Hotmail enabling spammers

I’ve had a spate of people complain to me recently that they are receiving spam from my address.  My first reaction was to change my email passwords, which are different from any other passwords I use, and even set up 2 factor authentication on my Google accounts.  But the emails continued, so further research was required.

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Another crackpot scheme

Whilst development of YAMS continues apace (and there’s actually people using it!) another Minecraft idea has wormed its way into my head and just won’t get out; What if I generated every possible Minecraft world and put them all up on the web for people to pick their favourite?

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When did Apple stop innovating?

I’ve only recently got around to checking out the new iOS 5 features, and as I’m due an upgrade, whatever is in there is going to make a big difference to my next phone purchase.

On paper, the list of features looks spectacular, but having spent a week with an Android and been researching smartphones heavily for a month or so, all of it looks familiar.  Let’s have a quick look down the list:

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The music service I really want

Now that Spotify have completely ruined their free offering I have been wondering how to fill the void.  I could always upgrade to premium, right?  Well, no;  I don’t want to spend £10 a month on a service where albums dissappear and metadata is wildly incorrect with no way to report or correct it.  I’d rather spend £10 a month on real CDs, but to do that with any discipline would require quite some effort and financial tracking, so I want someone else to do it for me.

This is something I wish Amazon, Play (who don’t even seem to have wishlists) or any of the large music sellers would do and surely can’t be too much of a stretch from how they already operate.

Combine the principals of subscription services, wishlists and actual real CDs in the post.  It works something like this:

  • Subscriber pays whatever they want a month (say £5)
  • They make a list of all the CDs they want, in priority order, a bit like wishlists and LoveFilm combined.
  • When the balance on their account reaches enough to purchase the top CD on their list, it’s shipped out and removed from the list.

With something as simple as that we can all be buying tonnes of CDs a year, increasing our music collections, keeping CD production alive and pumping vast reserves of cash into the poor hard done by record companies.

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Now Playing: Maybeshewill – Sing the Word Hope in Four Part Harmony

This sits firmly in the “post-rock” genre, instrumental and epic in places.  There’s some excellent riffage in there without a spot of widdling, although some of the voiceovers can be pretentious, what else do you expect from an instrumental post-rock album?  They’ve got 2 full albums on Spotify and “Not for Want of Trying” is equally as good as this.  Track 4 is included below, I challenge you not to tap your foot or nod your head along to that one.

Spotify Link | Last.Fm Link | Amazon Link

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Now Playing: The Contortionist – Exoplanet

The Contortionist - Exoplanet album coverThis is exactly the kind of thing thing I love, described by Last.Fm as “Progressive Deathcore” (even though I have no idea what that actually means) it’s loud but sweeping and beautiful in places.  Second track of the album is linked below but worth starting from the beginning if this is your thing.

Spotify Link | Last.Fm link | Amazon Link

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Goin’ through changes

If anyone is still paying attention here (and Google hits say there are still people coming here) then they may notice some changes going on.

A lot of what most people would consider “useful” content is being moved to my work’s blog, leaving this site as a more personal and “fun” blog.  All entries and pages relating to MovableType and YUI Editor are now over there and will be removed from here.  Don’t worry, I’ll 301 them all so if you are using the feeds or have bookmarked links you shouldn’t have to worry.

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Jumping Ship

After years of evangelising MoveableType, I’ve found it less and less suitable for a simple personal blog, so I’m trying out the competition.

I’ve used MT since v3, and still believe that MT5 is the best solution for my work’s multi-blog site. However as MT4 development is drawing to a close I tried Melody, but sincemigrating my personal blog to Melody I’ve been beset with problems. The latest meant I couldn’t access any templates, I just wanted to add Google Analytics code to this site, but an hour later I still hadn’t managed it. As I said, I’m no MT newbie, and I was still blocked from doing this simple task.

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Holy Smokes

So, yeah, I last updated this site in May 2009, whoops!

Coming back here because I’ve always wanted to get more stuff out but didn’t want to alienate the people who came here just for the YUI stuff, but since that project has largely disappeared, I’ve probably alienated them all anyway.   If you’re one of those people suddenly seeing this in your feed reader, sorry but that plugin probably isn’t going anywhere further.  It’s got it’s own repository on Github, so fork away if you still feel it is a requirement for you.  It died largely through my own abandonment of YUI as an editor, then Six Apart’s practical abandonment of Movable Type.

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YouTube lightbox

For a while now I have been toying with making my own JavaScript libraries built around the YUI libraries, as there were things out there I wanted but didn’t seem to exist in a YUI flavour.

I since found that exactly what I wanted didn’t seem to exist in any flavour (please correct me in the comments if I am wrong).
The two things I wanted straight away were image and video lighboxes.  Yeah, an image lightbox in YUI exists, but I want to just add a class name to a link and magically have the lightbox do all the work, and I wanted the same for youtube links.  I believe that making things as simple as possible for people, means they are more likely to use it.
So I went and made them.
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