27 Jan 2012 by Dave.

Twitter bought Blacktype in July 2011 and as part of that acquisition got hold of Storm. This is a press release detailing the publication of Storm’s code on Github.

They position Storm as a parallel messaging, disk less system.

M Davey asks if this has much use in Capital Markets here.

I wonder if ‘Time Series Order’ might not be a serious inhibitor to its adoption, but Chief Engineer, Nathan Marz on his blog seems to think it could be part of the answer to a large number of problems.

Posted in messaging, twitter, social media, technology | No Comments »

02 Oct 2011 by Dave.

Delicious, the social bookmark site was taken over by avos.com during the week. They have rapidly refreshed the javascripts used for storing one’s bookmarks directly from the browser and are communicating with their new users via their beta blog. There remain some problems with the Firefox Addin but the Chrome extension seems pretty solid now. 4th Oct 2011

I have saved a few bookmarks  using the Firefox addin, but when I go to my links page, http://delicious.com/DaveLevy, the most recently displayed link, dates from before the change of control.The AVOSblog article, …Missing Bookmarks... doesn’t seem to apply. The browser instance that made the save’s toolbar reports the saves. I have now re-installed the Yahoo addin, cleared the cache and re-synced the bookmarks on the browser used to make these saves. These ’saves’ were not visibile, however, ’saves’ from the home system have been written into the save feed and are visible using the addin widgets but are at the top of the feed.  When using a browser at the delicious site, the display date saved is corrupted and displays HTML visible spaces. This can be seen by filtering on tag=wordpress. 4 Oct 2011

I have replaced the Yahoo add-in for Firefox with the new ‘bookmarklet’, this saves to the same browser’s view of the link list, but doesn’t prompt i.e. autocomplete  tags as I type.

I have followed the instructions in the beta blog article, Firefox Extension Fixed, and cleared the cache. In fact, I reinstalled the addin for good measure on the Dell desktop. Still missing.

The Chrome add-in/extension was also misbehaving, I have uninstalled and re-installed it. It seems to be working fine now. I also bookmarked something from the Mac and Firefox this a.m. using the bookmarklet. I need to test the addin/extension.  3 Oct 2011

My ’saves’ on the 2nd October were using the bookmarklet, which I have saved  onto the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox on my home Dell desktop. 2 Oct 2011

I am sure you’ll fix it.

Posted in delicious, web, social media, technology | No Comments »

17 Sep 2011 by Dave.

I just love Pointless, the BBC Quiz show, where contestants have to show they know more than an audience by answering questions, obscurely, to obtain low scores. The final question requires that the contestants find an answer which none of the audience has mentioned. The hosts, Alexander Armstrong & Richard Osman do their best to make the contestants welcome,  it’s a really gentle atmosphere, teams get two chances to play so if they’re very unlucky with the questions they don’t feel badly treated, the prizes are typically British quiz show, and the contestants have been  polite to each other, with losing teams often congratulating their victors. In order to win you need to know a lot, understand the tactics of the game, and have a lot of luck. Part of the fasincation in watching the show is to test how much of these factors you have yourself, aided by the fact that they show you the answers to the questions, and the scores they obtained.

In the final round, a question is posed and to win, the final team has three chances and 60 seconds to find a pointless answer. These final questions can have many answers, for instance, they have asked

• John Grisham Novels
• Booker Prize Winners
• Keanu Reeves films
• Thatcher’s Cabinet Ministers (pointless…ho ho).
• Labour female MPs elected in 1997

I suddenly realise I have never seen a final geography question.

However, they are missing a trick, while the presenters, Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman, in particular, make sterling efforts to involve the home audience, the recap of the answers, is always too short, and often incomplete. It seems that 75 of the Labour female MP’s were pointless and this was too many to show. (I reckon I got two!) That’s what the internet’s for, Dudes. They must also have some questions that they don’t use.  I’d have thought a “join in” online page at the BBC site would be awesome, it might have to be published after the episode goes off line, but they do it for “Only Connect”. If they hosted it inside the bcc player site they have the social network infrastructure in place, they could even offer an online competition with other fans. The number of comments on Osman’s Blog show how big an appetite for chat about this there is.

Posted in social media, pointless, bbc, culture | 1 Comment »