Projects, and xFramework Nov 15 2005

So I’m currently planning and working on a couple of big projects. I’m not ready to say much more about the projects themselves yet, but both projects will be based on my open source set of libraries, xFramework. This means there will be plenty of improvements to the framework as I really start to tighten up the libraries, and fill in any missing features or functionality. I will blog more about the projects soon once I’m a bit further down the line with them, in the meantime, I plan to try and get some stable xFramework binary releases done over the next few weeks, and hope that others find the framework as useful as I do. For anyone interested, the current codebase is available using Subversion. All of the details are on the website. Quite a bit of the framework is now rapidly becoming stable, and as always, patches, improvements and additions are always welcome :-)

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Bash Nov 15 2005

This is one of my favourite sites. Some of the humour is low-brow, almost all of it is nerdy, but some of the quotes on there are still laugh out loud funny. And they have an RSS feed too so you can keep up to date with all the latest amusing quotes!

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Improvements Nov 15 2005

Couple of improvements coming to the blog next few days hopefully; firstly, I’m going to stick a permanent contact e-mail address somewhere on here, in case anyone wants to contact me about stuff mentioned. Secondly, I hope to improve the formatting of posts a bit, to make it easier when I create a post to jazz it up, space things out, should make writing slightly longer posts easier. Under that same umbrella, I’m going to work on an easy way I can format code to look good when I post it, so I can post useful snippets or interesting tidbits of code as and when I feel like it :-) I’m going to stick a link to the blog’s RSS feed somewhere, so that those readers without browsers informing them there is a feed available can find it and subscribe themselves (it’s available here by the way ;-) And finally, I may have a play with the way the tags are working, so I can give multiple tags to a single post, and so users can search the blog for posts of a certain tag, or category. Stay tuned!

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New music Nov 15 2005

So Pandora is simply awesome. I actually just load up the Pandora site, start one of my stations playing, and that’s it, my music sorted for the night. It has so far alerted me to a number of awesome bands, many of whom I probably should have heard of before, or perhaps did, but for whatever reason never sat down and listened to their music until now. Just Surrender, Boy Sets Fire, and Roses Are Red are great bands, to name just a few. Keep an eye on my favourites list to see some of the other bands I’m currently enjoying, thanks to the wonder of the Music Genome Project!

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Flickr / Pandora Nov 13 2005

So I’ve been playing with another couple of cool services; Flickr, and Pandora. The first has been around for a good while, and I never got around to signing up and trying it out. I’ve now changed this, signed up, and you can see my page here. No photos up yet, but that’ll change over the coming days I hope. Meanwhile, I’ve also been using Pandora extensively. This really is a nice service, as I’m always on the lookout for new music that matches my musical tastes, and this incredibly exhaustive database seems to be doing a good job of suggesting some really decent tracks. I’ve created a few stations, and I get a nice mix of the music I already like, a few classics that pop up, and lots of new bands. You can check my favourites here. They have just changed the sign up rules so you can create an account for free, and it’ll be supported by ads, or pay a small subscription to remove the ads. Either way, it’s an awesome idea, and a great service which so far I’m enjoying using!

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Impressive ideas Nov 11 2005

With the huge amount of new applications and services springing up on the web, under the general ‘web 2.0’ banner, I’m surprised that there are still companies with ideas that can impress me. Two such services with great ideas are Riya, and Newsvine. The former I heard about a few weeks ago, and it now seems its available for use. I haven’t yet taken the plunge and tried it out (to be honest I don’t have enough photos I’ve taken to get any real use from it, something I want to change). But the idea is deceptively simple. It’s job is to make organizing photos easier, and I guess more automated. At the same time, it does some crazy things with recognition technology to do things I didn’t even think computers were clever enough to do yet :-) Looks like a real winner, and I’m a sucker for innovation. And as for the latter of the two services, Newsvine; on the one hand it too does something fairly simple, providing a way for users to decide and control what’s newsworthy, and what isn’t. The bit that got my interest however was the bit about users writing their own news articles. It gives everyone the ability to become a journalist, and provides a platform for users to get their articles seen. I think the service will be a big hit when it finally goes live (you can leave your e-mail address at the minute to be notified when they hit beta). In the meantime, this post explains further about the service, and perhaps shows just how exciting it might be. I just hope this level of innovation continues, as I really enjoy seeing all these new cool services pop up. And who knows, in the coming weeks/months I might just enter the fray, with something that I hope to be rather 'innovative’ ;-)

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Switching to Linux Nov 11 2005

I’m slowly checking stuff off of my ‘exclusive to Windows’ list that’s keeping me using Windows on my main PC instead of switching to Linux. I run Fedora Core 4 on my laptop, and I’d like to do the same on my desktop, but currently there are a few Windows only apps that I either need to replace, or find ports for on Linux. For the majority of tasks this is easy enough, but the real problem is games! I’ve recently purchased Quake 4, which has a port for Linux: great! I’ve also recently purchased Age of Empires 3, which doesn’t :-( I’ve been testing the beta of VMware Workstation 5.5 recently however, specifically using the Windows version to host a guest Linux OS. Now I’m thinking that seeing how it runs so quickly (it really is a terrific product), I’ll be able to get away with running the Linux version of VMware Workstation, and having Windows as the guest OS for apps I still can’t find replacements/ports for! I’m getting ever closer to removing Windows as my host OS… :-)

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New New Orleans? Nov 10 2005

Dave Winer wrote yesterday about New Orleans, and how it has a chance to restart now. I think he’s right, it really is the kind of opportunity that only comes along once in a lifetime, but I think that the things he lists about New Orleans don’t MAKE it a great city, they MADE it a great city. Now that they have this chance to rebuild, this opportunity, they shouldn’t look to the past, and all the things that made it great in the past. They should look to the future, look for the 21st century equivalent of Louis Armstrong et al, and look for what will make New New Orleans as great a city in the future as New Orleans was in the past ;-)

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Ping services Nov 9 2005

Updated my blog software today to include pinging a superb service, Pingoat. I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of it until I saw it linked to today on an interesting post about Technorati tips and tricks. Really great service, seeing as it manages to ping so many different blog search engines in one swoop! Shame about their server problems tho :-(

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Amber Conundrum Nov 8 2005

José raises a few interesting questions, and points out our first big conundrum during the development of the service host runtime for Amber. This might require quite a bit of thought to ensure we choose the right solution going forward.

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