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Back in May I blogged about changing my passwords to be more mobile friendly, The year of mobile/cell? New passwords, now however, being on an iPhone, I’m on a QWERTY keyboard again. It was at this point I remembered a password generator I threw together in May/June time.

It uses quotationsbook.com’s feeds. Basically, you remember the quote, and, in-turn get a secure password. For example, search for keyword anarchy, and you’ll find the quote “Freedom without obligation is anarchy. Freedom without obligation is democracy“, which as a password is “fwoiafwoid“. So, check it out: Password Generator

I’m blogging this for Google, hopefully others find it and get it sorted faster then I did! When I connected my iPhone to Vodafone, I got the error, “Could not activate EDGE: you are not subscribed to EDGE”. You need to update your settings on your iPhone in: Settings > General > Network > EDGE, however I didn’t know what my settings should have been for Vodafone. If you have the same problem, enter the following:

• APN: internet
• Username:
• Password:

(yes, Username & Password are blank, that isn’t a mistake!)

I blogged about fon back in June. Tanya who works there just left a comment, and they’re doing a national survey in the UK to discover if Britain is a sharing nation over at wouldtheyshare.com and they’ll be giving away “hundreds of La Fonera + routers and a trip to Madrid among voters”.

Cool! I’d love to see more Fon hot spots in the UK. Go check it out, win a La Fonera (?) and become a member!

This post is in response to dConstructing The Brighton(cisco) Scene, but for some reason I couldn’t post these comments, but could others (?). No idea what’s happening, but I lost my comment twice. The second time I copied it first, so here are my thoughts.

I’d like to point out that I’m not just involved with Joard, I’m also involved with Sussex Digital, which Josh Russell and I started.

“Ivan hosts a OpenCoffee morning meeting every Wednesday at 10am at the new Costa Coffee on London Rd.”, I didn’t know, anymore information? I know of the Thursday OpenCoffee at the Sussex Innovation Center.

I’d also like to point out that there’s an active community of Flash/Flex/Adobe people down here making it a great place for what I believe is the largest Flash conference in Europe, also later this year, Flash on the Beach.

I blogged a while ago that my my email had become voicemail, if someone writes on my wall, or messages me in Facebook I get “To see what Katy wrote, follow the link below” (this isn’t an attack at Facebook, it’s just most popular at this time, and many other web apps are guilty). Now, I understand they want to up their page views for advertising and so forth, however, what if I don’t want to reply using a message in Facebook? Let me choose my platform of communication..

If you DM (Direct Message) me on Twitter, I get an email with your message in. This is better, as I can read your message straight away. However, what if I want to email my reply, I’d have to; find your email address, replace it in the To field. What if I don’t have your email address? It’s really relevant on Twitter as sometimes 140 characters isn’t enough.

Why can’t I just hit reply? There is no technical reason. Data protection? If you messaged me I’d say there’s a good chance you want me to reply, so, while not a lawyer I’d be surprised. Dammit, let me choose my platform of communication!.

Rant over. Yes I know they’re not stopping me choosing, but they’re not making it easy either.

This will be the third year of dConstruct in Brighton, I missed out on the first year as I was moving house (to Brighton none the less). Last year was a fantastic conference about API’s, and this years theme is user experience.

Tomorrow, at 11am, tickets officially go on sale. Here is your reminder, visit http://2007.dconstruct.org to get yours!

If your coming, find me at the pre and/or post party and introduce yourself… and if the parties are anything like last years you’re in for a treat. Veeliam snapped me throughout the evening, starting with respectable and just about respectable, then ending on a little drunk and attacking designers (so there is no confusion, I wasn’t really attacking Mr. Hicks), luckily I didn’t end up naked, wet, and exchausted after a dip in the sea.

See you there!

About two months ago Martin threw the best web related event I’ve been to, TechTalk in Menorca. The event was great, the speakers were great, being outside for an event was great, and Loic threw videos on his own vpod channel for all to see. While there Martin gave out a free ‘La Fonera’ promocode, so I took him up on his offer.

We’ve joined (as a linus) the other ten or so fon hotspots in Brighton. (for free wifi in Brighton we also have Loose Connection, and Pier to Pier)

I might be preaching to the converted here, but the experience of setting up La Fonera, and managing it makes it so attractive to recommend it to my mom/grandmom/etc. I’ve long had a theory (and many others have I’m sure) that security issues should not at any point be handled by non-geeks.

• They don’t care enough, probably due to lack of understanding
• It frustrates them, again, lack of understanding
• It annoys them, all those pop ups about ’something’
• They’re trying to get a job done, not worry about security!

fon is perfect! Yes, you have to trust fon as they handle security for you, and as Stefans Datenbruch and Michael Kebe pointed out by hacking La Fonera: there is potential for risk. They clarify “[it] wasn’t our intention to harm users or FON in any way”. I don’t think they did, hopefully they made fon stronger as it’s another security issue which hopefully end users won’t have to worry about, the experts at fon can.

P.S. you just got to watch their video: Matador El Café.

Xpay is a product from SecureTrading, I’ve used it a number of times on a number of different projects. So far I’ve been very impressed with the API, however there’s a few things about the Java application that I’d change:

• Logging - yes, I like to know what goes on with my servers
• Debugging - yes, strace and grep let me find what I needed to but I shouldn’t have to and don’t want to
• Process ID files
• The ability to start, stop, and restart a daemon like every other service I use on my server

I enabled three out of four requests (even if logging isn’t as verbose as I’d like, it’s a start) with some bash scripts a few months ago. There’s one for Ubuntu servers, and another for RedHat. Now they’re online and open source, if you use Xpay I hope this makes it a little easier.

What does it do? Gets your friends 3 most recent public photos from Flickr in a mobile friendly page.

How did it come about? Josh and I have recently been discussing doing a few really quick, small but useful web applications. I commented on Seth Levine’s blog post Twittering Away which lead to an email discussion. I asked for his thoughts on Radar and later mentioned I’d been thinking about doing something much more basic, but similar with Flickr, as that’s where my data is. Then I found an hour to hack it together.

It was done very quickly so it’s not without problems (consider it beta), but is a good proof of concept, and I’m enjoying using it. Point your mobile’s browser to http://prototypes.builtbydave.co.uk/f3 to follow your friends photos where ever you are.

Not my usual post, but I’m feeling a little chuffed. See, I don’t really do design. I take a much more technical role these days, and leave artwork and design to those much better then I. However, Rosie is a good friend of mine. She’s trying to break into marketing (p.s. got a position in Brighton/London area email her) and needed business cards of some sort. I suggested moo, and next thing I knew I had Photoshop open…

I’m very happy with the results, and Rosie is excited about her new moo cards. Perfect. I wonder if artworkbydave.com is available.

Technorati tags: moocards minicards moo minicards

Simon and Nat were in town this weekend and just before lunch, while spending time in the Pavilion Gardens the topic of coworking came up. This lead to ‘hot officing’, which is something I’ve talked about for a while and recently started planning for myself. I started thinking about this a while ago as I was getting frustrated with working from home (it’s great, but sometimes lonely) and Brighton being the media/web hub it is the concept just works.

• I don’t want to rent a desk (I’ll go there once a week)
• I don’t want to be tied to a single office (friends, love you all but change of scenery and distractions is healthy)
• I want the flexibility to work from home, from a coffee shop, or any spot with wifi
• I want to met new people and companies

My first ideas around the topic were not in an “office”, but around a “home office”, i.e. There’s room for 4 others to work at my place. The flexibility of working from home, but in a room of people working. One rule, the attendees chip-in and get the host(s) lunch as a mid-working-day thank you (or drinks in the evening etc). A wiki could handle this well.

The same wiki could handle this for offices, with very similar rules. As I work my way around the few offices I’ve already asked, I’ll check if they’d mind being listed in a wiki and start compiling a list…

… anyone outside Brighton care to join? … anyone outside UK care to join?

How cool would it be to browse to a wiki, click Paris, and email checking that next Thursday isn’t booked. Next week I’m in town for two days, and now I have an office as well!

Trying to find the right person? Why not advertise the way a person advertises? Business cards. Get a few printed with additional text “We’re hiring a designer”. That’ll let everyone you meet at the next conference know your hiring, who you are, and your contact details.

If the position isn’t of interest to the card receiver (or their network) the card will get forgotten in the pile or thrown away (after details copied you hope). So my thinking is it’s unlikely (but possible) someone might come looking a year later!

Every year for the past few has apparently been the mobile year of something, 3d/broadband/malware, you name it! I didn’t notice, sure my feed reader told me, but I didn’t notice. I was a laggard when it came to mobile. For a number of years I refused to join the masses, “I didn’t want to be disturbed”.

[Obviously] I got a mobile, and still I didn’t really notice. Now I’m noticing. Now it affects me:

• Photos go from phone to my Flickr from my pocket
• My location I txt to my Plazes
• Presence, yup. I publicly broke up with Twitter, and for the moment am using my Jaiku (this might all change, I do miss Twitter)
• The GMail client is amazing, I’m happy to be without laptop
• … then the rest, Radar, Google Maps, QR codes, Opera Mini, Widsets… and more.

The handsets are not without problems (UI speed seems to be a big issue), but now, the pro’s outweigh the con’s. In my world, I’ve become much more mobile.

My proof, I remember in patterns. My password, no idea what it is - give me a keyboard and I know the pattern. I am updating all my passwords to something that is easier to input on a mobile (and, yes, just as secure for all those considering cracking) as my attention is often on my mobile, not my laptop. For me, this is the year of the mobile.

It’s all become a bit a little complex!

A month or two back, I bit the bullet and decided to join all the social networks I found with at least another friend on. Previously I’d ignored MySpace, Facebook, and the rest of them and dedicated my time to the one I still enjoy most, Twitter. I join them all as a bit of an experiment, looking to learn and analyze how people interact online more. I’m left wondering a few things:

• Why has my usage of smilies has gone through the roof
• Social networks allow you to add “friends”, however, some people have tried to add me that I don’t consider a friend (I’m not a person full of hate, but that person you knew from 10 years ago that you really didn’t care about then, and don’t want to stay in contact with…), I’m interested in how people respond to a “denied friend request”, Facebook allows you to show limited profiles, maybe that’s a nice way of saying “I don’t like you much”.
• Most of my female friends that are online work in marketing, why is that?

My main problem now is I have friends all over the place, both online and offline. Some of these have my address/phone/im, others don’t, some are on Twitter and Facebook, but not on MySpace. To combat this I’ve got a filter in gmail that moves all emails from social networks to a different label so I can try and see everything in one place (also, I can see out of my friends what gets used more).

Thing is, my email has become voicemail. I login and see that Katy has messaged me back on Facebook (go and check that then, reply), and that Tom added me on Twitter (go and add him back), nothing from MySpace but, they don’t seem to email me (check that as I’m doing the rounds) and Rosie sent a message to everyone (read that, reply). Radar told me Pete and Josh have been adding photos on Radar (have a quick look). Then I’ve got Flickr telling me about my friends photos in Google Reader, and a similar setup with del.icio.us. Then I walk out the house, and my mobile gives me updates from Jaiku, and Twitter is my browser homepage on my N73 as well.

I love being connected, but seriously, this has to change?! If anything, just because it’s a drain on productivity - every time I check my email I’m on 10 sites doing ‘admin work’ on my ‘online social life’. And, when I want to ring Sam, he’s on my Twitter but I don’t have his number. And then there’s Skype, AIM/MSN/Yahoo/Gtalk/etc, I’ve not even got onto email yet (sorry if I’ve not replied yet). And, really, I much prefer speaking to someone.

Rant over

Today, Dexmo went live. We actually deployed last week just before The Future Of Web Apps, but today was the official launch.

Dexmo is a project I’ve been working on for Patrick & Rita, with Denis from 38one doing the design (more about the team). I describe it as a Myspace/Digg mix. Why not pop over and have a look? dexmo.com.