All posts of Ian

Sharing the Mac OS X clipboard with X11 apps

I’m using WingIDE on my MacBook and I couldn’t get copy/paste to work between WingIDE (running in X11) and native apps.  This meant copying URLs and code snippets was impossible…hugely frustrating! There is a simple fix, as outlined here just run the Property List Editor, open the specifed .plist, tick the 5 checkboxes, save, restart […]
15 years ago

£5 App Music-Themed Xmas Special

On Wednesday night we ran our music-themed £5 App Xmas Special (fivepoundapp.com). It was fab!  John and I had a fab time organising things and watching the night run so down-to-earthly – it seems that many others did too.  I particularly like: “I bloomin’ love £5 app! The event that’s happy to be itself, and […]
15 years ago

A quick look at four chatbots

This is a quick review of four chatbot that are easily found on the web.  I’ll take a look at the granddaddy ELIZA (wikip), A.L.I.C.E. (wikip) which uses AIML, Fake Kirk (with speech synthesis and a face) and O2’s Ask Lucy. The goal of these chats was to see how each of the bots broke […]
15 years ago

Printable local data sheet for visitors?

Here’s a simple idea to help visitors to a new area.  Maybe it’s been done before and someone can leave a comment about it? The problem – when you visit a place you don’t know you have no idea what you need to see, where to get a map, which pubs and cafes are nice, […]
15 years ago

How I’m writing The Screencasting Handbook

Many people have asked why I’m writing a book without a publisher.  The story has interested a bunch of people so I’ll outline the basics here. Update: there’s a related article by Marc-André Cournoyer covering how he wrote his “Create your own programming language” eBook. I started writing The Screencasting Handbook in the middle of […]
15 years ago

Building a high performance cluster with Ubuntu 9.10 and Eucalyptus

I’ve spent the last day (almost) installing Eucalyptus on Ubuntu 9.10 to create a mini ‘high performance computing’ environment.  We’re testing the concept and could build 100+ machines if the prototype works as expected. This is a running log of my notes, for this post I only have a partial setup. Note – I have […]
15 years ago

£5 App Christmas Special – Weds 2nd December

John and I are very pleased to announce our upcoming music-themed £5 App Christmas Special on Wednesday 2nd December, 8-11pm at Hector’s House in collaboration with the lovely Playgroup guys.  Please do the usual – sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to brew for you all.  If you don’t know what this […]
15 years ago

Vicinity-like iPhone app for ‘nearby people I’ve met on-line’?

Another from the crazy ideas dept…. Whilst preparing for the ‘How to build a network‘ workshop last week I got to wondering about conferences and groupings of geeks (and Normals, but they need to catch-up with our tech first). Why is it that when I’m at a conference or event, I don’t know if anyone […]
15 years ago

“How to Build a Network” workshop for WiredSussex interns

Yesterday I ran a workshop on ‘How to build a network’ for 35 WiredSussex interns.  The presentation is clear, the links below will help. During the talk I linked to some OpenStreetMap early progress videos for London 2006- and worldwide-2008 edits, these demonstrate a nice graphical result of building personal networks around a project. Early […]
15 years ago

Internship ‘How to build a network’ workshop

Tomorrow I run a workshop for WiredSussex to teach 35 interns ‘how to build a network’.  I’ll write an update that links to my presentation after the workshop, here I want to link to a few examples I’ll probably use. Update – I now have a full write-up which makes this post obsolete. OpenStreetMap early […]
15 years ago