Tag Archives: Wikipedia

16Oct 2012

Cognizant and their Wikipedia entry

⋅ Leave a Comment

I love it when I come across entries on Wikipedia that have obviously been

added by disgruntled workers or customers.

I’m not sure how long this sentence will remain on Cognizant’s Wikipedia entry, but here’s a screengrab while it’s still around. It’s the opening sentence that you need to read ;)

 

23Apr 2012

Create an offline Wikipedia with BytePac

⋅ Leave a Comment

I recently reviewed the excellent BytePac, allowing you to store and access old hard drives via some simple cardboard packaging.

Now, they’ve documented a simple method to download the entire contents of Wikipedia and add them to a BytePac connected drive. They’ve even provided a template that you can print to add a Wikipedia themed cover to your storage box.

Is it worthwhile? That’s down to you. If you have a need for an offline version, then it’s a great idea, well documented. Personally, I think I’m happy with the latest online version.

30May 2010

Things that I learnt holding my first competition

⋅ Leave a Comment

I’ve never run a competition before and, thanks to Creative, my first opportunity has just concluded.

And what did I learn?

Well, a lot. First of all, the questions I should be asking the prize providers. Instead I kept badgering them as I kept asking some pretty basic questions…

  • When do you want the competition to start?
  • How long do you want the competition to run for
  • Are the prizes all for one person, all a “first” prize, or staged (first prize, second prize, etc)
  • How long until delivery
  • What will you provide if a product is no longer available?

Whilst running the competition I kept an eye on the entries to ensure that I wasn’t receiving multiple entries per person or household. And, after only 24 hours, I appeared to have found a problem – 3 people, each with an AOL email address, and the same IP address. Suspicious? It looked like it to me.

However, the fact that AOL is their ISP is the key here – they use a proxy-based system, meaning that many users may share the same IP address. Wikipedia has discussed such an issue before on their own site.

The database I created to hold winner details held a name, address, email, competition answer and IP address. Based on the AOL problems I now realise that I should also store a time stamp and user agent. I’ll be making these changes for next time.

I did a lot of work on the competition coding to ensure SQL injection problems. None-the-less I realised a few days ago that although the competition entry form disappears after the closing date, the code to submit the form details into the database still exists. This means that a third party script could inject entries (although not anything that would affect security) after this time. Again, this will now be fixed for future.

Lastly, I had so many entries that just trying to keep track of “rule breakers” became a lot, lot harder – more work on flagging such things at the point of competition entry will be useful, and I feel an automated email coming on!

Meanwhile, I have contacted the 3 winners and am just awaiting a confirmation of their postal addresses before details are announced.

22Apr 2010

WordPress – Create an instant link to Wikipedia

⋅ 1 Comment

I’m often wanting to create quick and useful links to Wikipedia. Obviously, you could add a link manually each time, but wouldn’t an automated system be so much better?

Well, crack open your functions.php file within your theme folder and added the following code…

add_shortcode('wikilink','add_wikilink');
function add_wikilink($paras="",$content="") {
    return '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'.str_replace(" ","_",$content).'" title="Look up '.$content.' on Wikipedia" title="Look up '.$content.' on Wikipedia" target="_blank" rel="notarget">'.$content.'</a>';
}

Then, simply add the shortcode [wikilink] around any word/words that you wish to look up on Wikipedia.

For example….

The [wikilink]HTC Hero[/wikilink] runs the [wikilink]Android operating system[/wikilink].

This would then produce the following output…

The HTC Hero runs the Android operating system.

The links open in new windows (i.e. target=_blank) and I’ve set rel=nofollow – obviously you can change the above code to modify any of this.

18Mar 2010

Recommended Android Apps – Update

⋅ Leave a Comment

Two weeks ago I posted a list of recommended Android apps. Two weeks is a long time, though, and some of those recommendations have changed and I’ve stumbled across some more.

So, here’s an update…

Changes

WikiMobile has been replaced with Quickpedia for viewing Wikipedia – overall, it’s a much better viewing experience.

Advanced Task Manager and ASTRO have been replaced by ES Task Manager and ES File Explorer. There was nothing wrong with the original apps, but the two ES replacements, being from the same developer, are more integrated and, importantly, ES File Explorer had a killer feature for me – the ability to map to my home network drives. Don’t forget to use the ES Task Manager widget (Advanced Task Manager has one too) for an instant clear-down of running apps.

Profilechanger was far too unreliable, quite often not updating my profile. The replacement, Timeriffic, has more options and has been, so far, 100% reliable.

Updates

I mentioned a lack of decent Google Reader App. I tried NewsRob but wasn’t impressed – I’m sticking to the mobile version of the Google site for now.

BeyondPod did, indeed, become my podcast app of choice – Listen was far too flaky and unreliable.

New Apps

Appbrain is one of many websites that allow you to view the Android marketplace. What sets it apart, though, is its matching App that allows you to choose an item from its site and then install it directly to your phone.

It will even sync your app list with the site, allowing you to view (and share, if you’d like) those that you have installed. Look out for a full review and more details about AppBrain coming up…

One of the most useful apps that I’ve installed recently is Wifi Analyzer – this will display, graphically, your wi-fi network in a number of different ways. From strength meters to channel ratings, this is a really excellent program.

One app I purposefully haven’t installed is toggleheadset. A known bug in Android means that sometimes the software doesn’t switch sound from the speaker to the headset when one is plugged in. Up until now I’ve never experienced the problem – until yesterday. So now I have it installed and have the useful widget on my home screen – one quick touch and it forces the sound source to swap.

After much reviewing of Twitter software, I settled on TwiDroid or, more importantly, TwiDroid PRO. For a while it wasn’t available to me in the marketplace (for unknown reasons) but then appeared. So far, I’m enjoying it. However, I don’t wish to be alerted to new Tweets so have the background updates switched off – however, the updating of messages when you enter the app is quite slow. I wish they had an option to background update but not alert!

Anyone with a phone such as a Hero should be aware of security and, in particular, the possibility of having the phone stolen. WaveSecure Mobile is a solution to this. Install the app and from their website you can, via texts sent to the phone, request information to be sent back, including location. You can even perform a full backup to their servers and wipe any data on the phone. Unbelievably, it’s free!

Lastly, a couple of pratical programs – UltraChron Stopwatch and RealCalc Scientific Calculator. The former is a Stopwatch and countdown timer (with speech!) and the latter is a full scientific calculator which includes (and the reason I wanted it) base conversion.

Still Reviewing

There are a couple of apps that I’ve installed but haven’t yet had a chance to try properly. These are…

  1. Where’s My Droid – text your phone and it will ramp up the volume and alert you to where it is!
  2. android-vnc-viewer – VNC remote viewer, allowing you remote access to a PC. Will be trying this, hopefully, later today!

Top
%d bloggers like this: