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This is my first hidden service, for testing purposes. smbzeu3ydgy63zlk.onion. Give it a click and tell me if you see anything!

Like Alisha on Soft Tech Reviews, I feel like a late adopter of Twitter. Truthfully, I ignored the hype when the service came out, and the idea of using it to tell the world about the minutiae of my daily activities seemed rather stomach-turningly boring for writer and reader alike. Seems like I was just being uncreative.

Twitter is a tool like many others: it needs some thought in order to get the most out of it. Firstly, though, we've got to know what we're working with:

• A means of posting 140-character messages to an audience, who can opt to be instantly notified by mobile text message, IM or e-mail wherever they are, and can respond if they wish.


• An API which can be exploited to allow one's systems to integrate with Twitter, either by indexing and parsing twits, or sending and receiving them. This includes allowing computer systems to have their own accounts for the purposes of sending and receiving instructions and content to a human user.

That last point links directly into how I am using Twitter with Sandy. Sandy is a reminder service. It has some vaguely human characteristics, for example the ability to parse commands for times and dates, and to send a reminder by e-mail, mobile text or IM, even on a recurring basis. The Twitter interfaces are very useful. When Twitter's Jabber IM service is working (it isn't at the moment...), I can send a remind command through by that means, and also request information from the diary that Sandy keeps on my behalf. I can do the same through Twitter by text message, and this makes it very useful: I can set a reminder on the go, as though I were texting a savvy assistant.

People have written Twitter extensions for Firefox, and I can type a message in my Firefox address bar and twitter it directly to Sandy (so not a public message). Setting reminders as I think about them like this is very effective.

So, I've found a use for Twitter with a bit of ingenuity. I'll be expanding my use to include communicating with clients and colleagues over the next few months, but for the moment, I'm very content to have it in my arsenal of contemporary, web 2.0 communications tools.

I don't know what everyone is using for looking up addresses, but I normally use PostcodeAnywhere's demo. They allow five free searches a day, but now I'm going to the source of this information: I've found an equally fast service from no less than the Universal Postal Union: Address Doctor. It's international and lets you search with just a house number and postcode, or with whatever information you have. Sometimes I visit a customer and I know the street address but need the postcode for invoice purposes, so this is going in my bookmarks straight away and there's no usage limit. Any better suggestions?

UPDATE

Ah, it is limited after all. I've noticed that the congestion charging page on http://tfl.gov.uk lets you look up a postcode, then presents you with matching addresses. That's very handy, too, but only if you already have the postcode, obviously.

Having read the information in Burnham Library, I cannot help but feel that some of the proposed changes around the Burnham and Taplow area will serve no purpose other than to frustrate drivers who use these roads during quieter periods of the day. Reading the "supporting information" which shows the Council's thinking on this matter, it is clear that some of the reductions are based on conjecture and subjectivity: although the number of accidents per million vehicle kilometres has been given for some of the recommendations, some of them are terribly vague, area Ref no 10 (Dorney Wood Road) being a case in point, where a cut from 60 to 30 is suggested:

"Not meet DfT criteria for a reduction to 30, but 40 limit likely to seem incongruous..."

at which point, the comment tails off and is not printed. It seems the accidents and average/85th percentile speeds are only given when they help the cause.

Regular users of these roads are capable of judging the safe speed to use. The ones who drive recklessly as to whether injury will be caused will continue to do so without expensive enforcement in any case, regardless of the posted limit.

Please take a read of the supporting information and come to your own conclusion. If I have any support here, I will write a joint letter, even though the deadline has passed.

Sometimes you need to make use of several sources of knowledge to come out on top of a problem. Here's one such example, for my own reference. I didn't want to run "chmod -R 755 *" because all of my files would have the execute flag, instead of just the directories. Here's how to solve it (e-mail thread: read from the bottom up.

Matt,

Desquinn on the forums came back with this. It worked perfectly, so you might want to add it to your arsenal of house-keeping scripts. Just run these commands in turn:

$ find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
$ find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Thanks for your help: problem resolved.
J.

UnitedHosting - Support Department wrote:

Hello

I dont know of a simple way to find where the permission is wrong other than to check each stage of all the files and folders this particulart component could be using, starting with most obvious such as the upload directory and the script that performs the upload.

Maybe someone on the forums knows of a better way to do such a task.

Regards,
Matt
UH Support

Don't you just love it when intelligent people seem to lazily put the world to rights? Take a look at Structured Procrastination. John Perry, a philosopher at Stanford wrote some essays "defending yet more life choices generally seen as faults". I'll get through them all at some point.