Francis’ Weblog

Well as one season ends the next one begins. Europe had a couple of late snow dumps which extended the season a bit but the US season has now more or less come to an end. Those who did the Rookie Academy course and were teaching in the US are now heading to NZ to do another season… well some of them :). I’m hopefully going to head out to NZ for two weeks or so in August, so I can catch up and do a bit of snowboarding too

Here is quite an interesting article about search engine optimization. The guy who wote it has worked for a number of search engine companies, so you get some interesting insights to how the closely guarded algorithms work! http://www.webmonkey.com/06/16/index3a.html.

Ok haven’t posted in a while, and since my last post i’ve been duped by Googles April Fools joke… it was good tho!! Its worth a check out Google Romance quite funny and I was wondering what on earth they were playing at!

BUT Google have launched another great web app “Google Calendar“. It looks quite good, this is the second project since gmail that directly completes with an existing Microsoft exterprise product Exchange because you can share you calendar with any other people on Google! Google is also making Outlook plugins for it and also integration into gmail so that if you get an email saying “Hi francis do you want to meet up on thursday for a pint at the kings head” gmail scrapes the email and turns it into a calendar item that you can put straight into your calendar! This is cool stuff The only thing that is a little worrying is the privacy concerns, the amount of info google will have on people, their emails, calendar and if the rumours prove correct with GoogleDrive then your personal files as well.

Heres a couple of articles i’ve found recently which are quite interesting. Also a quick Ruby on Rails tutorial.
The State of the Web.
Ruby on Rails Tutorial.
Password Cracking Times.

The London eCommerce market is booming at the moment. The last couple of weeks my phone has been red hot from clients wishing to either upgrade there site, or to completley rebuild it! I seem to be turning down a lot more people than usual. Even the people i’ve been passing them on to are too busy.

Oracle has launched Oracle Express Edition (XE) which is basically Oracle 10g database for windows and linux. Its a free version of Oracle with only a couple of limitations. Databases cannot be bigger than 4GB and that it will only use up to 1gb of memory and 1 cpu. Which IMH is great because it stops it from taking over your entire machine as Oracle seems to do. I think its obvious that this release is an attempt to get the MySQL/Open Source users over to Oracle and then getting them to pay for a license when they blast through 4GB of database. BUT the BIG improvement for linux. It used to be a total pain to install Oracle under linux, adding users here, groups their.. but now you just answer a couple of questions and bingo… done.

If you use Skype a lot i’ve found Pamela, its quite a nice extension to Skype which allows you to record conversations and setup a “Press 1 for x, Press 2 for y” type thing, you can also get it to create podcast xml files of recordings you have made but the later requires that you register it, but apart from that its free

I’ve been kinda interested in the battle between Flash and the Java VM over the last couple of weeks. The Java VM has never really taken off (I think manly because it takes so long to load! :)) but once Sun get openGL working in the VM I think Java will take over Flash… maybe Just think, quake running on a Java VM in your browser. More and more good VM services are cropping up like The Switchboard which is an internet VOIP service. Maybe I should be learning Flex just incase?
Well I haven’t re-installed my lappy for blinking ages and I’ve been pondering if I should or not… but just don’t have the time at the moment so I’ve just found a great little app called JDiskReport. It basically looks at your machine and hunts out large applications or even large files that you have put in random directories which are eating up disk space for no apparent reason and gives you a graphical breakdown. Anyway check it out its a freeware java proggy. My laptop is a litter clearer now

Ok remember when you got your first computer? Well … hmmm… I don’t think I was that excited. But then it was BBC Electron hand me down with the expansion pack on the back so you got a lpt printer port on the back! With the tape player which you had to get the volume exactly right or the games wouldn’t load… the good old days

Oh and have to leave you with this… yes, Simpsons is to be made into a movie and you thought that the repeats on sky were getting anonying hoping its good tho!

Anyway me off to bed.. cya.