I intend 2011 to be a much more blog-rich year, I am already brainstorming some posts for February that will go live perhaps from the Ukraine, should my travel plans come together. The whole blog will be taking a new slant as I move on to new projects; I will likely be blogging a lot more about writing (as I finish this novel), travel, self-employment and entrepreneurship (as I now maintain my own sole/soul living.) This does mean a move away from code specifics, but no doubt with the way my businesses are online based there will still be a good helping of web development and technology posts.

It looks as if the majority of my 2011 shall be in London, with perhaps a few escapes to the Ukraine, Spain and elsewhere. Hopefully this less nomadic period will allow me to secure a larger business, finish this book and get fitter.

2010 Has been a good year for travel, from the sandy cocktail beach’s and fast paced mountain biking through lychee groves of Thailand across to the lake of Pokhara and the remote Bandipur in Nepal; sidestepping riots in both countries and a ridiculous ash cloud, through grace or luck. From central park and the Guggenheim to the Robert Moses beach and Long Island, New York was epic; and now in 48 hours or so on to Agadir, Marakesh, Casablanca and Fez, Morocco, its been a good year for travel.

While at home I have also picked up climbing, something I wish I had done more of while in Thailand. The Castle near Finsbury park is a fantastic location, especially when visited with a few good friends. I need to do more of that. I also look forward to a time when I have a piano in a house of mine so I can truely take that forward and carry on learning

Through work and exploration this year I have absorbed C#, something I am quite happy with as it bridges the gap in my skillset between open-source and MSFT, between web programming and local app development. In my opinion it is also a good year for Microsoft, despite their mediocre year on NASDAQ; they are releasing much more rounded products and seem to be beginning to see the benefits of what I see as a change in strategy. Either way C# has lead me to refine my rapid application development and brought the brute modern processing power directly into use, I would thoroughly suggest it to supplement your language base if you are leant heavily towards php/LAMP (while I would only use it over php for few of my future web projects.) RAD in C# let me experiment with an arbitrage betting program and write a quick Reddit wallpaper grabber (yes I know it needs fixing); as well as a bunch of other stuff like a Filezilla bulk user import, an SQL->php hardcoded rewrite of a huge site that meant 300% quicker loads, a remote image processing app, tons of little sharepoint integration bits, a full sharepoint 2010 site migration routine and also a true 3rd gen website asset management tool, which I will perhaps post more about.

Near U has had a fairly good year and I have added a few more sites to the portfolio (I still need to diversify though) – mostly bolstering and fulfilling old ideas for domains that have been stagnating, I hope to shift this up a gear to bring it all back into line now I have the freedom to do so; the cold financial climate does seem to have slowed people buying cars, specifically though on-line auctions this past quarter but I have high hopes for the new year. Part of managing this portfolio of now more than 200 sites has been writing up a proper asset management tool geared towards websites (mostly affiliate) as assets of value, csharp has allowed me to write this multi threaded, flexible, detail rich program in a ridiculous short stint of evening programming, perhaps it may even make its way as a sell-able tool, this however is to be seen.

In the last few months I have also been running with Sharepoint 2010 (another example of microsoft getting themselves together) – which although on its preface is limited or “nothing new” in fact has quite sufficient enough depth to hold weight as an intranet solution. I doubt you will find better workflow, versioning, integration and scope in a web-based solution (even if it is £120k for enterprise for 1000+ users) – developers should not be scared of it. To supplement a sharepoint installation I would also advise the familiarisation of developers with WCF, microsofts best answer to web services moving forward.

There has been a few good books recently which have also left a resounding impression, The Road Less Travelled (by M. Scott Peck) left me thinking more about the sub concious and revealed new angles on understanding people will that I will forever remember. In Nepal I left my copy of The Art of Happiness on a bus, but luckily found another copy in a bookshop in Pokhara; it is a fantastic book that taught me more than anything to see things more clearly and seek contentment truthfully. The Richest Man in Babylon was suggested to me by a friend who is investing in silver, which seems sensible – what a fantastic little book! some basic rules on managing money are told through a Babylonian narrative which is fun and quick to read. If reading like this was more present in our schools we would all be wealthier, at least everyone except producers of instant gratification goods. I also subscribed to Harpers this year, after finding it in Bangkok airport with hours to kill. It has significantly inspired me to proceed with writing my novel, it is always a great read and the harpers index is good:

Percentage of U.S. car owners who keep maps in their glove compartments: 50, Sunglasses: 23, Gloves: 0

Estimated value of Chinese household income that goes unreported: $1,400,000,000,000; Portion of China’s GDP this represents: 1/3

Number of poisonous dead mice the USDA airdropped into Guam this year to eradicate an invasive snake species: 316

Number of times between January and June that google turned over user information to government investigators: 4,287

Might have already posted about this before but Evernote has served me well all year, allowing me to dump my ideas, wacky thoughts or notes into a single searchable repository, wherever I am. I also started backing up to the cloud (cant wait to write new software that takes advantage of the amazon storage cloud) via JungleDisk, which seems to be pretty spot on for me, and backing up iphone contacts to Google contacts was also a helpful find. If you guys are not yet using Chromium (NOT Chrome), that’s another no-brainer. Install it, you’ll see what I mean (sorry Mozilla, you were trumped on speed.) Spotify has continued to be epic, even if the lack of nichey remix’s and the removal of some epic songs is irritating. Finally I have to say that Microsoft dropping their Express versions of visual studio 2010 and SQL Server is both useful, and strategically a good idea. Their IDE is pretty ridiculously good, and providing free (although slightly limited – SQL max db of 5gb for example) versions will bring in the hordes, and if they develop anything decent, chances are they will shell out for licences legitimately.

Best music find of recent months: Emancipator

Looking forwards I now cant wait to finish my novel, write a bunch of new useful softwares and in 2011 start another business, perhaps a software house selling software as a service? I have a pretty devilishly good idea that will leverage the amazon clouds scalability. Perhaps. Either way I fly to Morocco in 48 hours and I haven’t even thought about it yet. Better go.

As I said last post if I couldn’t find a reddit wallpaper downloading program I would make one. Well I found upboat (which is good) but with windows 7 (or display fusion) offering cycling desktop backgrounds every x minutes I thought I might write a more brute force downloader. So I did.

Reddit Wallpaper Grabber is essentially:

It’s only about 8 hours work, is unofficial and probably mildly buggy, but it works for me (and probably everyone on windows > 98.)

Features

• Save wallpapers in bulk, direct to a folder on your computer
• Get wallpapers from all the popular wallpaper reddit’s
• Sort by reddit sections (e.g. Whats Hot or Top of All Time)
• Include (or dont) NSFW Wallpapers
• Preview wallpapers before you download them
• Portable exe (No install needed, just runs when you open it)
• Its Free!

If you want to suggest feature requests/point out bugs then please do on the comments of this post. If you haven’t already – go ahead and download it.

Download v0.1 now of Reddit Wallpaper Grabber (its free!)
RedditWallpaperGrabber_0.1.exe (77kb)	RedditWallpaperGrabber_0.1.rar (52kb)

May was a month of brick lane curries, a new art exhibition (silent city), mini golf and a bunch of other blurry stuff.

June was a good month (on the whole apart from hackers and google caffeine?!?), did incalculable amounts of coding, new site rollouts, tennis, monopoly, booked new york flights and some other stuff. Wrote a lot, drank a lot of wine, updated a bunch of auction2post sites because eBay updated their api (for the better) – standard summer month.

I started 4 draft posts across these two months but none seemed to stick, it’s not like the months were dry, posts boning csharp just didn’t fit, I was going to post csharp iis and multisql management code, a nice project I wrote to datamine from ebays new api and I was thinking of digging out my seo hub php based hub and rewriting it as a multi threaded windows app, but yeah sometimes stuff just doesn’t seem to hold enough value.

As ever though projects continue to crop up and evolve. I am working on a stupidly simple file system snapshotter after an incident with a second hacker, I will probably post about ripping data from the Nike app on the iPhone, if it isn’t up already somewhere else. Also I will make a quick program to save the top 20 wallpapers from reddit to a folder so windows 7 can automatically show me new epics (theres even an rss!) if know one else saves me the effort. Unless that is, all this stuff gets superseded. Mostly it’s just me biding my time and making broader plans

Look out for possible random posts on business intelligence, the stock market and brain architecture too, as they seem to keep cropping up.

I am probably just getting on flight BA7312 out of heathrow, bound for sunny Thailand, most of my email addresses are now on replycannons, if you want to get hold of me I will be periodically updating this blog (so will see comments) and might check my facebook occasionally.

Let’s see what south east Asia has to offer!!

Well done Tom spotting this – My dad working hard and the Hayday Construction & Roofing on google streetview!

Unrelated to the pliers on streetview post

Someone sent me this random streetview find – Pliers revenge!

Next Friday I fly out to Bangkok, Thailand for a month of sun. Just wanted to shout out thank you to all the people that have given advice, helped me prepare and the few that are coming with me – I will update the blog a few times while out there – stick a few photographs on flickr etc and then do a proper photo dump etc when I am back, hardly taking any technology so should be a change from the normal! I was hoping to refresh this blog style but I haven’t got round to it – I updated my homepage but thats about it.

P.S. Silent City Collective site is coming soon

The reason this post really sparked was this post on pico projectors and what pico projectors might be like in 2015. I think pico projector’s (tiny projectors that will fit in your hand but produce a projection pretty much the quality of your old tv, anywhere @ 50 inchs) will get huge. I don’t doubt for one minute that MVIS stock will be the first sign of this in the coming months (the microvision showWX is going to be the worlds first mainstream big selling pico – prediction) and this will be only the start for developing display technology. Over the next 5 years visually representative technology will blossom. We will see embedded pico-projector’s slot into city planning, home design, products such as laptops (netbooks), mobile phones, games systems, camera’s. Within lcd little growth will happen but we will likely see some sort of “ultra hd” – probably double current full hd (1080p), while embedded pico’s will feature a whole host of new resolutions, by 2015 we will definitely see full hd pico’s. This development of display technology will usher in a new age of advertisements, coupled with Augmented Reality and revolution amongst the Operating Systems.

Which brings me nicely to Augmented Reality. AR. Currently there is much buzz around Augmented reality, which I believe really is the sudden sci-fi geek realisation that technically the technology to fully provide AR is out, its been out for more than a year. Smart phones with knowledge of where they are and decent digital cameras have been around longer than the iPhone. It seems once this dawned on people everyone made a mad rush to make something AR, regardless of what it is. As a result magazines, advertisers and marketing companies largely came first (presumably they had the quickest fluid funds to pay for AR.) This marrs the technology a bit if you ask me but perhaps as AR becomes more meaning based this will change. My jury is out on AR but I think it won’t be as big a deal as everyone is making out it will be.

Business will change, or rather some business’s will change the way they use technology. You always get early adopters but I believe a good proportion of companies that operate around creative, co-operative ideology will gear up more technologically as the younger generation come into professionalism. We will see different technological assistance of work in the workplace. Board meetings will not only be worldwide (like now via Cisco tele-conferencing) but they will be assisted by interactive technology, touch and display will play large parts in this technology, beyond the Microsoft surface table and towards the science fiction of minority report. Data will be housed, represented and communicated differently. A few years ago usb sticks and solid state drives didn’t offer an easy solution to copying files, network speeds were a 100th of what they largely are today, there was no cloud. As data management and storage develop as too will the way we use it. We will probably have identifiers rather than storage in 2015. e.g. rather than copying a file to a usb stick you will simply instruct your interface to relate that data to a physical object, a soundwave (a word/phrase perhaps?) or a time of day or place, provided you can prove who you are you could then recieve it. You could carry a 200gb file with you in your wallet or on your fingernail, as the likelihood is that 200gb file will be stored centrally in what people now call the “cloud” (but will probably be a server in london or a main city) and you will simply use a relation to prompt whatever interface into providing you with this file.

There will be hurdles in achieving universal centralised data but by 2015 there will be a huge proportion less of personal computing power stored in the home. The google OS is perhaps a sign of a branching of operating systems, but I don’t see google dominating the operating system market. Microsoft have become a lot stronger over the last 18 months but the real truth of it is that neither of these developers seem to be truely embracing all of the technology developments happening. Perhaps this lag in uptake is natural, Microsoft does show some promising signs but is held back by business concerns, google seems to throw itself into the ideas without checking they are in the right direction, linux, well linux is linux. By 2015 I predict there will be at least another major world provider of what we currently refer to as operating systems. The whole concept needs re-exploring from the ground up, even starting again beyond the google os. Touch for example, AR and improved options for display are all completely ignored by all of the aforementioned operating systems, Microsoft is the only developer that even references these things but is yet to truly develop a commercial option.

Search will change too. The last few years has seen a huge uptake worldwide in searching for things which in turn has pushed marketing, sales and online business into a whole new age. It’s also cemented new business models such as affiliate marketing, search based advertising and more grey area web production. The long tail has well and truly become a reality, many successful business people spend their days driving traffic from long tail search into successful sales. This will continue but it wont settle in a single routine for long. Affiliate marketing will take to interactive media more as this becomes more integral in everyday life, search will some how adapt to a new more astute audience that is used to getting good search results fast and who quickly picks up trends and becomes integral members of up and coming online phenomena such as reddit, twitter etc. Beyond real-time, search will need to integrate much more with outside sources, new operating systems and the work out the best way to catalogue and express the ever expanding online data and how it is created and used.

HTML 5 is on its way too, this will be a major improvement but it wont be the last the web sees pre 2015. By 2015 I believe that the “internet” as we know it, a vast linked store of webpages will be a very different beast. Microsoft (XBOX), Apple (iPhone), Sony (Ps3) – these are all well known, global brands and they are all investing / operating in the new world of applications. Pioneered by Apple and the iphone the idea of segmented approved tools that are properly ordered was a (very apple) genius idea. Bringing a (standard) apple simplicity to what was previously a confusing and avoided world of software for a lot of people. Microsoft, Sky, Sony and other huge technology developers did not miss this success. In the coming years slowly these companies will target specific software/hardware at every possible market audience. By 2015 every member of your family will be buying something digital. Expanding on the segmented digitally providable media of the iphone app, television programs, games, music, films and books will all be available at the click of a button, tap of a screen or utterance of a command (and payment systems such as xbox subscriptions and ps3 accounts will remove the actual money part of the transaction further accelerating digital sales.) This new availability of media will be supported by webpages, but the web-pages are much more likely to be totally interactive, 3d integration is already in browsers but we will see more of this as well as individualised experiences. Imagine every web-page you accessed could (based on rules of privacy) know your name, interests etc – the web could be a much more interactive environment. By 2015 though I think the web could be on its way to new pastures, gone with the current ideal of “pages” accessed by address. An OS with search integrally built in could remove the requirement for a browser, content could be constructed on the fly and applications/services/movies/experiences could replace pages as we know them, with the situation that web pages changing from a square, box of a screen to a multi surface vivid world that we live in, there is no doubt in my mind that the OS and the web “page” as we know it will adapt to a new medium.

We are living in a time which is the true beginning of technology adoption, 2015 might bring a few or all of my predictions into reality, it could just as likely bring thousands more. Social adoption will drive these things forward and in return the technology will hopefully create a more co-operative, fair and equal world society.