

It’s the linking the TV to the internet that excites me most. Will there be a time when I can host my own TV show that can be accessed by anyone in the world through a website URL? The web 2.0, opensource and social networking potential here is equally exciting but that’s one discussion for another time.

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This week it suddenly occurred to me that God (whether or not you believe in him or not) appears to be [[agile]]. The brief documentation of Genesis in the bible seems to back this point up since agile development encourages the production of working code over detailed possibly unnecessary documentation. For those of whom are not familiar with Genesis I present the passage below.

/*{{{*/
v1 In the beginning, God created the sky and the earth. v2 The earth had no shape. It was empty. The waters were dark. God’s spirit moved over the waters.
v3 And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light. v4 God saw that the light was good. God separated light and darkness.
v5 God called the light ‘day’ and he called the darkness ‘night’. And there was evening and there was morning. It was the first day. v6 After that, God said, ‘Let there be a space in the middle of the waters. Let it divide the waters into two parts.’
v7 And God made a space. There were waters above the space and there were waters under the space. And it was so. v8 God called the space ‘sky’. And there was evening and there was morning. It was the second day.
v9 After that God said, ‘Let the waters that are under the sky come together into one place. Let dry land appear.’ And it was so. v10 God called the dry land ‘earth’. He called the waters that came together ‘seas’. And God saw that it was good.
v11 And God said, ‘Let the earth produce grass. Let it produce plants that have seeds. Let it produce trees that have fruit with seeds. Let them be many different kinds.’ And it was so. v12 The earth produced grass. It produced plants that have seeds. It produced trees that have fruit with seeds. They were many different kinds. And God saw that it was good.
v13 And there was evening and there was morning. It was the third day. v14 After that, God said, ‘Let there be lights in the sky. Let them separate day and night. They will mark seasons and days and years.
v15 And let these lights in the sky give light to the earth.’ And it was so. v16 And God made the two great lights. The larger light ruled the day and the smaller light ruled the night. God made the stars too.
v17 God put the lights in the sky so that they gave light to the earth. v18 He put them there so that they ruled over the day and over the night. He put them there so that they separated light and darkness. And God saw that it was good.
v19 And there was evening and there was morning. It was the fourth day. v20 After that, God said, ‘Let the waters produce many living animals. And let birds fly in the sky above the earth.’
v21 So God created large animals in the sea. He created every animal that moves in the water. They were many different kinds. He also created every bird that has wings. And God saw that it was good. v22 God promised good things to them. He said, ‘Have large families. Increase so that you fill the seas and the skies.’
v23 And there was evening and there was morning. It was the fifth day. v24 After that, God said, ‘Let the earth produce living animals. Let them be many different kinds. Let the earth produce tame animals. Let it produce animals that crawl. Let it produce wild animals. Let them be many different kinds.’ And it was so.
v25 And God made the wild animals on the earth. He made the tame animals. He made everything that crawls on the ground. They were many different kinds. And God saw that it was good. v26 Then God said, ‘Let us make people who are images of us. Let them be similar to us. Let them rule over the fish of the sea. Let them rule over the birds of the air. Let them rule over the animals. Let them rule over the whole earth. Let them rule over every crawling animal that crawls on the earth.’
v27 So God created people who were images of himself. He created them as images of God. He created man and woman. v28 God promised good things to them. He said, ‘Have large families. Increase so that you fill the earth. Rule over the earth. Rule over the fish in the sea. Rule over the birds that fly in the air. Rule over every living animal that moves on the earth.’
v29 God said, ‘Look. I have given to you every plant in the whole earth that produces seeds. I have given to you every tree that produces fruit with seeds. They are your food. v30 I have given all the green plants to the animals on the earth. I have given them to the birds that fly in the air. I have given them to the animals that crawl on the earth. I have given them to everything that is alive. The plants are their food.’ And it was so.
v31 God saw everything that he had made. It was truly very good. And there was evening and there was morning. It was the sixth day.
/*}}}*/

Even if you don't believe in any form of religion even the evolution approach would appear to be agile. If we were indeed one day a primitive one cell organism, we didn't jump from primitive one cell organism to human in one step. No.. if the theory is correct we gradually made that transition. At the stage of sea dwelling creature to land animal, I'm sure a few unlucky animal sods learnt the hard way - failed fast - when they made that transition and realised "MM.. the air's kind of different out here, and these flippers are no good on land, and then painfully and slowly met their death. But fair play that unlucky animal sod tried it out, and his mates learnt from those mistakes. Taking the example of the Genesis story, imagine the scenario if God had followed a waterfall methodology. I dread to think. Day 1 and 2 would probably have been spent on analysis. Come day 3, God would have been doodling drawings of people, stars and suns and prototyping with bits of plasticine. He'd probably have got carried away with detail and only halfway into day 4 would have begun implementing the world from scratch having thrown away those prototypes. At the end of day 5 he'd have been aghast that the deadline of day 7 was looming and he hadn't even got the plants up and running and would have probably ended up working late through the night with a takeaway pizza. Come day 6 he'd have been cutting corners to get the world finished, the testing as a result would have to be squeezed into day 7 (remember agile God finished day 6 and put his feet up day 7). As a result of testing being squeezed, God I expect at the end of day 7 would have turned on his creation, it would have worked for a few days before suddenly realising that the sun was not equipped for the job of keeping everyone warm due to being a ineffecient fuel guzzler, the sun as a result stops burning, the plants and men all die and God realises he should have worked agile.

Anyway I digress.. my point is simple, the world doesn't work in a waterfall style way, and by some fluke it is a highly popular [[methodology|software development methodology]]. I'm not saying agile is perfect, but it frustrates me that anyone can favour a waterfallistic style approach over an agile one. Many people argue that agile doesn't fit everything for example building a house (although many will contest that) but does the [[waterfall|Waterfall Model]] really fit better? Does it make sense in software development or any sort of project to have such a huge gap between the conception of an idea and the end product?

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Goodbye Facebook Chat

Interestingly Facebook chat is no more when I load up Facebook from work. It has instead been replaced with "active content removed". I personally think this is a good thing as it was getting extremely distracting....

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HTML Code ASCII Symbols

http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm

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HTML5 Canvas

The HTML5 Canvas is pretty cool. It allows you to render bitmap images ([[wikipedia|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element]]). Unfortunately Internet Explorer at the time of writing doesn't support this. Shame that.

!API
[[canvas api|http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-canvas-element]]

!Getting Started Tutorials
[[hello world canvas|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/development/canvas/helloworldcanvas.html]]
[[mozillas canvas tutorials|https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Canvas_tutorial]]

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Hello Facebook Chat

Yesterday marked the arrival of facebook chat and it has got me thinking about what this mean for me and its users in the future. At first i was pretty mesmorised by it all. All of a sudden i knew when i have a notification without checking my email. I can also chat to my many friends who are online at the same time as me.

Then i began to become worried and here is why. I tend to leave facebook open in a tab. All of a sudden my window starts flashing when i get a message. This results in me switching to it and ending up in another conversation being distracted from what im doing. I tend to look at it during my coffee break at work so now this coffee break is slowly creeping longer in duration unwillingly. The second aspect is i get conversations reminiscent of those that made me stop using msn back in the dark ages in the first place..

{{{
x says:
hello.
Jon says:
hello.
X says:
how are you.
Jon says:
fine you.
X says:
also fine.

<<At which time X doesn't continue the conversation.>>
}}}
This is an example of the ultimate worthless distraction - a conversation that is not going anywhere. This was the reason i began using facebook. I liked the way i could reply to messages in my own time. Communicate when it suited me. I liked the way every wallpost and message had some sort of point to it.

Now if I get a message from a friend I feel i have to respond instantly so as not to appear rude no matter what I'm doing it whether it be facebook stalking or trying to get some presentation done. If im on for a quick session before bedtime i may now feel obliged to stay on longer and converse whilst wishing i could just go to bed and looking for a "way out" of that conversation.

Sure there are good aspects to it. For some reason I'm now getting lots of instant messages from people i havent heard from in a while engaging in small talk that wouldnt normally be worthy of a message or a wall post.

And how will work take this? Will they see it as a distraction now and look to ban it? My company is much more accommodating of [[Facebook]] then others seeing true benefit in bringing people together. Will this change their opinion on it? Will they think it's a welcome addition? Time will tell.

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links: Facebook

Hong Kong

sa14-tu24
finnair
asda-travel

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How I moved to TiddlyWeb and reaped the rewards

Compare 11 seconds with my old version with 4 seconds for this version

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How to add comments on your online tiddlywiki using instacomments

This is something that has frustrated me for a while especially considering I use TiddlyWiki as a "sort of blog". This problem is how can I enable people to post comments on my works, my views and anything else I care to put in my own personal TiddlyWiki. It turns out that with a bit of work there is an easy solution. 

So here it is: use [[InstaComments|http://www.instacomment.com/]]. Sign up for an account and click on the code tab once you are logged in with your brand new spanking account. Follow the instructions and download instac_connect.php and place it somewhere on your server then include the code it tells you to which should look something like this...
{{{

<script type="text/javascript">var instac_connect = "http://www.mysite.com/instac_connect.php";</script>
<script src="http://www.instacomment.com/scripts/instac_js.php"></script>
<link href="http://www.instacomment.com/styles/instac_styles.php?id=4399" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

}}}
... into your MarkupPreHead tiddler - this will load some javascript files into the head of your tiddlywiki document when you open it. Take a look at my [[MarkupPreHead]] tiddler to see how I've done this.

Finally you will be given on the code page something along the lines of 
{{{
<script>instac_button(<<ID>>, "tagname");</script>

}}}
where ID is a unique number specific to your account. This is where it gets slightly tricky. This function by default calls the javascript document.write which if ran would essentially nuke your tiddlywiki into non-existance. To get round this we need to temporarily override the document.write function so that it behaves using the inbuilt wikify function provided in the TiddlyWiki core. For this we write a small plugin which you can see in [[InstaCommentsPlugin]] - make sure the id passed however is yours and not mine!! Essentially all this function does is tidy up the name of the tiddler from which the macro was called (so that the comments will be provided for that specific tiddler), then alter document.write to take the text passed as it's argument to instead wrap that text in an {{{<html>}}} tag and wikify. 

To make sure every tiddler has commenting available, you will then need to add a line into your view template {{{<div macro='instacomment'></div>}}} - all this will do is run the macro within this div. Again see my [[ViewTemplate]] to see how I've done this. And voila as easy as that you have comments in your TiddlyWiki. Great if you want to collate views on your work from multiple people without opening up your tiddlywiki to editing.

Currently this won't work on hosted pages such as [[TiddlySpot|http://www.tiddlyspot.com]] as you need the insta_connect.php file but there's no reason TiddlySpot couldn't add this to their server in future with a bit of poking...

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links: MarkupPreHead InstaCommentsPlugin

How to base64 encode an image in python

Easy..
{{{
import base64
path = "x.png"
base64.b64encode(open(path,"rb").read())
}}}

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How to cook in TiddlyWiki

I have had a few people ask me about how to use cook for developing TiddlyWiki plugins. An unfortunate incident where a momentual loss of brain has resulted in me being without a power cable has forced me to use Windows and have to setup cook on it so I thought I'd share my wisdom while it is still fresh.

First things first you need to download the tool which can be found in [[the svn cooker directory|http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/tools/cooker/]]. You'll also need [[Ruby|http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/]] for this to work.

Once this is all done you can execute ''cook.rb'' to get cook to run. If you run cook.rb it will give you some usage instructions. The first parameter cook takes is the only one you should care about to start with. The parameter is a file path to a *recipe* and this file gives all the rules to creating your TiddlyWiki.

A recipe is essentially a set of rules of how to make a TiddlyWiki and the file name of the recipe is significant. A recipe with the filename "spaghettibolognese.html.recipe" will create a file with name "spaghettibolognese.html".

A recipe lists rules that are needed to be followed to make it. TiddlyWiki has a recipe which if included will create the latest version of TiddlyWiki in svn. The recipe can be found here [[tiddlywiki core recipe|http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/core/]].

The path must be relative to the location of the recipe.
ie.
{{{
recipe: ../core/tiddlywiki.html.recipe
}}}
means that the tiddlywiki core recipe can be found up one directory, then in the core directory.

Once you've got this cooking you should be able to view the outputed empty tiddlywiki. A recipe can also point to tiddlers.
To do this you add the line
{{{
tiddler: HelloWorld.tiddler
}}}
this points to the file HelloWorld.tiddler and this file should look something like this:
{{{
<div title="HelloWorldTiddler" modifier="MyName" tags="[[a]] [[b]] [[c]]">

<pre>
Hello [[world]].
</pre>
</div>

}}}

To include js files you probably want to remove the {{{<div> and <pre> bits}}} and just have pure js code. You can associate meta data with a js file by creating a file with a .meta suffix.
ie. a js file "test.js" should exist alongside a file called "test.js.meta" where the latter file contains code like this: 
{{{
title: TestPlugin
modifier: MeAgain
tags: [[a]] [[b]] [[c]]
}}}

There are also lots of useful things you can do including merging files
eg.
{{{
tiddler a.js b.js
}}}
will create a tiddler with meta data found in a.js.meta but the contents of both a.js and b.js. This is great for making plugins which make use of code in various locations.

I'll let you get the basics working - with the above this should be enough, but you may find the following page with [[basic cook usage instructions|http://trac.tiddlywiki.org/wiki/Cook]] helpful. Of course comment, or post in the TiddlyWiki groups for more help.

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Hypergraph

Open source hyperbolic graphs using a java applet
http://hypergraph.sourceforge.net/

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IE6

As Michael Mahemoff kindly points out [[IE6 is older than your grandpa|http://softwareas.com/ie6-is-older-than-your-grandpa]].

IE6 causes a lot of pain for web developer/designers all over the world. In fact I'd go as far as saying it is stifling possible innovation. Whereas new browsers are highly powerful many developers/designers are held back by using new powerful features of those browsers as some people keep insisting on using Internet Explorer. Thank god the tide is turning, for example [[you tube|http://youtube.com]] no longer hosts Internet Explorer 6 along with lots of other websites.

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IE6 ActiveX and Ajax

Osmosoft recently launched a new website for ILGA (the international gay lesbian association). The main focus of the website is a map (built using my [[Vismo library|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/Vismo]]) of the world showing legal information about topics such as "Are male to male relationships legal?" and in those countries where they are not legal exposes those countries that still think it is valid to punish two gay people with death.

As with all websites it's had a few teething problems, but the most recent one I came across was quite serious and felt was worthy of a blog post.

We got an email from someone who was at the website launch in Copenhagen at the outgames conference - they were trying to share the website in their company however when they tried it on their corporate network in IE6 the website wouldn't load. It transpired that they were getting a weird error message: "automation server can't create object". Of course at first glance due to the complexity of the VismoLibrary I felt I had overlooked something quite serious. However digging around revealed that in fact the error was caused because this corporate network had decided to disable ActiveX in the internet explorer 6 security settings for all their employees pcs (if making them use IE6 was not enough). The result of this was my seemingly harmless jQuery.ajax calls were failing as they were not possible.

So with the problem identified, time for solving. I wanted the most simple solution with minimal change to the server. Ideally I wanted to just change my javascript and not touch the head tags of pages on the ilga server. I got a solution which does just this.

Effectively what I do is test for browsers without  the ability to create XMLHttpRequests. For these browsers I append a hidden IFRAME to the body in javascript, the source attribute of which is the url I am making an ajax call to. Then, when the iframe has finished loading it runs the success function as normal. The result = normal looking website for these niche users. Hurray.

[[The ILGA website|http://new.ilga.org]] has since been updated with this fix.
Here is the code for those interested:
{{{
	    try { //see if I can do an ajax call
	        var test = new XMLHttpRequest(); 
                ilga.ajax = jQuery.ajax; //default to using ajax for all happy browsers
        }
        catch (ex) {
            ilga.ajax  = function(options){ //define a new function which does exactly the same but with iframes
                if(options.url.indexOf("http://") == -1){
                    var x = document.createElement("iframe");
                    x.src = options.url;
                    x.style.setAttribute("cssText","display:none;");
                    document.body.appendChild(x);
                    jQuery(x).load(function(){
               
                 		var response = jQuery(
                     	x.contentWindow.document.body).text();
                        options.success(response);
                    });
                }
                
            };
        };
        
}}}

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links: IE6 VismoLibrary

Ideas for a rainy day

go zorbing (rainy possibly not a good idea though)

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Improved IE experience for canvas graphics just in time for Christmas - reuse is the key!

Not so long ago I mentioned about experimenting with speeding up the experience in GeoTiddlyWiki for internet explorer users. The proposal was to throw away Google's ExplorerCanvas and to create the vml objects myself and treat scaling and translating transformations differently to ExplorerCanvas. So to recap ExplorerCanvas allows you to do everything in canvas which you can in Firefox, however fatally this means that it replicates the way canvas performs transformations - it applies them first and then every drawing command that follows implements that transformation

So for example in canvas say you had a drawing of a line from coordinate 0,0 to 100,100 and then wanted to scale this line to make it twice as big you'd do the following.
{{{

ctx.clear(); //clear existing drawing
ctx.scale(2,2); //set new scale

//drawing same drawing in this new context
ctx.beginPath();
ctx.moveTo(0,0);
ctx.lineTo(100,100);
ctx.closePath();
}}}
You try to do the same thing in ExplorerCanvas and it may not be noticeable on one line but I promise you the more lines there are the more noticeable that is going to get.
The reason is that ctx.clear() method. With that call, every single vml object is going to disappear. Then with every closePath command a new vml object will appear. Creating dom elements and destroying them are not good ideas in Internet Explorer.

So focusing on what vml is, it becomes clear that if you want to do some translations and scaling you should re-use existing vml objects instead of deleting ones and creating new ones. Sure it's still going to load slow that first time, but every time from then on it should be much quicker to draw. You can either directly modify the path attribute of the vml object or even better using css modify the left, top, width and height attributes. Still haven't worked out the best way for rotation but it certainly makes a difference in apps just using translation and scaling. 

I guess the proof is in the pudding so try either [[this link|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/tests/explorercanvasvscss/canvastest.html]] or take a look at [[my Travel tiddler|Travel]] and try the panning and zooming in Internet Explorer, and although it's still not quite the same experience as Firefox it's a lot better than you might expect.

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links: GeoTiddlyWiki ExplorerCanvas Travel

InstaCommentsPlugin

/*
Unused unmaintained code. here purely for historic reasons..
*/
config.macros.instacomment ={
  handler: function(place,macroName,params,wikifier,paramString,tiddler){
var title = ""+tiddler.title;
title = title.replace("%20", "_");
title = title.replace(" ", "_");
title = title.replace("'","");

var old = document.write;
document.write = function(text){
  wikify("<html>" + text + "</html>", place);
}
if(instac_button){
instac_button(4399, title);
}
document.write = old;
}
};

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Internet Communication

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Japan

I went here for the first time in February 2008 on my birthday. I look forward to telling you more about my trip!

!Youtube
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yyU0pe6EFBQ
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OAN6JHa7uNU

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tags:

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Keeping your notes cleaner using image tagging

Most of us use diagrams to convey ideas in our notes, whether it be to explain a complicated database structure, to show how things are related or to explain the meaning of life. In fact many of your notebooks I am sure are full of diagrams you have doodled. So why doesn't TiddlyWiki your own personal notebook do this as well? Well it's getting there... I have written a plugin called [[ImageTaggingPlugin]] which allows you to annotate images (note this works best in Firefox so please switch browsers if you can to get the best demo).

This allows you to do cool things such as what I've done in my note about [[Osmosoft]] (see below)..
----------------------------------
<<tiddler Osmosoft>>
----------------------------------
If your an artist it is pretty cool in that you can provide large resolution photos of your art and allow users to explore them and add notes. I've done another demo using fellow Osmoftonian Paul Downey's Web Is Agreement poster as well as demoing some of my girlfriend Caro's art. Check that out [[here|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/development/ImageTaggingPlugin/demo.html]]
[img[/images/moralcompass.JPG]]

It also opens up the doors for a good way to organise your notebook - take a doodle which explains your note book and organise your tiddlers as if you were organising them on a shelf. Feel free to try a copy in your own notebook. Controls are as follows: double clicking on a tag opens it, if you double click and its not on a tag, it will create a new tag.  + and - keyboard keys increase/decrease the size of the circle that will be placed on the image. Click in an empty space to add a tag and then hold down on the circle created to move it around the page.
<<TagImage /images/jonrobsonmeuk.jpg fill:rgb(255,0,0) width:400 editable:true>>
Note: I realise there are a few bugs and might be a few issues therefore with the plugin. However this is because it is very experimental at the moment. Thus I would be highly greatful for any comments you can leave me using the form below!

Enjoy...!

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Laos

I went here for the first time July 2006. I look forward to telling you more about my trip!

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Less Than Greater Than and Geofilter TiddlyWeb Plugins

I have just released two plugins on PyPi that I hope will be very useful for TiddlyWeb users.

The first of which I call ''ltgt'' - which stands for "less than greater than". This TiddlyWeb plugin adds a filter that you can use across all your bags to perform simple less than or greater than functions. This is best demonstrated by an example..

All my posts on this blog live in a bag funnily enough called [[posts|/bags/posts/tiddlers]]. Tiddlers in this bag have a field called "created" which tells you when the post was first created. A common query you might want to carry out on a dataset such as this is find all posts I have written from the start of 2010 to today.

In TiddlyWeb (and TiddlyWiki for that matter) dates are expressed as YYYYMMDDhhmmss  - where YYYY is the year, MM is the month, DD is the day, hh the hour and so on.. where the hour, minutes and seconds are optional. So the first day of 2010 would be the string 20100101 and today the 22nd March would be 20100322. For the query we want we need all posts where the created date is less than 20100101 and greater than 20090101. This corresponds to the new filter supplied by this new plugin "gt=created:20100101&lt=created:20100322"

I can now find that 11 posts have been created between these two dates using [[this url|/bags/posts/tiddlers?gt=created:20100101&lt=created:20100322]]

For any other field other than modified and created, the fields are treated as floats. I imagine this would be useful for the sort of things you might do with an Excel spreadsheet - generate a report of all items between two dates or if you had tiddlers with a cost field associated you might want to return every tiddler that costs over 20 pounds (this would equate to something like ?gt=cost:20.

If you fancy playing with a copy of this, the install is quite simple if you have used TiddlyWeb before. It can be found on [[PyPi|http://pypi.python.org/pypi/tiddlywebplugins.ltgt]] so install is a doddle just do
{{{
pip install tiddlywebplugins.ltgt
}}}
and do the usual add to TiddlyWebConfig sort of stuff.

Next up is a plugin for geo lovers called ''geofilters''. If you have a tiddler with a field "geo.lng" and "geo.lat" you have a geotiddler. For instance [[this is a geotiddler|/bags/rssfeeds/tiddlers/tag%3Aflickr.com%2C2004%3A_photo_2392936850.txt]].

One thing that might be useful to know is to find data near a given location. The example above  is a photo I took in a place called Nha Trang in Vietnam. Maybe I want to see other photos or data like this. More concretely I might want to find other data within 100 kilometers of this. This tiddler has fields "geo.lat" and "geo.lng" with values 12.249262 and 109.18848 respectively (well it does at the moment :)). Using my geofilters plugin you can now query tiddlers in a bag or recipe like this:
{{{
?near=109.18848,12.249262,100km
}}}
So for all tiddlers in the same bag as this photo I can try this [[link|/bags/rssfeeds/tiddlers.wiki?near=12.249262,109.18848,1000km]] and instantly get all those nearby tiddlers in a TiddlyWiki. One of the results is this flickr photo [[tag:flickr.com,2004:_photo_2392109735]] taken in Cambodia, a country which shares a border with Vietnam. Instantly your geodata is more open and useful then an Excel spreadsheet. 

This one can also be found on [[PyPi|http://pypi.python.org/pypi/tiddlywebplugins.geofilters]]

Watch this space... there will be more on geotiddlers.

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links: TiddlyWeb

London

After much resistance I moved here in October 2008. I never thought living in London would happen and it's turning out to be not too bad (albeit expensive)!

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Love thy Customer

I had the pleasure of spending 3 days and 3 nights in Brussels, Belgium last week with a customer of Osmosoft's for whom we are currently doing pro-bono work for. The reason for the trip was we have a release coming up (a big one) and we were a bit behind on a few things, and I believed that we could nail these much quicker in person. Turns out this was correct. In those 3 nights and 3 days there was lots of talking, lots of coding and most importantly lots of results. Jon Lister/JayFresh who has just left Osmosoft this week was also on that trip and to quote him "We got about 2 weeks work done in 3 days". Quite an achievement. 

And it wasn't that expensive in business terms... for 3 people the major cost for us was hotels - and that only cost us £180 - made possible by the decision to stay in a youth hostel rather than a luxurious hotel. And although my sleeping wasn't as good as normal as a result, I still kept my productivity as 1) I was out of the office - therefore this was important and required my focus 2) I was with my customer and 3) I really care about the success of this project.      

There are a few things I really care about and think are important in software development. One is re-use, another is testing and the third is time with the customer. I know we have a credit crunch going on but don't let that be an excuse for neglecting the most important person in your project's world.

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Mail it a tiddler

For those of you who remember yesterday I set my TiddlyWeb up so it would mail me a tiddler on demand from a shell script (just to demonstrate it could be done). If you haven't read it or have the memory of a goldfish please read [[Mail me a tiddler]] to get up to speed.

So phase 2 was always going to be going the other way and taking an e-mail and turning it into a tiddler. Again I've gone away and done some work and have made this possible! Hurray!

If you take a look at this [[lovely link|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/wiki/bags/emails/tiddlers/78b4c3b5-a77b-11de-9fa9-0030489a0ca6.txt]] you will find yourself presented with a tiddler. But this is no normal tiddler - this my friends - is the first tiddler created by e-mail (as far as I know). Lo and behold its beauty!

But you my friends if you don't believe me can try it yourself as I've setup a test instance allowing you to e-mail your very own tiddler to this bag - simply send an email to tiddlyweb at jonrobson dot me dot uk and TiddlyWeb will soon get back to you with a url to view it. Pretty neat hey?

To get this running yourself you will need 4 things - tiddlyweb, a pop email account, the [[sendmail plugin|http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/JonRobson/TiddlyWeb/plugins/sendmail.py]] and the newly created [[getmail plugin|http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/JonRobson/TiddlyWeb/plugins/getmail.py]].

Configure the getmail script with your pop email settings and you will then be able to run
{{{
twanager getmail emails true
}}}
which will check the email inbox you gave it, and put any new mails into the bag called emails. The final argument will send a notification (you will need to adjust the text in getmail.py to change the message to suit your needs).

Those are the two pieces as I see them in the mailing puzzle. With both of these you should be able to make TiddlyWeb plugins that do lots of amazing things such as publishing tiddlers from email/sending notifications. Now I've got to find a way to do the same with a text message :)

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links: TiddlyWeb Mail me a tiddler

Mail me a tiddler

I was quite interested in the concept of mailing tiddlers from tiddlyweb to e-mail addresses. I could imagine several use cases for this - one allowing notifications. For instance I might want to get an email of all the most recent comments added to my blog.

I'm also interested in the idea of emailing/texting my tiddlyweb instance in some format ([[mahemoff talks about the same concept here|http://softwareas.com/2010-the-year-email-took-off]] albeit he's not necessarily thinking TiddlyWeb) and for it to know what to do with the email it receives and transform it into a tiddler. I'd then need a reply from tiddlyweb saying "yum yum thanks for that tasty tiddler click here to confirm you are who you say you are". When I click that link my tiddler appears. Quite useful if you are away from home -something that Twitter has taught me. I'm not sure if it's just me but since I never have a pen or paper on me and always have a mobile phone, I find myself writing draft text messages with ideas I've just had or things I want to look up when I get home. It would be much better if I could mail/txt that to a location that I've hooked an rss reader into to remind me of things to do.

To create this very tiddler - I would send an email to my tiddlyweb with a subject of "/posts/tiddlers/Mail me a tiddler" (where 'posts' is the bag it goes to) and the body of that email would be the very same as you see when you visit [[this link|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/wiki/bags/posts/tiddlers/Mail%20me%20a%20tiddler.txt]]. Nice and easy.

Anyway I digress, I've not done the receiving aspect yet, but it turns out sending emails from TiddlyWeb is quite easy - if you have [[sendmail|http://www.sendmail.org/]] installed on your server you can try this [[sendmail.py twanager script for tiddlyweb|http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/JonRobson/TiddlyWeb/plugins/sendmail.py]] simply run
{{{twanager <<email>> <<bag>> <<tiddler>>}}}
like this:
[img[/images/sendmail/input.png]]

and it will send you the tiddler from the bag to your email in text format.
[img[/images/sendmail/output.png]]

Hope this is a good starting point for something even cooler! :)

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links: TiddlyWeb

Make friends with Google - get your ccTiddly indexed

One of the big pains with TiddlyWiki is that if you put it on to the web it will not get indexed by most search engines very well. Most annoyingly if your TiddlyWiki is huge then if I am searching for something specific such as "penguin skiing start date" which is inside a tiddler called "Penguin skiing championships", although google might find the term "penguin skiing" inside my website it will only index the tiddlywiki itself in it's entirety - so as soon as a potential visitors to the penguin skiing championships click on that search result in google they will see my default TiddlyWiki with no mention of penguin skiing. Although that content is hidden away in the site, that visitor is unlikely to try searching for that term again in the TiddlyWiki search box. So that potential visitor has now had a bad experience of my website.

So this was something that was annoying me so I tried to do something about it. Now if you do a search on google for my tiddlywiki ([[google search me|http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=LiO&q=site:www.jonrobson.me.uk&start=40&sa=N]])) you will find this site is indeed indexed by google - quite nicely in fact.

I saw 2 problems that needed to be solved.
* 1) Non-hash based uri's 
eg. http://www.jonrobson.me.uk#[[Make%20friends%20with%20Google%20-%20get%20your%20ccTiddly%20indexed]] doesn't get indexed by google but a url like http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/workspaces//tiddlers/Make%20friends%20with%20Google%20-%20get%20your%20ccTiddly%20indexed/ will.
* 2) Tiddler link generation.
Google or which ever search engine that is trying to index my site needs some way of trawling through it - this is through bog standard html links.

I also had 1 other requirement which was..
*3) No duplication of effort 
I didn't want to save html pages for tiddlers that were already stored in a database, or store extra things in that database - this seemed unnecessary and wasteful.

So here is how I approached this solution. First I tried to solve 1). To do this I created a folder structure that I thought was quite logical. It was this.. 
workspaces/<workspace name>/tiddlers/<tiddler name>.

So if I wanted the tiddler foo in the workspace bar it would be workspaces/bar/tiddlers/foo to get to that tiddler.

In my .htaccess file I added these lines to get my server to redirect to the right place - the "right place" being workspaces/index.php
{{{
#to indexes
RewriteRule (.*workspaces/)([^/]*)/$ $1/index.php?workspace=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}	[L]
#specific tiddlers or tags
RewriteRule (.*workspaces/)([^/]*)/tiddlers/*([^/]*)/$ $1/index.php?workspace=$2&tiddler=$3&%{QUERY_STRING}	[L]
RewriteRule (.*)workspaces/([^/]*)/tags/([^/]+)/$ index.php?workspace=$2&tag=$3&%{QUERY_STRING}	[L]
}}}

Now in index.php I had to solve problem 2) and satisfy 3). I made index.php into a nice page with a title and body, and inside the body I included another file called javascriptfree.php which would take the workspace, tiddler name or tag name passed in the query string parameters and use them to print some tiddlers. The code in javascriptfree.php was setup to create sql queries that pulled from the database the tiddler(s) being referred to. I also wrote some sql for pulling down all tiddlers with a certain tag - but I feel this is too much detail for this blog post. The next important bit is the text pulled from the database needs its links to work, so to do this I ran a php regular expression replace to get any wiki-text links to become real links. I then printed this on to the page. Problem 2 and requirement 3 solved. 

So now I had a way to browse my ccTiddlyWiki without javascript - it was just detached from my real ccTiddly, so the last task remaining was to bring these together. The tricky bit which I solved by some hackery was to decide what this workspaces/index.php file should generate without any query string - ie. what default tiddlers should be pulled out. I basically hardcoded an sql query which mimicked my default tiddlers function - however I am sure there is a more generic nicer way to do this. Now we have a default landing page we need to create a way of transporting google and non-javascript browsers there without disrupting our javascript-happy browsers. This is quite simple - we just need to the php wikified default landing page into the noscript tag in our ccTiddly index.php file. This essentially equates to adding the following line (remember index.php has <html> and <body> tags, javascriptfree.php is just the text that goes in the body.
{{{


<?php
include_once($cct_base."workspaces/javascriptfree.php");
?>
}}}
Now with javascript turned off the browser just sees the data in the noscript tag. It will look boring like this but at least it is indexable.
[img[images/sitenoJS.png]]
With javascript however it will look like this
[img[images/sitewithJS.png]]
Try turning off javascript yourself to see what happens if you don't believe me.

So that's pretty much it.. or is it? The answer is no. Although we now have a site indexable by users, the only page they can access in TiddlyWiki form is the homepage. If they try and access er foo at workspaces//tiddlers/foo they will see the ugly no javascript version so we need some way of making them jump to the right page, and it would be nice if we did so without a noticeable change in url. The first aspect of this is javascript detection - for this I created a hidden form in our javascriptfree.php that would be submitted by javascript if possible. If the form submit worked (ie. the value hidden within that form could be seen in the query string) then the normal ccTiddly index.php page would be loaded instead of the non-javascript version. However it would still know the workspace and tiddler/tag name which with a bit of tiddlymagic we can extract from the query string the tiddler name just as tiddlywiki currently can from the hash in the url. The code I use to do this can be found in [[RecentTiddlersPlugin]] at the end but I'll paste it below too.

{{{
var newinterval;
/*SERVERSIDE SEO OPTIMISATION PLUGIN */
/*HACK by Jon Robson to allow serverside friendly urls */
var indextid=window.location.pathname.indexOf("/tiddlers/");
var indextag=window.location.pathname.indexOf("/tags/");
if(window.location.hash){ abort abort!!!
}
else if(indextid > 0){
var tiddler = window.location.pathname.substring(indextid);
tiddler = tiddler.replace("/tiddlers/", "");
tiddler = decodeURIComponent(tiddler.replace("/", ""));

var tiddlers = [];
tiddlers.push(tiddler);
newInterval = setInterval(function(){if(story) {clearInterval(newInterval); story.closeAllTiddlers();story.displayTiddlers(null,tiddlers);};},100);
}
else if(indextag > 0){
var tag =window.location.pathname.substring(indextag);
tag = tag.replace("/tags/","");
tag =decodeURIComponent(tag.replace("/", ""));
var taggedtiddlers = store.filterTiddlers("[tag["+tag+"]]");
newInterval = setInterval(function(){if(story) {clearInterval(newInterval); story.closeAllTiddlers();story.displayTiddlers(null,taggedtiddlers);};},100);
}
}}}

So that's it - all the components you need to have your cctiddly indexed by google. Try it yourself by downloading [[http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/development/googleLovingForccTiddly/workspaces.zip]]. It may require a bit of hacking to work with your specific ccTiddly instance however as I have not packaged it up into a plugin or anything... In the meantime I'll be thinking up ways this could work for normal tiddlywikis...

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MakeBlogLinkTemplate

{{block{<<view title link>> (<<view tiddlyvoting.average text ifEmptyString:?>>/5)}}}

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Making a Canvas Clickable

I've been doing some work with the canvas object and wanted to briefly share my experience. Basically I have been drawing polygons and trying to make each of those polygons clickable something which canvas does not support out of the box.

Do this I accepted I would need a way of identifying a polygon. To do this I just wrapped the fundamental data used to draw the polygon - the coordinates - into a javascript object which also carried an id. The id would also represent the order in which it was drawn - ie. the first polygon to be drawn has id 0, the 5th has id 4 and so on... eg.. {{{ {coords:[x1,y1,....], id:0} }}} - these will also need to be stored in an object memory (more on this later) so they are all accessible and referencable.

The first method I tried then to make the canvas clickable was using the ancient <map> tag. This allows you to add <area> tags to specify clickable areas on an image. So if I have one flat image with 2 buttons, one of which I want to take to a contact me page and another I want to take the user to the homepage, I define these areas and associate them with different clicks. Well this was a tried and tested method, so I gave it a go with canvas. To do this, I popped a transparent image over the top of the canvas and associated it with an image map which I created dynamically as I drew the polygon. I'd recommend NOT doing this. Since the <map> tag is ancient - it gives a big kick to performance, however if your wanted something relative simple ie. 4 polygons that you want clickable feel free to give it ago.

Without the map tag rendering was much quicker however, it just wasn't clickable which begged the question - how do I make it clickable without producing a big dent in my performance. Well it turns out that the canvas supports a bizarrely named function "isPointInPath" which well tell you if a given x and y coordinate is in the polygon last drawn. Only downside of this is you can only run this test as you draw it. No big deal.. this is doable. We just have to iterate through all the polygons we have drawn on the screen - which we can do as we have that lovely variable memory from earlier.

However now after drawing the polygon we run a test on a given mouse x and y coordinate to see if the coordinate is present in the polygon.
{{{
function drawPolygon(poly,x,y){
	this.canvas = document.getElementById(canvas.id);
	this.ctx = this.canvas.getContext('2d');
			for(var i=0; i < poly.transformedCoords.length-1; i+=2){
				var x =parseFloat(poly.coords[i]);
				var y=parseFloat(poly.coords[i+1]);
				this.ctx.lineTo(x,y);
			}
			//connect last to first
			this.ctx.lineTo(poly.coords[0],poly.coords[1], poly.coords[poly.coords.length-2],poly.coords[poly.coords.length-1]);
			this.ctx.closePath();
			
			this.ctx.stroke();

return this.ctx.isPointInPath(x,y);
}
}}}
Using the above operation we can thus find the polygon where the x any y coordinate sit in, and return the polygon and do something else with it. We could change the fill colour for instance and just redraw that polygon. However this is still not ideal. Imagine 1000 polygons - we'd have to check each of those 1000 till we find a hit. We're going to need some optimisations.

The easiest one I can think of is by using grids. Each polygon, no matter what shape can be contained by a box. The box can be made of 4 values - x1, x2 and y1 and y2, where x1 is the furthest point on the left for a given polygon and x2 is the furthest to the right. When drawing a polygon, we can keep a record of this and store it into our polygon object as an attribute for instance poly.grid.x1, poly.grid.x2... etc..
So our polygon object now looks a bit like this {id: 0, coords:[x1,y1...xn,yn], grid: {x1:0, x2:50 y1:10 y2:50}. 
It is now much quicker to iterate through all the shapes and return only the shapes where for a given x and y mouse coordinate {{{x >= g.x1 && x <= g.x2 && y >=  g.y1 && y <=g.y2 }}} where g is the grid attribute of the shape. We now only have to redraw in instances where two polygons are in close proximity that their "grids" overlap.

It's the best solution I've come up with so far but it's not without it's weaknesses.. it seems the ExplorerCanvas does not support the isPointInPath operation which means less accuracy in IE (well until I work out an algorithm that does isPointInPath for me).

Watch this space and I'll share some code on this soon...

no ie support

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links: ExplorerCanvas

MarkupPreHead

<!--{{{-->
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="KsGrYwiBz9gOEq0kFbloZIzd5hW8lWrdBotKwULp-jQ" />
<title>finding my feet - a sort of blog/wiki hybrid thingy from the head of Jon Robson</title>
<meta name="description" content="This is the alternative blog of Jon Robson, a web developer working out of London for Osmosoft and BT with a great love of HTML5 and its possibilities..Jon is a big fan of a challenge, thus proved by taking a pure javascript client-side application called TiddlyWiki and along with a server side version of the open source TiddlyWeb thinking he can turn it into a blog with a good server side optimisation story. See how he is getting on here." />
<meta name="keywords" content="jon robson"/>
<link rel='index' title='Jon Robson' href='http://jonrobson.me.uk/' />
<link rel='alternate' type='application/atom+xml' title='RSS' href='/atom' />
<link rel='archives' title='All blog posts' href='http://jonrobson.me.uk/archive' />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://jonrobson.me.uk/static/css/findingfeet.css" type="text/css"></link>
<!--[if IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/static/css/ie6-jr.css" type="text/css"></link>
<![endif]-->
<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-7040645-4']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>
<script type='text/javascript'>
//fix a nasty bug
alert = function(){};
var alert = function(text){};
</script>

<!--}}}-->

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Minifying javascript for tiddlyweb

Another plugin for you. This time I've taken [[JSMin|http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html]] and I've upgraded my tiddlyweb so that it has an extra serialisation - minified. Now if you access one of my plugins and request it minified eg. [[here|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/wiki/bags/plugins/tiddlers/VismoLibraryCode.minified]] you will get a minified form returns. Try [[here|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/wiki/bags/plugins/tiddlers/VismoLibraryCode.txt]] and you'll notice the code is not originally minified. I've also put a hook into wiki so if you access [[here|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/wiki/bags/plugins/tiddlers.wiki]] for example you will get a tiddlywiki with anything tagged [[systemConfig]] in minified form. This is a good thing as it reduces the size of the content you are supplying to your users thus decreasing their load time.

If you want a peak head over and check it out from [[svn|http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/JonRobson/TiddlyWeb/plugins/pluginminifier]].

tags:

links: systemConfig

Mirror Mirror on the wall

I've been arty recently having received a blank mirror as a Christmas present from my girlfriend's mum. I think being arty is really important for any software developer as I see this as a creative field - if you are just coding for the next payrise you are in the wrong job in my opinion - software development in my eyes is just a new generation medium for artists.

Anyway I took the concept that a mirror shows the person that looks at it on the exterior, I thought I'd try and reflect what is on the interior.... hope you like! Gaudi meets EastPak.

<<image /images/art/P3290893.JPG 600>>

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My Employment

I currently work for a telecommunications company as a [[software developer]]

I have previously worked for Airbus in the [[Knowledge Management]] department.

tags:

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My Family Tree

[[view here|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/familytree/familytreeindex.php]]
I will be upgrading this to be within a TiddlyWiki soon. Watch this space..

tags:

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My Work

My work revolves mostly around the two projects TiddlyWiki and TiddlyWeb, but I've been known to play with/develop using [[openstreetmap|http://www.openstreetmap.org/]], [[JIT|http://thejit.org/]] and [[SVGWeb|http://code.google.com/p/svgweb/]]. I also contribute to other opensource projects in non-softwarey ways like [[WikiTravel|http://wikitravel.org/wiki/en/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=Jdlrobson]].

Most of the development I do will probably end up on this site or on [[github|http://github.com/jdlrobson]]

!Websites
Websites I have worked on include ''[[The International Gay Lesbian Association website|http://ilga.org]]'' (more details [[on this blog|ilga]]) and the experimental [[Tampr for coffee fiends|http://tampr.co.uk]]

!TiddlyWiki plugins
I have created various TiddlyWiki plugins however most of them are experimental and never completely get the love they deserve. Plugins I create for TiddlyWiki end up [[here|http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/JonRobson/plugins/]].  To build them you might need to read this blog post about [[How to cook in TiddlyWiki]]. Probably one of my more interesting plugins was ''TiddlyTagMindMap'' - a project exploring Mind Maps for TiddlyWiki without any external files which I feel are great for organising large amounts of data. Probably one of my most popular plugins however I'm a bit embarrassed by the underlying code. See [[TiddlyTagMindMap on tiddlyspot|http://tiddlytagmindmap.tiddlyspot.com]]

!TiddlyWeb plugins
I make lots of TiddlyWeb plugins in Python. The more consumable ones end up on [[pypi|http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=tiddlywebplugins&submit=search]]

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links: TiddlyWeb ilga How to cook in TiddlyWiki

MyMap

<<geo width:200 height:200 id:mainmap>>
<<flickrMyGeo http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/handle/proxy.php?feed=http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/?id=24701860@N05&format=rss_200 mainmap #00ff00>><<DopplrMyGeo 'http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/handle/proxy.php?feed=http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/jonrobson/feed/mytrips/b2d5f666ed4d073d72416f3f100ea7e67a34f2b8b1bcc46e931666edf58376c2/all' mainmap #ffff00 #00ff00 #00ff00>>

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Nerdy Terms

Sometimes the team say nerdy things I don't know what they mean. I make a note of them here.
!ENOPARSE
Stands for Error No Parse (an old c error code).
Means you didn't understand something.

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Netvibes Open source?

I love [[netvibes|http://www.netvibes.com]].

You can put pretty much anything of interest you want on the page. The only downside is I find I tend to spend longer on the web. I'll open up the homepage, glance at all the things of interest to me and then act on the data pushed by way (maybe reply to a facebook wallpost or read more on an interesting news article). I've also got a fair amount of freedom to move the boxes on the page to where I want them to be.

Search boxes for instance. No need for one of those on a homepage as I've got one of those in the top right of my firefox browser. Date and time? Nope.. got one of those in the bottom right of my taskbar.

It's still not perfect though. It might be a big ask but it would be cool if I had total freedom. The freedom to move widgets so they overlap, the ability to define the exact x and y coordinates they appear at rather whether they appear in the centre, left or right. Would be good to be able to put the top bar which allows me to add new contact, alter settings and sign out right to the bottom. In fact it would be good if I could edit the source code directly- be given total power of my content. Same goes for apps. I noticed a clock app on my travels, but the times in it are shown in a relatively large font. It allows me to choose between an analogue and digital clock or red or green coloured digits but what about the size, the font etc..? Why can't I change them..

I guess there is a danger of losing total structure and security to the WWW if you allowed a user to modify source code, but I believe the more power you give to the user the more powerful the web becomes. You as an individual become your own web developer essentially. Look at BBC news for instance. Half the content I never look at. I am sorry to say I rarely visit the Scotland news section so why should it be pushed my way? I wonder whether we will ever get to a state where you can "netvibe" any website through a simple interface. I dream of a time I can simply hide a link, alter a layout (I say hide as destroy would mean to remove it forever) to suit my individual needs. I wonder whether this will ever happen...

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Nicer Tagging

I have been doing some work for one of our clients on their website we are developing using TiddlyWeb and TiddlyWiki (http://new.ilga.org). We are using TiddlyWiki as a content management system where users login to a TiddlyWeb instance and are able to use the TiddlyWiki interface to create tiddlers which can be many things including the articles displayed on the site.

It was recently pointed out to me that we had been a bit lazy in implementing tagging for the users of this content management system. Most of the users would not be familiar with TiddlyWiki or it's syntax however we had left the TiddlyWiki native tagging mechanism into our system.

So I've come up with a more interesting solution: NicerTagging - which you can get and look at [[here|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/development/niceTagging/index.html]]. Essentially what this does is try and mimic the Flickr interface for tagging. It allows users to type new tags in a box and hit enter to add the tag to the tiddler. Tags are now deleted by using crosses next to each of the individual tags. It also makes use of some other code I have been using in my [[AdvancedEditTemplate|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/development/AdvancedEditTemplate/index.html]] plugin to make suggestions on tags using existing tags in the TiddlyWiki system and a Suggestions tiddler for custom tag declarations.

I thought I'd introduce the plugin to the TiddlyVerse. Let me know how I can improve it and if it's useful :)

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links: TiddlyWeb

Nick Webb

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No javascript tiddlyweb

So something's been bothering me for a while... When people come to my website through search engines they get a totally different experience from reading it in the context of my TiddlyWiki ie. if they were to put http://www.jonrobson.me.uk#No%20javascript%20tiddlyweb into their address bar.

Instead if they get to this post from their search engine they see [[a basic html version|/wiki/recipes/beefcaked_jonrobson/tiddlers/No%20javascript%20tiddlyweb.html]]. This is fine, they can read what I'm saying, but they are getting a totally different experience. This bothers me. From this view they cannot see the content they are missing. For instance if I was to run a tiddlywiki macro called 'thisisthemostamazingmacrointheworld' right now.. here-><<thisisthemostamazingmacrointheworld>><, in the html version you missed it. However if you were reading this with javascript maybe some amazing javascript would happen (well in this case the macro doesn't exist and throws an error so that's not important). What *should* happen is that user should be informed that they missed out on this incredibly amazing macro as they have javascript disabled. Just to rub it in a little.

The next thing that annoys me, is the style of [[the basic html version|/wiki/recipes/beefcaked_jonrobson/tiddlers/No%20javascript%20tiddlyweb.html]] is completely different from my website style. Black text on white background does not reflect me. I've put lots of effort into my web design, I want people to see that regardless of whether they have javascript or not. However, I want to use TiddlyWiki to edit my website and maintain my content as I am comfortable with the technology and enjoy using it. I don't want to have to maintain several extra files to make sure the site looks the same for non-js viewers. I want everytime I edit my page template for the changes to be reflected in the non-js version.

So put simply I've created a plugin that uses [[Jinja2|http://jinja.pocoo.org/]] - a server side templating engine to mimic how TiddlyWiki constructs it's pages. It takes the reserved tiddlers PageTemplate and ViewTemplate and converts wiki syntax into html syntax on the server and serves up a page that if it goes well (remember this is a first version so not completely tested) will look pretty much like it would in javascript. If PageTemplate and ViewTemplate are not defined it uses the default TiddlyWiki shadow tiddlers. For example with javascript enabled look at a bag of plugins on my site [[/wiki/bags/plugins/tiddlers.nojswiki]] and compare with [[/wiki/bags/plugins/tiddlers.wiki]] - it looks very similar. Disable javascript and view the same 2 links and on the latter link you'll get a nasty red box, however if you click browse the content on this page you get that more reassuring interface.

At the moment as soon as you click a link in the non-javascript version you'll be redirected to the javascript tiddlywiki version, so anyone coming from a search engine should now be back in the world you want them to be. Yey. The code if you're interested can be found [[here|http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/JonRobson/TiddlyWeb/plugins/NoJSPlugin/]] for you to try it yourself.

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links: PageTemplate

NothingToSeeHere

Unfortunately I've used this word somewhere but I've assumed you know what it is and don't feel I have anything interesting to say on the matter.        
Keep calm and carry on.

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Nottingham Forest

This is the football team I support.
It's a painful life, but one day we'll be back in the big time I'm sure.

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Offline Maps and better geotagging in GeoTiddlyWiki

I've been continuing my experimentation with loading google static maps into the canvas powering GeoTiddlyWiki (see [[GeoTiddlyWiki meets google maps static image server]]. It's been a good 24 hours and I've got to a point where I have managed to get the scaling and translating functions in geotiddlywiki matching that of google maps (alot of trial and error and making use of [[proj4js|http://proj4js.org/]]). 

Here is an example of this in action:
[img[images/newyork.png]]

The interesting thing about this is it highlights the difference in quality between the geojson data file I've been using and the actual shape of the world (as google sees it). It would be quite feasible that the google maps static image layer could be used to manually improve the quality of the associated geojson file - after all it's just a case of adding additional coordinates to make the shape more detailed and thus geotiddlywiki could become a tool for constructing geojsons for other mashups.

Currently the static images are pulled off googles server each time the map is redrawn, but I love the idea of these downloading locally in the background, thus making the map available for offline usage. 

Make sure you see this in action here [[http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/JonRobson/plugins/WorldMaps/examples/staticmap.html]] checking out it's various dependencies.

On another subject I've been refining the geotagging aspect of GeoTiddlyWiki. Before there was lots of overlapping of geotags (see [[this post|GeoTiddlyWiki]] however now I've begun treating geotags differently to polygons. I've got a great example of this you can view in [[Travel]] and explore.

tags:

links: GeoTiddlyWiki GeoTiddlyWiki meets google maps static image server Travel

One to many is what makes Twitter great

I recently went on holidays to Singapore and Borneo and on this trip I feel I really harnessed what makes Twitter great for me. I went on holiday with my partner Caro who up until this point had never left Europe and I also happened to go on holiday during my birthday. Expecting pandemonium on the text front (birthday wishes and are you still alive texts) I decided to send a link to my public twitter timeline to all my family and Caro's. I felt liberated... Now instead of texting everyone I was alive I just sent a message to my twitter account (which is connected to my mobile) and instantly I had reached my target audience without sending a few expensive texts to the variety of people who care about me or for finding an internet cafe (which I must say is quite difficult in the jungle). I also had the added benefit of tweeting real time when I got attacked by a leech in the jungle sharing a peculiar moment in my life and I had the added benefit of when receiving a text from a family member instead of texting them back directly I could contact them all with the possibly interesting reply.

I only found two downsides with this experience:

1) For some reason my texts from Singapore did not get to Twitter. Why I have no idea, but I had no feedback back from the twitter service or network provider saying the update had failed. So I had 2 days of not being able to broadcast my activities unknowingly. This caused problem number 2) - my Dad got worried. Since I had sent a text to Twitter saying I had arrived in Dubai (which was successfully broadcasted) my Dad knew I made it halfway to my destination, however he was then to wait 2 days before finding out I had arrived in Singapore safely (because of point number 1). Not ideal.

However I have to say overall Twitter is a great companion to bring on your travels. I will definitely be using it again!

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OpenLayers

Map based visualisation started looking at.

Can use longitude/latitude as markers.

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OpenSocial

Something I heard about from Mr. Paddock and thought I'd make a note of..

OpenSocial is currently being developed by a broad set of members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement this API and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. Facebook however resists..

[[link|http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/]]

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Opensource and Documentation

Opensource is a powerful thing. This whole blog is powered by the works of minds of various highly intelligent individuals who've locked together to work on topics of similar interests. I love the concept of such a community. A community where at any time there is a group of people really passionate, motivated and willing to achieve a like-minded goal in their spare time as a hobby.. for free. Imagine if this could be replicated in a work environment! Many people putting their hands together saying "I want to get involved with that" to solve a problem that is of interest to them! I'd bet they'd fine a way of fixing it and probably a damn good way in that. I get the impression in some ways Google work like this, and that's probably why they are seen as such as attractive company to millions of people.

Unfortunately businesses don't work like this. Usually they consist of hand picked people put in jobs, some of whom care about the impact of the work, some of them whom are mainly interested in their own personal career progression and how much money they can make out of it and how they can spin it on their CV.

I had a session at work today where we learnt about the life of one of my employees senior managers. It was interesting as from his chat, it seemed to me that he had got where he was today by doing something outside his job role. Something he believed in. He and a single colleague friend had made a billing system on a computer that at the time was groundbreaking. It had taken him 6 months, and this embarrassed some of his colleagues who the traditional way had been trying to create one in 2 years without an end product. Perfect example of how the "open source approach" is better than our traditional ways of working.

Without wanting to generalise or offend anyone, I'd bet this manager documentedd their work quite casually initially (because that's the boring bit right?!) whereas that group of workers who had spent 2 years probably created pages and pages of worthless documentation that no-one will ever read.

Even though I'm a big fan of opensource, I'm not an active participant of the opensource community and I'll tell you why.. put simply I find it so inaccessible. Firstly I get the impression that the people in it appear are much more intelligent then me and I feel I will get laughed down with my newbie questions. I also wouldn't know where to start... it just has this aura of an exclusive club where you have to be invited in. I'm sure this is not the case, but I just don't know how I get in. And when I recently found opensource projects on for example sourgefource, despite knowing what this opensource software could do, I had no idea where to start in the code, no documentation to refer to. I just had to play around with it hoping I could get it to do what I wanted. It was like going to Ikea, getting lots of planks of wood and being expected through trial and error to work out how it makes a desk. Not impossible but unnecessarily hard. And when there is documentation it's usually in a format I need to analyse for long periods of time before I understand. All I want is a simple getting started tour. Take a house analogy.. the house being the open source with all it's furniture and utilities functions, I want a quick guide showing me what everything does, so that I don't end up trying to toast bread in the washing machine or even worse pissing in someone's bedroom sink because I mistook it for the toilet. Once I know what that washing machine does, I might not know how but at least I've got a good headstart!

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PageTemplate

<!--{{{-->
<div id='contentWrapperJon'>
		<a href="/"><div id='header'></div></a>
		<div class='rsslink'><a href='/atom'><img height='30' src='http://jonrobson.me.uk/static/images/rss.png' alt='rss feed'/></a></div>
		<div id='topLinks' tiddler="TopLinks" refresh="content"></div>
		<div class='TopRightMenu'>Navigation Menu <div macro='search'></div></div>
		<div id='middle' >
			<div class='content'></div>
		</div>
		<div id='sidebar'>
			<div  class='aboutbox' refresh='content' tiddler='AboutBox'>
			
			</div>
		</div>
		<div id='displayAreaJon'>
			<div id='messageArea'></div>
			<div id='tiddlerDisplay'></div>
		</div>

</div>
<!--}}}-->

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Parking Permit Number 2

I was unfortunate enough to receive a parking permit Saturday evening after taking my Dad out for a meal. I find it most frustrating that we live in a country where we have no right to have our car on public land without having to pay.

TBC...

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Paul Downey

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Peerguardian causes problems with connecting to certain websites

This has caught me out a few times so I wanted to make sure I recorded it so that it doesn't happen to me again. I noticed certain websites would not load through Firefox or Safari and for the life of me I couldn't work out why. It turns out I installed peerguardian (a piece of software designed to improve internet  security was the reason why. Even though it was not running it turns out it was the reason why certain websites would not load. Turned it off/uninstalled it, and those sites were accessible again. Yey!

I've recently been thinking about timelines written purely in html. The current idea in my head is a concept of time along the top - some sort of bar with dates for example and below that a list of projects with an arrow to the left of them where the start of the arrow corresponds to the start date of that project and the end of the arrow (the tip of the arrow head) represents the end date or possibly the current date if the project is still on going at the current time (i haven't quite worked that out).

Anyway, I wanted to do this without images and it seems that you can with pure css. A while ago I came across this super cool jquery plugin [[and bookmarked it on delicious|http___delicious.com_url_5163367ac1cd57e640c659285b81fc39_jdlrobson]]. This jquery plugin made use of an interesting css illusion through borders (a good website on the technique used here is also in my delicious feed - find the link [[here|http___delicious.com_url_da0960677150eb96af0196381af8c62c_jdlrobson]].

Anyway I assumed I could use the same technique to do the same and it turns out as recent Nobel peace prize winner Barack Obama would say..."Yes we can!"

I've not perfected the technique in IE yet but it seems to work fine in Firefox, Safari and Opera. See the results and give me your feedback as a comment to this post. 

[[CSS arrows without images|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/development/css_arrows/arrow.html]]

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Programming is an art

I've always considered myself quite arty, quite creative. When I was young it was chalk and blackboard, I then moved on to playdough, then to Lego. As a youth I was always writing stories (most of which I never finished), drawing pictures (most of which looked rubbish) and then something happened. I reckon it was when I entered into GCSEs and A-Levels. I pushed more towards the sciences, thinking their were better employment prospects there, my creativity was stifled. I spent most of my time on computers researching to help me pass those exams and naturally fell into creative zones on the computer. I began creating computer games for a fan-based gaming community (around the tv show [[South Park]]) using tools called "The Games Factory", (a successor of "Klik and play" which some people may have heard of), but as I began A-levels and thus studying harder this died too. Now I'm a shadow of how creative I used to be and it depresses me. I can't help but feel like I've been let down by the education system. I've absorbed so much knowledge but most I haven't used, yet as a computer programmer I need my creativity which I feel has been impacted by the education system I've gone through.

I feel the approach in software engineering I've been brought up in is wrong. As much as it is important to have good working code that does the right thing software should not be thought as a black box which you put parameters in and out comes some sort of result. This is a primitive model of software back in times when computers were extremely large and did large sums. No I think software is more like a painting. This is another reason why [[agile software development]] fits in nicely with it. Software development is about gradually creating a masterpiece. It can take time to create good software but good software is subjective just as art is. We take feedback from users just as artists take feedback from critics. We should be continuously trying to improve the software, massaging it to create something we are proud of.

It worries me that most companies have huge offshoring models, where software developers are required to create software and meet contractual agreements to get it out on time. This puts more emphasis on producing functional boxes rather than art. How can an artist work under time pressure? It's just not natural. A good artist can produce an arguably quite good painting in a few hours, but it's never going to be there best work, but if they get paid for getting that painting done in a few hours then they will never be reaching their full potential. I'm not saying programmers should be given infinite time to create software I'm just in the firm belief that programmers should be nurtured into producing code they are proud of. They should care about what they are delivering, possibly because it's something that will add value to their lives as well as others. It should be about that warm feeling you get when you create something that brings enjoyment to others, not the money factor. That's what I get out of it and I think that's why the opensource community works so well.

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Protecting Colonel Sanders

My colleague Martin Budden just pointed me at this [[news article|http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/google/5356031/Google-Street-View-blurs-face-of-Colonel-Sanders-at-every-KFC.html]] about how Google's Street View service doesn't blur out the face of Colonel Sanders.

After hearing this 1) I didn't believe it and 2) I was wanting to prove wrong the quote from a spokesman that said: "It is unfortunate that Colonel Sanders' face has been blurred, but at the same time shows just how good our facial recognition technology is." 

I put it to the test and found that most instances were indeed blurred however from one angle the colonel was clearly visible thus invading his privacy.

I quickly did the decent thing any standing citizen would do and filed a report to Google.

<<image /images/funny/kfc.png 500>>

I'll let you know of any progress but hopefully Mr Sanders will be regaining his privacy soon.

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Pushing TiddlyWeb to the max

So, we ran into some issues with TiddlyWeb, here's how we solved it.

!Optimise filters were were using

!Use Memcache
Halved response time from 4.5s without to 2.8s with.

!Gzipping stuff
Add this code..
{{{
LoadModule deflate_module libexec/apache2/mod_deflate.so
<Location />
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
# BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

# NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
# the above regex won't work. You can use the following
# workaround to get the desired effect:
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</Location>
}}}

The hardest bit for me was working out how to restart my apache server, and in the end a {{sudo apachectl -k restart}} seemed to do what I needed.

I also provided Expires headers to css, javascript and image resources on the site. These tweaks caused a slight improvement but not anything worth measuring.

[[Read more about gzip|http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.html]]

!Page caching

After some analytics on where things were going wrong, we found that the majority of time was spent accessing tiddlers from the filesystem. Although the memcaching helped with this alot, the reason was the server running TiddlyWeb had lots and lots of ram. If our server didn't have lots and lots of ram, the pages would be a pain to load.

We are using a templating engine called Jinja2 to turn tiddler content into normal webpages. We do this using a plugin called jinx. Without memcaching this was taking between 4.25 and 4.96s. This was the time taken to filter a bag of tiddlers to get what was effectively 16 tiddlers needed to construct the page from 9 lines in a recipe, then to compile the page using the jinja2 template engine. This can be completely killed by using some caching to give page response times of around the 68ms mark. The only thing we need to remember is that we need to refresh the cached page when an update is made - and luckily we have that trigger in the PUT command.

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links: TiddlyWeb

Ratings and Commenting with TiddlyWeb

Thanks to some focused effort I have upgraded by blog further so that TiddlyWeb handles commenting rather than [[instacomments|How to add comments on your online tiddlywiki using instacomments]].

It was actually quite simple in the end. I created myself a bag called comments. I gave create permission in the policy to GUEST. I [[cooked|How to cook in TiddlyWiki]] [[Mike Mahemoff's comments plugin|http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/MichaelMahemoff/plugins/CommentsPlugin/]] and added the plugin to my TiddlyWiki. This gave me the ability to add comments with a slight adjustment to my [[myblogViewTemplate]] so that every blog entry was now commentable.

I then went to another colleague's repository ([[Ben Gillies|http://github.com/bengillies]]) and got his html and tiddlywiki validator plugins to stop people posting nasty things that might break my blog. Essentially these server sides check the content you are posting to a TiddlyWeb bag are free of script tags, systemConfig tiddlywiki tags, don't have reserved names and are free from lions and tigers and bears.

So this gave me basic commenting with hardly any work. The next challenge however was to [[beefcake|Get some Beefcake for your tiddlers]] comments. Remember I'm trying to fill this TiddlyWeb/TiddlyWiki with as much content as humanly possible while still maintaining a speedy load up time for my visitors. To do this I decided that 1) No comments should be loading at the start. It's just unnecessary. 2) Every time I load a tiddler with commenting I should see all if any comments on that tiddler.

The solution I came up with was to adjust the displayTiddler function call so that everytime one of my blog posts was displayed it would make an ajax call to a comments url as specified in the beefcake config file. Mine is [[here|beefcakeconfigjonrobson]]. As you can see I have prefixed the second line with comments: which tells the beefcake plugin to use this url to load comments. So now everytime someone tries to display something it uses that url to filter the bag for comments relating to the item. Easy. You can check the adjusted beefcake code for this [[here|BeefcakeYourTiddlersPlugin]].

So last but not least, I wanted to have ratings on posts. A similar use case in the project I have been working on in ILGA has popped up so I thought I'd investigate. I also wanted to filter all the stuff I talk about so it's as interesting as possible and I was hoping my users would help me by rating the things I write. So I quickly knocked up a plugin which allows just this. It's nothing WOW - I just setup a url on my TiddlyWeb instance that allows me to call urls like /stats/AVERAGE?value=5&tiddler=foo&field=rating which goes to the tiddler called FOO in a special reserved bag, takes the value passed in the querystring and averages that value with the existing value of the field rating and saves the new value.

I can now query this bag to sort by the field rating to see what interests people most in this big blob of stuff.  All the code required to do this can be found in [[http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/JonRobson/TiddlyWeb/plugins/RatingsPlugin/]].

Anyway I've blabbered on too much about stuff that doesn't seem that interesting to me. So go ahead and rate this low to confirm my suspicions..! :)

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links: TiddlyWeb How to add comments on your online tiddlywiki using instacomments How to cook in TiddlyWiki Get some Beefcake for your tiddlers

RetrieverPlugin

config.macros.retrieve = {
  handler: function(place,macroName,params){
      jQuery.get("/bags/posts/tiddlers/"+params[0]+".json",
         function(r){
             var tiddler = eval("("+ r +")");
             var newTiddler = Tiddler(tiddler.title);
             newTiddler.fields = tiddler.fields;
             newTiddler.tags = tiddler.tags;
             newTiddler.modifier = tiddler.modifier;
             newTiddler.modified = tiddler.modified;
             newTiddler.fields['server.page.revision'] = tiddler.revision;

             store.addTiddler(newTiddler);
         }
     );
  }
}

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Seeing the world in style and on the cheap

Last weekend I went to Stockholm, Sweden for the first time. It was my 5th weekend break since November 2007. How can I afford to do this you ask. Quite simple - 2 things "skyscanner" and "couchsurfing". These are possibly the 2 most important websites to me on the web. They open up travel opportunities for me that were just not available to even my parent's generation.
For those who are not familiar with these 2 websites here's a quite rundown.

''[[Skyscanner|skyscanner]]''
This is a website that allows you at a glance to find cheap flights over a variety of airlines. Not all are present on here, but certaintly most of the European budget flights appear on the site. You pass skyscanner some parameters such as where you want to fly from or where you want to fly to, and when you want to fly. The beauty of the tool, is you don't need to know the exact details. Commonly I'll have a place or time in mind. In this example, I fancied going away the bank holiday weekend of May. So I put in my from and to flight dates, I specify I'd like to fly from a London airport but it doesn't matter which but I tell it I don't care where I go. Sweden came out cheapest, next thing I knew I was booking £20 return flights (including taxes).

''[[Couchsurfing|couchsurfing]]''
The problem with Sweden is it's quite expensive. You look at accommodation and you'll find it to be in the region of £30 or so a night. The other problem with weekend breaks is everyone else has the same idea, and most of the cheap places are gone. Then when you get to that place you'll also find that you have no idea what to do there in such a short space of time and you might miss out. A third thing to consider is if you do it alone you won't have any drinking buddies.

For all 3 of those dilemmas above, couchsurfing provides a solution. Fundamentally it's a social networking website, but with a key difference, when you make a profile you enter a world of like minded individuals who are willing to meet up with people travelling nearby or in their own home city. So this weekend, through several email exchanges over the Couchsurfing website I arranged to stay with a guy called Richard I had never met. From his profile I got a basic idea of what to expect and sure enough it proved to be a fun experience. Instantly I had a friend to drink with and show me how to use the subway and where the "interesting" parts of the city were and I escaped paying a hefty hotel rate. But honestly this is not about saving money. It's about a different travel experience, making new friend(s), entering a fellow couchsurfers world. If you haven't tried it, love travelling and thrive from the social aspects of life, I suggest you check out the site. I'll tell you more about my experiences later. I've talked long enough..

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links: couchsurfing

Shindig

This is a google project. It is explained better than I can explain here: http://blog.programmableweb.com/2007/12/19/opensocial-shindig-released/

 The end goal will be an incubator that will allow a common api that various social networking tools will be able to exploit to share functionality. About 80% of shindig is in igoogle. Any website should be able to incorporate an igoogle widget and vice versa. More on this as I read up on it.

http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/ShindigProposal

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Show me some data!

I attended [[rewired state|http://rewiredstate.org]] my first hackday sponsered by The Guardian. It was a great event but it left me frustrated. I went into the event hoping to create some quite cool mash ups based around the [[met police crime website|http://maps.met.police.uk/]]. My aim was to create a [[chloropleth map|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choropleth_map]] for the UK/for London showing various types of data with the expertise of a few others in the room including PSD ([[Osmosoft]]) and making use of my javascript map library I have been working on for [[GeoTiddlyWiki]]. I however struggled to find any geojsons of the UK or London and as a result fell at the first hurdle and wasted most of my time trying to get an svg into geojson form (albeit without the same level of accuracy). There is very little data out there - I visited [[ShapeWiki|http://www.shapewiki.com]] but unfortunately there were no shapes on there for the consistencies I needed as it is community based and I guess there is little motivation for developers to sit there and create geodata for counties when they can create mashups around data that already exists. Also I'm sure the data is out there somewhere but it's not public - and if it is it's hidden. The original source data for GeoTiddlyWiki I found by chance and that was through looking at the underlying code - there was no 
{{{
Looky here!  Here's the data I used ---->>>>> download <<<<------------ if you want to do some cool mashups yourself.
}}}

So what's the solution to getting data out there? Would we benefit from a website where developers could post data they find and let other developers search it and use it? Maybe www.dumpyourdatahere.com? I'd certainly find such a website useful - it would give me time to concentrate on making things what I'm good at - and not wasting time reinventing the wheel. Would be really interested in anyone's thoughts if they'd care to comment... :)

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links: GeoTiddlyWiki

I had a good chuckle at some of the comments made on BBC news website "your view" with respect to England apparently having slower broadband speeds then the rest of the world: [[link|http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?forumID=4855&sortBy=2&edition=1&ttl=20080604103039#paginator]].

I felt the reporting was quite biased in taking the view that in England we have it bad, but to be honest, we don't have it that bad. The main complaints were that broadband was slower then it should be outside big cities, or even non-existent but if you move to a remote area in the Scottish highlands, you do it because you love the area not because you want fast broadband. I know we all want a perfect world, but why should telecommunications companies and the government spend money on getting faster broadband in these remote areas where there are very few people to make a valuable return on the investment? It would be a crazy view.

My opinion is that the people writing the article and making their negative comments, just don't know enough about the situation to understand that the law of physics is unacceptable.

The following comments should give you an idea of the people who are actually providing views and hopefully make you laugh!)
{{{
Actual readout came out as 0.1 Mbps but over here when you try to see the speed it always shows a much higher figure. The line I am working from now shows a speed of 54Mbps and my home connection shows 100Mbps.
Tony Fields, Ho Chi Minh City

Quoted as up to 8mpbs, yet barely more than 1! Apparently due to distance to the exchange. It's a technological scandal and needs to be resolved.
AJBerry, Dunfermline
}}}

A technological scandal indeed that law of physics.... technological scandal indeed.

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Social Networking

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Solving the IE testing problem

Me and colleagues hate IE testing. Today I finally caved in to come up with a virtual machine solution. I thought my findings were interesting so I'd share them.

To do this you will need
1) A windows machine with internet connection
2) A copy of the opensource virtual machine [[virtual box|http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads]] installed on the device you want to access ie6/7 etc
3) Some way of moving files from your windows machine to the machine with virtual box installed.
4) A windows xp/ vista cd

So now first things first move your arse down to [[microsoft virtual hard drive download page|http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en]] and download all the images of different IE versions you want to be able to test. Luckily they are all here, annoyingly they are all in unfriendly exe/rar formats. Fine if you want to run your virtual box on a windows machine, really unhelpful if you want to run your virtual box on a mac or linux machine. So this is where the window machine comes in. Download the files from this webpage to that machine, run them and the installer will spit out a vhd file (virtual hard drive). When done copy these on to a dvd or use a firewire cable/network/usb drive whatever and get those files on to the machine you want to run your vms.

Now we have a copy of virtual box and some vhd files. You can burn/hit with a hammer/explode your windows machine now if you care to. It's no longer needed in this process.

Now it's quite easy. Load virtual box, click the new button, click next and give it a name, then allocate it some size, and select use existing hard disk. The existing hard disk is your vhd file so point to that.

Repeat for all your virtual harddrives.
Now when you boot them you might require your windows xp cd to install additional drivers as I did (your network driver is probably the most essential here! :))

And that's it..
Web dev just got a lot easier (for me anyhow).

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Structured tag clouds

I've always wondered what merging the concept of a tag cloud with something with structure would yield so today I am really happy to present it as part of TiddlyTagMindMap. The weightings are done on frequency alone but could easily be changed to read in other values eg. popularity, amount of comments etc..

I also wanted the tag cloud to serve as an informant for navigation - to tell me where topics of interest were as I navigated. So for example in the above graph, the nodes that stick out to the reader are the big ones. These are because I have written lots about them, and I hope that thus this prompts the reader to dive forever into that topic.

I think the result of this is much more useful then a standard tag cloud. From a personal point of view straight away I can see where the mess on my blog is and what I keep rambling about and what is important to me and I feel this is very powerful - a picture paints a thousand words. 

I still have much more work to do however. One thing I feel that is important is the user has complete power. This user interface doesn't allow a user to re-arrange nodes - this is like telling someone they have to read 500 documents on a desk however they cannot move them and instead must rely on a computer to do the rearrangement for them. As I said though.

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TTMM_Menu

[[About Me|AboutMe and Contact Me]] <<closeAll>>

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Tag

A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (a picture, a geographic map, a blog entry, a video clip etc.), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information.

(From [[wikipedia|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata)]]).

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Tag Mind Maps Continued

As promised my new version is up and running. It's still not perfect but the key valued added comes from seeing more than just parent, child relationships. Have a play with it. See if you discover anything interesting. It's only as good as the tags that feed into it though! To demonstrate how more effective a tag mind map is at locating information here is an example. Since travel is one of my interests in life, somewhere in this blog is an entry with a map of places I have visited. Can you find it if you start at [[MyInterests]]?

Learn more about the source code here: [[TiddlyTagMindMap Version 2]]

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Tagging

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Tagging and Mindmaps

Okay.. The reality of this blog is as it grows posts like this will fade away and disappear. I and any readers I may have will have to use the search box to find posts like this, and most of them will fail. Those who are reading this in the future well done, you've found it. Did you find it easy to get here? Was it because someone else suggested it, were you looking for it specifically or was it a completely random encounter?

The truth is I personally never know what I want, but I have a rough idea. It's like looking for a new house. Say I wanted to move to Belfast... I could find any house in Belfast no problem however could I find my dream house easily? No not really. Even with the power of Google and other search engines I'll end up plying through website after website looking for the answer with no luck.

Taggings quite a good way to do this. We can group similar blogs, but what if that tag is very general? With the house example a house in Belfast could be tagged "house" as could a house in New York. The tag gets me closer to that dream house but I still have to wade through the "junk" to find the house of my dreams. Sure I could create a tag for "Belfast houses" and one for "New York houses" but eventually these groups get bigger and I'd have to retag to keep that information meaningful and soon I have a vast number of tags, and then I'd have to search within those tags for "Belfast houses" and wade through all the tags associated with Belfast houses.

This is where mind maps and good tagging through collaboration can help I believe. Tag clouds (such as that on del.icio.us - http://del.icio.us/tag/) are a great way of pointing out the more important or more large of tags. I can get a feel for the size of the data in there. As long as I the reader am in tune with other readers of a website the most popular tags pop out at me. I can differentiate between them, I can make sure I look at the most popular items. The problem however is I am making that huge assumption that I am in tune with other readers. Take football for instance. Manchester United is probably the most popular team in the world and therefore if I was looking at tags of data (in whatever form it might be) associated with football teams, Manchester United is going to stick out in that tag cloud. I being a Nottingham Forest fan am not likely to see a prominent tag for them, but that's the information I (I being the key word) am looking for.

So now consider Stumbleupon. I can use stumbleupon to build up a profile of the things I personally am interested in. It doesn't know me very well at first and suggests quite dull information, but with time like a good friend it builds up knowledge of me as a person and gets better at suggesting stuff. I'd like to see a tag cloud that took my personal preferences into account when displaying data to me. Maybe one exists.. but I haven't heard of it.

But still we fall back on the issue that tag management isn't brilliant. You may find this post very boring or very interesting. Either way it depends on luck and the subjective opinion of people who read this that will determine whether this will be lost in the blog and thus in the world wide web forever. However if I maintain a structure to my tagging, a structure that could dynamically change through collaboration over time, a structure that has meaning (like a mind map), I might give it a better chance to be found. Really what I'm getting at is a new layer to search. You search for a term then instead of going through several pages you mine deeper through related key words that prompt you to get to the information you exactly need.

Tagging and Mindmaps Version 2

I'm getting a little frustrated with this first attempt at a "tag mind map". Mainly because it relies on a java applet to load which sometimes crashes my browser and just doesn't quite feel right. I was chatting to [[Jeremy Ruston]] at an open source event last week and he pointed me in the direction of a very cool javascript opensource library called [[JIT]]. It's quite an impress piece of kit, is completely javascript based and is particularly visually "cool".

I'm going to try rehacking the tag mind map using this kit, despite 2 already obvious limitations it has in that it doesn't seem to support cycles or more than one mind map.. so watch this space and you might see some big changes :)

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links: JIT

Tagging my tweets

I seem to be going through a creative phase at the moment so I'm making the most of it and churning out code that I think is useful. The latest one is a spin off of my last blog post about aggregating my rss feeds into once place using TiddlyWeb. Yesterday, Osmosoft had a show and tell where we talked about the things we are and have been up too. [[TiddlyTweets|http://osmosoft.com/tiddlytweets/]] was one that was mentioned - a client side twitter archiver. It reminded me of my server-side TiddlyWeb rss archiver which also happens to archive my tweets. However the problem with archiving tweets is tweets don't have tags.

Okay... so they do- tweeters have delegated specific characters to mean things. For instance if in a message I tweet "I am going for #coffee with @jayfresh" I am purposely tagging that tweet with the word coffee and referencing another Twitter user, my friend jayfresh. However, I am lazy. People are lazy. It would be lovely if when everyone tweeted they picked out the most interesting word in their tweet and put a hashtag in front of it. For instance back in February I went to Singapore and I tweeted "finding singapore airport quite dull. All the interesting shops were the other side of passport control!". At the time I didn't think this was a significant tweet and still I don't. However I am sure there are people in Singapore airport now who may find some use in that bit of knowledge about Singapore airport and make sure they go shopping before going through passport control. If my tweet was tagged with singapore and airport maybe they would find that tweet much easier. However this would require me to have written my tweet as "finding #singapore #airport quite dull. All the interesting shops were the other side of passport control!".

So anyway, I've blabbered on too much. What I've come up with is simple.

I have a TiddlyWiki which you are currently reading. Every thing I post to this TiddlyWiki has tags.
I have a delicious feed. I purposely tag links in my delicious feed so I can find them again.
I have a Flickr feed. I like to tag my photos so I can find them again.
Combine the three above and I have a list of tags.

I now tweet "finding singapore airport quite dull. All the interesting shops were the other side of passport control!"
I run the archiver I introduced in [[Merging all my rss feeds using TiddlyWeb]].
However there is an extra step...
Now before saving I take the new tiddler that has come from an rss item. It has the text "finding singapore airport quite dull. All the interesting shops were the other side of passport control!". I parse this text for words that exist in my list of tags from above. By this I mean I look at the word "finding" - I ask is it in my tags? The answer is no so I throw it away. I then look at the second word "singapore" - and I ask is it in my tags? The answer this time is yes. It happens that when I when to Singapore I couchsurfed and made a new friend called Han Tan, who it transpired was an internet meme (ie. like the star wars kid) for [[dancing like a crazy man on YouTube|http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd_FcVM92VI]]. At the time I thought this video was funny and added it to my delicious feed I tagged it "singapore". Now I see the word "singapore" in my tweet and know I've used that word as a tag before so that tweet gains a new tag "singapore". I then go on to the word airport and so on and so on.

So now I can tag my tweets. If you use my search engine and search for singapore, you will get some tweets in the search result with that keyword. I've now enriched my data. You can see my code [[here|http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/JonRobson/TiddlyWeb/plugins/imrsswithtags.py]]

So what is the significance of this...
Well one other use case I can think of is voicemail to text. Say I leave my friend Stuart a voicemail on his phone, his lovely Ribbit service will send him a text and an e-mail with a transcribed version of my message. Maybe Stuart wants to find that voicemail again using the above tagging mechanism he has a better chance then without it.

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links: TiddlyWeb Merging all my rss feeds using TiddlyWeb

Testing for SVG Support

SVG is supported by a browser if the following is true in javascript
{{{
document.implementation.hasFeature("http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/feature#Shape", "1.0")
}}}

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Thailand

I went here for the first time July 2006. I look forward to telling you more about my trip!

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The Apprentice Business Model

Just been using Virgin's on demand TV service. Quite fancied Harry Hill's TV burp but sadly couldn't find it. It seemed quite a fundamental thing to me that on demand TV should have a search facility that you can use to find a specific TV show but alas not. As a result I am resigned to watching the first episode of "The Apprentice". It has got me thinking, would "The Apprentice" style of episode make a good business model? Get teams together, give them a big challenge such as "make us number 1 in X/ make me Y million pounds by the end of the week" and give them an incentive to do well at the given task (ie. I'll double your salary if you pull it of) but the only catch is "one of you will get fired at "close of play" based on performance in the task. I'd love to see the results of such a business model. High turnover of staff but would it get results.... mmm.

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The Big Bang

So scientists in CERN re-created the big bang somewhere beneath Switzerland. It made me wonder.
If we as humans are capable of creating "the big bang" could we be our own creators?
If we combine this theory with the idea of time travel being possibly as appropriate speeds could we humans be our own God...........?

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The Web Is Your Oyster - create and tweak travel itineraries for your trip through the web

Have you ever found yourself with the mammoth task of planning your next trip? You're going somewhere, maybe through business or just through pleasure - maybe you've just finished University and you are going to do a round the world trip but have no idea how that trip will take form.

Maybe you know exactly where you are going.. but you don't know what to do with your 2 days there or maybe you are going travelling for a few weeks and want some inspiration for nearby places to explore. I have found myself in this situation various times. For instance back in 2007 I had a flight from/to Bangkok, 7 weeks and wanted to go to Vietnam, however didn't know how and where I'd be going to do this after much painful reading of books such as Lonely Planet and Rough Guides I came to the conclusion that I might as well go to the countries of Cambodia and Laos since they were on the way. However, then it was a case of logistics - what was I going to do in those countries? where was I going to go? where would I stay? How was I going to get from A to B?

Luckily it seems the web can help here. WikiTravel is a website rich on Lonely Planet style content with the added benefit of hyperlinks which allow a computer to easily make associations of various places. For instance if you go to a location page you will find links to nearby places in the Getting There/Away section and links to districts of the location. However it can be quite overwhelming reading through WikiTravel just as it can be in a travel guide as so many of the pages you read through although related can be found in various locations in the book and without good long analysis it can be tricky to work out that for example Singapore is right next to Borneo and you could consider a little excursion there while you are away.

So it was with this thought that I have created "The Web is Your Oyster" - it starts off as one single html file that you can place on a usb stick, it then grows as you pull down information and map images from the web on the fly and add your own personal notes about plans and reservations so come the time for your holiday you can take that same usb stick with you and read it on the plane, or on the move in your destination where internet may not be readily available to you or very expensive with data roaming charges.

So this was the basis for the demo/proof of concept I will now be sharing with you. I must firstly make the comment that this works best on an Apple Mac. The main problem that still needs to be addressed is saving images locally via javascript. I have not seen evidence of this working in Internet Explorer yet. The main functionality this loses is the ability to cache maps as you view them, however you can download tiles manually to make the data offline.

So step one is to plant the seed - you tell it where you are going and how many days. In this example we will go to Singapore for 10 days which will fire off a google local search request.
<<image images/TheWebIsYourOyster/image1.png 500>>

The page will then visibly begin flashing as it pulls down pages from WikiTravel for offline use. It will also pull down an GeoRSS feed from Flickr to add some inspiration.

The result is the map above will now be centered on Singapore with lots of clickable geotags.
<<image images/TheWebIsYourOyster/image2.png 500>>

It will also create a timeline in the menu to the right of your map with the 10 days we gave it waiting for input.

<<image images/TheWebIsYourOyster/image3.png 300>>

We can click on these and add notes such as flight times and logistics as we find them by clicking on these notes and editing them.
<<image images/TheWebIsYourOyster/image4.png 500>>

Just as you would be able to with Google Maps you can then pan and zoom around the map, as it does this it will try to pull down image tiles so that in future no web connection will be needed. You can click on the maps and explore the data it pulled from the web -for instance the wikitravel article on Little India in Singapore below and edit it to cut down bits that don't interest you personally.

<<image images/TheWebIsYourOyster/image5.png 500>>

As you read articles you dislike you can press delete in the top right of the note to remove them from your itinerary.

You can then enrich it further by tagging specific locations. So for instance, say I was lucky enough to get a reservation at Raffles hotel I could put a tag on the map for it.

<<image images/TheWebIsYourOyster/image6.png 500>>

I can then click this newly created tag and add notes to it there and then.

<<image images/TheWebIsYourOyster/image6a.png 500>>
There are lots of other features you may care to try - you can add tags to the map using your mouse by holding shift and clicking the left mouse button on a point in the map. Also you can search your content, and focus the map on geotagged notes using the "go here" button which you will find next to the creation date underneath the note title (see image above for example).

<<image images/TheWebIsYourOyster/image8.png 500>>

There's lot of work to be done (as I said it's a proof of concept), and I'm sure lots of people will have views on what websites it should use for it's data, and other cool ideas about how it should work. Please fire me with any comments you have good or
bad - I'm keen to hear them! To see it in action: take a look at [[Singapore Web Is Your Oyster example|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/development/TheWebIsYourOyster/examplesingapore.zip]] used in this post. Then try it for yourself! [[Right click and save to download and try The Web Is Your Oyster|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/development/TheWebIsYourOyster/index.html]] - don't try using it online - you won't get the same experience!

Interested in the code? Check out: [[the svn code for the web is your oyster|http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/JonRobson/verticals/TravelItinerary/]]

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The darkness of a life without e-mail

It's amazing how one fire http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/01/the_planet_houston_data_center_fire/ halfway across the globe from where I am can really disrupt my cyber life.

Sunday morning I woke up to find my e-mail was not working. This is because my e-mail is hosted off this website, which is hosted free by the lovely people at [[Jamroll web hosting]]. This meant my plan for doing some wiki on this website on the Sunday couldn't happen. The fact I had no e-mail was worst though. As a result I have lots of catching up to do. Also since it was down for nearly 48hours many e-mails haven't got through to me. I've noticed Facebook notifications in particular haven't arrived on my doorstep. As a result I might have missed an important e-mail I was expecting with regards to a parcel I've been waiting for for almost 3 weeks to be delivered by Amtrak which has instead sat at their Birmingham depot. Annoying [[customer service]] that.

Lesson I've learnt is always make sure I have some sort of backup.

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The domain name is extinct, why change it?

So it's recently been announced domain names are to be relaxed in 2009 [[link|http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7475986.stm]]. Owch.

I'm not sure I like the idea and not even sure it makes sense. I'll be able to get domains like jon.robson and we'll probably be seeing lots of businesses grabbing domains such as orange.mobile and porn.xxx. So what does this mean for the end user? It won't be a simple case of is it thatwebsite.com or is it thatwebsite.co.uk, they'll have to think is it that.website or thatwebsite.www etc.. etc... The web could get a more confusing place. Also what's to say everything that ends in .search will actually be a search engine. More confusion... We already have situations where we have .com websites that are not companies nor based in the USA, this is going to spiral with new domain names.

However, I guess we're used to a scattered web. After all the domain name is usually found through a search engine.. so will it really matter what it's actual address consists of?

I put to you the domain name is extinct. I rarely use them. Most of the time you google or find a url through collaboration on web platforms like [[Facebook]], [[del.icio.us]] and even old fashion world of mouth. If you're like myself you use firefox and type a word into the nav bar, and firefox fires of an "are you feeling lucky request". I never use "http://www.google.co.uk" I just use "google". So why change this? Why do we need more web addresses. The only gain is brand, and to me it's not important. A url is not going to effect your brand.

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links: Facebook del.icio.us

The problems I have with England

[[the same old five offerings]], [[decline of british community]]

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links: the same old five offerings decline of british community

The story of ILGA, Osmosoft and Me

On the 24th February 2010, Osmosoft and BT will be launching the new website of ILGA, the International Lesbian Gay, Bisexual Trans and Intersex Association. Disastrously I managed to plan my holidays to coincide with this event having thought it would be launched in January, and the fact I am not going to be there on the day is the one major disappointment I have had in my time on this project.

The project has had many highs. For me it has been an amazing learning experience. I have learnt a hell of a lot about web development, web design, project management and LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) issues. It has been the biggest project I have had the honour of working on in BT and for me it has been the most exciting and interesting as it is the first website I have built that I truly felt I could make a difference with.

I have been working on this website over the duration of almost a year, at times alongside fellow Osmosoftonians Ben Gillies and Jon Lister. The website is the result of a combined vision between Stephen Barris, communication officer of ILGA and the team. Centered around a map of the world showing legal data, the purpose of the site is to provide information to LGBTI people all over the world in what ever country they happen to be in and whatever purpose that has brought them there - whether it be as a tourist, as a worker or as a resident. The website also aims to raise awareness about LGBTI issues, hopefully engraving outdated and unethical laws into the minds of all who see it.

I've been working on this project for over a year. Like many of the things I do in Osmosoft, it has raised many questions from my peers -usually they don't understand why BT would pay me money to make open source software but this is another story)- they have now been asking the question, "why would BT invest so much time in making a website for a charity with no financial gain? "It is an interesting question, which I can only offer my own personal opinion on (not BT's)  which has always been the reply question "well, why would a company give a company X thousands of pounds to a charity with no outcome except a potential pat on the back for showing you support said charity". Here I believe BT have done something much more useful and powerful than they could have done with a charitable donation.  

As a straight person, before my involvement I must confess that I never really passed a thought on the issues that LGBTI issues face. I believe the website we have produced for ILGA reflects these issues well and powerfully, in its articles, legal maps and through the voices of LGBTI people all over the world through the Your Stories section - a section which allows users to post personal stories about experiences they have had in their own country or others just because of their orientation or sexuality. For me reading through it I think I am starting to *get* what LGBTI people face... I really urge you to go visit and have [[a look|http://ilga.org]] and hope that it has the same impact on you whether you are straight, bisexual, gay, lesbian, intersex, transexual or an alien lifeform that is has had on me.

In my opinion I would say BT + Osmosoft have come out of this project with:
1) Useful open source software that can be reused elsewhere inside their company. The main technology that ilga.org is built around is [[TiddlyWeb|http://tiddlyweb.com]] and [[TiddlyWiki|http://tiddlywiki.org]]- both opensource platforms which we in [[Osmosoft|http://osmosoft.com]] are currently using to construct voting/reputation systems (a la Stack verflow), document collaboration systems (see [[TiddlyDocs|tiddlydocs.com]]), reporting applications, powerpoint replacements, carbon footprint tools, [[Scrumptious|http://scrumptious.tv]]... the list goes on. It also uses HTML 5 technology (canvas) and prehistoric IE technology (VML) to create chloropleth maps - the first major website I am aware that does so (bearing in mind that ilga.org gets between 1000-1500 hits a day) - creating real possibilities for graphics capabilities in BT without Flash (read [[a summary of why flash is bad|http://softwareas.com/live-blogging-open-source-show-and-tell-ossat-at-theteam-november-2009-part-1]].. note there is a video out there but can't find it).
2) An application that could truly make a difference to raising awareness about LGBTI issues around the world. Every person who has come into Osmosoft towers for demos has seen a map of the world showing how many countries still punish homosexuality by the death penalty and gasped (or at least shown some sort of shock). It might not be Martin Luther Kingesque but it's still quite a satisfying achievement that makes me proud. Activists and non-activists are raising awareness of LGBTI issues through their [[personal stories|http://ilga.org/ilga/en/countries/WORLD/Your Stories]] and [[articles|http://ilga.org/ilga/en/Articles]].
3) A useful resource for BT's LGBTI employees to inform them about the risks posed by traveling around the world on business or pleasure.
4) Some good publicity (BT recently was voted by the [[IGLCC|http://www.iglcc.org]] as the most gay friendly company in the world in 2009)

You can see the website at [[http://ilga.org]]. The website is launched officially at BT Centre on Wednesday. Ironically I will be in [[Brunei|http://ilga.org/ilga/en/countries/BRUNEI%20DARUSSALAM/Law]], a country where homosexuality is illegal and carries a punishment of up to 10 years of jail time. I obviously will be keeping quiet....

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Thoughts on customer service

As a customer I expect to be able to phone up / go to a company. I don't mind waiting in line but when I'm seen I want to explain my problem. I don't want to be treated as an idiot. I don't mind running basic tests but if I beleive they are useless I expect the employee to know the tests are pointless and to react to what I say. If the staff doesn't know how to fix the problem, I understand that we are only human. I don't mind if I have to leave the problem withe them as long as I know they will take ownership and fix that problem.

Good examples of this in action are Apples Genius Bar and BT's @btcare twitter account.

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Tiddly Desktop

http://www.digitaldimsum.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/202.html

I quite fancy merging it with TiddlyTagMindMap at some point...I'd quite like to see this done. I envision TiddlyTagMindMap in the background with loaded tiddlers in front and just a search engine. No sidebar, just the start of a quite intuitive different way of working.

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TiddlyCharts

So something that's been bugging me for a while (maybe a year) is I have been using Excel and other spreadsheets occasionally to do things such as creating simple graphs. This was not acceptable to me and it annoyed me that my TiddlyWiki couldn't do this for me. I imagined what would be great would be to create a table in wiki markup and then be able to use it to churn out a graph.

I finally got a chance, making use of [[g.Raphael|http://g.raphaeljs.com/]] a library I found a while back which seemed to do everything I needed except make it nice and easier for me to get data into a graph.

To cut a long story short - I've done it!! You can view the output at [[tiddlyspace|http://charts.tiddlyspace.com/]].

The ideal is simple - create an html table in a tiddler which is correctly formatted (you can get an idea of the format from the examples). You can do this by using the html wiki markup eg:
 {{{
<table><tr><td>heading 
1</td><td>heading 2</td></tr><tr><td>30</td><td>50</td></tr></table>

}}}
or by using the much simpler table wiki markup:
 {{{
|heading 1|heading 2|
|30       |50       |
}}}
Or you can even create a macro that outputs the table for you. This allows you to create interesting pie charts of your most commonly used tags for instance...
[img[/static/images/TiddlyCharts/pietags.png]]

...as well as show you graphs for activity on a given space - which days saw lots of tiddlers being modified and which didn't. Or simply for visualizing a company share price.
[img[/static/images/TiddlyCharts/shareprice.png]]

Please let me know your thoughts and ideas for improvement.. I'm hoping this will be of benefit to more than just me!

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TiddlyGeoStuff

Currently I am working on GeoTiddlyWiki with the goal to provide offline maps and allow easy editing of chloropleth maps into TiddlyWiki.

Right click and save target as on this: [[GeoTiddlyWiki|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/projects/GeoTiddlyWiki/index.html]] to play with GeoTiddlyWiki for yourself (works best in Mozilla Firefox).

If you just want to get going with a more trimmed down version of the above please download [[Map In A TiddlyWiki for offline map functionality|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/development/MapsInATiddlyWiki/index.html]]

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TiddlyTagMindMap Version 1

Version 1 my first cut was based on Dawn's work with Tiddlywiki and an opensource project called hypergraph. I didn't like the fact it required a jar file and xml file and eventually abandoned it in favour of [[JIT]]

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TiddlyWeb

All things chrisdent and TiddlyWeb can be found here in chris's github: http://github.com/tiddlyweb/

! all about the tiddlywebconfig 
base_tiddlywiki - allows you to specify the empty.html used by tiddlywebwiki

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TiddlyWeb as a blog

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TiddlyWiki Macros

!!!{{{<<today>>}}}
Shows current date.

!!!{{{<<version>>}}} 
This macro shows the version number of the current TiddlyWiki document.

!!!{{{<<Alltags>>}}}
Lists all tags. Clicking on a tag lists all the tiddlers assigned that tag. 

!!!{{{<<List [type]>>}}} 
Parameters : (all (default), missing, orphans, shadowed, touched, filter)

!!!{{{<<Timeline [date] [length] [format]>>}}} 
 The timeline macro creates a list of tiddlers sorted by a date specified.

Example : 
{{{<<timeline "modified" "0" "ddd, YYYY-0MM-0DD">>}}}

Produces : 


<<timeline "modified" "0" "ddd, YYYY-0MM-0DD">>
!!!{{{<<Slider cookie tiddler label tooltip>>}}}
The slider macro allows embedding tiddlers within another tiddler, with the option to toggle the visibility of the transcluded contents.

    * cookie: variable to save the state of the slider
    * tiddler: name of the tiddler to include in the slider
    * label: title text of the slider
    * tooltip: tooltip text of the slider 

 Example
{{{<<slider chkTestSlider [[OptionsPanel]] "Options" "Open advanced options">>}}}

Produces : 
<<slider chkTestSlider [[OptionsPanel]] "Options" "Open advanced options">>

!!!{{{<<Tabs>>}}}
The tabs macro creates an area where it displays one of several tiddlers alternately, as the user clicks on the tab labels at the top.

It is used like this:

{{{<<tabs ID Label1 Tip1 Tiddler1 Label2 Tip2 Tiddler2 [Label3 ...]>>}}}

produces :
<<tabs ID Label1 Tip1 Tiddler1 Label2 Tip2 Tiddler2 [Label3 ...]>>

    * ID: specifies the name of a cookie used to save the information about which tab was displayed last.
    * Label1, Label2, ... define the labels that are displayed at the top of the area for each tab
    * Tip1, Tip2, ... define tooltips that explain, somewhat more verbosely than the labels, what you can expect to find on each tab.
    * Tiddler1, Tiddler2, ... name the tiddlers that are displayed on each tab. 

Obviously, there must be exactly three strings for each tab.

The syntax for the tabs macro looks like this:

{{{<<tabs txt[cookieName]
	"[label]" "[title]" [[tiddler]]
	"[label]" "[title]" [[tiddler]]
	...
     >>}}}

produces :


<<tabs txt[cookieName]
	"[label]" "[title]" [[tiddler]]
	"[label]" "[title]" [[tiddler]]
	...
     >>

!!!{{{<<Tagging [tag]>>}}}
This macro generates a list of tiddlers that carry the specified tag.

<<tagging [tag]>>

If the tag parameter is not specified, the current tiddler's name will be used instead.
!!!{{{<<Tagchooser>>}}}
!!!{{{<<NewJournal>>}}}
This macro generates a button to create a journal tiddler, using the current time and date as title.

It is otherwise identical to the NewTiddler macro.

Example : 
{{{<<newJournal [date format]>>}}}

Produces : 

<<newJournal [date format]>>

The optional parameter can be used to specify a custom date format.

In addition, all of the NewTiddler macro's parameters are valid.

!!!{{{<<NewTiddler>>}}}

 Usage

<<newTiddler [parameters]>>

Parameters

This macro uses named parameters. All parameters are optional.
|Parameter|Description|
|label |button label|
|prompt|button tooltip|
|title|title for the new tiddler (defaults to "New Tiddler")|
|text|contents for the new tiddler|
|tag|tag to be applied to the new tiddler (parameter can be used repeatedly to specify multiple tags)|
|accessKey|single letter to use as access key to trigger the button|
|focus|which of the editable fields to default the focus to (e.g. "title", "text", "tags")|
|template|template tiddler to use to display the new tiddler (defaults to EditTemplate)|
|fields|custom fields to be assigned to the new tiddler, in name:value;name:value; format|

Only fields contained as input fields in the specified template can be primed with an initial value.
[edit] Example

<<newTiddler
	label:"New Tiddler"
	text:"Hello world."
	tag:"test"

	tag:"an example"
	accessKey:"1"
	focus:"tags"
>>



!!!{{{<<Savechanges>>}}}



!!!{{{<<Search>>}}}

This macro creates an input field to perform full-text searches on a TiddlyWiki document's tiddler contents.
[edit] Usage

Example : 
{{{<<search [value]>>}}}

Produces : 



<<search [value]>>

By specifiying the value parameter, the search form can be "preloaded" with the desired term.
[edit] Options
This section is still incomplete. You can help by contributing to its expansion.
Please improve the article, or discuss the issue on the talk page.

    * case-sensitive
    * regular expressions 


!!!{{{<<Gradient>>}}}

The Gradient macro allows simple horizontal and vertical coloured gradients. They are constructed from coloured HTML elements, and don't require any images to work.
The Gradient macro is an extended macro that processes the text after it up until the next '

>>

' sequence. It looks like this:
Example : 
{{{<<gradient vert #ffffff #ffdddd #ff8888>>gradient fill>>}}}

Produces : 
<<gradient vert #ffffff #ffdddd #ff8888>>gradient fill>>

The first parameter can be vert or horiz to indicate the direction of the gradient. The following parameters are two or more colours (CSS RGB(r,g,b) format is also acceptable). The macro constructs a smooth linear gradient between each of the colours in turn.

Inline CSS definitions can be added to gradient fills like this:


Example : 
{{{<<gradient vert #000000 #660000 #aa2222>>color:#ffffff;font-size:12pt;Darkness>>}}}

Produces : 

<<gradient vert #000000 #660000 #aa2222>>color:#ffffff;font-size:12pt;Darkness>>

!!!{{{<<Closeall>>}}}
!!!{{{<<Permaview>>}}}
Changes the browser address bar to a permalink to the current Tiddler or the set of open tiddlers. It is used with the ToolbarMacro like this:

Example : 
{{{<<toolbar permalink>>}}}
Produces : 
<<toolbar permalink>>

!!!{{{<<Toolbar>>}}}
The ToolbarMacro is used in the TemplateMechanism to define the toolbar that appearthat appear either in EditMode or in ViewMode. The arguments to the ToolbarMacro is a list of command names, as discussed in the CommandMechanism..

You can precede a command name with a "+" to specify a default command that is automatically chosen when a tiddler is double-clicked, or the ctrl-Enter key combination pressed. Similarly, precede it with "-" to specify a command to be chosen when the Escape key is pressed.
!!!{{{<<Annotations>>}}}

!!!{{{<<Edit>>}}}
The command <<edit>> switches from ViewMode to EditMode. The EditMacro is either a double mouse click inside the tiddler or the entry 'edit' in the tiddler's Toolbar. It is used in ViewTemplate as ToolbarMacro like this:
Example : 
{{{<<toolbar +editTiddler>>}}}
Produces : 


<<toolbar +editTiddler>>

!!!{{{<<Message>>}}}
!!!{{{<<Refreshdisplay>>}}}
!!!{{{<<View fieldname how...>>}}}
Retrieves a specified field (given by fieldname) from the tiddler to be displayed and outputs its value in one of the following ways (the optional //how// parameter):

    * (unspecified): render as is (without formatting)
    * link: format as a link (using createTiddlyLink)
    * wikified: format using all the normal rendering rules
    * date: expects a value of the form YYYYMMDDHHMM and outputs it using either a specified format (...) or config.views.wikified.dateFormat 

The standard field names are:

    * title - the tiddler title
    * tiddler - the tiddler title (as well)
    * text - the text of the tiddler
    * modifier - the person who last modified it
    * modified - date&time of last modification
    * created - when it was created
    * tags - the tiddler tags 

If your tiddlers contain custom fields, they could be specified as well.

The view macro is used extensively in the standard tiddler rendering templates (ViewTemplate and EditTemplate).

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VGraph

So earlier I blogged about a Family Tree vertical. This vertical has been a catalyst for me finally getting round to creating a sort of [[TiddlyTagMindMap|http://tiddlytagmindmap.tiddlyspot.com]] version 2, which I'm now calling VGraph.

[[TiddlyTagMindMap|http://tiddlytagmindmap.tiddlyspot.com]] has been probably my most popular TiddlyWiki plugin but it's probably my most badly written and largest plugin. I was using a library to make it ([[Nicholas's JIT|http://thejit.org/]]) and I found this library had lots of things I didn't necessarily care about. Since making this I've done a lot of work with canvas and vml, most notably in the construction of ILGA's new shiny data visualisation world map on [[http://new.ilga.org]] and the [[Vismo library that powers it|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/Vismo]]. I've learnt a lot of lessons from this about making old Grandpa IE6 happier.

I have listened lots to the TiddlyWiki community and have got ideas about what people care about for a graph plugin - it needs to be configurable to a variety of needs, needs to work across different browsers and most importantly shouldn't lock them into a particular graph layout algorithm.

[img[/images/vismo/radial1.png]]
{{footer{radial layout}}}

[img[/images/vismo/hyperbolic.png]]
{{footer{hyperbolic layout}}}

[img[/images/vismo/walkers.png]]
{{footer{tree layout}}}

I've created a generic graphing plugin called VGraphPlugin which I'm putting out there for feedback. The Family Tree vertical [[I blogged about earlier|Finally a Family Tree Vertical]] now uses it and this graph plugin unlike [[TiddlyTagMindMap|http://tiddlytagmindmap.tiddlyspot.com]] is algorithm focused. I am keen on the idea of users adding their graph algorithms to suit the data they are presenting and being able to toggle between them quickly. For instance you can change the algorithm from a drop down in the bottom right corner and see a different graph in an instance. Many thanks to [[Nicholas's JIT|http://thejit.org/]] by the way which saved me a lot of time writing complicated algorithms here.

I've also developed a concept of a labelMacro. It's still not perfected but I have made it so that you can add a parameter to my macro called labelMacro and it will render the label according to what that macro referenced says. So for instance the macro {{{<<view tags>>}}} shows the tags of the tiddler calling it. In the graph you can do {{{<<VGraph labelMacro:'view tags'>>}}} and the graph will render with node labels showing it's tags rather than title.

[img[/images/vismo/hyperbolic_created.png]]
{{footer{labels shown as created date field instead of titles}}}

Have a play with [[this copy|/development/VGraph/index.html]] and let me know your initial thoughts... please bear in mind, there are still a few issues I need to iron out with cyclic graphs.. and of course one of the next steps is making this more interactive and explorable. Cheers!

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VGraphDemo

This is a demo of the VGraphPlugin.
<<VGraph parentFields:{{['tags']}} excludeTags:{{['myblog','rssfeeds']}}  algorithm:'radial'>>

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Vietnam

I went here for the first time July 2007. I look forward to telling you more about my trip!

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VismoCanvas

On Wednesday we had a hackday to create a product called [[MediaWikiUnplugged|http://mediawikiunplugged.com/]]. For an afternoon's work, although we hadn't created a masterpiece it was a pretty productive day and quite a good outcome, and great working with the Globant guys. The result seems to have been [[retweeted a few times on Twitter|http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mediawikiunplugged]].

It made me realise however that if we could create that in a half day I could surely get VismoCanvas - a project I've had in my head and in several scrapped prototypes in a semi decent state to see what people think of it.

In a nutshell the project is this - I want to create a client side graphics program completely written in html/css/javascript. I think the [[TiddlyWiki community|http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki/]] would really benefit from a drawing application to create simple graphics on the fly, save them and transport them in document. I also like the idea of multiple users being able to collaborate on an image just as they might to a piece of text.

So the result of 1 day of hacking is [[VismoCanvas|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/projects/VismoCanvas/canvasediting.html]] which I will now share with you. It throws together alot of the code I have written in my VismoLibrary with jquery and some jquery plugins to bring a basic (and a little buggy) graphics application that provides line drawing, circle drawing, stroke and fill styling and the ability to move and resize those circles. When I throw in some more effort there will be also be polygons.

Where I'm planning to go with this is to make these diagrams you create interactive - the ability to add links to each shape that when viewed by someone they can click on them and jump to places on the web. Think flowcharts, think family trees, think diagrams of brain neurons, graphs - the possible uses are endless.

And importantly.. it's cross browser and pretty performant... even in IE. Let me know what you think...

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VismoLibrary

[img[/images/vismo/vismo.png]]
I have made several visualisations/graphics based plugins built around a library of code I wrote called the VismoLibrary. You can find out more at it's special page: [[link to vismo|/Vismo]] (with example demos and documentation)

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VismoWiki

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Web 2.0

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Websites with bad user interfaces

!Eurostar
Slow, lots of pages, refresh page to look at other available trains/to
When you click preferred passengers fill in below box instead of some nice Javascript does a page reload - completely unnecessary!
When payment fails spat me out had to start from beginning again.

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What I have learnt about vml

So Internet Explorer cannot do canvas yet. We can moan about this all we want but the fact is we are stuck in this situation until Microsoft speed up and provide it in a new release and even when they do, we still will have issues with backward compatability in older versions of Internet Explorer the granddad of browsers! I've seen many attempts to rectify this by providing a hack for canvas for Internet Explorer - the well know [[ExplorerCanvas]] and even some talk of some method using flash which I will be interested to see the results in.

Anyway, I've been playing around with canvas and the closest IE alternative that is native to the Internet Explorer browser - vml. I've used this in a recent project ([[GeoTiddlyWiki]]) and most recently for the [[rewired state event|http://rewiredstate.org/buzz]] I attended. You can see my result (albeit a week later then the day) which is a [[chloropleth map of London council tax bands|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/development/RewiredState/councilbandd.html]]. For those who are interested there is a geojson of London powering it, which I have hacked together out of some kml data which should be useful for some other hacks you may have in mind.

Anyway... vml is completely different to canvas as it concerns dom manipulation whereas in canvas which takes a bitmap based approach where you make a series of calls to a javascript function and create an output. This is why I believe that trying to mimic canvas exactly by porting these javascript commands into vml based alternatives is flawed. The killer one is the canvas clearRect function. If you draw a clear rectangle over the top of a drawing you have done in a canvas object, it will be a quick command and won't make many differences to memory. However if you want to clear a vml based drawing this means hitting the dom hard by deleting each of the vml shape objects you have created for your drawing. A big drawing could have hundreds of dom elements in it. Imagine deleting 1000 divs in one go and your get the idea of the issue here. The other fact is ExplorerCanvas is a generic solution, therefore it can make no assumptions about how you are using it. For instance say in your canvas app you are drawing a smiley face and you are allowing the user to move the smiley face around the screen with a mouse click. The pseudo code will look something like this:
{{{
clear the canvas
translate my drawing to x,y coordinate,
draw circle
draw eye 1
draw eye 2
draw mouth
}}}

Now consider an ExplorerCanvas type alternative where we mimic each of these functions with a suitable vml based alternative...
{{{
delete all dom elements that are children of the drawing
create vml circle at x,y
create eye 1 at x,y
create eye 2 at x,y
create mouth at x,y
}}}
Here it's not a big issue as it is a small drawing but here we are deleting 4 dom objects then creating 4 identical objects from the previous time EVERY time the user moves around the "canvas impersonator". Now consider an alternative where we create our own specific version targetting our drawing a smiley face app.
{{{
if I havent drawn my smiley face yet..
create vml circle at x,y
create eye 1 at x,y
create eye 2 at x,y
create mouth at x,y
store my shapes
else
for each of my shapes
change css left and top position to give translation effect
}}}

In this situation we alter the style of 4 objects rather than deleting and adding to the dom - a much faster operation. It also seems that modifying a dom element attribute is quicker than dom manipulation. If you have a look at the [[VML W3C Note on shape element|http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-VML#_Toc416858386]] you will see that coordinates in a vml shape are hardcoded into an attribute called path. Therefore instead of deleting vml shapes you need consider that modifying an existing shapes coordinates could be a much more performant way of rendering in Internet Explorer.

I guess what I'm getting at is that no generic solution to canvas in my opinion will ever bring you ideal performance. If you want good cross browser performance then I'm afraid being lazy and using an off the shelf product is probably not your best bet. Dive into the [[VML W3C Note on vml|http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-VML]] and get to know VML yourself (it's actually quite easy since it is just creating and styling dom elements) and see how css and reusing existing dom elements can bring a better experience to your poor IE users..

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When computing was simple

I was lucky enough to be able to visit Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes last Friday ("home of the codebreakers"). It was a fascinating insight into the history of computing and really put things in to perspective about how far we have come in just 50 years. It was incredible to hear about how in the times where the feat of breaking Enigma was carried out how they were using pens and paper and mechanical devices just to get some bits of the puzzle. What truly interested me though was the museum of computing - a library of what I would consider ancient machines that the public are free to play with. I had a play with an Acorn with my fond memories from school time and had a go at some retro programming paying homage to the show "Look around you" armed with the manual placed beside the machine. 

Here is the lovely program I wrote - 4 lines of code - 3 to get it up and running and 1 to execute it. And no those are not line numbers you include them in your code!
{{{
>0 FOR X=0 TO 999999
>10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU"
>20 NEXT
>RUN
}}}

I'm not really going anywhere with this - It was just a bit of fun and something to seriously reflect on but it reminded me of the simplicity of interfaces and the simplicity of programming languages back in the day. It took me a day recently to get Eclipse setup with the right Java environment and here I had a simple program running in no more than 5 minutes from nothing.

[img[http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3009/3032534712_1ab75b0fa3.jpg?v=0]]

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Where I have lived

I like to move around a bit. I'll tell you more about where and my experiences at some point here.

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Why Twitter?

Many of my friends have questioned my use of Twitter, not seeing the point in "knowing what my other friends are doing, what time train they are on and when the y are going to bed". So I thought I'd put my spin on it even if it similar to an already established view.

So although knowing someone is going to bed now is not the best example of a useful twitter it does radiate information you might not else have known. I now may have an idea of what time that person is going to bed and thus I may choose to get my phonecalls to him or her before that time so as not to bug them. However this silly example aside, there are many more useful tweets that may be pushed your way, even if at first glance they are not what they seem.

For example say I get a tweet "X is off to see Les Miserables." At first glance this may not seem very interesting, but come the time I want to see Les Miserables I expect I will have made that connection mentally and I will be contacting to X to see if it's worth an evening of my time. Other information they transmit are location, state of mind, interests, knowledge, that is not obstrusive but sometimes useful.

For instance if a friend I haven't seen in a while tweets that he is in a certain location that is 5 miles away from me, if I'm doing nothing that friend may expect a call from me in a few minutes to see if he's free for a coffee. It's a powerful tool.

In the work environment it's even better. My previous team used an internal product to keep people updated on their statuses and through it I had a greater awareness of that fabled "big picture". Suddenly I got an idea of how often our program director was showing off our product to customers, I got an idea of what work was on the horizon and I got an idea of the problems my team members were facing and a platform to raise problems I was facing. In a big team, if I encountered a problem, despite the vast sea of big heads in my organisation it could be hard to find the right person to raise that problem to in hope of a solution, short of ringing everyone individually and seeing if they knew how to fix the problem. However with status messages I usually found the answers came to me.

So, tweet and get the world to tweet with you. I think your be surprised..

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Why do we put up with IE and musing about family trees

So I spent some time over xmas working on my TiddlyTagMindMap plugin on things that I've been meaning to get done for a while. Yesterday I spent an hour working on it so I could show off a few of the features that will be available in the new version (chiefly node meta data). However this hour wasn't creating new features.. it was troubleshooting why it wasn't working in Internet Explorer. Eventually I found the reason - a number was being passed as a string and was fixed by adding one line of code (telling IE to parse the string as an integer). This is not a first this happens all the time and it pains me that we live in a world where lots of people use IE and I have to spend the time doing this so people won't look at web apps I've designed them and see them broken in the IE context.

I put this effort in to fix the bug as it is important that I reach a wide audience with the creations I make. However what pains me is I have to spend time doing this in the work context as do other developers. I've known developers to waste days troubleshooting Internet Explorer issues and it's not even like you have a version of Firebug for this product to make things easy. The money businesses must waste on getting web apps to work in Internet Explorer is criminal yet I see web apps that have been poorly designed that ONLY work in Internet Explorer and I see businesses that encourage their employees to USE Internet Explorer instead of better quality alternatives.

That topic aside I came across a link about Geneology and TiddlyWiki in a colleagues delicious feed ([[link|http://www.howcast.com/videos/112628-JLiki-How-To-Create-Your-Own-Genealogy-Wiki]] and it got me thinking about my old family tree that I made many years ago ([[Robson Family Tree|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/familytree/familytreeindex.php]]) that I have meaning to "TiddlyWikify" for a while now. This got me thinking about TiddlyTagMindMap and how apart from the visual layout it could be used to display family trees. The annoying thing however is with the library I'm using the emphasis seems to be more on the animations it uses rather than the algorithms that layout the nodes and it got me thinking about creating a new library where you can specify functions for layouts based on child/parent positions. This would initially be just to create a simply flow chart style diagram but later functions for [[hyperbolic graphs|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperbolicTree]] and radial graphs (the visualisation technique used in [[TiddlyTagMindMap]]) could be defined and each visualisation technique would be interchangeable. I think this would be essential but require some work :). Will keep you posted..

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Why straight people should care about LGBTI rights

<html>
<p>Yesterday was the launch of the new website for ILGA. I was not there and in my absence I recorded a personal message  which was played during the event explaining from a personal perspective how this project has affected me. On behalf of those who were also unable to make it, I have uploaded it for your viewing pleasure. For all those who were at the event I hope you enjoyed yourselves!</p>

<object width="400" height="300"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9067239&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1" /><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9067239&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="300"></embed></object><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/9067239">Why straight people should care about LGBTI rights</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user2427416">Jon Robson</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

<h2>Transcription</h2>

<p>Hi my names Jon. I've been working for BT for just over 2 years now and I joined on their graduate program.</p>
<p>It might surprise a lot of BT Kaleidoscope (<a href="http://btkaleidoscope.co.uk/">BT's network for LGBTI people</a>) members that I'm actually straight. When I've had drinks with them previously I'm pretty sure most of them 
assumed that because I was hanging around with them I must be gay. I was one of them. And likewise i feel that when I talk to my friends and work colleagues about the work I'm doing I'm pretty sure they felt the same
I'm pretty sure that most of my friends now think I am gay as over the last year I've had a quite strange change in behaviour in that I've been talking about LGBT stuff quite a lot. When India decriminalized homosexuality 
for instance I was on Facebook and Twitter saying "yes it  is okay to be gay in India!". In hindsight maybe not the best idea.</p>

<p>
When I first joined this project I didn't really have any knowledge of LGBTI issues and what reason did I have. I'm straight and to  me LGBTI issues were exactly that they were issues for LGBTI people not for people like 
me. However when you reflect on it I'm sure many people in the audience have friends or work colleagues or maybe even family members that are gay. I personally do I have several friends from university, several friends I've 
made through this project and I know personally that if I took one of those people and put them in a country where the understanding of homosexuality was completely different from ours I know they would have a problem with that 
and it is quite a scary thought. Imagine that person you care about in a country like Uganda or Iran for instance.
</p><p>
I remember seeing the map for the first time. We took a PDF document - the state homophobia report - and inside this pdf document there was a list of all the laws and the legal status in all the countries around the world. We 
took that pdf document and put in on a map. I remember being shocked at seeing how many countries were red and said that homosexuality was illegal. I remember seeing another map which was punishments for male to male 
relationships and that really shocked me as I realised there were countries in the world that not only said that homosexuality was illegal - something i didn't even see as a crime - but they were saying this was a crime 
punishable by the death penalty.
</p><p>
The Your Stories section was particularly interesting for me. The Your Stories section allows anyone to come on the website and to publish a personal story about themselves and their life in a certain country. So for instance 
if you went to Italy and had a holiday there you could report back on how it was for you. Did people shun you in bars? Did you have issues in hotels because you wanted to share a bed? That sort of thing. There was one 
particular message on that section of the site which was particularly moving for me. It was from an Algerian guy he was 35 years old and he published a cry for help. He was saying he was close to suicide because of the 
homophobia and lack of acceptance he had just for being homosexuality. And as more and more people contribute to that section it really brings to life that these are more than just laws these are more than just writing on a 
piece of paper they make their lives horrible just by there very existence.
</p><p>
It strikes me that I'm not the only straight person that should care about these laws. I'm sure there are many politicians that are straight, straight people like me and I believe that these people haven't thought twice about 
these laws either, just like I hadn't before. What if one of those politicians had a son and that son came out as gay and has a really bad experience. is it only then that the politicians will take notice..
</p><p>

Being involved in this project has been quite a journey for me. I've come from this guy who has no awareness of LGBTI rights to someone who has a lot more knowledge then most people. Still to this day when I see things in the 
news about anything LGBTI related I notice it and I never would have noticed it before.
</p><p>
I really hope that when you leave this you will <a href='http://ilga.org'>look at the website</a>, look at all of the maps, read some of the articles and start that journey that I did.And please don't forget that what we are 
talking about here is love. I'm sure many people in the room, watching this video will agree that you can't help who you fall in love with. You are who you are and what right does a law 
or a country have to say that you can't love that person. And I'm sure many people in this room do have loved ones, people they care about that are gay. As straight people we need to care. </p>
</html>

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Work and Email and Colocation

I have recently begun to limit my e-mail usage and I've finding it quite productive for my work. I was finding too many distractions even after filtering out many of the regular e-mails I get with information on building works, what's going on in my line of business, what's going on in the graduate scheme I'm part of, what's going on in the world of my company. Very little of it is relevant to me, and overly worded with [[BB|Business Bullshit]] most of the time. I tend to check it a few times in the morning and a few in the afternoon and just code in between. Sadly though it's quite a lonely existence, as my team are vastly spread out over 2 countries so there is no one to chat to. All I have is a scrum call in the morning and any required phone calls/instant messenging conversations during the day.

I still haven't quite worked out how to fill that void in a non-colocated environment. If I get an answer I'll get back to you.

tags:

links: Business Bullshit

York

I spent 3 lovely years of my life here at The University of York and will always think of this place fondly.

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__THE_PROCESS_HAS_FORKED_AND_YOU_CANNOT_USE_THIS_COREFOUNDATION_FUNCTIONALITY___YOU_MUST_EXEC__()

Just sharing a very weird error message I have just troubleshooted. Suddenly my apache server starting playing up throwing an internal server error "__THE_PROCESS_HAS_FORKED_AND_YOU_CANNOT_USE_THIS_COREFOUNDATION_FUNCTIONALITY___YOU_MUST_EXEC__()" whenever I ran the command urllib.urlopen or urllib2.open.

It seemed that for some reason this was happening because  of a php module i was loading in my httpd.conf file
{{{
LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
}}}
Simply uncommented the line, and my problems went away. Computers can be weird sometimes. Would love some light shed on this if anyone has any suggestions why this happened!

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a php proxy script that uses curl and a proxy server

I'm not sure of how interesting this will be to my blog following, however this is a problem I continuously come up against in my javascript programming and even with lots of google it seems to take me ages to find a solution. So the problem is this - you have an application that needs to make ajax requests to an external server. To take a real example maybe you want to find out geographical details about the town of Billericay. To do this you can query the url http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/local?v=1.0&q=billericay 

To get this working on your website you need to workaround [[cross site scripting security|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting]] as your website is unlikely to live on the same address as the script you need to call (in this example googleapis.com) To do this you need a proxy script. You create a file called proxy.php which looks at the external eg. the one above and prints the page contents. Now your query url becomes proxy.php?feed=http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/local%3Fv%3D1.0%26q%3Dbillericay - so you access the googleapi url through a webpage living on your own website. As a result, you now you get exactly the same result as the one above produces however now it lives on say jonrobson.me.uk/proxy.php so any page that also lives on jonrobson.me.uk can now access that data through javascript.

Anyway I'm probably talking rubbish now, like I usually am, and getting too techy. The problem is that most companies operate something called a proxy server which prevents employees from getting to pornographic websites, scan outbound content, log usage amongst many things. The proxy is usually configured on your browser level,and as a result your normal proxy.php script which does not use that proxy server typically cannot access any external websites without that proxy. So your code is now useless.

After a day and a half of agony, my colleague Simon McManus finally found a way that our proxy.php script could access websites using our internal networks server via curl using php. I'm pretty sure I will lose this code and that this code is of interest to others so I now paste it below for your viewing pleasure.
Hope it helps you like it helped me..
{{{

<?php
$feed = $_REQUEST['feed'];
$url = parse_url($feed);

// security checks 
$url = $feed;
// Attempt different proxy methods. 
$url =  str_replace(" ","%20",$url);

if(curl_version())
{
  $ch = curl_init($url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10); /* Max redirection to follow */

  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, "your.proxy.server:8080");
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYPORT, 8080);

  curl_exec($ch);
  $info = curl_getinfo($ch);
  curl_error($ch); 
  // HANDLE 301 redirects
  if($info['http_code']==301)
  {
  //echo $info['url'];
  }
  curl_close($ch);
  exit;

  } elseif(readfile()) 
  {
  readfile($feed);
  } else 
  {
  $params = array('http' => array(
  'method' => 'GET',
  'header'=> 'accept:application/json',
  'content' => $data));
  $ctx = stream_context_create($params);
  $fp = fopen($url, 'rb', false, $ctx);
  //echo $response = stream_get_contents($fp);

}

// in some situtations this needs to replace the above line. 
//echo $response = readExternalFile($feed);
?>

}}}

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art

My girlfriend and better half is an artist and I think she's pretty damn good, but I guess I am probably biased and know little about the subject, although I hear art is subjective ;-)

You can check out her art at [[strangeblanket art|http://www.flickr.com/photos/strangeblanket/]]. Feel free to give her an e-mail to tell her what you think I'm sure she'd appreciate it :)

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bad character encoding

this is a good reference : [[ascii characters|http://www.web-source.net/symbols.htm]]

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beer

If you're offering I will have one of the following..
Chimay (blue)
Leffe (brown)
Triple Karmeliet
Beer Lao

Good luck finding them though.

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bloggers

Some blogs I'd recommend:

JP Rangaswami has a cool blog that you can read here: http://www.confusedofcalcutta.com

Jeremy Ruston created [[TiddlyWiki]] without which I wouldn't have a cool website.
read his blog here: http://jermolene.com/

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chinatrip

ebookers
23/01-23/02
Fly with finnair london to seoul. Fly back from Hong Kong (415)
london to hong kong, seoul to london £492.89
london to hong kong, beijing to london £455.60*
Take the Jinchon Ferry from Incheon to Tianjin. It takes 26 hours, but it's 
interesting to sail across the Bohai Sea to get to China, after wards you can take a 
bus or a train to Beijing that's pretty cheap and takes like an hour.

jan 26th is chinese new year

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coffee

I drink too much of this stuff as you can see from all my tweets with the word coffee in it. It can't be healthy.

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couchsurfing

[[CouchSurfing|couchsurfing]] is a worldwide network for making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit.
You post a user profile that is accessible to everyone on the network.
You can search for "couches" in countries all over the world that you are travelling to and contact the owner of that couch to see if you can stay with them for a period of time. If the couch owner agrees you receive their address or details of how to meet them.
There is a feedback system to deal with people who abuse the system.

It's hard to explain really.. just have a look and try it. You might be impressed!
url: http://www.couchsurfing.com

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links: couchsurfing

Any data I find will be published here: [[geojson,kml,svg data|http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/development/data]]. I will get each file documented below by data type.

*kml
*json
**geojson
***World map [[geojson]]

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data visualisation

This is a subject I am greatly interested in as I believe the brain is much more receptive to data in the visual form rather than the textual form.

!Interesting Related Links
[[ibm many eyes|http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app]]
[[infostetics|http://infosthetics.com/]]

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decline of british community

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del.icio.us

http://del.icio.us/

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<<tiddlytagmindmap labeldepth:2 popup:true focus:'data' width:500 height:400 startState:all  ignoreLoneNodes:true exclude:{{['excludeLists', 'imagetag','geotagged']}} zoom:200>>

tags:

links:

foo

test

tags:

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geocaching

[[wikipedia geocaching entry|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocache]]

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geotagging

With geotagging you associate a tag with a physical location. read more on wikipedia [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging].




<<geo width:300 height:200>>

<<geogoto 52.059444 1.155556 10>>

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getting jinja2 on a locked down server

If you are having trouble installing jinja2 on your server (maybe you've got an error 
saying 'unable to execute gcc: permission denied') then you need to disable speedups when you install jinja2.

To do this run
python setup.py --without-speedups install
or remove from setup.py that says:
{{{
        'speedups': Feature("optional C speed-enhancements",
                Extension('jinja2._speedups', ['jinja2/_speedups.c'])

}}}
job done. jinja2 installed.

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links:

I worked on a new website for ILGA, the International Gay Lesbian Association. The website highlights legal status of LGBTI issues in various countries 
through an HTML 5 map (made in canvas by myself) and promotes awareness through articles and user contributions. [[Read the press release|http://www.btplc.com/Innovation/News/travel.htm]] and read [[The story of ILGA, Osmosoft and Me]] as well as my take on [[Why straight people should care about LGBTI rights]].

Want the map on your website..?

tags:

links: The story of ILGA, Osmosoft and Me Why straight people should care about LGBTI rights

A magical scripting language that makes alot of stuff happen in this 
website.

tags:

links:

tags:

links:

mapping

!interesting map based mashups
http://maps.met.police.uk/

tags:

links:

meta-data

tags:

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myinterests

I enjoy quite a few things. These are listed as tags.

tags:

links:

The company I work for as of October 2008. Here is a photo of the team.
[img[/images/osmosoft.jpg]]

find out more about us at the [[Osmosoft official website|http://www.osmosoft.com]]

tags:

links:

So I've been on a bit of a packaging spree the last few weeks, the result is several usable TiddlyWeb packages that should be relatively easy for users to install to their TiddlyWeb instance and get up and running. Many of these are outcomes of other projects I've been working on including a TiddlyWeb which supports voting (more on this later), the work done on [[ILGA|http://ilga.org]], Osmosoft hack days and work on this blog.

So along with [[tiddlywebplugins.geofilters|Less Than Greater Than and Geofilter TiddlyWeb Plugins]] which I talked about in my previous blog post (Less Than Greater Than has since proved redundant in the grand schemes of things due to an improvement in the TiddlyWeb core since it was written... note that geofilters has been updated accordingly), there is also now [[tiddlywebplugins.voting|http://pypi.python.org/pypi/tiddlywebplugins.voting]], [[tiddlywebplugins.twanagerutils|http://pypi.python.org/pypi/tiddlywebplugins.twanagerutils/]] and [[tiddlywebplugins.imrss|http://pypi.python.org/pypi/tiddlywebplugins.imrss]]. All come with tests and provide various enhancements to your TiddlyWeb.

[[TwanagerUtils|http://pypi.python.org/pypi/tiddlywebplugins.twanagerutils/]] is a utility package that could prove useful to people who spend a lot of time managing TiddlyWeb on the command line. It packages up various batch jobs into nice commands. For instance say you just downloaded a TiddlyWiki plugin that assumed you were using fields on your tiddlers "geo.long" and "geo.lat" and plotted tiddlers on a map. Say you already had data in your TiddlyWiki/TiddlyWeb that used the fields "longitude" and "latitude" but stored the same data. Booting up your new TiddlyWeb with this plugin you could run {{{renamefield mybag longitude geo.long}}} {{{renamefield mybag latitude geo.lat}}}and straight away your TiddlyWiki would be prepped for using this plugin. It also supplies other useful methods for making all tags in a TiddlyWiki lowercase/uppercase/whitespace free, a method for mapping tags to other tags and methods for removing fields.

[[imrss|http://pypi.python.org/pypi/tiddlywebplugins.imrss]] is a twanager plugin that allows you to import rss/atom feeds into a bag. When teamed up with a cron job it provides you with a powerful method to aggregate content. Essentially the rules are simple - an atom item which looks like this:
{{{
<entry>

	<title>jon wrote a blog post</title>
	<link href="http://jonrobson.me.uk/foo.html" />
	<updated>2001-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
	<summary>Description of blog post.</summary>

	<georss:where>
    <gml:Point>
      <gml:pos>51.023 0.429</gml:pos>
    </gml:Point>
  </georss:where>

</entry>
}}}
maps on to a tiddler that looks like this (note that the title is made url friendly):
{{{
title: http___jonrobson_me_uk_foo_html
geo.lat: 51.023
geo.long: 0.429
heading: jon wrote a blog post

Description of blog post
}}}
There are ways to get tags and images into the tiddler from the feed just using standard rss/atom namespaces. It should be pretty logical to a user. If it doesn't work how you expect, give me a nudge and I'll tell you why and/or fix up the tool to do it. Advanced users with some python knowledge can tweak it to also carry out variations of the rss item -> tiddler method to meet their own customised TiddlyWeb needs.

[[tiddlyvoting|http://pypi.python.org/pypi/tiddlywebplugins.tiddlyvoting]] is a plugin aimed at rating tiddlers. Once installed it provides the url tiddlyvoting which can be posted to to rate tiddlers. Say for instance you had a collection of 'films' which you stored in a bag called 'films' and a user wanted to rate a film (a tiddler) in that bag (which he was able to read) called "Kill Bill". Typically you might not want to give that user permission to also edit the title of the film or the blurb that you store in it. TiddlyVoting provides a way to bypass the security of a bag to update special fields. Accessing the url {{{/tiddlyvoting?tiddler=kill bill&bag=films&value=-2}}} for instance would update the tiddler with title "Kill Bill" in the bag "films" with the value -2. This value is used to fuel currently 3 fields on any given tiddler: tiddlyvoting.increment (a grand total of all values passed to tiddlyvoting), tiddlyvoting.average (the average value of all values passed to it) and tiddlyvoting.mode (the most commonly passed value). All values passed must be integers and all votes are logged in a bag called tiddlyvoting. It's a bit more complicated then that but hopefully that's enough of an introduction.

I'm hoping you will find these packaged plugins useful. Any questions just holler...

tags:

links: TiddlyWeb Less Than Greater Than and Geofilter TiddlyWeb Plugins

/images/jonrobsonmeuk.jpg_tag_31

About this wiki

AboutBox

AboutMe and Contact Me

Admin

Advanced Filters Plugin

Ajax (java)

Asia

Bad User Interfaces

Bali

Best backpacking hostels in the World

Billericay

Bletchley Park

BlogArchive

Blogging with TiddlyWeb

Bringing performance improvements to ExplorerCanvas

Bristol

Britain loves bad beer?

Budget Airlines

Business Bullshit

CAMRA

CSS

CVs in the world of today

Cambodia

Carbon Footprint Calculator

Coding made easy with jquery and classes

Colchester

ColorPalette

Customer Support for the Techy

Data Visualisation Elsewhere and the importance of folksonomy

DefaultTiddlers

Definition of a TagMindMap

Design- I have been doing it wrong

Directed Edges

Dopplr

Editing GeoTiddlyWiki

Egypt

Email, Notifications, Atom Feeds and WikklyText

Everyone needs good neighbours

Explore My Data

ExplorerCanvas

Facebook

Finally a Family Tree Vertical

Flickr

Frederick Dohr

Future of TV

Genealogy

GeoTiddlyWiki

GeoTiddlyWiki meets google maps static image server

Get some Beefcake for your tiddlers

Getting email into TiddlyWeb take two

God was agile

Goodbye Facebook Chat

HTML Code ASCII Symbols

HTML5 Canvas

Hello Facebook Chat

Hong Kong

How I moved to TiddlyWeb and reaped the rewards

How to add comments on your online tiddlywiki using instacomments

How to base64 encode an image in python

How to cook in TiddlyWiki

Hypergraph

IE6

IE6 ActiveX and Ajax

Ideas for a rainy day

Improved IE experience for canvas graphics just in time for Christmas - reuse is the key!

InstaCommentsPlugin

Internet Communication

Ipswich

Ipswich, United Kingdom

JIT

James Shi

Japan

Java

Jon Robson

Jon is running TiddlyWeb

Jonathan Lister

Keeping your notes cleaner using image tagging

Laos