This week saw the quiet launch of something big.  A new crowd funding platform that welcomes any project no matter where in the world you are!  How can they remove such a limitation?  Well by using a globally recognised currency that anyone can use, that of course would be Bitcoin.

Just one of several projects on the brand new crowd funding site.

Bitcoin Starter is like any other crowd funding platform such as Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, the difference being that it only accepts Bitcoin payments as contributions to projects!  Other than that, the main rules stay the same.  Anyone can submit a project, they write up their aim and they post it on the website saying how much they’re needing, what they’re planning to use it for and how long they have to raise the funds.  If the target isn’t reached, the money is returned to the people who pledged it and if it’s successful, the pledgers get rewards for their help.

So what’s so great about using Bitcoin rather than dollars, euros, pounds, yen or indeed what ever currency you’re used to spending?  Well for starters, no matter where you are in the world, your Bitcoin is usable and you don’t have to go through any lengthy process to open a bank account to use it.  In fact, you don’t need a bank account at all, just a Bitcoin wallet on your device.  If you don’t trust yourself to keep your Bitcoin safe on your device you can keep one online too but the important thing is, anyone can have one and trade online.  It means that money can be sent instantly over the internet without payment providers taking large costs and without so much banking regulation (money is sent directly from user to user).  More people are able to raise the Bitcoin they need to start a project, regardless of country, age, ability to open a bank account, everything!

Bitcoin is the worlds fastest growing currency, when I first started investigating, 1 BTC cost 48 GBP, now it costs 90 GBP and is fast heading toward £100 and that’s in just a couple of weeks.  The rapid growth shows just how much people are trusting this new currency, especially after a rocky start with some pretty nasty press.  My next post will be more about Bitcoin though, this one is about Bitcoin Starter.

As I say, it’s been a quiet launch but the creators have been kind enough to invite me to seek funds for My Agility Board on launch, therefore, My Agility Board is on the front page and looking for funds to help it expand.  There are also other projects such as those seeking funds for a photographer who’s dream is to go to Pripyat in Ukraine so that he can photograph the home of the Chernobyl Disaster and another wishing to raise funds to buy Tablet computers for educational purposes in the world’s poorest areas.

It’s been a very quiet launch and it’s taking off very slowly but I’m sure as the Bitcoin community grows, so will BitcoinStarter.com, it’s definitely one to watch!

While we’re all jumping on the band wagon of pointing out that iOS6 Maps having bad maps (it does by the way, truly awful maps), let’s not forget that no body is perfect…

Not the first issue that I’ve found on Google Maps, let’s not forget what I found on a TomTom satnav a while back, Google AND Apple were based on Telemaps which meant that the same issue crept onto Google Maps too.  Thankfully, TomTom got in touch on that occasion and fixed the issue quickly.

So a new version of Farmville 2 has been driving me mad with notifications on Facebook.  Here’s how to block them.

Just go to http://www.facebook.com/appcenter/farmville-two and click that Block button. For the sake of your own sanity, do it now!

Can’t do it now?  Add it to your To Do list on http://www.myagilityboard.com

This post is a duplicate of the first post that I have put on blog.myagilityboard.com

I created My Agility Board at the start of 2012, I was mid way through my fourth year at University and using agile methods but hated using a large pin board to keep track of my project for a number of reasons.

For starters, the pin board was huge, if I went to catchup with my supervisor, I couldn’t very well drag the pin board up with me and what if they weren’t even in the building at the time?  Sometimes a photograph just wasn’t good enough.

I started using the sticky notes program on my computer with a background which worked at first but the truth was, I had more than one computer and not being able to access my notes on other computers was annoying so I figured I’d create some kind of online system that I could create notes, have them stored in a database and work just like the notes apps that you get on most operating systems.  I wanted to make sure they could be made public too so that I could share them with people in a read only format to keep people up to date on what I was doing.

After creating it, I figured I may as well make the site open to the public which meant that my friends were able to use it for their honours projects too.  As I write this, it’s nearing 1,800 boards registered.

Having asperger syndrome, I’ve always been keen on little gadgets that keep me organised, when I was at school, I was the only kid to be walking around with a little pocket PDA with my timetable on it, something my teachers hated but it kept me happy.  Of course, now everyone has smartphones so it doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

Well anyway, My Agility Board became a pet project of mine once I left university, I kept using it and was always getting little tips on how I could improve it but one thing that concerned me was, some people were putting private data on their boards, stuff that should be kept secure.  The moment I realised, I encrypted the database so that I couldn’t read it by accident and so that if it were some how hacked and downloaded, nobody could read it.  Passwords, notes and email addresses are all encrypted but there’s still one security hole.

Unlikely as it may be, if someone were to site and watch packets traveling over a network, they would see the contents of notes and login details transmitted in plain text.  This is actually a common method of cyber espionage and it is fixed by using an SSL certificate, you’ll have seen this on many websites in the form of a little padlock in the address bar of your browser.  The thing is, to get a certificate that shows that checks have been done to validate a site’s identity, it costs a fair bit of money, so haven’t got one yet.

The site is also unreliable at times, often it can go down for a couple of minutes, not much but when you’re using it a productivity tool, a couple of minutes can mean a lot of frustration.  To fix this, I need to move the site to a new dedicated server as opposed to the cheap web hosting that I’m paying for at the moment.  Unfortunately, this is a bit out of my price range.

I figured the best thing to do would be to monetise the site.  To do this, I wouldn’t charge for the features already there but create some features that have been requested from time to time and sell these as upgraded pro accounts.  However, I felt that it would be wrong to start charging for features when the site itself is not yet reliable or secure.

Because of this, I’ve turned to crowd funding, in the hope that people will look kindly on my situation and help me get this site going some more.  With my fiancé being super organised (more so than me with my sticky notes;) I asked her to help me by being in charge of the money side of things if I managed to get some funding and in the future monetise the site.

IndieGoGo seemed like the best solution to my hopes so I have placed the site on there and I’ll be giving T-Shirts, free pro membership (when I create it) and other things in exchange for people’s generosity.  The campaign can be found at www.indiegogo.com/myagilityboard

I’m not sure if people will think the site a worthy cause but we’ll see :)

Andy

I have been struggling with something at work for a few days now and that is setting the default text field on the login page of the miiCard website.

Our login page is very simple, username, password, that’s it.  Choosing to have one field as selected proved very tricky because we were using the asp:Login control which did not provide easy access from the code behind and refused to allow a static ID to be used by javascript/jquery.

Eventually, I worked out a decent solution using jQuery (though the same could be applied to native javascript.

The trick was to put at the bottom of my login page markup some jquery mixed with some javascript.  We knew that there is a TextBox control with the server ID “UserName” inside the Login control which had the server ID “Login1″.

So the JQuery was quite simply, one line.

Which generates the correct code replacing thepart with the client ID that the server had generated.

I haven’t tested this but the same should be easy to do if you’re not using JQuery too.

Remember that JQuery requires the # to specify that it’s an ID where as Javascript already knows it’s dealing with an ID so no # is required.

Hope this of interest to someone.

Dear Support staff,

You have likely noticed that you are receiving no registrations of Nectar Cards through your website, please forward this message on to your site developers as it will explain how to fix this issue.

When registering my Nectar card online (using a temporary card I’d picked up in store), I was told that I had not filled in all mandatory field.  Seeing that I had, I decided to debug your javascript.  Your javascript’s fnSubmit function clearly showed that it was looking for a field named “gender” that was not present on the form.

Using the debug tools in my browser, I created a hidden field named “gender” and (based on the coding style of single characters you’ve used) I guessed that the value needed would be “M”.  After doing this, your sign up process completed correctly.

Another error was encountered when I attempted to add a second card holder to my account.  Selecting “Miss” for my girlfriend’s account, I would then move down to select a gender, the field was this time present however by selecting “Female” the title “Miss” would be changed to no selected value.  Selecting the title again would do the same for the gender field thus once again throwing up an error that not all mandatory fields were correctly filled in.

Using the debug tools in my browser again, I chose to remove the call to the javascript made by the two drop down boxes and submit the form now that your javascript could not delete what I had inputed.  After doing this, the form submitted correctly.

I hope this information will help you remedy the issues with your live site as quickly as possible so that you may start receiving online applications again.

Andy Barratt
Computer Scientist and Software Developer
www.andybarratt.co.uk

Ah a post about the illusive job mentioned in the last post!

So I’m moving to Edinburgh, perhaps as soon as tomorrow.  In fact, I have actually been working in Edinburgh since Monday and thus far have spend £84 in just three days travel thanks to Britain’s extortionate train fares but let’s get into what you’re interested in, miiCard.

I woke up a couple of months ago to a rather terrifying email in my university inbox which in my student life was at the crack of dawn (so about 10AM) and certainly woke me up.  It featured some poor soul desperately trying to break free from the clutches of a zombie horde and underneath this was written, “break free from coding hell.”

Allow me to clarify, at this time of year, we receive dozens of job adverts at the School of Computing every week, some of them of interest, none of them exciting.  I normally glazed over them hoping that perhaps one of them would do something special like whisk me off to New York (don’t ask why, it’s my dream not yours).  This one, got my attention.  If you take a look at my CV on this site, you can see that I’m not the most formal of people.  What you see is exactly what you get when I’m applying for a job, complete with that fine Andy Barratt branding down the left hand side (hell, that’s even on my business cards!).  I don’t do dull, I just can’t be arsed.

And as this was evidently not a company to always do things formally, I decided I wanted to find out who they were, after a quick scroll through their website, I sent a rather unconventional email, in the way that I do, and a copy of my CV as a PDF because what I saw on the site impressed me, miiCard is actually something exciting!

Well come on then, tell us what miiCard is!

miiCard is a personal security company… now doesn’t that sound dull?  Keep reading.  What miiCard does is create an online version of a passport.  They give you an online ID card and they check it against your online banking to prove, to money laundering standards, that you are who you say you are.  Why?  So that you can prove it faster to everyone else!

What if I told you that 70% of bank applications online fail.  Can you hazard a guess why? Well you apply for a bank account but then the final step is “please come into your branch and show us your proof of address and your proof of ID.”  Well so much for that, I’m a lazy bastard like the rest of the world and I just can’t be bothered to walk to the bank.  I’ll survive with my current bank account.

Oh but imagine this, you apply online and it says, “do you have a miiCard?  No?  Sign up for one in 5 minutes and then we’ll give you your bank account.”  Well then, thank you very much, I can spend the rest of my day watching NetFlix!

How about this one?  You’re looking for a flat to rent (can’t imagine how I got this one in my head), and you find one online, you take a virtual tour and it’s awesome, only, you have to travel far across the land to make an application and prove who you are before you can even sign the lease many days later!  How tiresome!  I may as well just commute for the first wee while.  Oh but wait!  I can apply for this flat with my miiCard and allow the letting agent to do the rest!  Awesome!

How about dating online?  How often have you heard of grotty little people preying on the vulnerable in dating sites?  They chat, they get on fine, he says he’s the same age and she loves his sense of humour, he has a Facebook with loads of photos so she knows he looks cute.  So how come now she’s standing by a pier and a creepy guy who’s 20 years older than her and he is not taking no for an answer?!  If the dating site had people register with miiCard, people would know that who they’re talking to is who they say they are!

Why has no one done this before?!  Identity theft is one of the biggest threats to our security online and being able to prove who you are is not always so easy, to be able to do it so quickly like this is brilliant.  I was hooked in and the day after my initial email, I got an email from CEO James Varga inviting me for an interview, which I of course attended the next day and was offered the job less than a week later.  Because of my dazzling looks I do not doubt…

I remember that the vacancy as advertised online described the position as “being part of something big” and thinking how much I agreed with that statement.  If miiCard takes off, I think the term miiCard will be as well known as the name PayPal.  Almost everyday I think of a new reason why a miiCard would come in handy.

And that’s how I shall leave you, with this question and the video after it, how many ideas pop into your head where proving your identity instantly online would save you time?

I’m moving to Edinburgh this week to start work at an exciting personal internet security startup, more on that later.  In the mean time, if you can get to Dundee, I need to get rid of my crap!

• Goodmans Freesat HD box, that’s subscription free satellite television with HD channels and iPlayer through an ethernet port!  £40
• PS2 Slimline, missing power cable, £10
• Graphics card, decent but can’t remember spec, PCI Express, Free
• Internal DVD Rom Drive, Free
• The P.C. Support Handbook by David Dick, Free
• Motherboard, Conroe 1333-DVI/H £20
• Pentium D Processor and fan, suitable for above motherboard, £30 (don’t remember speed)
• TP-Link Wireless N PCI card, £5
• 1GB DDR3 Laptop Memory Stick, £5
• Microsoft Wireless Mouse with base station (yeah, before the days of usb dongles) Free
• iMac G3, blueberry colour, slot loading.  Various upgrades, Mac OSX has been REMOVED, this runs Ubuntu Linux 10.06 LTS for Power PC.  This makes it run more modern programs than MacOSX, not everything though.  It’s the one I did in this article http://www.andybarratt.co.uk/recycle-imac-g3  £50
• Laptop with broken screen and no hard drive, great for use as a server at uni, Free
• Olympus OM10 35mm camera, I love this camera though I don’t need two.  No lens.  £10
• Panasonic NV-GS17 Mini-DV Camcorder with battery and charger.  Great wee camcorder in wonderful condition.  Unfortuantely, neither of my Macbooks have firewire ports so it has become obsolete for me.  £50.

Will likely add more stuff as I go.

Comment below or contact by other means if you know how.

I found a couple of bugs in Draw Something that let you cheat, it’s as easy as turning it off and on again ;)

One of my favourite bands is chamber music trio featuring a Cello, a Double Bass and a Beat Boxer on Flute.  I first discovered the band when I watched a video on YouTube that had gone viral of the flutist from this band playing the theme from the popular computer game Super Mario Brothers whilst simultaneously beat boxing.  After looking further, I discovered his band which was named Project.  Having watched a few modern takes on some classical pieces I was hooked and immediately downloaded their album entitled Brooklyn.

The video currently sits with a view count of over 22 million.

Yesterday I decided that I wanted to take a look for other albums by Project and after purchasing the only other full album I could find, iTunes gave me a suggestion that I buy a third by a band called “Project Trio.”  I was a little confused as it appeared that this was the same band with a new name.

I performed a quick search on Google for “Project Trio” the top result was for their website which confirmed to me that this was indeed the same band, complete with a listing for the Brooklyn album only now stating that it was by Project Trio.

Project Trio gave a link to their Twitter profile that I could follow and after doing so, I decided to write a quick tweet asking them about the name change.

@thePROJECTTrio When did you guys change your name? Trying to decide if I should change your name from Project to Project Trio in iTunes.

The original Brooklyn Album still shows the original band name on its cover.

After downloading their albums I was wondering if I should simply change the name of all three albums’ artists in my iTunes library to read “Project Trio” as I often enjoy listening to an entire artist’s discography in order of album release.

When I woke up this morning, Project Trio had replied to my tweet explaining that the name change actually came from something that as a computer scientist, I was already very familiar with.

@wormholer693 We are officially PROJECT Trio. Changed it about a year and a half ago. PT is way more google searchable!

I had been pondering whether the band had had a reshuffle or perhaps felt their name wasn’t descriptive enough, it had crossed my mind that the name Project had clashed with somebody’s copyright but the entire thing came down to SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.

Search Engine Optimisation is the act of refactoring code and page content on a website so that it can be found easily in web searches.  Often I have found myself investigating what would be the best name for a web project so as to make sure that it could be found easily online.  How many other things could you be meaning if you do a web search for the word twitter?  If you think of a nice catchy name that you know will bring your project out on top on Google, you have a better chance of getting your brand out there.

I had not actually considered how this might affect projects that are not necessarily web based.  Bands have, in the past, not had to think of how well their band’s name could be searched because the World Wide Web didn’t influence our lives so much.  This meant that we would get some really strange names popping up for bands that would be a nightmare to search for.

I find it really interesting to see how people are now thinking of SEO when not even working on a web project anymore.  It’s interesting to see that Project Trio felt they required a name change to work in our new web based world.

Indeed, a search for “Project” on Google places the band on the second page of listings compared to “Project Trio” which returns the band as the top result.

I wonder how many more non-web-based ventures out there have picked their names based entirely on how well a search for them would appear online.

You can find out more about Project Trio by clicking here.