if you use rss, you’ll want to update to http://www.colmmcmullan.net/blog/rss too.

thanks.

the topic this year is ‘free’.

i feel as though my next objective should be to have something to talk about at one of those conference things.  i guess i should blog/flickr/twitter more.  baby steps.

if you follow me on twitter, you might want to turn me off tomorrow morning

Edit Home Screen. To rearrange icons, touch and hold any icon until it starts to wiggle, then drag icons to desired locations. Drag an icon to the far right to create additional Home screens. Press the Home button when done. Dismiss 

it was only a matter of seconds after pressing dismiss that it restarted the home screen and popped up again. i did manage to become quite the whizz and even once managed to get as far as choosing

Erase All Content and Settings 

from the reset menu in the general menu of settings (if you think about how much time i had between reboots you might find the speed of that menu traversal mildly impressive). however, the erase was cut short by YAB (yet another reboot).my guess is that the addition of new applications messed with the first home page, somehow overloading it with more than the maximum 16 apps. even if i edited the home screen in the few seconds i had, none of the icons gave the option to delete and none would move to the second page. eek.google told me that some other people had the same problem: http://www.iphonealley.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4701 and all hope was not lost since some people had managed to get out of it. somehow. they didn’t provide much detail. typical.then (hallelujah!) i found this: http://www.haklabs.com/2008/jailbreak-update-to-iphone-113/#comment-22996to break the loop and restore your iphone you need to do the following:

1. turn off your iphone by holding down the home and hold buttons for about 10-15 seconds. make sure it’s off and not rebooting.
2. plug your usb lead into your iphone but not your computer.
3. hold down the home button.
4. still holding down home, plug the usb lead into the computer.
5. fire up itunes and restore iphone to original settings.
6. breathe.

i’m sure this will be the solution to other iphone jailbreak/crashing/unresponsive/weird problems. hopefully someone out there who gets themselves into a tricky spot like i did will find this useful.

today i twittered that i am “frustrated that the future isn’t here yet… feeling it’s partly my own fault.” [1]. this was prompted by an article in the guardian describing the future of london’s bus services [2]. i also watched the video introduction to nokia’s conceptual design of ‘morph’ – a fascinating device which would interact with the environment around it in ways unimaginable using devices available to buy today [3].

so how to we get from where we are now via london bus to morph? not like this:

“The priority is to get all the buses equipped, then we can start thinking about what we want to do with the real-time passenger information.”

knowing what products to build on the data so people can have the best possible experience is non trivial and i don’t expect TFL (on their own) to get it right. however, knowing what to do with the data is a complete no brainer: set it free and let people help you create the right products.

the first thing london bus plan to do with the data is to have a spoken announcement every time the bus is approaching a stop. i hope they reconsider. why go with something so intrusive from the outset? why not start by putting the next stop on a scrolling LCD or TV screen only? why not allow people to decide the best way for them to access the data themselves?

personally i’d love an application that allows you to use a mobile device to select the stop you want to get off the bus, then it interrupts the song i’m listening to or beeps my mobile phone whenever i’m one stop away from the destination. i could also share with a friend that i’m meeting the unique identifier for the bus that i’m on so they track the bus and know when i’ll arrive with them. that would be beautiful. for me. will TFL think of me and build that application? no. but by keeping the data to themselves they prevent me from building it for myself and sharing it with others.

a closed system distances a company from their own customers – who are the people that know best what direction and products they should be focusing on.

openness creates the potential to interact with services and our environment how we want to – which improves services and makes me a happier customer.

[1] http://twitter.com/colm/statuses/764540124
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/28/research.transport
[3] http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/02/28/nokia_morph_phone_concept.html

in brief: multimap twitterbot and our video presentation from hackday (an iphone spoof)

ok. as a little side project that’s been going on, we’ve created the multimap twitterbot as announced on the multimap blog today. i honestly think it’s really useful. you can get directions (what we call a ‘route summary’ so it should tell you the main roads you have to take), find and get directions to your nearest *everything* and also it’s a handy way to get links to the multimap site. there’s instructions on the user guide page, let me know if you have any difficulty with it and i’ll help you out.

i’m delighted that it’s now out in the wild and if even one person finds it useful or cool i’ll be more than happy

this all ties in with hackday (see my photos)… it seems the done thing to blog about what you hacked so here goes…

richard and i spent our time integrating the twitterbot with the newly announced yahoo fireeagle. basically we used fireeagle to store a user’s location meaning they could set their location once then just do messages like ‘to closest wikipedia’ rather than ‘to closest wikipedia from sw1′ or whatever. even though it’s still very much beta, fireeagle looks fantastic and i’m really excited about where it’s headed (i was lucky enough to sneak a chat with the extremely approachable mor naaman and tom coates about it at the 24 hours of flickr event).

anyway, i absolutely loved the video presentation we made about it (a parody of the apple iphone ads), thanks to RK’s fabulous editing skillz we were able to put together something i don’t think we would have bettered in a week’s work… take a look at the final product: http://richardkeen.net/mm_twitterbot.mov

so to finish off, please try the twitterbot…!

breaking news! the guys at twitter blogged about our bot! yippeee!

congrats to all the winners.  huge thanks to yahoo and the bbc for the whole event.  it’s fantastic to give people the focus to unleash all that creativity every once in a while.

keep opening data.  keep hacking.  not now though.  must sleep…

as i twittered, if we had another week to prepare it probably wouldn’t be any better.

i’m excited, anxious, and bursting to get up there to show it off…

for anyone with a short attention span here are the key things:

• flashy new multimap site (flashy as in shiny, not as in adobe)
• open street map maps on multimap via bookmarklet wizardry (wizardry as in magic, not as in ‘click here to continue’)
• and you can now use multimap’s feature packed api for free (as in gratis, not as in libre).

onwards…

you may have noticed that the http://www.multimap.com site has been completely redesigned. it’s a very big deal for the company and certainly something we’re all very happy to get out there and are looking forward to developing further in future. i’d just to highlight a couple of features that probably are not easily spotted that i really love…

• right clicking on the map to add a favourite
• hold shift while clicking and dragging on the map to draw a box of where you want to zoom to
• hold control and move your mouse or whatever to fly around like superman
• for londoners, check out the draggable and zoomable tube map by clicking on the icon beside ‘tube stations’ in the useful information palette. then click on a station to select it and click the ‘show on map’ button on the bottom right. equally go from normal map to tube map by selecting ‘tube stations’, clicking on a tube marker and using the ‘show on tube map’ button. very cool.
• as andy hume pointed out, you can select from different map types available by hovering over the ‘maps’ button and choosing from the list that appears (only available where we have multiple map types, london would be a good example with three different types available at certain zoom levels)

so ok. great you say. more fancy maps, just what i wanted… ah, but wait. there’s *even more fancy maps*. you may have heard of a very interesting project called open street map. for those that haven’t, think wikipedia for maps. got it? no? think harder. ok good. anyway, john mckerrell (a multimap developer and osm fanatic) has recently posted a wonderful little bookmarklet to display open street map data on the multimap site. just drag the little piece of magic onto your toolbar, go to http://www.multimap.com/maps/ and click on it. you’ll get two extra map types for displaying open street map data. maptastic! (sorry, i’ll try to stop making up words, well, words like that anyway)

i bet you’re so impressed now that you’re just dying for some more map action. well, you’re in luck. you can make your own! the final and possibly most interesting thing is that multimap have opened up the mapping, geocoding and routing modules of the api to be used for free by developers (that’s you). richard keen has posted an excellent introduction to the open api which I’m glad to say highlights the work mapstraction have done to ease the stress of choosing between geo apis and also the fact that we’re making use of freethepostcode data. so not only can you make a great mashup, but you can make your great mashup even better by contributing postcodes to this project. i’m delighted multimap are encouraging and supporting these open data projects.

i suppose all that’s left to say is keep an eye on http://blogs.multimap.com and http://forums.multimap.com/ where interesting things are sure to happen…

disclosure: i work for multimap as a software developer but this is, of course, my own meaningless personal opinion.

my request to go to hack day has been accepted (yay!)… a few of my colleagues are also attending which is great but if you don’t know me and are attending feel free to drop me a note to colm dot mcmullan at gmail dot com.

a little introduction perhaps – my job title says software engineer so if you have an idea requiring some code but don’t know anyone to do i might be able to help you out. but i’m honestly not only interested in coding, any type of idea is welcome

but it’s normal for a band to cover a song. it’s not normal for a footballer to cover a goal. that’s what lionel messi has done…

so much has been written and said about the goal but nothing has got close to describing the feeling of utter astonishment i have when i see the side by side comparison. the movement of messi, the areas of the pitch key events happen, the movement and attempts of the opposition players, the finish, the celebration… it’s frightening. if you watch the video carefully you’ll see eidur gudjohnsen put his head in his hands just as messi scores, what a fitting reaction.

update: he completed the brace by copying maradona’s other goal.  impressive.

waste valuable time by making something do what it already does in a slightly different way

second, i was typing an email recently and i was using ‘joe public’ to talk about all those people out there who use websites and trying to make a point along the lines that these are the people who blog. then i realised that whoever came up with ‘joe bloggs’ was way ahead of their time, despite what wikipedia says…

i don’t like queuing very much so if i’m traveling alone i love the fact that i can just ignore all that check in hassle by sauntering up to the closing desk at the last minute. very stress free.

however, i don’t like having to constantly check the flight departures screen to keep me up to date of where i should be and when. that’s too much to ask in the modern age. maybe some airline will be innovative and offer text message updates to customers such as boarding gate 3 now or flight delayed until 20.15. it could be an opt in thing allowing the customer to choose to take the risk of relying on technology but one i would gladly accept. i had an experience recently where my flight was first delayed by a few hours but was then moved forward again. i could easily have decided just relax for a couple of hours and not check again until nearer the time. lucky someone had been watching the screen…