PlanB

Entries categorized as ‘Uncategorized’

Some FOAF stats

September 8, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Some FOAF stats from Sindice for something I had to write last week.

All classes

“Agent”, 3.84 million
“Document”, 6.15 million
“Group”, 5.78 thousand
“Image”, 711.23 thousand
“OnlineAccount”, 15.47 thousand
“OnlineChatAccount”, found 324
“OnlineEcommerceAccount”, found 242
“OnlineGamingAccount”, found 240
“Organization”, 10.05 thousand
“Person”, 2.64 million
“PersonalProfileDocument”, 11.7 thousand
“Project”, found 726

All properties

“accountName”, 8.02 thousand
“accountServiceHomepage”, 7.24 thousand
“aimChatID”, 9.54 thousand
“based_near”, 7.35 thousand
“birthday”, 2.48 thousand
“currentProject”, found 648
“depiction”, 696.31 thousand
“depicts”, 617.16 thousand
“dnaChecksum”, found 65
“family_name”, 2.46 thousand
“firstName”, 4.2 thousand
“fundedBy”, found 237
“geekcode”, found 107
“gender”, 15.8 thousand
“givenname”, 24.17 thousand
“holdsAccount”, 9.88 thousand
“homepage”, 1.22 million
“icqChatID”, 22.8 thousand
“img”, 684.38 thousand
“interest”, 64.77 thousand
“isPrimaryTopicOf”, 1.54 million
“jabberID”, 2.98 thousand
“knows”, 1.08 million
“logo”, found 374
“made”, 1.97 million
“maker”, 1.97 million
“mbox”, 3.7 thousand
“mbox_sha1sum”, 43.9 thousand
“member”, 5.53 thousand
“membershipClass”, found 58
“msnChatID”, 7.68 thousand
“myersBriggs”, found 154
“name”, 1.77 million
“nick”, 96.7 thousand
“openid”, 80.24 thousand
“page”, 5.84 million
“pastProject”, found 179
“phone”, found 999
“plan”, found 139
“primaryTopic”, 278.11 thousand
“publications”, found 202
“schoolHomepage”, found 644
“sha1”, found 60
“surname”, 25.32 thousand
“theme”, found 282
“thumbnail”, 2.51 thousand
“tipjar”, found 73
“title”, 2.02 thousand
“topic”, 3.13 million
“topic_interest”, found 90
“weblog”, 300.06 thousand
“workInfoHomepage”, found 505
“workplaceHomepage”, 1.68 thousand
“yahooChatID”, 6.72 thousand

Categories: Uncategorized

CharBotGreen for Identica

June 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment

CharBotGreen is stilll suspended on Twitter but fortunately she’s still announcing away on Identi.ca.

It’s trivial to move a bot from one to the other. In the source for CharBotGreen there’s a line

u = "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"

Using the Twitter-compatible Identica API you I can just replace that line with:

u = "http://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.json"

The only thing to watch for is that Identica stores names as lowercase and the authorisation fails if you don’t send it in lowercase.

Doesn’t work in Identi.ca:

req.basic_auth 'CharBotGreen', 'sekret'

works in Identi.ca:

req.basic_auth 'charbotgreen', 'sekret'

Thats it though – easy!

Categories: Uncategorized

Web Unperson

May 30, 2009 · 8 Comments

A couple of times this week people pinged me to say their browser was reporting my site as a phisher like this. I thought little of it since we’d been hacked before on Dreamhost and WordPress and asssumed we had got on a blacklist somewhere. I rechecked the site, couldn’t find anything, and reported it as an error.

Last night though I found that my twitter bot, CharBotGreen had been suspended as a phisher, and tonight I find I’ve been suspended from twitter too. This is a bit of a blow, and the cause in both cases seems to be that I linked to my blog.

Using Google webmaster tools I discovered that several pages had links to viagra etc pages on them, invisible except in the source, with html inserted through the header php. Firefox and Safari made it difficult to find this out by inserting buggy ‘this is a phisher’ text (with broken links) over the source as well as the page itself.

I’ve now moved off Dreamhost completely – though it might have been simply that I had not updated WordPress enough. I’m on wordpress.com now, so I hope that’ll remove this riskiness.

The whole episode has made me rather depressed. Google has basically killed my online identity. I’m on various lists asking to be taken off, but there’s been no movement since last night, and I had no warning. It seems that there’s a blacklist being used in both cases, not competely sure what it is yet.

Anyway, if it happens to you, take it seriously and deal with it as soon as you can.

Update: I’m actually not on google’s suspended list any more. Hurrah! But still no Twitter. Guess it’s time to move to Identica with that and the madness of #fixreplies. Meh!

2nd Update: I got my Twitter account back this morning (2nd June, 3 days later). CharBotGreen is still suspended.

Useful links:

Google – My Site’s been hacked
Google webmaster tools
Google apps admin page: Google MX Records

Categories: Uncategorized

iPhone working with PoGo

May 26, 2009 · 5 Comments

I’m so chuffed about this -

I bought a Polaroid PoGo inkless bluetooth mini sticker printer having been entranced by psd’s one, but knowing it didn’t work with the iPhone and that I’d have to get my laptop out to print anything. The PoGo is a lovely toy but I was getting a bit irritated by this limitation. The problem was twofold:

  •  iPhone bluetooth is crippled – you can only use bluetooth headphones, and not use it for file transfer. Annoying.
  • iPhone stores pictures as (peculiar) pngs and PoGo only accepts jpegs (which I found by trial and error – I can’t find any PoGo docs on that at all)

The first issue was easily solved – I have a jailbroken 1st gen phone and I just installed iBluetooth with Cydia, which is a app installer based on .deb packages.

The second was more tricky. I looked at ImageMagick for iphone (it’s on Cydia) but didn’t get anywhere. I think I needed to install gcc which was a step too far. Instead I put ssh on it (pretty cool in itself), found some hints on the web, and found that iPhone actually creates jpgs as well as pngs (in /private/var/mobile/media/DCIM/100APPLE – the pngs are in /private/var/mobile/media/DCIM/999APPLE). Weird! Anyway, iBluetooth allows you to browse the filesystem, and send files you find there, and that worked.

So all you really need is iBluetooth as it turns out. Hope this is useful to someone.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: , , ,

CharBotGreen – a Twitter Radio 4 announcement bot

February 3, 2009 · 3 Comments

Update – it’s now charbotgreen2, as twitter never unsuspended charbotgreen.

I wanted to try out the Twitter API and since I was finding myself repeatedly going through the tedium of flipping browser tabs to see what was on Radio 4, I figured I’d make a bot that tweeted what was on Radio 4 instead. This had the added advantage that I could use some half-written code I’d started for a more complex event bot that was turning out to be too hard. I neglected to do a twitter search, however, which would have shown me that there were at least two similar services already working. Ah well. Here’s CharBotGreen

Thanks to: Damian for the name and technology suggestions, @psd for the picture, and Charlotte Green for being a great Radio 4 announcer (as are they all!)

Be warned – do not use my Ruby code as an example of good practice, as it most certainly is not.

What it does

Once a day – pulls down the Radio 4 programmes json (details – what an excellent service that is – beeb++) – and stores it in an H2 database like this, having wiped the database over night (sometime between 1am and 5.20am, when it’s on the world service and no detailed schedule is available anyway):


CREATE TABLE if not exists beeb(DT TIMESTAMP, PID VARCHAR(8), D DATE, T TIME, NAME VARCHAR(255));

So basically I start the Radio 4 day with an SQL representation of today’s schedule page. I started with PID as UNIQUE but then realised that the same PID could be broadcast twice a day.

Every 5 minutes – checks in the database for anything starting in the next 5 minutes and sends a tweet, either ’starting now’ or ’starting in a few minutes’ depending on the exactness of the match

SELECT * FROM beeb WHERE D = '#{d}' AND T >= '#{t}' AND T < '#{t1}';

where t is the current time and t1 is the time in 5 minutes (d is today’s date).

Technology

I use ruby and H2 over JDBC. You can see the every 5 minutes and daily scripts and the readme.txt. Why these technologies? Well, I wanted to learn Ruby and using Jruby means that you can use many ruby libraries but you can also access Java classes which is handy for using the H2 database. Why H2? well it’s a self contained, in-memory, SQL-compatible database written in pure Java, so I could keep everything in one directory. For something this lightweight there’s almost no point in using SQL but I wanted it for something a little more complex as well so it made sense (and makes it nice and easy). I use Json pure for the json parsing (it has to be pure to use it with Jruby). If you want to use Ruby rather than Jruby the SQL bit will take some fiddling with; the rest should be ok as is.

Hashtags

I jumped into a little chat on twitter about what hashtags to use and settled on #pid: and then the PID (such as b00h4r7x). I’m still not sure about this; I put the URL in as well.

It’s all super-simple

But good fun to do. Psd suggested that some Charlotte Green-style amusing incidents would be fun to put in there, though I’ve not worked out how to do that. Another improvement would be if it gave you a little more notice about what’s coming up as @bbcradio4live does.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged:

Expand tinyurls using ruby

February 2, 2009 · 2 Comments

Just a tiny thing but handy and I couldn’t find it anywhere else (I’m new to Ruby and I’m coding by google so don’t expect great style here, but this seems to work):

require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

url = URI.parse "http://bit.ly/1Zw502"
if url.path.size > 0
  # catches case where you get an url like
  # http://planetrdf.com with no slash
  # this catches this but doesn't look it up
  req = Net::HTTP::Get.new(url.path)
  begin
  res = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port).start {|http| http.request(req) }
  case res
  when Net::HTTPRedirection
   uu = res['Location']
   puts uu
  end
 end
end

uu is the expanded url. Is there a better way than this? Is it me or is Ruby documentation a bit thin on the ground? (Thanks to Damian for pointing out to me how tinyurls work – I’d never bothered to look before!)

Categories: Uncategorized
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What I just watched on Joost

October 24, 2008 · Leave a Comment

For fun, I just added a little to this blog in sidebar.php. It shows what I just last watched on Joost, updating itself every 5 minutes.

<script>
updateJson();
function updateJson() {
var url="http://www.joost.com/api/events/lastwatched/libby?json_function=lastW"
var script = document.createElement("script");
script.defer = "true";
script.type = "text/javascript";
script.src = url;
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);
};


setInterval ( "updateJson()", 60000 );

function lastW(obj){
var el=document.getElementById("lastW");
var id=obj.events[0].publicId;
var title=obj.events[0].title;
var thumb=obj.events[0].thumbnail;
if(el){
el.innerHTML="Libby just watched: <a href='http://www.joost.com/"+id+"'>"+title+"</a> on <a href='http://www.joost.com/'>Joost</a>";
}
};
</script>


<p>
<span id="lastW"></span>
</p>

I’m biased of course but I think this is pretty cool. Numerous (alpha, check the heath warning) APIs are at http://www.joost.com/doc/api. Allan and Toni_H have been playing around too.

Categories: Uncategorized

this post sponsored by danbri.org wordpress installation services

January 13, 2008 · 2 Comments

Testing a wordpress blog for libby. 1234 is this thing on.

Move along, nothing to see here. Yet.

–danbri

Categories: Uncategorized

Hello world!

January 13, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Categories: Uncategorized

Insert terrible pun here

February 18, 2007 · Comments Off

Update: Sorry I have *no* invites left. None whatsoever :-)

hooray

For the last year and a bit I’ve been working on Joost (formerly known as the Venice Project), an IPTV product, in various capacities, most of them managery. Great fun, very cool people, so very very tired… There’s a lot of RDF under the hood, including Jena and Redland (see Leo’s post for some more detail), plus there’s a lot of open source stuff in there too, and the whole player is based on Mozilla (Allan has a little more on that). There’s SVG in there too…
If you want to see what we’ve been working on I have a bunch of invites to give out, mail me at Joost if you want one – I figured that’d be preferable than spamming friends with invites they don’t want.

Categories: Uncategorized