Hack Day Plans

This weekend is Yahoo!’s Hack Day. And as in the last two years, I’m going to be there. Although (also like the last too years) I’m far to old and soft to consider staying up and hacking through the night. I’ll be leaving at a reasonable time on Saturday evening to get home to a… Continue reading Hack Day Plans

Local Planets

Over the last few years I’ve written a few times about how I’ve been building planets. A planet is a web site which aggregates web feeds on a particular topic and republishes them as a combined web site (almost certainly with a combined web feed as well). One of my earliest planets was Planet Balham… Continue reading Local Planets

Internet Genealogy

In 1992 I started tracing my family history. The two main tools for amateur genealogists (at least until they get back to about 1840) are the indexes of registrations of births, deaths and marriages and the returns from the census which has been taken every ten years since 1841 (there are earlier censuses, but they… Continue reading Internet Genealogy

TV Licence by Email

I’m not the world’s most organised person. I’m forever losing important pieces of paper. Over the christmas break I went through some of what I laughably call my filing system and attempted to impose a little more order. One of the important pieces of paper I found was my TV licence. In an attempt to… Continue reading TV Licence by Email

Technology Failure

Alexanders the estate agents currently have a banner on their web site which proudly proclaims their use of “State Of The Art Technology & Integrated Computer Systems”. The effect of this boast is somewhat lessened by the fact that their site claims that today’s date is “November 18 108”. They also have a “rental property… Continue reading Technology Failure

Combining Google Accounts

Somehow over the last few years I have acquired two Google accounts. One of them is associated with my Gmail email address and the other is associated with my dave.org.uk address. Recently I heard that the G1 phone ties itself to a single Google account when you activate it, so if I’n going to get… Continue reading Combining Google Accounts

Livery Companies – Project Complete

(Well, stage one of the project, anyway.) A couple of years ago whilst I was working in the heart of the City of London, I noticed that my lunchtime wanders were taking me past a few of the City Livery Halls. I’d always been aware of the Livery Companies, but I’d never really investigated them,… Continue reading Livery Companies – Project Complete

More Password Idiocy

When will web sites start to be careful with people’s passwords? Oh, I know that a few sites get it right, but it seems to me that the vast majority still don’t have a clue what they are doing. Here is today’s example. I got an email this morning from a company called RAM (that’s… Continue reading More Password Idiocy

Twitter Hierarchy

For most of the last year, I’ve been working behind a corporate firewall which blocks most social networking sites. It’s therefore only in the last month or so that I’ve been able to use Twitter all day every day. It seems to me that many of Twitter’s users have slightly distorted the sites original purpose.… Continue reading Twitter Hierarchy