I’ve just launched an unofficial forum for the Yahoo!/BBC Hack Day being held next month in London. There’s already an unofficial wiki, but there’s nothing like a bit of banter before an event

I’ve just learned about, and signed up for, BarCampSheffield.. a BarCamp taking place in the fabulous Northern town of Sheffield in a couple of weeks. For those who aren’t familiar with BarCamps, they’re a chance for a bunch of geeks to get together, give a bundle of presentations about various things, talk, hack, drink, and basically have a really unstructured, casual get together for a day or two.

BarCampSheffield is under the careful caretakership of PlusNet, and they’ve managed to sort out 30 free (single) hotel rooms that are first come, first served.. about fifteen are left I guess, so if you want to go, now’s the time to sign up on the wiki page.

It doesn’t look like many Rubyists are going, perhaps two or three, but I’ll be there and if you want to meet up, just drop me a line or post on the BarCampSheffield forum I just threw together! All looks like it might be a lot of fun.. we’ll see!

Amazon presents you with this question when looking at certain comments on reviews left at their site. But what are they really asking? Is my answer:

* Yes, I think it doesn’t add to the discussion.
or
* Yes, I think it does add to the discussion.

By saying “Yes”, are we agreeing with the “1 person” or affirming the post adds to the discussion?

Gotta love the way negatives mess up our language, haven’t you

There are about 2000 t-shirt concepts in here..

So these two guys (Streeter and Amir) who work for CollegeHumor.com started to have a prank war and all of it’s gone up on video sharing site Vimeo.

First up, Streeter on the attack..

Audio Prank! on Vimeo

Amir gets him back with a fake date..

Prank War Continues… on Vimeo

Streeter hits back hard..

The Prank War Goes On! on Vimeo

But not as hard as Amir’s totally cruel infringement on Streeter’s side gig as a stand-up comedian..

Prank War Continued: Streeter Bombs on Vimeo

Can’t wait to see it continue.

Today, a Feed Digest user reported that his digests using IceRocket were no longer working. I looked into it, and it seems IceRocket had banned our proxy. I rigged up an alternative proxy and it worked for about 50 requests, and then that was banned too. Clearly the ban was automated, and probably reflects a new rule / policy from IceRocket.

I took a look at their robots.txt to see what the deal was, and it turns out they block ALL useragents from their /search directory, which means most of their RSS feeds can’t be used by, er.. anything. A feed reader is an automated client, much like Feed Digest is, so we’re not technically allowed to retrieve their feeds except manually with our browsers Of course, this all depends on the definition of a ‘bot’.. more on that later.

I decided to put Google Reader to the test to see if they respect robots.txt rules, and.. no! I could subscribe successfully to an IceRocket feed ( http://www.icerocket.com/search?tab=blog&q=robots&rss=1 ) from Google Reader, despite IceRocket’s robots.txt file denying it. So, at least Feed Digest isn’t alone in mostly ignoring robots.txt policy (although barely any feeds are usually covered by them since otherwise they’d be made useless) and Google Reader doesn’t follow the rules either. Difference is, Google’s a big guy and doesn’t get banned and Feed Digest is small and does. Perhaps we’ll work it out with IceRocket in a nice fashion, but the point remains and this could easily be an issue with 101 other feed providers out there in the future.

However, the remaining point is.. is a feed reader a ‘bot’? Finding a definitive answer to this isn’t easy. The original “robot exclusion” standard says:

WWW Robots (also called wanderers or spiders) are programs that traverse many pages in the World Wide Web by recursively retrieving linked pages.

In theory this means almost no feed reader is actually a “robot”, although it appears Feed Digest is being treated as such, although this definition of “robot” seems riddled with potential loopholes.

What’s the actual policy here? Are proxies, feed readers, feed “crawlers” (but not recursive ones) and so forth “robots”, “spiders”, or not? Furthermore, would an application that trawled through linked OPML files be a “robot” because it recursively retrieves OPML files? It’s a toughie, but I’m thinking there needs to be some policy set on this by the higher-ups

The latest version of Ubuntu works a treat on OS X under VMWare Fusion.. but don’t even bother trying using Parallels. It’s atrocious. VMWare Fusion also needed some work which involved adding vga=740 to the bootflags, but after that it works great.

This is the best video I have ever seen on YouTube so far. So true!

I don’t have time to do all / any of these, but a few ideas that have been floating around in my head lately:

mod_mongrel: An Apache module to make configuration of Mongrel / Rails apps easier. It starts up the instances, manages the cluster, chooses available ports, does the proxying automatically, etc. Deploying Mongrel/Rails apps at the moment is too “sysadminny”.

RubyScript: A Firefox plugin to allow Ruby to be used in a Javascript-esque fashion in Web pages. Would be good for off-line / intranet / specialist use. This kinda exists in Microsoft world.

Single text box journalling, notes, etc: A single page with a single text box. You type, it stores. If you type with a ? at the start, it then automatically searches for items matching your query and shows them to you. The ultimate simple note taking system. Just a single text box. Like Twitter, but not public. I’ve 90% developed this already but haven’t been bothered to finish it yet.

Web RAD tool with open source runtime environment: Think along the lines of Coghead, but with an open source runtime environment that anyone can use to run their apps. Imagine Delphi or Visual Basic, but simplified, and browser-based with an open source runtime.

There’s probably more, but these are the ones that I keep thinking about for five minutes each day.. so I figured I should note them down.

My book, Beginning Ruby, was published today. Learn more about it (and how to get a copy!) in this short article I’ve written.