Robin Marshall - Open Source Web Development

I’ve been running a $15 portfolio at iPredict for about a month now, and in spite of actually losing money on sensible predictions, I’m really pleased with it. Why am I losing money? Well, when PM.LABOUR shares were low I bought 20 of them, I held on to them figuring the value would improve closer to the election. I then watched them plummet and the value of my portfolio drop to $12 so I sold them to prevent further losses, figuring that as people accepted the inevitability of a National Government the share price would continue to drop in the same way that the US.MCCAIN08 shares have. How wrong I was, a few surprise polls and cooperation from the greens has seen the share price recover, so I’ve made the possibly foolish move of buying 5 more.

Successful outcomes for me so far have been predicting the 100 point drop in the OCR and short selling some OCR.9OCT08 stock.

My current portfolio (including short selling McCain) is graphed below:

The 25th birthday of Gnu and the Free Software movement gives me hope for the future of humanity. Stephen Fry discusses the “good science” of free software, how sharing knowledge is simply the right way to go. Ironically, I make a living from commercial software, but it is the free software that inspires me and allows me to make that living.

Link to video

Another Twitter Bot, perhaps a little boring of me, but maybe useful to Auckland Twitter users. Based on the Wellington version I made previously, just a slight tweak to the bounding box.

http://twitter.com/AuckRoadAlerts

A note to AA - if you don’t like me doing this, just let me know and I’ll take it down, it should be driving traffic to your site though.

It seems AA have updated their site using the GeoSmart Mapping API. I noticed they use an AJAX request to grab a JSON encoded object that neatly describes all the information I need. The JSON object not only breaks the incident data down into component parts but also includes NZMG map coordinates so I can choose exactly the bounding box I want to capture alerts from.

This change actually made it easier to take the twitter bot from a flaky hack to something a bit more robust in just a few minutes. I’m not sure if they intended that when they built the new version of the site, but it shows how using a really simple format like JSON for data interchange can deliver mash-up potential.
I hope AA don’t mind me scraping their data, if they do, they are welcome to get in touch.
http://twitter.com/WellyRoadAlerts

I’m interested to see the next Ubuntu 8.10a release introduces 3G networking. It’s pretty exciting to think that an operating system that moves as quickly as Ubuntu will be running on mobile devices. As a web application developer, I see that the mobile browser is a great way to provide a user interface to mobile apps, but that underlying access to the hardware will provide the possibility of the most interesing applications. An open OS will surely make this access much easier.

ReadWriteWeb has an article from a few days ago that discusses the introduction of a universal edit button for wikis or pages which allow user editing. From what I can tell, it would appear in the browser in the same way that the RSS feed button appears. I’m not 100% convinced that people know what the RSS button means, but it’s certainly a lot better than needing to know what RSS means.

Having introduced wikis to two separate workplaces, the biggest hurdle I’ve seen so far for non-web people is the name. “Wiki” is something people don’t understand, even when I try to make the Wikipedia example, they still don’t quite get it. Removing buzzwords is key to getting mass adoption of a technology as fundamental as editing of content.

I love the way wikis enable non-technical people to contribute content, and I’d love to see a lot more public consultation like the Future Melbourne project use it to get wide ranging participation in government, perhaps first we need to just say “go online and participate” without needing to say “use the wiki”.
Article:  Wiki Providers Come Together to Offer Universal Edit Button

After my last post, I realised I hardly ever drive to Wellington anymore anyway, trying not to burn any more hydrocarbons. Perhaps a more political version than WellyRoadWorks, but certainly more interesting to me, is this twitter feed I created which shows the oil price change whenever it moves up or down to the next whole dollar. Whether political, geological, or purely a function of over-eager oil speculators, the message is clear, everything that depends on oil is getting more expensive.
http://twitter.com/OilCrash

Background image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/good_day/152342733/

Scraping content from: http://bloomberg.com/energy

Trying to explain what’s cool about Twitter to a colleague yesterday, I put together a small script that scrapes the road alerts from AA Roadwatch and posts them to a twitter feed.

Why? Well Twitter is unique in that as well as being a social messaging platform, it also acts as a RSS/REST/SMS/IM gateway. I can post a message using the web service, and anyone can receive it as an SMS/text message or in their IM client if they follow it. In a way, it can be seen as a message queue with a publisher and multiple subscribers.

The beauty of Twitter is that I could whip up a first version of the WellyRoadAlerts mashup in just 20 minutes, as most of the work has been done for me.

There are many other examples of this sort of mashup out there, but in the meantime, some Wellingtonians might find this useful.

Check it out: http://twitter.com/WellyRoadAlerts

If you work for AA and don’t like me doing this, please let me know.

The prototype guys have done some great work in improving the $$ CSS selector operation and it’s much faster. If you use prototype, and I use it a lot, this is a major improvement. Old news for some, but very exciting for me. Read the release notes for more information, and check out the speed comparison against other JavaScript libraries.

Technorati tags: prototype, javascript

Jeff Han was at TED again this year, here he is talking about his multi-touch screen interface. Did you see that little circular widget he uses to change the operational context of his touches? Probably inspired by the wheel on the iPod, and a clever way to use the rotational motion of the user’s wrist.

Technorati tags: jeff han, multitouch, ui