A journey of 1000 miles starts with a single SaaS Solution
Web Development
Web development work that I do
Google’s lost the love but gained a calendar
Apr 21st
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.
Programming head to head…
Mar 29th
About two weeks ago I was pulled in to help out a an extranet project (for a famous battery manufacturer) which really just needed a push in the right direction. Not enough design of the project was done in the early stages which meant some quite major issues were not identified until late on in the project. This therefore meant a load of code had to be re-written. Just even a little more design work or better prototyping could have figured it out … anyway gripe over
My next project is just a brief stint working on an eCommerce site for a couple of weeks. At the same time working on a travel site I help setup: www.qwertytravel.com. I’m going to see if I can improve it by putting a bit more “Web 2.0″ stuff into it. I’m currently looking at google maps and a JSP API (http://www.lamatek.com/GoogleMaps/) Google Maps is just great, Its quite cool technology. I do think that people have gone a bit “Web 2.0″ mad… Its not new technology its just I think the internet is in the “second coming” stage. Its become an everyday resource which people use without thinking about it… ok some people but some compared with the world population is a lot
Just found another good podcast for techies, its language independant and is focused on software engineering. Its great compliment to a programming specific podcast like Java posse. You can find all the info at: http://www.se-radio.net/
I’ve also found a site that pits different programming languages against itself. It definatly shows that C++ is faster a bit than Java but i’m not too sure if the algorithms used could have been improved to show better results. Which really shows that the speed of the language doesn’t matter if you have programmers that don’t optimise their code. Anyway its worth a quick look: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/index.php
Windows so slow? – Interesting article about the issues facing Vista (microsofts new OS) and that Microsoft bundling stuff in the 90s is to blame in the delay.
iPod or not to Pod that is the question…
Mar 24th
I managed to claw my ipod back from my little bro a couple of weeks ago! He managed to find it somewhere. He claims that I said I wasn’t using it anymore (shorly not!), anyway I got it back and i’ve REALLY got into pod casts in a big way. Kinda accidently really anyway found a couple of great podcasts to listen to on the train into work. Sync ma ipod in the morning and off you go!!
Techy:
Java Posse
A great podcast discussing java news and interviews, created by a guy from Kent University
The Twits
Technology chat
Security Now
Hosted by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporta they talk about personal internet/computer security. Its really for the home user wanting to know more about cryptography etc but they have some useful stuff. I did listen to one episode and they kept going on and on about one time pad encyption. They said it was 100% impossible to crack. Which … yes is “technically” 100% full proof, but you still have to transfer the plain text pad to the receiver of your encrypted message and if that gets intercepted without you knowing you code is broken. So I wouldn’t call it 100% myself… they did get around to mentioning this near the end but not after I had shouted at my ipod a couple of times saying “no it isn’t what about transferring the pad!… etc…”. After receving a couple of strange looks from people on Clapham Junction station I swapped tracks to the Simpsons
Info:
New Scientist Podcast
New Scientist has a number of articles and news from the mag in the podcast and has some really good interviews with knowledge matter experts.
FOXCAST: The Simpsons
Well think this one is quite self explanatory.
WOW what a year to go and do the Rookie Snowboard course! For those who don’t know I did a snowboard instructor could in new zealand last year and it was… AMAZING! really good fun and learned so much, not just snowboarding, which have really helped in my professional career as well. You can see all my rookie posts by clicking Rookie Academy in the catagories.
ANYWAY the reason I say its a great time to go is because the UK -> NZ exchange rate at the moment is amazing! Its currently cheaper than when I paid for it so you can get quite a good deal.
I’m hoping to get back out there this coming season. I did the course with my mate Mikal and he stayed out well popped back to the UK got a visa then went out
Todays cool site of the day: http://www.deviantart.com/
Some of the images on it are amazing my favouite sections are:
3d Wallpaper
Abstract Wallpaper
Icon Sets for programs etc
A mate from work showed me the site, he said most of the icon sets are on GPL but to get permission to use them usually only takes a quick email to say could I use them and the fame and recognition for the designers is enough
I feel a blog design update coming on which reminds WordPress (the blogging software I use) has been upgraded to 2.0.2 so i’m now going to attempt to upgrade it. Wish me luck!
Cool Stuff…
Mar 22nd
Another day in webland another dollar! or pound. Anyway I was hunting around the net today and Microsoft has released some code!! All the code for Microsoft MechCommander 2, hey its not Windows XP but I think its kinda ground breaking…ish! Its all in C++ but has everything you need to get it working. If anyones interested in game programming tis great! The game came out in 2001 but its basically a demo for XNA from what I understand..
The 2006 Jolt awards are out. Microsoft won the best development environment for Visual Studio Team System 2005. But IntelliJ IDEA was on their heals which is the IDE I use for writing Java (highly recomended!) but i’m kinda getting into Netbeans as it has some great stuff for creating mobile phone apps.
OOhhh almost forgot. Take a look at VMTM (if you haven’t already), its VMWares “technology network”. Basically you can download a whole range of different VMs and also a FREE VMWare Player. The upshot being you can run Fedorra Core 4, MySQL, Oracle 10g!!, DB2 or even just an “internet browsing VM”! The browsing VM runs firefox so you can browse the web in the safe knowledge that you won’t get any spam installed on your computer, or attacked by any viruses, because if you do all you have to do is delete the VM and restart the fresh copy.
For all my Uni mates! remember David Barnes? Well I was listening to an interview with him on the BlueJ IDE. Its basically a Java learning Tool that Kent Uni has produced to help students learn OO in a visual way without going straight into the code (if only we had it when we were learning!). ANYWAY… Its seems that its soo good microsoft has copied it. The BlueJ team have done an article on their website about it so you can make up your own mind, dialog box for dialog box!. It does look very much like they have used the BlueJ ideas. Just as an aside a special version of Netbeans is being created by Sun which integrates BlueJ more info on Roman Strovl’s blog.
My Digital Compositing Mates! I know a couple of you program java, well there is a new Java framework out for key frame animation and timing. I haven’t tried it out but looks quite cool. More info here, and continued here.
Ok i’m off to bed, go faster caffine tablets on standby for the morning!
Course over…
Mar 20th
My course is now finished and it was GREAT! learnt loads, i’m working on my showreel which should be finished soon before I forget how to do everything. I’m currently working of a media company at the moment doing some OO web development (had to dust off a couple of my books.. no only joking! ). Just found a really interesting page on wikipedia…”Comparison of web browsers” listing all (or most) of the web browsers over time from WorldWideWeb back in 1990. Oh and even quotes spyglass as the original maker of Internet Explorer (at least you know microsoft will never charge for the use of IE!).
Anyway i’m off to play around with Netbeans…
