A Day in Paradise

welcome our new music listening, game playing, media sharing, internet browsing, graphically challenged windows vista overlords!

Indices

So Barra stopped updating their historical S&P numbers last November. This leaves me having to update 30+ product deployments which have been cut off from thier benchmark datasource.

I’ll admit it was rather silly to make my application dependant on a single source of information which I didn’t have control over. In hindsight it’s obvious that I should have built my own webservice, which would not be dependant on any one source of information.

I guess we live and learn. Now to find alternative datasources and roll out a new webservice and update those deployments. Like I didn’t have enough to do already.

I clicked through the “Ask Robbie” web design site today, and he has the coolest flash header… great toy!

I’ll be doing the “opening act” for Tobias Schlitt’s talk on eZcomponents at the next PHP Usergroup meeting.

My talk will be a quick overview of the various error handling techniques available to PHP programs. This is a beginner subject, but I will show code using not only native PHP techniques (exceptions and native error handling in PHP) but will also touch on a couple third-party error handling packages such as PEAR_ErrorStack, PatError.

So mark down 16th of March, on your schedule. Same place as usual.

The new slashdot, still ugly as hell, but now with a beta Tagging system! All they need now is to round of the remaining 3 corners of all the boxes and they will be fully web2.0 compatible!

It doesn’t seem that slashdotters have really “gotten” what tagging is about, since the tags currently assigned to articles are all but useless. Maybe it’s just that there aren’t that many subscribers to tag articles.

VoipStunt and VoIP Buster

These look like interesting VoIP providers. They have a fairly large list of countries to which land-line phones are free.

Anyone used any of these services?

Independent Online Edition > Media

At first my intelligence was insulted, but then I saw the subtitle of the article:

Ana Kronschnabl and Tomas Rawlings pick the best open source websites where users can change the content

and then, while obviously not in the way the authors had intended it, it made perfect sense.

Other sites on the list are Wikipedia (where you don’t even have to hack it to deface it), an unknown bootable linux distro, some documentary website.

No, my intelligence is insulted… what kind of list is this, other than another opportunity for “journalists” to make an article with buzzwords in it. What is an “open source website” anyway?

DivX Video: Download DivX Software and the DivX Player

It’s happy birthday everyone month… Opera, google, now DivX. In commemoration of the birthday, DivX is offering their bundle as a free download!

The cover letter is the best part! Feel free to tell your family, spam your friends, update your blog and mention it in your podcast

Sun Microsystems

The best one: Given how hot and slow our competitor’s servers are, it’s no surprise that their name RHYMES WITH HELL.

Google Blog Search: wormus

Hey, cool Google knows about me

IT Conversations: Jason Fried - Basecamp

Whatever you are doing right now is less important than listening to this talk on software development.

Such simple concepts about what makes software good and bad. The best bit is about what should go into a first release… half a program rather than a half-assed program. Since basecamp gave 30 days free they didn’t bother coding a billing system before launch but focused on the UI.

In 40 minutes he trashes a lot of what is generally accepted as standard project management procedures. It worked for them, I think the project manager had something to do with it.

Three Column Layouts - css-discuss

A round out of all the Three Column CSS layout tutorials. I really need to understand CSS.

Opera 10-year online anniversary party - Opera Web Browser

Get them while the Party Lasts!

Google Talk

They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free anytime, anywhere in the world.

Sounds like they really think they are doing something different, when in reality there is not much which is very special about google talk.

I tried out the official client, and the first thing that hit me was the sparse interface. What google has done is made the chat client as web-like as possible. In fact, you could probably whip up an AJAX client which is exactly identical in functionality. All links are underlined, and mcuh like web pages, there is nothing you will need to doubleclick on anything.

This works nicely with my theory that one morning we will wake up and find out that we won’t need anything more than firefox and google to be fully functional in our work and play.

A couple annoying things: No timestamps in the chat, no pasting of html… although links are made clickable. You can do some simple formatting using a *bold* and _italic_. Maybe there is a manual out there.

I tried the voice chat, it worked nicely. I only chatted with one person, so can’t say that it’s better than skype at this point, my one call was certainly no better than some chats I have had on skype which seemed to be totally flawless.

Google Talk is also tied into gmail so when you get a new email you’ll see a nice little message in the corner of your screen. Maybe I should start using my gmail some more.

Oh, well… I’m awormus@gmail.com add me

Finding warez using Google | The days start here
Disclaimer: This post is not about encouraging you to download unlicensed software (reads: warez). Use at your own risk.

OK, so I was just talking with a friend and he was saying that the reason my google ads weren’t making me any money was despite my traffic (1700 Unique visitors yesterday), and fairly decent CTR, because of my “dogdy content” I was getting crap ads.

Oh well, I can’t help it! USE Linux, not Warez… an amusing article none-the-less.