http://kirrus.co.uk/stuff/eaccelerator-0.9.6.1.tar.bz2
http://kirrus.co.uk/stuff/eaccelerator-0.9.6.1.zip

You can see the files sha1sums here: https://eaccelerator.net/wiki/Release-0.9.6.1

Alternatively, if you’re scripting (we are), you can use the following to get my (‘up-to-date’) version:
http://kirrus.co.uk/stuff/eaccelerator-latest.tar.bz2

bz2.. because that’s the version we use here

Linking
IMHO the Web 3.0 revolution will consist of websites and web apps from the 2.0 era becoming closer.
I think that it will become easier to link together content across web sites to create new forms of content.

In the Web 2.0 revolution was helped by blogs with authors linking together information in posts. (This I might add has been very useful to combat the slew of dodgy sites that  sit high in Google’s results but just spit back the search terms as results, nullifying your search. Nowadays I find use ‘blog’ in search terms, especially when looking for reviews.)

I can’t wait until someone puts together a really good way of visualizing all this data. As the internet grows the importance of being able to sift through the available data and collate it into collections on particular topics is becoming paramount.

I have been looking out for a system to visualize my internet links in some kind of subject oriented way with a timeline / time axis. So far the only thing that comes close is Basket Notes for KDE (screenshots). If only that were a web app! (if i had the motivation and focus, I’d turn my meagre php programming skills to that task myself, but alas like my sketched design for a social networking site written in my design book pre the advent of facebook, I think I’ll leave it to someone else!)

I guess the closest web based similar system (I’m aware of) currently in operation is Wikipedia!

Retrieval
Look at the useful plugin Ubiquity, and the fantastically useful cross platform application and search launcher, Launchy for example. Both of  these are designed to give us quicker access to and search abilities for our data.

Workflow
Making computers integrate seamlessley to our lives rather than inturpting them.
Today the focus of computing is shifting from _ to the workflow -how we get things done. I think this is essential because your average end user doesn’t care how things get done, just as long as they can get done.

Digital Photographers often use a prescribed workflow when working on digital photos – ‘developing them’ as it were to bring out the best. PCPro Magazine suggests 1. Levels and Curves then 2. Colour adjustment followed by Sharpening. But I’m talking more than just the best sequence of events to achieve the best quality output. I’m talking about the process itself.

Our brains think sequentially, each action is broken down step by step and steps performed one after another. A break in our concentration, or ‘flow’ impacts our effectiveness. This is especially true for people with ADHD (like me). Reducing the need for context switching.

“Consider that it takes 15 minutes for a developer to enter a state of flow.  If you were to interrupt a developer to ask a question and it takes five minutes for them to answer, it will take a further 15 minutes for them to regain that state of flow, resulting in a 20 minute loss of productivity. Clearly, if a developer is prevented from flowing several times during the day their work rate declines substantially. “

(Retrieved from http://softwarenation.blogspot.com/2009/01/importance-of.html)

For example, downloading pictures from your digital camera and uploading them to facebook. Recently I’ve been using ‘Windows Live Photo Gallery’. Ugh, I know, but the point is it that Vista offered it to me, and it was an easy to find and add plugin that allows me to upload direct to facebook, where most of my photos end up these days.

To download the pictures I simply flip out the SD card from my camera, and insert it into my laptop (useful laptop buying advice)’s SD card slot

And that’s the point, people will take the path of least resistance/effort.

Path of least effort Principle
According to my observations
like people walking down the high street striving to avoid collision with other pedestrians, my observation leads me to believe that everybody is operating on the principle of least effort, where the person you are approaching will attempt to take a path that will need the least amount of diversion from their original path in order to avoid collision, while you yourself will attempt to do the same thing.

how does this come back to web 3.0?

How many clicks does it take while searching for some long forgotten but relevant piece of information before a user will get bored and move on? [research advertising, google hotspots, number of clicks] Could it be as low as 3, and as high as 8?

Unified User Interface
Facebook for example. I was trying to find my note on laptops to include a link in this article, but alas my click on Notes from the home page only brought up a ‘feed’ of Notes. Where I ask is the Filter options that preside on everyone’s profiles? Why can’t I select ‘Just Garreth’ here too?

If something like that is useful, it should also be Unified, that is available everywhere!

In the time it took me to discover the ‘workflow’ to access my notes in this ‘fast/bitesize/information obsessed’ age my poor overloaded ADHD (video: ADHD impact on life) brain might easily have become bored frustrated and more importantly distracted and moved on…

Availability
Cloud computing and Rich Web Applications (Blog: Google and Rich Web Application)

Organisation of Data
TOC

Concise
It’s an inverse law – As our attention spans decrease, so the conciseness of the data we consume must increase ceterus paribus.

Why do my spidey senses tell me facebook, not google may be the winner in the Web 3.0 revolution?

1. Reduce the need for context switching
2. Make data transfer between devices, programs and operating systems simpler and more unified
3. Make data easier to locate and retrieve
4. Make locating an open program/context switching easier and more natural – in doing so reducing the impact on flow by automatically knowing how to get back to the other program/where it is.
5. Design and create more natural interfaces – e.g the Apple’s iPhone and iTouch.
6. Consider how context switching works in our heads and apply this to UI.
7. Work on unified User Interfaces as not to interupt flow

What do you think? Leave some comments of your vision, and what you think of my ideas.

I was writing a batch script to mount up a network share that involved checking to ensure my NAS unit was turned on. The script is scheduled to run after the computer resumes.

What I found out is that the built in version of Ping.exe is terrible at telling you whether the ping has returned successfully or not. I was checking the ERRORLEVEL – %ERRORLEVEL% variable to find out what ping was returning. It should be 0 for success and 1 or higher for a failure.

What I found was, i was getting replies from the local pc (dunno why, leave me a comment if you know) and ping was reporting a success even though the correct pc failed to reply. The solution?
Replace the Windows ping.exe with Fping. It has a lot more options and appears – from some initial quick tests – to correctly report the errorlevel.

Kudos to Wouter Dhondt for developing it. I’ll update this post with any more news!

Fping vs Ping errorlevel return values

Recently my eyes have been a little strained using the computer. I think it probably has something to do with the misplacement of my reading glasses somewhere at University. Hopefully I’ll find them before my Mum finds out and goes nuts lol.

Anyways to reduce browser related eye strain, I found a handy script for Greasemonkey (in Firefox) that kinda inverts the webpage/makes it less white and a bit easier to read (higher contrast). Its not perfect but it’s a handy hack until I can do some more hunting for my glasses!

Anyway enough text, here’s the links:

Invert web page colours (lifehacker)

Direct link to Greasemonkey script

Options are customisable, so you can restrict the websites it works on…

Oh, and here’s a screenshot:

Simple fix/hack – make Firefox save PDF files rather than open them.

1. Open Options (Tools \ Options in Windows and Edit \ Preferences in Linux)
2. Open the Applications tab
3. under ‘Adobe Acrobat Document’ change the value of the dropdown to ‘Save file’

1. OK the change
2. All done. Hopefully that’s one less annoying crash to worry about!

Ps get Session manager to save yourself loosing a window full of tabs or having to do a horribly manual procedure like recovering tabs from a accidentally closed Firefox window.

That’s all for today, I’m afraid. Not much else to talk about

Hopefully I’ll be able to produce some proper posts next week!

There are various reasons for this, mainly todo with connection speed.

What I have at the moment is:
#/bin/sh
terminator -x ssh user@site.com wget -qc -t 3 -o ~/wget_testlog ftp://anothersite.com/file.ext \\& \& &


I want it to kick off, ask for a password to login via ssh and then go away…
I would like to be able to set the location for the download to ~/www/files/

I was planning to place this script in /usr/bin and install it in firefox using the code/link provided on this blog: Wget from firefox

Can anyone complete my solution with the correct syntax, or provide a better solution (preferably KISS)?
I’m more of hacker than an expert IMO and I know when I’m out of my depth!

Cheers,
Garreth

You may think when you visit, for example, bbc.co.uk that it’s just “there”, and not worry about how, but my job is dependent on the how. The error messages you see when a website isn’t working are also very descriptive, but quite cryptic if you’re not in the know.

All websites are hosted on servers. A server is just a computer which we use to serve others, so in this case, serve a website, or provide email services. Normally, a server is a rackserver, designed to fit in a small space with a lot of other computers in a datacentre, far, far removed from that big beige box that allows you to browse the internet.

When you visit a website, a lot of different things are happening in the background. Firstly, your computer looks up the computer address with the domain name you just visited. Say you just hit my site, “kirrus.co.uk”. Well, the internet addressing system, that tells your computer where to look for the website is based in numbers. So, your computer asks special servers on the internet, we call “Domain Name Servers”, what the address is for that website. In this case, they’ll reply “80.87.131.49″. Your web-browser, firefox, will then ask for “kirrus.co.uk” from my server “80.87…”). Everyone has one of these IP addresses, even you. Go to http://itempeter.com to see yours

Once my server has the request, it then sends the web-page back to your computer.

What is a webpage?

A webpage, as your computer sees it, is a collection of a couple of languages. The most basic is “HTML”, or “HyperText Markup Language”. This was designed to allow you to quickly put together a webpage – all you do is wrap (or mark up) the text you want with the flags you want. For example <b>word</b> tells your computer to make word bold, so, you see: word

You can see the HTML that makes up this page by clicking on “View” and then “View Source” in your web-browser.

That’s the most basic level. It gets a lot more complex than that under the skin, with extra languages running on your computer (JavaScript, CSS [Cascading Style Sheet]), and on the server (PHP – PreHypertextProcessor, ASP, perl, python, MySQL) but they’re all too complex to go into unless you want to create dynamic websites. A good place to go if you want to create webpages is w3schools.com, where they have lots of tutorials on all the major web languages.

Can I just say.. bad bad bad bad bad bad bad?

That and they have no idea how much this will cost to implement. £2bn is too little imho. Technically, implementing this will not be easy, and will cost a lot

On my machine, it and my graphics card drivers just don’t seem to get along. It crashes when anything interesting (or too busy) happens on my screen. A lot. The other week, it crashed whilst I was doing the utterly uninteresting task of mining (I set it go, and then go about doing something more interesting, like studying, whilst keeping half an eye on it to make sure I don’t get blown up), but more often it crashes whilst I’m trying to do something more interesting, like helping blow other people’s space ships up.

This game is interesting, in that you are effectively immortal, dying isn’t a problem. The only rule is, only fly what you can afford to loose.

Still fun game

I can give out 21-day free trials, if anyone wants one, let me know. (Disclaimer: If you sign up, I get 30 days free play )