Its a few weeks into 2011 and a redesign and new plan is in order. I took inspiration from a few fantasticblogs for this theme and make no claims at anything other than trying a fresher look!
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.
Program written using csharp and SQL Server 2008 r2? Great eh? … What about your users? …Doh. Anyway its good to re look at your data layer, so if this crops up and you need to switch to a more portable solution (Compact edition means anyone can use it on windows) then put in the time. Heres a few snippets of SQL changes that you will need to deal with in recreating your tables in SQL Compact Edition (moving from full blown SQL server auto scripting)
Dont try to SET anything, skip them. ANSI_NULLs, ANSI_PADDING
Replace CURRENT_TIMESTAMP with (getdate()) – easy to forget this but I always seem to use it as a default.
Keep constraints on line
Of course if you wrote your tables from scratch in T-SQL it probably wont be a problem.
It now realises when reddit is under heavy load...
December 16, 2010
Just a quick update for the reddit wallpaper grabber which some of you reported issues with. In fact it was more just that reddit was under heavy load and lazily I had no pretty error handling in there. So I quickly added a notification so as to clear up the times when reddit is inaccessible. You can download v0.2 here, but if reddit is down, reddit is down! Please do keep dropping me lines if you spot any more bugs.
There is by far enough written words about the freedom and positives of leaving ones established job, for better or for worse I think it is the right way forward for me, now. I have had a long list of things to post about, technology thoughts and projects completed; now thankfully I have the control of my time enough that I can post about them.
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.
Find out if a user has "liked" your facebook page or app etc.
September 18, 2010
Working with integration of Facebook Connect for authentication is mostly easy at the moment, once you have got your head around FBML etc. However as they are in between switching from the old Restful API and the new graph API there remains the odd little thing that has only a splatter of useful documentation online. The first one of these I have come across is trying to find out if a user (who is logged in to your site via facebook connect) is a fan of page X.
There is infinite uses for this – with facebook more and more integrating “likes” with their search and other stuff you will need this functionality to drive traffic from facebook. Anyway this used to be the easy case of using https://api.facebook.com/method/pages.isFan?access_token=… to get a 1 or 0 depending on whether or not the user had “fanned” the page/website/whatever.
But then came along the big bad Graph API, which to get this IsFan functionality is a bitch. Getting the “likes” directly works for the page owner (which confuses everything) but not for third parties, showing just the popular/main category “likes” against them (and you need extended permissions.)
Something led me to happen across the following video from google I/O 2010 which gives a full expo (57 minutes) on their BigQuery and Prediction API’s. You can see they have made a lot of ground with ridiculous processing, claiming to be able to run SQL queries (or a derivative) on trillion’s of rows in seconds, essentially for free. BigQuery lets us, the general techy public do that, cool eh? Well yeah it is, but I cant help but ask the cynical, why? Data, I would presume is their goal, and if it’s yours to share and insensitive, BigQuery is probably a BigWin. Otherwise its often we find ourselves as technological problem solvers seeking services such as this, a way to fix X, a quicker way of processing Y, a ladder Z to climb fence A to get to B, which can lead us blind with determination down paths, data under arm, paths that are not as safe, sensitive or secure as we thought.
I look forward to someone tooling up the predictions API onto the lottery results.
Imagine films re-casted in 3D, re-mixed like music
August 7, 2010
A short while ago I read a press release about a software capable of producing 3d models of moving characters from a piece of video, I was certain the link was on reddit but I cannot find it. Anyhow it got me thinking about the uses for this, should it progress to a viable standard and there has got to be a few notable ones. For the film industry it will no doubt aid the allocation of 3d work over digital film, although it will have to get slick to replace the use of bright colour identifiers in place of actors.
*update: I found a similar software here on new scientist, its not the same that inspired this post but its relevant, video from there.
"I am not unfamiliar with horror, my memory is a faithful wife and my imagination, unlike myself, a diligent maid who sits quietly all day at her work and in the evening can speak so prettily for me that I just have to look at it even if.."
