December 2005
12 posts
'Happy Holidays', or 'Merry Christmas'?
I don’t want to get involved in what has to be the stupidest debate of the year, however I do want to point people to this site, because its hilarious. I haven’t blogged as much as I want last few weeks, as I’ve been working on lots of things, all while preparing for the festive season, and so it’s been rather hectic. However I’d like to take this opportunity to wish...
64-bit goodness
Here is some excellent news, some decent support for 64-bit at long last! I logged into Steam this morning, and was informed that it will detect when you are running a 64-bit native OS, and execute the appropriate version of the Source engine. Pretty cool stuff - I’m running an AMD64, but using the Win32 version of XP because of a lack of 64-bit Wireless drivers. If this gets resolved,...
Tabloids
Couldn’t agree more with this excellent post. I’ve learnt to take The Register with a pinch of salt - it’s like the tabloid paper of the tech world.
Dashboard
Not quite sure how I have only just found this now, but dashboard is an excellent tool that tries to display information accrued from multiple sources (e-mails, documents on your computer, browser history etc) that is pertinent to what your doing on your computer. If you are chatting on IM about something, then it’ll try to locate and display information about that topic. Pretty clever...
This rant - sponsored by MasterCard
This really gets on my nerves - the third sales phase for FIFA World Cup 2006 tickets went live today, my interest peaked by Fridays draw for the group stages. It seems like a fair way to distribute tickets - between now and 15 January 2006, you can sign up and ‘order’ which tickets you want. Since demand will outweigh availability, at the end of January, a lottery will take place to...
Damn write
This service is awesome. In terms of innovation, it’s right up there. Should that be write up there? ;-) It’s called Writely, it’s still in beta, and it’s superb. It’s an online word processing package, sporting rich text formatting of documents, collaboration features, document revisioning by the looks of things, and the ability to import/export Microsoft Word...
Sunday
Caught the news at various times throughout the day, which dealt mainly with the huge fire at the oil depot in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, a place not all that far from me. In fact, accounts from people living in my home town are that the noise woke many up here, and that there was a definite rumble felt at the time of the first explosion at 6am. I must admit I slept right through it,...
Blogging, SSE and xFramework
Haven’t blogged much last few days, been working on cooking up a few ideas… Been playing around with the SSE support I added into xFramework a while ago. I’ve fixed a few problems with the namespacing, and made the base RSS classes better able to support extensions such as SSE. The SSE classes now seem to be working as intended, so it’ll be cool to see what comes out of...
Free the Mac Mini
Some excellent work going on here to release an open-source Linux driver for a Broadcom chipset used in a variety of wireless network cards, including the Airport Extreme. Using this new driver in conjunction with this cool guide to getting Fedora Core up and running on a Mac Mini (which stated, correctly at the time, that the only device that wasn’t supported is the Airport Extreme using...
Bird's Eye
Extremely cool stuff. The bird’s eye views bring a whole new dimension to online mapping apps.
New stuff
Committed a few updates to xFramework this evening.
Firstly, tweaked xFramework.Common.Db slightly, and added the MySql provider I was talking about needing :-)
Secondly, I added a load of updates to the xFramework.Common.Xml library, specifically to the RSS classes. An overview of these classes explain how they now work, and should give a good idea of how they can be used. I consider both the...
Validated
Ah yes, and I’ve updated my blogging software to use the most recent xFramework.Common.Xml version now, which results in valid RSS (validated here). As such, you’ll see that theres a little ‘Valid RSS’ image at the bottom of the blog page now :-)