An exciting day in many ways yesterday! The European Court have confirmed the European Commission’s fine on Microsoft for ant-competitive activities. The Guardian have reported it with the head line “European appeal court opens Windows to the world and shakes the superdominant“. …
Discover remarkable things, in a remarkable way
I wrote a piece on a colleague’s product. It was a crowd sourced content discovery tool called Slynkr; it looked remarkably like DIGG which was exceptionally hot at the time, and I was very excited by its tagging functionality. …
Hot Stuff
Over the weekend, I went to the West Dean “Chilli Festival”. I had no idea what a big industry chilli growing was in this country. …
Microblogging
On my sun/oracle blog, I posted a little piece on Microblogging, examining Twitter and the fact I was using del.icio.us as a microblog. The original article also talks about plazes and the initial ideas about creating single spore. It notes the early attempts to make Twitter suitable for phone users, mainly through SMS. …
On my sun/oracle blog, I noted my first use of Facebook. The main interest at the time I wrote this post is historic. I review the apps installed, and today, we can note that most have gone as Facebook have colonised the platform and made redundant the apps that helped popularise their network. The original article also notes that Facebook, i.e. the network is an end-point in terms of content distribution. …
Enhancing Google Maps
I have just updated my South Coast Travel public google map to include placemarks with links to the BBC and Met. Office weather reports. I am disappointed that they have no obvious weather icon and that the i icon is available in only one colour.
I did poke around the Google maps API pages and may take this further so that I can incorporate the page into www.davelevy.info, but if its like yahoo, this could be a bit difficult.
Otherwise its screen shot and link to the Google Maps URL …
No Music in the Car
I changed the battery on my Honda yesterday and the radio is now unusable as it needs the code logged into the radio to restart. I have created a snip called Honda Radios to help me sort this out.
Best bet would be to take it back to the garage that mucked it up. …
An explosion in New York
I returned to NYC, for the first time in three years and the meeting was disrupted by what I came to call a plumbing incident. I was 200 yards away and 31 stories high when the explosion in New York happened last night. It was jolly noisy. I looked out my window and the building next door was shrouded in steam. …
Sailing
Down to Poole in Dorset very early this morning. I have finally got my act together to take the RYA Day Skipper course and spent the day learning to navigate using charts, pencil and paper. The maths reminds me of the boys’ A-Level homework and although despite being geeky enough to look up the cosine rule, drawing scale models of the “triangles of velocity” is probably quicker . 😉 …
Running Python on Windows XP
I wrote an article on installing Python; a bit of chat about why and a bit about how. I got myself a copy of the O’Reilley “Learning Python” book and started working my way through it. For various reasons, I decided to try it on Windows; I thought the binary install would be easier and I had some reasons for not trying it on Solaris. The windows install from python.org is quite cute, as you would expect but it requires some further configuration before the python imports and module search works properly. …