Crazy Delicious Feb 8 2006
Ok this is a bit of an old one (first appeared on SNL at the end of December I believe), but I thought I’d blog it anyway. Lazy Sunday. Fucking superb. If you close your eyes and listen to it, I swear it sounds like the Beastie Boys.
Mmm, pro Feb 8 2006
I’m now a pro. Erm, I mean I now have a pro Flickr account. You can check out my photo page here, or my photostream RSS feed here. Keep an eye on it, as I plan to start using my unlimited photosets, and 2GB monthly upload limit :-)
Cool app Feb 8 2006
This is a very useful application, you can get a free account with limited features (I’m currently using that as I get to grip with the various things it can do), and then there are a number of plans to increase the featureset and storage limits. Written with Ruby using Ruby on Rails (by 37 Signals, the guys that started it all), it’s very quick and easy to use. Cool stuff.
Finally Feb 8 2006
Looks like there might finally be a decent improvement to the graphics capabilities for Linux desktops. I was following this, and Luminocity (an advanced 3D spinoff testbed from Metacity), however it looks Novell are ready to drop Xgl now, as they contribute the core code, and a composite window manager that should provide some really decent effects on the desktop. I’m about to set up a separate machine (my old box before I upgraded) as a Linux desktop, so I’m hoping to give it a whirl. Who needs Vista eh?
RF Online Jan 30 2006
Everyone should be forced to play this game when it comes out, but in lieu of that happening, I urge everyone to give it a look. Entering second phase of beta next few days (when those like me who have pre-ordered the game get to give it a go), it’s due for release hopefully February/March time. It’s an eastern MMORPG, having been out in Korea, China, and the Phillipines for a while, but it’s generating a lot of excitement surrounding it’s launch in the UK and US (backed by Codemasters, also responsible for launching DDO). Looks like it might be the first MMO I get addicted to in quite some time.
Flickr Jan 30 2006
I finally got around to uploading something to my Flickr account, specifically two photosets - photos taken last weekend at my girlfriend’s work’s do (as the evening wears on I look more and more drunk), and photos taken from my holiday in 2004 in Los Angeles with my boy X, which I got around to finding again today. I just realised I only get three photo-sets with the cheapy free version of Flickr though, so I’m tempted to pay the relatively decent cost to upgrade to a Pro account, and get cracking with the photos (perhaps photographing everything I can think of - shoot first, ask questions later??).
Recent acquisitions Jan 30 2006
Ordered a few PC bits on Friday, and sure enough today I received a new Sony DVD re-writer drive, an Akasa AllInOne memory card reader/temperature monitor unit, and of course I needed a second graphics card (NVidia 6800 GS 256MB PCI-E) so I’m now running in SLI mode. Screenshots of how awesome everything looks to follow (why oh why does Quake 4 save them as tga’s?) but for now rest assured, everything is running sweet.
XML-RPC Jan 30 2006
So I’ve been hacking on XML-RPC last couple of days, and next few days a fairly nice implementation should hit the xFramework.Common.Xml library within the xFramework svn repository. The reason I’ve been doing this is a multitude of things combined really. First of all, I switched back from using the Flock browser, back to using Firefox. Flock is nice, but was a little sluggish, especially with multiple tabs, or if you’ve left it open for a while (I tend to have both of those things happen). When I got back to Firefox, I figured I’d browse through the plugins, and I found Performancing, a superb blogging plugin that allows me to blog straight from the browser whenever the feeling strikes. Well, it would have done, had my blog software supported it. I wrote the blog software myself, and so I figured adding support for one of the common API’s might be a good idea - I picked the MetaWeblog API, and so delved into the XML-RPC spec, along with the MetaWeblog spec, and knocked up an implementation. I am now blogging this straight from my browser :-)
The other reasons I really wanted to make a good, re-usable implementation of XML-RPC was because I’m working on something else that needs to be able to expose certain data with a defined interface, and to be honest SOAP based web services were boring me (why do I need to send everything in an envelope? Both sides of the service know what to expect, as they have to conform to SOME kind of interface, so why confuse the payload further with a load of extra namespaces and nonsense?). I almost went the RESTful route, but out of the two, and with the advantage of being able to use XML-RPC to implement the blogging stuff I wanted to get round to, I figured I’d learn that and cook up some code to do it. I’ll probably get round to REST at some point, but for now I’m simply extending and improving the RPC code to do exactly what I want it to do. It’s so ridiculously simple when I think about it, it makes everything really easy. I guess I’m quite surprised more stuff doesn’t use it really, as it’s a very neat, tidy and defined way of doing things. Great stuff.
System admin tools Jan 29 2006
This is a great article detailing a collection of tools, scripts and hacks that should be in the toolbox of anyone working on a Unix based system.
El on Rails Jan 25 2006
So I thought maybe I’d have a crack at learning Ruby, just for shits and giggles, and also thought as part of that I might investigate Ruby on Rails. The guys over at 37 Signals certainly seem to know what they are doing, and if it’s as good a web development and deployment framework as I’ve heard from various sources, then it’ll be a nice feather in the cap, and useful too. I’m sure I’ll vent my progress right here, so watch this space ;-)
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