It’s been a good evening at Podcampuk. The afternoon’s sessions were quite funny and the band was good. I enjoyed filming the band thanks to the diversity of shots I could aim to get.
We had some interesting interviews of which two were with teachers. One was a University level professor whilst the other was a teacher for 7 year old children. The children were podcasting for students in Australia as well as America therefore we see a nicely different use of the medium. This topic never ceases to surprise people.
It’s been a good complete weekend night and whilst I enjoy podcamp UK I do want to have a rest at home. There’s nothing nicer than getting back from a trip and dumping the bag in your bedroom and walking around feeling much lighter.
The Fun and games of attempting to migrate Instagram data continue. I have now spent several days on the task. I have my Instagram posts currently sitting on a local blog. The challenge has been to migrate it from my local WordPress installation to the main website.
After dozens of failed attempts the SQL database, seperate from this blog’s database was getting filled with lines of data. I was up to over 31,000 pieces of data or more. I didn’t check the term a plugin uses.
From my experience of playing with JSON files they are dealt with differently by each app you use to convert them, so what works in one instance, fails in another. This is true of JSON to XML and JSON to CVS conversion.
I went to PHPMyAdmin and purged two tables and now I’m back to having a blank slate. I cleared both the media and the post tables. I also emptied the uploads folder. I feel optimistic that my next attempt will be successful.
Everyday at least one friend has one of their friends lose their mobile phone and all numbers on that device. As a result you find that there are hundreds of groups with the title “named individual has lost their phone” where everyone is expected to post their mobile number for quick synchronisation.
It would be quite simple to implement. As everyone adds their contact details into the database and as you acknowledge that those in your contact list are your friends you could develop an api that would allow you to download all that information straight to your phone whether HTC, motorola or nokia. It’d be an interesting application to have. It would also slow down the rate of “i lost my phone” which in itself would be a great improvement.
This weekend I’ll be in Paris for another seesmeetup, an opportunity for French speakers to meet in person after getting to know each other online. They’re good fun.
Seesmeet’up a PARIS le samedi 6?
See some of you there
As if zombie slaying, vampire biting and sheep throwing weren’t enough the facebook lunacy has reached Twitter via Zefrank and the stupid colour wars. As if the conversation was not interesting and fulfilling enough for twitter users there is now a movement to create a colour war encouraging people to split into groups.
I dislike this movement for a number of reasons. For a start it’s a complete waste of time because it does not require people to do anything in the physical world. Just change your avatar and you’ve participated. That’s similar to the zombie wars.
As a second point it’s encouraging people to break into smaller clusters and groups, which although fun in certain situations where groups are too big is pointless on twitter. In particular I saw that for one colour the point was not to tweet but rather be tweeted at. Now why would you ask for people to remain silent when the whole reason behind twitter is status updates, firstly and conversations as a side effect of the first.
When few people used hotmail it was clean and e-mails were worth reading but as chain letters arrived so the usability went down. When geocities became popular so pages became flooded with junk, same with myspace and later facebook. I really don’t want to see this junk making its way into the twitter stream. I spend too much time there to appreciate it.
That’s why I won’t participate.