2009 has been pretty busy so far – as you can see from the lack of activity on here! Its almost 3 months in ’09 and this is my first post!

For those of you interested in what I’ve been up to…

At work – we are in our busy end of FY period, I’ve been going to Brussels quite a bit for a project for the European Commission. Experienced a first – a meeting/workshop with (almost all) the EU Member state countries which was really interesting.

Lots of other exciting projects kicking off at the moment – looks like I will continue to be busy well into the next FY, which is good. Fingers crossed the economic downturn isn’t used as an excuse/ is a cause for cutting back on environmental and climate change projects.

On a personal level (also linked to work) Kat and I signed up to participate in trials for a new type of improved home thermostat (‘chrono-proportional’) for the EST (its a project that work are running).  It involves putting a few temperature sensors up indoors (and one outside) and we submit weekly gas/elec meter readings. These will monitor the effectiveness of our current thermostat – then later in the year we will have a new type of thermostat fitted and we’ll do the monitoring again.

The improved weather means I’m out on the bike alot more now which is good news, have also combined the riding with my new toy (which I got for Christmas) a Digital SLR camera – I’ll probably post up some photos soon.

Recent/Interesting Web Links:

Came across www.goodguide.com which is a product comparision site which lists how ethically produced,/green/healthy products are. Bit US specific at the moment but worth keeping an eye on.

An article on The Guardian’s (Free) Open Content API and DataStore. In fact the whole http://infosthetics.com website is worth a look at.

I’ve started playing around a bit with Twitter – have to say I was (and still am a bit) skeptical of this – so we’ll see how long I use it for. So far I have linked it with my Facebook status messages. Perhaps there’s a way of linking WordPress to it so it can announce new posts?

Thats it for now – hopefully it won’t be as long until my next post!

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).

Really impressed with the work my colleagues have done on the new AEA website (http://www.aeat.co.uk). This also includes the ecopath website which will be vastly expanded in due course.

I can’t claim to have been hugely involved (other than some bits and pieces behind the scenes) although this is partly because they kicked off the project whilst I was in Paris (talk about quick turn around!). The plan is to move it to the Silverstripe CMS in due course which will make management and updates easier.