Last month, just before travelling to the West Coast, I practised my latest presentation,”Six reasons to choose Solaris”, in which I have a slide with some company logos of the users of Solaris 10. One of my audience asked why Google wasn’t on the slide …
How real is virtuality
We travelled north up the strip, and had dinner at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba. It was a bit of a European thing with a bunch of Brits, French and Germans. This cafe has an excellent if more limited wine list and we were fortunate to have the advice of Eric Bezille and Dave Tong. Our waiter was excellent, knew what he was selling and very patient. It must be hard selling to a bunch of opinionated engineers. We talked about a number of things, of which one was “Second Life”. …
Sun CEC 2007
I visited California (& Nevada) for training and conferences with Sun, the first part was at Seascape, Monteray and was the bi-annual Distinguished Engineers conference, we ended up in Las Vegas for the Customer Engineering Conference. I led a team that built and ran a messaging service for managing questions to the presenters. I did a bit of blogging which can be picked up at my sun/oracle blog. It would seem that the technical stuff about how we built and ran the messaging system was hosted on an internal site and so is unavailable; the blog on question quality remains quite interesting. …
EU 10, Microsoft 0
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. …
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. …
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. …