Author: Alex

My So-called Life (April 18th)

Post author By Alex
Post date April 18, 2010

April 18th –

	Shared AlexNolan: http://twitpic.com/1ex10t.
	This is becoming a regular slot on my Twitter account, yes, it’s the latest edition of Curry Life! (@ Red Fort) http://twitpic.com/1ex10t
	Just watched 3:10 to Yuma. Reaffirms my belief that Westerns are the purest genre film. That doctor’s actor died in Firefly too, poor guy.
	Liked 2 videos.
	Shared 2 links. soup torture freaky soup guy.mp4
	Wish there was an edited version of Eastenders with all the cringeworthy bits cut out!
	Christ Dot, show a bit of tact!!! #eastenders
	Yer man Clegg’s holding up pretty well against Paxman tonight #ge2010 @LibDems
	Shared AlexNolan: http://twitpic.com/1f6hnf.
	The hell?!?! #thisweek intro very odd http://twitpic.com/1f6hnf
	Liked Explosions near Rock Ferry, Birkenhead, UK – 23:00 12 April 2010.
	Shared Explosions near Rock Ferry, Birkenhead, UK – 23:00 12 April 2010.
	Opera Mini for iPhone’s finally out – clearer display on some sites than Safatr, but counter-intuitive for some actions (eg pinch)
	RT @guardiantech: Spotify slammed by songwriters http://bit.ly/cQSPod
	Checked in at Tesco Allerton Road
	I confess I’ve never once seen their work, but I simply cannot tell whether @planetjedward is for real or so tongue-in-cheek it’s funny
	Bluejumperguy talking a lot of sense on #newsnight. I’ll have what the Tories are smoking, maybe I’ll spot legions of charitable volunteers
	On study leave this week, but have spent over 6 hours crushing the proles underfoot anyway. A necessary evil, gotta show them BB is watching
	Liked iggy investigates an ipad.
	Shared iggy investigates an ipad.
	Barbie Nolan commented on your Post.
	Barbie Nolan commented on your Post.
	Barbie Nolan commented on your Post.
	Interesting collection of bands on at Leaf after #igniteliv tomorrow night, met Ragz last year, lovely lady. http://bit.ly/9xgY0L
	Published Site updates.
	Sneaking out the door early to get over to #igniteliv – Human Resources are on the prowl so this requires Ninjaskillz!
	I can now say with certainty of empirical evidence that Dominos Allerton are a pack of thieves! Overcharge again and I’ll call the cops!
	I rarely have a bad word to say about Apple, but censorship of satire followed by a u-turn when it wins an award? http://bit.ly/bwHm0T
	RT @minapop Korova is on fire… Hope Street, Liverpool http://tweetphoto.com/18769512
	RT @runpaintrunrun: Fire at Korova? I blame volcanic ash!
	Not impressed with this dalek episode of #doctorwho so far, very hammy!
	Use the force Danny Boy! #doctorwho The TARDIS can do the Kepple run in under 9 parsecs!
	That should of course been the Kessel run and 12 parsecs. Anyone get the impression they filmed this one before the rest? #doctorwho
	Posted Blog Posting Tool on Delicious.
	Published links for 2010-04-17.
	The editors of Digital Spy have got out of bed the wrong side this morning, my Google Reader is chock full of bitchy articles!

bookmarks

links for 2010-04-17

Blog Posting Tool on Delicious

Just tagging this as a test of the blog posting feature of delicious…

(tags: delicious blog wordpress tagging post)

blog

Site updates

Post author By Alex
Post date April 15, 2010
1 Comment on Site updates

Ack once again I’ve completely neglected the blog. Rather than promise updates and (likely) not deliver, I’ve made some infrastructure changes:

Delicious daily digests
Lifestream weekly digests
iDevice compatibility via wpTouch
New theme – iZen
Tweaks to my feed

I will be back after my exam though – have finally got the headskillz to actually say some things people might find interesting – and might or might not post some bits I’ve had drafted for a while before then, we’ll see.

Tags alexnolan, blog, delays, delicious, iZen, lifestream, site, wptouch

blog

Brothers Nolan do America, 2k9

Post author By Alex
Post date June 21, 2009

We’re doing a road trip to America in August, and would like some advice of the internets. Where should we go? What should we do? Check out Michael’s post for details.

Meanwhile, I’ll be back with new blog posts shortly – I have interesting things to talk about.

Tags holiday, roadtripusa

events

Thoughts on Dream Director and FACT

Post author By Alex
Post date January 25, 2009

FACT is really awesome you know. In addition to a bunch of my family working there, they have the best cinema venue in Liverpool, and regular art & digital media exhibitions, of which the quality is steadily improving.

Last weekend I went to Dream Director, which our Michael has already written a nice long piece on. To paraphrase, we slept over at FACT, with a couple of presentations in the evening, and breakfast in the morning. When we were asleep, we got incidental sounds pumped into our sleeping booths based on when sensors detected us to be dreaming. My own thoughts are much the same as my little bro’s, but I’d like to add that the quality of the talks was really high. Luke Jerram is a very lucky man to have had the opportunities to produce some stunning creations and have people view and interact with them outside of traditional gallery / exhibition venues. The ‘Sleep Science’ talk from Chris Alford was even better – I had such a poor grasp of the subject beforehand and learnt a lot about how and why we sleep. An account of sleep paralysis, something I occasionally suffer from, was particularly good – did you know that many cultures think a little demon is sitting on your chest?!?!?

As part of the piece, we had to record our dreams from before (the night before in my case) and the morning after the FACT sleepover. I won’t go into detail about the one before (was a nightmare involving an ex) but the one that I had after being played sounds of open spaces all night was kind of humourous! I was up in the admin section of FACT (where we’d had the presentations) and the artist and I had a row about Dream Director! I kept saying it wasn’t working, and he became incredulous and full of disbelief. Eventually he stormed out. I later discovered that in reality, I had been played more sounds than anyone else that night, but I don’t remember them. How odd.

Tags dream, dreamdirector, fact, lukejerram, sleep, sound

events featured

Deconstructing the Capital of Culture

Post author By Alex
Post date December 7, 2008
3 Comments on Deconstructing the Capital of Culture

My presentation from Barcamp Liverpool is up on Slideshare. It was really designed just to open the discussion, so you won’t get the full story of the session from these notes. Thanks to everyone who attended for all your contributions!

Deconstructing The Capital Of Culture

View SlideShare document or Upload your own. (tags: liverpool capitalofculture)

Tags barcamp, barcampliverpool, capitalofculture, liverpool, liverpool08, novas

wordpress

And I'm back

Post author By Alex
Post date November 29, 2008

Hoping to blog a little more soon. Working on a presentation for Barcamp Liverpool this weekend, so fingers crossed that goes well. Other than that, got a lot of stuff on during the lead up to Christmas so if anything big crops up, I’ll write it down here. Otherwise, check out the new Lifestream page which basically links to all my social networking sites. It’s pretty cool actually, and since I update Facebook and Twitter far more than this blog, will keep you up to date with all my goings on.

Tags barcamp, christmas, lifestream, plugin, simplelife, socialnetworking

work

Implementing Organisational Learning (II)

Post author By Alex
Post date July 19, 2007
1 Comment on Implementing Organisational Learning (II)

Ok I’ve had some time to continue development of our intranet site at work, and I have to say the results have been really excellent. WordPress United was finally released last wekend, and it’s every bit as good as it promised to be. I appreciate that it might be getting hard to track what I’m using and not using now so I’ll break it down:

WordPress 2.3 alpha trunk build (using SVN so it gets updated constantly).
A post RC2 version of phpbb3. If you don’t know phpbb well, it’s not as fun to use as WordPress, since phpbb mods are actual modifications to the code, not plugins. Therefore, I’m stuck with my current version of the code until I upgrade and reapply all the mods.
Active Directory phpbb authentication.
WP-United 0.51. Any time a logged in phpbb user goes to the WordPress page, it logs them in there too. It also handles embedding the templates, cross system plugins, widgets, style sheet priority, user blogging permissions and many other things.
NextGen Gallery. This is a fairly straightforward embedded gallery plugin for WordPress. I really wanted to stay as lightweight as possible for this one as its initial task is simply to replicate and augment a staff photo gallery using modern technology.
Phpbb3 Portal. The developers of this front end for phpbb3 have made a very good effort considering the constraints that the system has. You have to do a lot of hacking around to get things a) working, and b) looking good, but the results are a powerful block based portal. I particularly like a dynamic tabbed RSS block I hacked together from code at StaticFX.
Simple Syndication. This is a phpbb3 mod which syndicates the entire bulletin board in RSS feeds on a per forum basis. It’s really powerful but I suspect it doesn’t parse bbcode tags correctly, which will cause a few issues when I try and syndicate news directly into users’ Outlook mailboxes.
AskPeople. This is a separate project I’ve been working on, which happens to have a beautifully integrated style. We’re hoping to use this initially for performing staff surveys, but eventually for wider customer ones. It’s really cool and very easy to quickly put something powerful together.

Anyway, that’s an overview of the technologies I’ve been using. The front page of the intranet is the WP blog. Our Newsperson will blog to that and keep the masses informed. The rogues’ gallery and a bunch of other static pages exist as links from the front page. Other than that I’ve kept things very similar to how they were. The intranet content is still using ‘activemedia’ and the bulletin board is still accessed via the front page and probably will be completely ignored. However, I feel quite positive about the whole thing – the implementation has gone so well that surely there’ll now be an uptake for it….

Tags askpeople, blog, ldap, nextgen, phpbb, phpbb3portal, plugin, simple syndication, staticfx, wp-united

work

Implementing Organisational Learning (I)

Post author By Alex
Post date July 5, 2007

I’ve been working for about a month now on a project to improve communication in the organisation. It came about because I was pretty badly offended at a new ‘idea’ that had been thrust upon us during some messy politics that were going on. I won’t go into that just now but the idea was to have an IT Newsletter distributed around the organisation to tell staff what’s going on. It was to be pure propaganda, with a complete absence of useful information, and I hated it.

Instead I did some very quick thinking and came up with a plan. I used some of the theories about Organisational Learning (OL) I’ve been reading about in my OU work this semester. These told me I should try to consider how best to a) facilitate the ability to impart explicit knowledge to other staff members, and b) create an environment where free discourse is understood and encouraged. High minded ideals indeed!

Initially I got interested in WordPress Mu. Once set up, it’s pretty much as good as regular WP (although a few versions behind) and highly scalable. Unfortunately I had serious issues with implementing it on a Windows server, and of course WordPress’s MySQL heritage makes things awkward.

Then all of a sudden phpbb3 RC1 was released. Regardless of the WordPress situation, the forums have been in desperate need of upgrades for years now. What’s more, phpbb3 has built in LDAP support, so users can log in with their Windows passwords. So the final project has grown out of that more than anything.

The current situation is very rosy. I’ve got the new forums mirroring the functionality and content of the old ones, but by adding an RSS mod I’ve opened the way up for much freer flow of information. phpbbportal is installed as a front page Portal, which uses RSS feeds from departmental forums to publish news in a tabbed layout. Next on my list I need a photo wall type thing. I might just use the standard member list for this, and upload each user’s photo as their avatar (and limit maximum display size).

Finally wp-united gets released this month, a plugin which integrates WordPress and phpbb completely, allowing multiple blogs. I intend to trial this out with an IT Services blog, and depending on how it goes, there could be justification for using it more widely.

I feel that although I’ve done a lot of work here, I’ve become more conservative with the project as it’s gone on. There’s a lot of sense in this – the users can barely grasp the concept of a forum, never mind a blog, so the more I can allow them to do within their current means the better.

I’ll come back to this with some updates and more general comments later, I just wanted to get this written down for now.

Tags blog, organisational learning, phpbb, wordpress, work, wp-united

photos

Photo Gallery updated!

Post author By Alex
Post date June 22, 2007

I’ve finally succumbed to pressure and updated my photo gallery with around 350 new photos. There should be something for everyone, and I’ll hopefully continue to add even more photos over the next few weeks.

The main site is right here.

22793

22831

23047

23255

Tags gallery2, photos