Interesting on nostuff.org archive | Chris Keene

Adverts that follow you

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 21:49:15 +0000

Now one of these days I will finally get my ‘moving flat’ epic published, in the mean time you can read my how to buy a property guide. It really is worth every penny.

Part of this process involves buying a sofa which doesn’t suck as much as my current sofa.

Of course, I’m doing this the proper way of procrastinating and constantly looking at websites and not deciding anything (look out for my exciting new book of the same name, the ultimate manager’s guide).

Twitter clients

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:30:50 +0000

From about an hour after signing up to Twitter until very recently I used Twirl on both PC and Mac as my Twitter client. I was happy with it, and still am, but had noticed people using other clients and wanted to see if I was missing anything.

I round up my findings here:

[][2]

Three twitter clients

University league tables combined data

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:52:30 +0000

Last year I collected the University League tables published from various sources and combined them in to one spreadsheet.

I’ve been updating this for this year, i.e. tables published in early/mid 2009 aimed at those starting in 2010.

You can see the UK Combined University league table data Google spreadsheet here and re-order as you please. I’ve updated the three ‘UK only’ lists, and will update the international lists in the near future.

PubSubHubbub instant RSS and Atom

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:51:37 +0000

I have just come across PubSubHubbub via Joss Winn’s Learning Lab blog at the University of Lincoln.

It’s a way for RSS/Atom feed consumers (feed readers etc) to be instantly updated and notified when an RSS is updated.

In a nutshell, the RSS publisher notifies a specific hub when it has a new item. The hub then notifies – instantly – any subscribers who have requested the hub to contact them when there is an update.

Amazon AWS EC2 and vufind

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:53:36 +0000

Today I saw a tweet from juliancheal, which mentioned he was setting up his virtual server on slicehost. I hadn’t heard of this company but their offering looks interesting. This got me thinking about cloud hosting and I decided it was time to actually try out Amazon’s AWS EC2.This allows you to run a virtual server (or multiple servers) in the Amazon cloud, servers can be created and destroyed by a click of a button.

short urls, perl and base64

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:56:20 +0000

One of my many many many faults is coming up with (in my blinkered eyes – good) ideas, thinking about them non-stop for 24hours, developing every little detail and aspect. Then spending a few hours doing some of the first things required. then getting bored and moving on to something else. Repeat ad nauseum.

Today’s brilliant plan (to take over the world)

Over the weekend it was ‘tinyurl.com’ services and specifically creating my own one.

Playing with OAI-PMH with Simple DC

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:15:14 +0000

Setting up ircount has got me quite interested in OAI-PMH, so I thought I would have a little play. I was particularly interested in seeing if there was a way to count the number of full text items in a repository, as ROAR does not generally provide this information.

Perl script

I decided to use the http::oai perl module by Tim Brody (who not-so-coincidentally is also responsible for ROAR, which ircount gets its data from).

Top UK Universities : Combined Rankings

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 01:05:07 +0000

There are various league tables out there for UK Universities. I’ve collected the results from a number of them, a league table based on league tables. This should hopefully help to remove any biases or weaknesses in particular methodologies. The results are further down this post.

I collected results for just 53 Universities, not the full 120 odd that exist in the UK. This was due to laziness, and to be honest I’m more interested in the higher end of the numbers. However I’m fairly sure no university I’ve excluded would come higher that those I’ve included In fact it was originally going to be 50, but as I collected from the various sources I added a few more around the cut off point.

Radio Pop

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 17:38:10 +0000

Radio Pop is an interesting experimental site from the fantastic BBC radio labs.

It is a sort of soical network site for radio listening. It only records your listening through the ‘radio pop’ live streams. I (like many) mainly listen to listen again and the radio iplayer, and they are working on intergrating with both. You can see my profile here.

You can ‘pop’ what you are currently listening to (basically a ‘i like this’ button). I’ve added my ‘pop’ rss feed to my dipity timeline.

blip.fm

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:00:38 +0000

Very first thoughts of blip.fm, and therefore not a proper review, and based on first impressions, not research.

blip.fm is interesting but so far for me has proved a little frustrating in understanding how to get the most out of it.

[For reasons not clear to me I have dumped my thoughts as bullet points (which would have worked just as well as sentences, but can sometimes make it more readable).]

Olympic medals by population

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:05:14 +0000

The table below shows number of Olympic gold medals (for the top three countries) as of 18/8/2008. It also shows the number of golds divided by total population (in millions, otherwise the numbers just look silly). It also shows the number of golds divided by the number people participating in the Olympics for that country.

I couldn’t find anywhere on the web details of the number of participants per country. The numbers used below where based on comments made by a TV commentator, and I could only remember the first digit of each! (I hadn’t expected the need to recall it at the time). Needless to say, take these numbers with a bucket of salt.

mobile phones, desires, frustrations and musings

Thu, 22 May 2008 07:31:34 +0000

I mentioned in my last post that my current phone is a Motorola RAZR2 V8. I got this because of its shape (nice to hold), large screen and large keys. These may not sound like funky features but are actually what are important to me.

I look at the iphone and nokia n95 with envy, the answer to all my problems is in these phones. Why? Which one? Why do I crave these when I do not use the features on my current phone.

Up and Then Down

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:05:06 +0000

Factoid of the day: “Generally, England is over-elevatored”

via ‘Up and Then Down’

Today’s new thing: LRB

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:51:13 +0000

Apparently the London Review of Books isn’t a London based magazine which reviews books. I say this not as a joke, oh you cultral ones. I really do think it is justified of me to presume a publication called London Review of Books is actually a review of sodding books. Apparently it is not. Apparently is has some interesting articles.

Upper Peter…

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:36:09 +0000

…or Northern Rock. ho ho ho

There has been zillions of stuff in the press of late about our friends Northern Rock.

They had the genius idea of rapidly increasing their mortgage business, and instead of using deposits as (a good part of) the supply of money to pay for the mortgages, they instead borrowed from other banks. Borrowing from other banks is normal, but doing it to such an extent was the thing that made Northern Rock different. They got all their eggs and placed them all in a basket. Only they kept needing more eggs. And one day there was no one to give them more.

Amazon : censor reviews of the high arts

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 21:04:42 +0000

Yesterday I posted a link to the reviews page of Katie Price and Peter Andre‘s A whole new world.

In what can only be proof that Jeff Bezos himself is reading my blog on a daily, no – i correct myself – hourly basis, not a day later all the reviews have been deleted. Of course, the arts have always suffered censorship at the hands of facist governments and evil corporations. It’s something we live with, but with just a touch of pride that such dark work was all down to my own little hands typing away on this here web-experience.