As a result of the Skiff Hack, we now have Skiff member profiles and presence info available for the skiff at http://who.theskiff.org.  As in, you can see who is currently in the Skiff or who has been around recently, and a bit about them in the process.

Yes, that is another profile to maintain, but this helps.  We can find out who is around us at the Skiff on a day to day basis.  Lovely work Tom and Simon and I don't know who else made it.

My skiff profile is here.

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I'm rather fond of django-imagekit -- a useful django tool that organises a bunch of image processing on images saved in django models.  It comes with a bunch of useful scale, crop etc tools based on PIL. 

However, I was looking for a way to make a sepia images from my uploaded image.  I found Fredrik Lundh's PIL code for sepia in his post Sepia Toning with PIL and adapted that into the form needed for a django-imagekit image processor.  Here's how  that looks:

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"""
Adds a sepia filter processor for django-imagekit which
can be used in an imagekit specification.

https://github.com/jdriscoll/django-imagekit

See http://effbot.org/zone/pil-sepia.htm for the original
code for the sepia filtering in PIL

"""
from PIL import ImageOps
from imagekit.processors import ImageProcessor


class Sepia(ImageProcessor):
    """
        Turn image sepia
    """
    @classmethod
    def process(cls, img, fmt, obj):

        def make_linear_ramp(white):
            # putpalette expects [r,g,b,r,g,b,...]
            ramp = []
            r, g, b = white
            for i in range(255):
                ramp.extend((r*i/255, g*i/255, b*i/255))
            return ramp

        img = img.convert('RGB')
        sepia = make_linear_ramp((255, 240, 192))
        if img.mode != "L":
            img = img.convert("L")
        img = ImageOps.autocontrast(img)
        img.putpalette(sepia)
        img = img.convert('RGB')
        fmt = "JPEG"
        return img, fmt

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Given how useful the # key is, it has always annoyed me that on the standard UK Apple keyboard, getting a # key requires keying Alt-3 to get it to appear. 

If you are doing web development with jquery, or writing shell scripts or python, you end up using this key a lot and Alt-3 just doesn't work for me.  However, on the left of the recent Apple keyboard, there is the § key.  I've never used §, I guess somebody must.  

Anyway, so I went and found Ukelele, a keyboard layout editor, and modified the keyboard map to put the # where the § used to be, and the result is what I call the BritishLHash keyboard layout.

BritishLHash.keylayout Download this file

How to use this:

1. Download the file, and put it in your ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts folder.
2. Open Language and Text in System Preferences
3. Select the Input Sources tab
4. Tick next to the BritshLHash keyboard.  This makes it available as an input source for you.  And also Tick Show Input in menu bar
5. Find the little flag in the menu bar.  Pop it up and change it to BritishLHash.

That's all there is to it.  I've been using this mapped file for a year or so, and it works fine in OS X 10.5 and 10.6.

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I'm getting rather fond of a full mutiple-window experience when watch the Formula 1, and one of those windows is open on a search for f1 or #f1 to keep an eye on the discussion.

That works, except there is often a repeated promoted tweet that stays at the top of the search results. This confuses and annoys me, as I have to cast my eyes past this promoted tweet again and again and again to see the real search results.  Once, on the initial search, is enough, after that, these things are unnecessary noise. Like this:

So, I've made a Google Chrome Extension to take away promoted tweets after the first time you see them.  When there are more search items, and 'x new tweets'  shows, clicking on this renders the search results minus the promoted tweets.   You'll still see Top Tweets, though, I might take them on next.

Get the extension from here:  Hide Repeated Promoted Tweets.  Read more info here.  I hope it is useful.  And let me know what you think.

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Promote JS is all about referencing high-quality Javascript documentation, and I surely approve.

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For some years now, I've been, on occasions, having a good rave about wanting to start a (print) magazine that had neutral or balanced advertising.   I'd want a magazine that devoted equals space and effort to advertising to sell things to people, and advertisments to encourage people not to buy things.

So, on one page you'd have an ad for a new 'fridge, and on the other side, a similarly high-quality ad encouraging you to maintain and keep the old one or share the neighbours.  There are two sides of every buying decision, we just don't get to see them very often.  And when we are trying to save carbon, not buying appliances does help reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere.

So, you get the idea:  A nicely designed magazine with rules that mean that advertisers need to somehow ensure or allow or fund the for and against cases for their product.  Would anybody care to advertise? Would anybody dare to advertise?  It'd be an interesting experiment.

It would be mad to start a new print magazine right now.  So, what about something online -- and this is the new bit of my thinking.  Presumably, once can buy banner ads with the keyword 'fridge' or whatever and promote not buying a new fridge.  It's be easy enough to make ads like that, and they'd get nicely delivered onto pages where people were looking to buy fridges or were searching out a new 'fridge to buy.  Perhaps the click through rates wouldn't be that high, so it wouldn't cost too much, but who knows?

This has to be against ad placement terms and conditions, you think?  Well, I've just had a look at the google adwords policies, and I can't see anything in there that make it wrong to suggest not buying something might be a good option. Actually, under the 'Anti' and Violence section of the Content Guidelines, there is a specific allowance for "Consumer awareness ads (positive and negative) that don't violate the basics of the policy".   That sounds ok for now, but there's a lot of details to work on.

Okay, so, to make this thing fly, we need:

• funding for some ads
• destination website(s) with the reasons for all of this, or useful consumer information on 'sharing the neighbours fridge' or 'how to survive without a car' or similar.

And that probably means a charity or consumer organisation that wants to try it out. An initial experiment would be very interesting because it would yield click-through information about how consumers react to these messages, and could give a charity or similar a quite high profile.

Anybody interesting in trying this out?

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Google Scribe provides text completion service. Using information from what you have already typed in a document, Google Scribe provides related word or phrase completion suggestions. In addition to saving keystrokes, Google Scribe's suggestions indicate correct or popular phrases to use.

I have another question for you is to become an editor of the newspaper and then at the end of their lifespan and regenerative capacity of these cells to their cognate receptors on the cell surface and then they will become more apparent from the following detailed description of the invention. 

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It was interesting to read Jaron Lanier, in the New York Times, referring to Clay Shirky talking about twitter as a kind of global mind...

In one recent example, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has suggested that when people engage in seemingly trivial activities like “re-Tweeting,” relaying on Twitter a short message from someone else, something non-trivial — real thought and creativity — takes place on a grand scale, within a global brain. That is, people perform machine-like activity, copying and relaying information; the Internet, as a whole, is claimed to perform the creative thinking, the problem solving, the connection making. This is a devaluation of human thought.

That reminds me of my somewhat provocative talk at the Twitter Developers Nest last year: You are a Neuron, which was a thought experiment and chat about our individual messaging of short messaging on twitter adding up to the beginnings of a global mind of sorts.

I'm thinking I need to go deeper with that talk, specifically to tease out some of the interesting aspects of how we learn to work together in a connected social system to do things like share and filter links for each other.   At an individual level, sharing a few links with followers seems simple enough, but can we express that as some kind of intelligent filtering function.

But enough of that.  Jaron Larnier's article is well worth a read; as a part of the ongoing discussion about what is Artificial Intelligence. And especially to red about the unsettling thought (or rumour) that Google is scanning all those books not just for human search, but to feed to a big artificial intelligence...

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Many, many thanks to Mat Walker  for organising Certified Scrum Master training in Brighton that I just did.  

It was two full days of interesting material, ideas and practical activities, skillfully presented by Nigel Baker of Agile Bear, who kept it alive and fun.  Scrum is intriguing, I was expecting something a lot more technical and exact, but Scrum comes across as human scale, pragmatic and full of common sense.  These must be the right things for managing projects full of change.

Left me with a lot to think about and a desire to find a team and a project and try it all out. 

And, good news, Mat is thinking about organising another course in Brighton.  Sign up here for more information.

It was run at the new Skiff location in Gloucester Street, off the north lanes. Fantastic place.

Oh, yes, and I'm now a Certified Scrum Master.

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Instead, have a look at the video over at Caroline Lucas' website for video and text of the speech.

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I'm heading back to the UK after a month and a bit in Australia, so will be back coworking and hanging out in the usual Brighton places, and looking forward to catching up with folk after this unexpected trip.

There are a few blog posts to add in here, they are queued up in development.  I've been making notes but not really getting into finishing stuff off.  They will come in their own good time.

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I'm having a play with Google buzz. Come and join the fun over at:

http://www.google.com/profiles/grasuth

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I'm in Australia (Perth) for the next few weeks, due to family illness.      I've swapped out my UK mobile for an Australian one, as I did over Christmas.  That number is 0416 655 902.   That's +61 416 655 902 in international 'plus' form.

Most likely I'll be here in Perth until the end of Feb or thereabouts, and then back in Brighton.

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