bradKELLETT

I have been using the new Brightkite location-aware social network (invite-only at this point) a lot over the last few days, and one of the very common questions I hear is how I do check-ins from my mobile phone, since at this point only U.S. carriers are supported for their SMS service. The (not so) secret is you can send MMS messages to email addresses with most Australian carriers (Vodafone seems to be only exception here), and Brightkite gives a personal email address for every account to send commands to.

Once you have an MMS compatible handset, simply:

1. Log in to Brightkite and select Account settings from the left of the screen
2. Click the Mobile tab
3. Scroll to the bottom and find your unique account email address, program this into your phone or remember it
4. On your mobile phone, create a new MMS message
5. In the To field, instead of putting in a phone number, put your Brightkite email address
6. Put the standard SMS commands into the body of the message. These can be found in the Brightkite help, but the basic ones are:
   • @placemark or @full address to check-in
   • !message to post a message and attach it to your current location

Using this method also means you can post photos to Brightkite from your phone. To do so, just add the photo in the body of the MMS message, and the text you want to go with it in the Subject field.

Enjoy, and feel free to add me as a friend over on Brightkite.

Read about some changes and updates.

The general response to my hesitation on the release of my Twitter timeline export tool was that I should, indeed, release it. So I have.

The tool now carries one of the most attractive names around: TweetDumpr. With it, you can export your entire Twitter timeline to a CSV (comma separated value) file, which can be read by any spreadsheet application. To get around the lingering privacy issues, the tool now requires you to authenticate to Twitter first, which makes sure you are only dumping your timeline and not someone else’s.

Currently, the tool only works on public timelines, but a new version is already in the works that handles protected users. Feel free to give it a go and report back on bugs that you encounter – it is still in the early stages of development.

Update: I have now released the tool.

As part of developing the Twitter Stats application, I created a standalone script that will dump a user’s entire Twitter timeline to a CSV file (comma separated value, readable by spreadsheet applications such as Excel), including the tweet text and the post time.

Initially, it was my intention to release this script to the public. I had several requests from people that wanted to have a record of all their tweets, which I kindly provided for them, and in my opinion the tool would prove quite useful.

After mentioning this to a couple of very smart people, they raised privacy concerns and suggested I keep the code to myself, which I have done thus far. These concerns stem from the fact that the tool can dump any user’s entire non-protected timeline, not just your own. Personally, I don’t really think this is a huge problem – if you have an unprotected timeline, all your tweets are public record anyway, the tool just makes it easier to extract and save these tweets. On the other hand, someone having a local copy of your stream does sound like a worrying proposition.

Clearly, there are far larger privacy issues associated with all of this, but I wanted to open up the floor and find out what other people think of the possible release of this tool. Should I put it out there, or keep it to myself?

Note: This is skewed toward computer science courses. I’m interested to see if it is the same in other subjects.

I have long had a belief that universities are, by and large, completely out of touch with the real world. This may not count for all universities/colleges or their staff, but in my experience most work given is largely pointless and taught by lecturers that have never been out of the academic environment – meaning they have no idea how things happen ‘out there.’

As I said, this probably doesn’t count for all lecturers and professors, but most that I know have finished high school, gone straight to study in a university, perhaps undertaken research, then right on into lecturing. It is this lack of real-world experience that prompts them to issue work that does not help prepare students for the outside world.

There are certain things that I believe that all students should learn, and while they might not be used generally in the workplace, they are things they provide a solid grounding for future thinking. This kind of work is fine, but there is so much pointless work that doesn’t fall into this category, and I honestly feel sorry for those students that leave university with no concept of the workplace. I have spoken to several students in this exact predicament recently.

I have with me an assignment that was issued in an Australian university just a few weeks ago, one which I believe perfectly highlights this point. I will not reveal the university it was given at, nor will I reproduce the content in it’s entirety, but I will highlight a few points that I feel are, quite frankly, ridiculous. Continue Reading