The Artesea

One of the great features about having a Google Calendar was the ability to make a calendar public. This meant that if I wanted to have the 2009 F1 schedule, instead of manually typing it out myself I could search for “F1″ and it would return ready made calendars. There were some small issues with the public calendars. For example the times would be set to various different time zones making them a bit pointless for me, or the author would insist on using CAPS FOR EVERYTHING, so on the odd (read that as most) occasions I would end up creating my own, but then making them public to the world.

Yesterday, after the World Cup draw I sat down and copied and pasted the fixtures using the BBC and FIFA as source reference. Two hours of work have resulted in a nice calendar in a format that I want. I mentioned on Twitter that I would share it, and got some requests back. What I was surprised to find when testing the “share” feature on the netbook logged in under Heathers account was that there was no longer an option to Search Public Calendars. Assuming I was missing something, I looked all over the Google Calendar page, still nothing. Next stop was the Help pages, a quick search for Public resulted in this The “Search Public Calendars” button is missing from my Google Calendar. All I have is “Search My Calendars”. It has 172 posts, no official reply from Google and it started back in February!

Turns out Google have a help page explaining why they removed the service

Removing public calendar search and the public calendar gallery
We’ve decided to discontinue public calendar search and the public calendar gallery. These were specialized U.S. English-only features that weren’t used as extensively as we would have liked, and proved difficult to maintain over time. We’re looking at ways to make it easier to search and browse public calendars, but for now we’ve removed the gallery and public calendar search function.

“Difficult to maintain”, were not talking about an undergrad with a project that suddenly exploded, we are talking about Google, the guys who index over a trillion webpages and ensure the search results are returned in under a second.

So for the time being if you wish to share my Google Calendar for the World Cup (all times UK based), click on the following link, and in the bottom corner click on this icon . Alternativly past the Calendar ID: rp57smf89rsb1hgo09abvq1mhg@group.calendar.google.com into the box which says “Add a friend’s Calendar” when you are in Google Calendar.

ps. My three year old Arsenal Calendar, which is updated as soon as I’m informed of fixture changes has the ID: 2fg9ab1h7b36kp037cp6qjol3k@group.calendar.google.com

The lead story today on the news is that employees of T-Mobile have been selling on customer information to a third party who are then using the information to try and get the customers to upgrade.

Now whilst I don’t have the full information, my first point will be DON’T PANIC.

The information these third parties want are your name, number, contract expiry date and possibly your address (although not essentially needed). Bank account and account security information shouldn’t have been passed on.

It’s the same scam that has been running for years. You get a call from your Network about a month before your contract expires. They offer you an upgrade, however for some reason you can’t keep your current mobile number.

What actually is happening is that a dealer is try to get to commission from the mobile phone companies for providing them with a new customer. They lie claiming to be from the mobile company you are on, hoping you won’t notice until it’s too late and a new contact has been signed.
The way the scam worked in the past was that when you signed a new contact your details were added to a Phone Book of mobiles. Companies would store the data, wait 11 months, then call you. As the first 5 digits belonged to each network you could tell who you needed to pretend to be calling from.
However since then several things have changed. Contracts are no longer 12 months, but instead 18, 24 or in some cases 36. At which point should the cold calls be made? Now numbers are ported around as people move between networks getting the best deal on each upgrade, it’s getting harder to tell which network to customer was on last.

I remember several years ago, a colleague at work received a call from Orange advising that his phone was available for upgrade. He asked them who they really were, the response was that they were calling from Orange, he asked them again and they repeated that they were from Orange. He called them liars (rather loudly) and asked why if they were from Orange would they be calling him 3 months in to his contract with Vodafone, of whom he is an employee. The call ended pretty quick.

Remember, networks are pretty lazy at getting you to upgrade. The more months you spend with them using your old mobile, the more money they can make as they don’t need to subsides a handset.
If you do ever receive one of these calls, never commit to upgrading. Ask for a name and a number to call back on after you have had a chance to shop around. If it was your real network when you call the customer services number on your bill and speaking to an adviser, there should be notes explaining what was offered. If there isn’t anything, then it’s going to be a third party (or a very lazy member of staff).
Of course if this third party is offering a great deal on an upgrade you might want to consider taking up the offer, but remember you are dealing with people who blatantly lied to you, and could do again.

My full time job is working for Vodafone, at no point have I ever passed on customers details, nor have I ever worked for any company “offering” upgrades. Everything I have written in this post is from my experiences of speaking to these companies when trying to be upgraded and do not reflect the views of my employees.

One of the office jokes is to replace a word in a song with Garf. For example instead of Parklife we have Garflife.
Last week David started singing We buy any Garf (dot com) to the annoying but catchy tune from WeBuyAnyCar.com adverts. A few hours later and the domain www.buyanygarf.com was part of my collection, and a few hours after that the DNS was pointing at my VPS.
That night I sat down and created our first song, Total Eclipse of the Garf.
We now have three videos on our Youtube Channel, a cut out Halloween Mask, a SMS shortcode, photos on Flickr and a Facebook group.
If you have any suggestions for future songs, or social media ideas leave a comment below.

For those of you who follow me on twitter it might soon look like I’m talking like a pirate.
The reason? I’ve recently purchased a short url format to use as a custom URL redirect.
For the moment it only works with my blog posts and the BBC News website, and it’s only available to me (although if you do a RT nothing will break).
Anyway I welcome argh.tc to the collection of domain names I now own.

Just picked this at random:

(292409)
61 Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

An argument in our office this week broke out. Simon claimed that he once had Doughnut Flavoured Skips. The whole team really didn’t believe him. Google searches found a couple of people claiming to remember them but nothing concrete. So I emailed United Biscuits (owners of KP) and got back this reply:

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for contacting us concerning Donut flavoured KP Skips. We can confirm that we did produce these and that they were discontinued quite a few years ago and are unlikely to be manufactured again.

Before any product reaches the shelves, extensive and costly product development and research is undertaken. Only a small percentage of new product concepts reach the retail outlet and even then, products may easily fail to gain the necessary appeal. Sadly, therefore, some products are removed from sale after only a seemingly short time.

However, a longer manufactured product may also be discontinued due to a falling off of popularity, resulting in it no longer being a viable product to produce.

Kind regards,
Sue,
Consumer Services Co-ordinator.

But this wasn’t enough for us, so I asked if they had any images and they came back with this photocopy found in the cupboard.

Which meant that Simon was right all along.

…or how to block adverts like AdBlockPlus does except on your Windows Mobile phone whilst using Opera Mobile.

Having used both AdBlock+ and Greasemonkey on Firefox, one of the things I noticed missing on Google Chrome was the ability to hide the adverts.
Chrome by default doesn’t support any plugins, so I went googling around for a solution and found AdSweep. Turns out that it is possible to have User Scripts in Chrome (the same thing really as Greasemonkey) and after some tweaks and a simple javascript file download the adverts were gone.
Then yesterday I noticed a post on PocketNow.com about using a JavaScript hack to resize the text input box in Opera Mobile.
The trick was using User Javascript (again Greasemonkey), so I wondered if it was possible to use the AdSweep Opera js file on my phone.
The answer is yes

Simple steps to enabling:

1. Download the Opera AdSweep.js file from AdSweep.org (I suggest on a computer instead of your phone).
2. Using which ever filemanager you prefer (I like Total Commander) create a userjs folder in your Opera directory. On my phone using Opera Mobile 9.7 it was \Program Files\Opera Mobile\profile
3. Copy AdSweep.js from your computer in to your userjs folder on the phone.
4. In Opera Mobile, type opera:config (no http) in the address bar.
5. Under User Prefs you should find the following three options:
   • Always Load User Javascript: Tick
   • User Javascript: Tick
   • User Javascript File: \Program Files\Opera Mobile\profile\userjs\ (this is the location on my phone, make sure it matches the path you used above).

   Make sure you press Save at the end

6. Close Opera (if you have Widgets running and even if you don’t you may prefer a soft reset).

Next time you open Opera you should find adverts start to disappear.

For the last few weeks in my spare time, I’ve been trying to create a hybrid of Dabr (a PHP open source twitter client which supports oAuth) and juitter (a javascript jQuery client).

twhash

Today I can announce twhash.
To do anything you need to be logged in to the site, via the oAuth call to Twitter (don’t worry if you don’t understand, just follow the links on the site).
Then you select the #hashtag you want to follow, and in near real time the tweets appear on the page.
If you want to take part you can enter a tweet at the top of the page, and if you want to reply to a message hit “reply” first and it will fill in the @name and set the flag to link the tweets together.

Following on from Charlotte’s post here on her views from the Wikio stats, I’ve gone through MyBlogLog and extracted the top 10 LibDemBlogs based on click throughs.

There are some major caveats in the stats:
a) these are clicks from LibDemBlogs.co.uk, this doesn’t include people who use the RSS feed, those who have sites in their own RSS feed readers/aggregators, sites which are accessed via bookmarks or those linked from other bloggers.
b) I only checked the “top” 50 blogs, as the current method needs me to enter each url in to the MyBlogLog one by one, and wait for the results. This means that a long tail blog could have been missed.
c) Those who post lots will have more clicks to their sites, this doesn’t mean that they are more popular.

I had been thinking for sometime that the blog was due a makeover, but just couldn’t be bothered to sort it out. Then last week I needed to move LibDemBlogs over to a new server, I planned to move the blog with it, but at some point in the future when I had some free time. Turned out that the old server needed renewing now, so the plan to leave the blog for a bit was turned into a Bank Holiday of coding.
Then with the blog on the new server I just got a white page. I had modified my old template over the years with some random pieces of code and one of them was causing an issue, hours of attempting to fix it resulted in no luck. In the end I decided to re-install WordPress from scratch (whilst keeping the old database) and from here I installed this new theme.
After all this I then discovered I had quiet a few duplicate comments in my database (possiblily from when I moved from Blogger to WordPress, or from Haloscan to WordPress). I deleted all of these, but then discovered around 70 comments weren’t attached to any post. Unfortunatly there doesn’t seem to be any way in WordPress to move comments from one post to another so I had to manual edit the database using mySQL queries as well as trying to work out which post from 2004-2006 people were on about.
Hopefully the backend to the blog won’t need much more work, and I can focus on making a few tweeks to the template in the coming days.