harry-wood

"free" as in freedom, or just free as in $0? Anyone see a mention of copyright/license anywhere on there?

> "In my book..."

As I was reading, for a second there I thought you'd actually written a book called "Communicating via electric currents seems weird". Sounds amazing! Where can I buy this book??

Turns out that in order to evade DMCA action, they needed to do more than not being on github. As of yesterday I think..

"WhatFreeWords is currently unavailable due to DMCA action from the What3Words company"

Am I the only one who was disappointed that this wasn't an article about a plan to actually raise a ladder to the moon?

So you provide an API, but someone was hammering your website with a scraper? That's annoying. Seems like bad behaviour.

I did find it surprising that this article has a whole section on "Challenge 4: Anti-Bot Countermeasures" (and how to bypass them) but doesn't mention giving any consideration as to whether this is a reasonable way to behave.

It says "2,980 large and medium airports with scheduled services from OurAirports.": http://ourairports.com/data/

I liked this bit on page 3: "these levels were so simple, that some under 5's managed to play the first few levels" ...and my grandma who had never used a mouse before: https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/2015/02/27/grandma-trying-lemmi...

Exactly. But not just when copying a URL. Short, simple URLs look nicer and feel better. This is basic web design, but somewhere along the line we've allowed salesy/marketing nonsense to infest our web.

This spells out the issues really well (with a funny video) https://wistia.com/blog/fresh-url The suggested solution on there "Fresh URL" is interesting, although it's throwing more javascript at the problem.

To add some contrast to this discussion, let me say that I think it looks quite neat :-) I see some folks here are quite shocked by it. Maybe using these shock site URLs (https://github.com/huntwelch/UTM-Mangler/blob/master/utm-man... ) is a bit over the top.

I was casually musing about such an idea myself a while back: https://twitter.com/harry_wood/status/735048026335682561 . This offers a way to more actively fight back against the over-use of messy UTM URLs. Perhaps a gentler thing to do would be to link to a place/places which re-educate web developers on how to design URLs. (It seems there's a few folk round here who need some re-education on this matter!)

Not "every website you visit". Every website you visit where the developers chosen to use messy URLs for tracking.

I agree. For me tracking is an annoyance, but this particular practice should be regarded as bad web design. It should be roundly denounced by the tech community. Why are so many web developers so willing to mess up their URLs in this way?

On the other hand I've encountered folks who claim to be forming a start up. They've got the name and the logo. They've got the whole pitch ready. They sound enthusiastic and passionate. But... they still have to find a technical person to actually build it. They basically have nothing.

And I often think there are too many people going around spouting wisdom for example about how you _must_ let customers and market demand drive your product design before writing a line of code. It's actually not true. There's plenty of good businesses which are built upon a fairly deep technical idea, which must have required a lot of development work in isolation before it saw the light of day.

...but I agree it's also a trap leading the death of many unknown unicorns.

Funny how it ends with "my very individual perspective (I worked in London as a management consultant whereas in SF I worked with a startup)" ...which was entirely obvious throughout the whole piece.

LeafletJS is awesome. It's an important open source offering within the OpenStreetMap ecosystem. If you're looking for an "OpenStreetMap API" for embedding a map, then you're looking for LeafletJS! ...or another one called OpenLayers, or various other lesser used options. You have a choice! With OpenStreetMap you also have a choice of where you get your map "tiles" from, or you can render and host them yourself. Check out this website which explains a lot more about the various options for making the switch to OpenStreetMap:

http://switch2osm.org

Do you mean the leaflet website, or the leaflet maps library itself?

I see the http://leafletjs.com website uses some google fonts, and google analytics, but I would have thought it would degrade gracefully if those things are blocked.

As for the leaflet maps library itself, this will definitely operate independently of google or twitter. Try here for a simple example embedded on my website (with no googleness) http://harrywood.co.uk/maps/examples/leaflet/1-just-map.view... or even better, try here where I'm loading it from locally hosted javascript: http://harrywood.co.uk/maps/examples/leaflet/1b-local-osm.vi...

Those links working for you?

The thing with the "don't open email attachments" type advice, is that somehow it's not enough (I think it's more complicated actually. You need another bullet point for "keep your browser up-to-date" and/or avoid certain typos of website and certain links. There's several types of traps beyond email attachments) I despair at teaching my old parents how to not get malware infections. They may last a couple of months, but it's only a matter of time before something they do leaves me spending the weekend trying to run virus cleanups. I'm sure my parents' experience is indicative of many other less tech-savvy folk.

But anti-virus isn't the solution either. This happens with anti-virus eating half their CPU. I don't really know a sensible way to let my parents have a windows laptop these days. They use an iPad now, and that's the end of it.

I certainly agree with your top and bottom sentence there. AV software is basically an industry which shouldn't exist (or at least shouldn't be anywhere near as well-known and lucrative as it is). The reason it has existed, is because Microsoft have in been poor on security in general. I think more specifically we can say that earlier versions of windows took an approach of being way too permissive with things like file permissions. It seems to me they've been gradually phasing in more sensible limits ever since, and if they're also phasing out 3rd party AV software, I can see that might be a sensible rationalisation too.

Might be. I'm not 100% sure because, while they are improving general security, the other challenge microsoft has always faced is that hackers target windows first because it's most popular. Previously hackers had a mish-mash of several different AV softwares to stay ahead of. By making every windows machine a highly regularised defender-running target, this might make life easier for hackers.

There's some complicated nuance in the word "powers" in that sentence. LeafletJS is an open source javascript library for displaying maps on the web. This usually involves bringing in a base-map, and you can get this from a whole myriad of different providers who do the stylising, rendering, and hosting of raster map tiles. They in turn may or may not be doing all of this using vector map data from OpenStreetMap. It's all nicely de-coupled, although for a typical web developer, when you look to "use OpenStreetMap" it will mostly just involve learning how LeafletJS works. Also regardless of which OpenStreetMap-powered tile server you choose to use, you must give credit to OpenStreetMap on your map display. But to illustrate the de-coupling... you might also choose to use "OpenLayers" instead. It's another open source javascript map display library!

You might be interested in my impressions as somebody who hardly ever uses office software, but an open source enthusiast and keeps up with some tech news.

I was aware of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice split of course. I knew this would mean some confusion until the dust settles. My vague impression was that LibreOffice might be a better choice for supporting openness versus corporate ownership (and so I'd plumbed for that myself) but at the same time I worried that OpenOffice might end up being better managed and maintained than LibreOffice. I was not aware until I read this, that the dust was settling so comprehensively on the side of LibreOffice. More than just OS idealists buying into it, it's actually being maintained a lot better.

This is good news. The situation seems a lot clearer than previously, but yes the message needs to get out. Hopefully apache will shut down, redirect and facilitate re-merging the brand names.

me too. It made me feel less calm

Yeah I noticed that too. The glowing red embers turn white hot with increase ...mostly towards the end. Because we're comparing with 1997 levels. I suppose that shows the general trend well, but it's not so good for actually spotting patterns of change as the time slider moves.

Yep. Disqus is one of the more understandable shifts-to-bloat which developers have made in recent years. Understandable because spammers have made it so difficult to run our own comments. The selfish anti-social behaviour of this small minority of "SEO experts" ends up forcing everyone into tech choices we should otherwise be avoiding.

That last paragraph is pretty much a description of google search is it not? That's what struck me about this article. It's describing AI as a thing which is coming in the future, but... knowledge mining document discovery tasks? The future is now! Google's AI (combined with the vast corpus of linked knowledge on the open web) is presumably already doing away with the need for a lot of low-level legal enquiries which would have previously been handled by law firms. I notice this article touches on the topic:

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/22/opinions/barton-rise-and-f...

"Nonprofits and government entities have put almost all of the raw materials of American law online and Google and other search engines have made that law easier to find than ever. An American with a smart phone now has more access to legal sources than most lawyers or judges did fifteen years ago."

When stuff is made available on the open web for google (and other search engines) to index, that is the AI revolution right there. I say bring it on. Laws and court proceedings should be treated as public property. It should be put on the open web, permalinkable, annotatable, preferably with an explicit open license, so we can all benefit

From the headline I thought it was going to be trying to persuade us all that SOAP is better than REST.

...Phew! Turns out it's really "Is request-response the best Microservices architecture?"

Well this article says at the top "In simple terms, electronic trading brought down costs, while High Frequency Trading brought down ethics."

...but it doesn't really go on to explain that. It's just a fairly dry bullet pointed definition of different types of High Frequency Trading.

It's a shame it doesn't explain, because high frequency trading is evil, and a really depressing waste of talent.

Always sad when a big company kills an idea, but it happens a lot.

For me the really sad thing about this is thinking about all that community collected data. If a company manages to attract a community of people volunteering and contributing data, it's wrong for that to be taken away. Hopefully it won't be taken away completely in this case, but if the app is phased out, then you'll just have to hope your data shows up within google maps in some form. You're at their mercy. The data was collected by the community but it never belonged to the community.

There's a broad principle here which I think we need to be more collectively savvy about. Community "Crowd sourcing" should always go hand-in hand with community ownership of the data. This means open licensing and offering of bulk downloads. There needs to be increased awareness, and strong campaigns against the behaviour of companies who recruit a volunteer community, but don't give the data back (and I mean give it back properly, in a raw unencumbered open-licensed form)

Waze is not the worst example of this because I think a lot of waze contribution is in the form of very passive data collection. The value comes from algorithms rather than dedicated passionate contribution from volunteers. But even so. The community puts data in. The community loses the data in the end.

Well that's a matter of cartographic style, which is only small part of what goes into creating a map like this. The nice thing about OpenStreetMap is that it supplies the raw data to enable all manner of map style experimentation, so actually there's lots of different maps powered by OpenStreetMap, some more difficult to read than others. You might find 'MapQuest' style is more pleasing on the eye. http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=48.8432&lon=2.356&... Same data. Different map style. More details here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparision_Google_servic...