Tamlyn

Hopefully these PHP snippets can be useful to someone. The first function formats a number to a specified number of significant figures (this is different from rounding to a number of decimal places). The second function uses the first to display a number of bytes with appropriate human-friendly formatting. e.g. 12345B becomes 123kB (to three significant figures). 

I’d like to organise an informal gathering of Twitter users from Hackney and heareabouts. There’s a bunch of us living in the neighbourhood and i think it would be nice to get a proper introduction so we can put faces to the usernames. I was thinking the Pembury Tavern for a couple of drinks some time next week. Please let me know your availability and I’ll try and pick a day that suits everyone.

Update: We had the first Hackney Tweetup last Wednesday 3rd December at the Pembury Tavern. Thanks to @ollieRelph @monkchips @phoebebright @ewebber @hackneye @gradualist & @kuxi for making it a success. Keep an eye on the #twee8 tag for updates.

I’m planning a trip to North America this winter and I’ve just realised that not only will that mean I’m not very far from SXSW in March but I’ll be in Vancouver on the exact dates of Interaction’09 in February! My problem is that as I will be between jobs I would have to pay for these myself and at $425 and $699, respectively, they’re not cheap.

I wrote to East Midlands Trains last week to claim a refund for a cancelled train. Yesterday I received this reply:

The @trendingtopics Twitter bot tweets the topics that people are talking about most on Twitter. There’s also an RSS feed if you’re interested. It’s a very low tech solution and it’s not guaranteed to work but I find it quite useful.

Phew! It’s been a while. I actually compiled this mix back in May or June but didn’t get round to finishing it until now. Once again there’s no theme other than music I’m currently enjoying – or at least, was enjoying 4 months ago!

Web addresses are horrible. They’re difficult to remember and poorly understood. Which is why I found the recent trend of suggesting search terms instead of quoting a URL interesting.

I read an interesting letter yesterday from Ecotricity, my electricity supplier. I received it a couple of weeks ago but hadn’t opened it because i thought it was a bill!

Note: cross-posted from the PlusNet Community site.

Myself, Sam & Matt went out to Sheffield city centre on Monday afternoon for a spot of user testing. It’s the first user test I’ve run in the wild, previous times have been with friends & family or work colleagues. It was an interesting afternoon and we certainly learned a lot.

I had a quick play with Google Lively this morning. I’m going to avoid the obvious what-the-hell-is-Google-doing-releasing-a-shit-imitation-of-Second-Life question that everybody else is asking and instead look at some of the usability issues I encountered.