Categories
Life

Happy Christmas!

speedy-santaHappy Christmas blog readers (it would appear that there have been almost 3,000 of you this year according to Google Analytics!)

Check out my favorite Christmas Game – Speedy Santa!

Cheers!

Ollie

Categories
Environment Technology

Some recent browsing (Green Issues, SOA, Dashboards)

Some sites that I found interesting recently…

I’ve been looking at quite a lot of Green IT/Business type issues recently www.climatechangecorp.com is a good site (even if it does heavily promote its events on the content).

Carbon Calculators article: http://www.climatechangecorp.com/content.asp?ContentID=5119 Its disappointing it mentions AEA only in the context of providing the emissions factors – we actually do a whole lot more including building online carbon/emissions data platforms (and calculators) ourselves.

Great article from Adobe on Web 2.0, SOA etc – gives a great overview: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/web_end.html

Sun Microsystems came into to talk to us about their Java CAPS recently and it looks really interesting. We’ve already started to look at NetBeans IDE more closely (particularly the PHP plugin and its SOA/Business Process (BPEL) diagram/visualisation to BPEL XML code features…

See http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/javacaps/index.jsp

Dashboards, Flex with PHP etc:

One of my current projects is update our (data) visualisation and dashboard piece of our offering – as such we’ve been researching whats out there that we could use to enhance our technology stack:

Flex and PHP http://devzone.zend.com/article/3580-Building-Dashboards-With-PHP-and-Flex

Zend Framework/Adobe Media Remoting – http://corlan.org/2008/11/13/flex-and-php-remoting-with-zend-amf/

Interestingly Microsoft seem to be about to launch a new Dynamics AX product which is focused at Environmental data management – interesting to see the main IT vendors start to move into the space that we’ve been in for some time. This is really good news as it will give more deployment and integration options moving forward (eg for customers already using Dynamics).

Categories
Open Source Technology Web Development

Wowed by upgrade to WordPress 2.7…

Have just upgraded to the latest and greatest WordPress and was shocked as it has wowed me again in terms of user interface. The pace of improvement of this Open Source product is incredible. Just as I think wouldn’t it be good if… they’ve done it in the next release (and improved stability / fixed bugs).

They’ve introduced a turbo button which makes use of Google Gears (the offline/browser enchancement) and added more time saving shortcuts and a better post writing interface (particularly for re-using existing tags on new posts – this UI for tagging taxonomy might have to be borrowed on some of my projects…) Read their blog post here for more info on features (includes a video).

Below is the new dashboard – compare the below to WordPress 2.5 that I upgraded to back in May 08

fireshot-capture-5-olivere28099s-yard-ollie-cronke28099s-blog-e280ba-add-new-post-e28094-wordpress-blog_cronky_net_wordpress_wp-admin_post-new_php

The new dashboard is below – it now has dragable “modules”

wordpress_wp-admin

Trouble is it now makes me want to upgrade the design of my blog – but I know I have way more important things to do with my time before I faff with that again!

Categories
Gadgets Sony Stuff Technology

Exciting Playstation Updates (Iplayer & Playstation Home)

The latest firmware upgrade for the PS3 (is it me or does the thing love to spend half its time updating itself or something or other?!) is worthwhile – whilst the last one added Life with Playstation (which is an enchancement to the folding@home application that puts spare processing power to use) this one adds Playstation Home (think Second Life) and the ability to play Iplayer videos (although not download) which is really cool and very useful.

Playstation Home looks really good although it must be struggling with increased demand – as most of the time it fails to connect which is a shame.

Can’t help but think though that some of these products – Life@Playstation, Playstation Home could use better more imaginative names…?

Categories
Technology Web Development

Future Browser Wars – Internet Explorer 8 (Beta) and Google Chrome

Internet Explorer 8 ScreenshotSeems the web browser market is hotting up again, what with the recent launch of Google’s chrome browser (which I suggest you check out – and the cartoon – if you haven’t already – although I have pretty much stuck to Firefox due to some extensions I can’t live without – link). And now Microsoft have IE 8 in public beta: – http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/worldwide-sites.aspx

Will write more once I’ve tried the IE8 beta out but more it would seem that it has (in classic Microsoft style) “borrowed” quite a few features from elsewhere – including some of the stability enhancements that Chrome has introduced…