November 21st, 2008
I have stepped into the social world of Facebook and have become intrigued as to how to write an application for Facebook. I have a number of questions surrounding this.
1. What will the application be and what should it do?
2. How do I start? Where is the ‘Create application’ button?
3. How do I test my application
4. How do I advertise my application
I should confess, that I did not come up with all these questions before I started and I have been partially influenced by a colleague and friend on this little adventure. The big pluses are, I get to play with PHP again, I get to mess on Facebook and I get to hassle folk to squish and upload photo’s (time to step up Lee!). I just love this language for messing on the web with.
I shall blog on this over the coming weeks but the my application is based around GeoSquishing. If you have not tried GeoSqushing and gone out and ’squished’ something, shame on you. Go now and try it. Its fun and a great way to strike up converstation as people may wonder what the heck you are doing. For novel ideas, browse GeoSquishing.com. Wee and Higgi have come up with some novel ways to squish things.
Tags: Development, Facebook, GeoSquishing, PHP
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November 18th, 2008
On the news today I heard about 2 local businesses who ran their business from the web. When they setup their websites they also obtained a domain name through the hosting company. There where problems which resulted in the websites being blocked but this then raised the question “who owns the domain name?”.
They both set up new sites with new domain names, and had to start building up their name on search engines all over again.
Read the agreement you sign up to. It turned out the host owned the domain names. I always recommend that you go through a registrar and register your domain name yourself. You then own it.
P.S. The news report is here.
Tags: Domain name, Hosting, Registrar
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November 15th, 2008
This title may be a little obscure for some folk so check out this Alfresco link. So this raises the question of who named the product/company? There is a lot of the Queen’s English throughout Alfresco.
That aside, I recently attended the Developer Intensive course in Virginia offered by About Objects Inc. For those who have not done much with Alfresco, it is, as the title of the course indicates, its intense. There is a lot of ground to cover as there is a lot to Alfresco. From installation, configuration, web scripting, extending, customisation, etc. Its built upon the ‘Best of Breed’ open source components and you will find yourself saying “Yes, I know that componenet and I wish I had spent more time investigating it”. For example, the stack includes Hibernate, Spring, EHCache, HtmlParser, Rhino, YUI and the list just goes on and on and on.
For those you do not know what Alfresco is and are wondering what the heck I am going on about, Alfreso is the Open Source answer to Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Its built upon existing Open Source products and development languages and it comes in a great price point of ‘free’. You can, of course, opt for the subscription based Enterprise version which offers support at a far less price point that with the big ECM players out there.
So apart from the Open Source stack and the cost of ownership, what is so special about Alfresco. Well its the flexibility, extensibility and modern approach to content management that makes it so appealing. I started using ‘Aspects’ in EMC Document 6 and thought they were awesome. Unfortunately for Documentum ‘Aspects’ were added to the existing architecture. On the other hand, for Alfresco, ‘Aspects’ were part of the architecture and are at the heart of the whole system. For example, objects do not have a lock property. This is applied as an aspect when a document is checked out for editing. When it is checked in, the aspect is removed and no more lock property. Fantastic. Only use properties and persist them for as long as they are required. There is a lot more going on here so well worth reading up on it.
I could go on praising Alfresco but of course there are some downsides. They are bullding the product on an Open Source model but potentially need more tranparency between the Enterprise tree and the community tree. The community tree is also at the bleeding edge so you do get a good taster of what is coming down the line. Hopefully the more I get using Alfresco and developing with it the more I can blog on it.
Tags: Aflresco, Document, ECM, EMC, Open Source
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November 8th, 2008
During an a project last year we talked about a user interface like what you seen in Minority Report. We thought of many cool alternatives but seeing as that was really outside the scope of what we did it fell under the ‘Shinny Thoughts’ category.
Microsoft are working on Surface and really looks promising. Other people have been hacking the Nintendo Wii interface and using this in Proof Of Concepts (POC). Now Mgestyk have brought out their gesture-based control interface. I have tried interfaces like this which use webcams before with verying results but have Mgestyk finally nailed it?
Their FAQ covers a good number of questions but until we actually get to try this in the wild will we know how good it actually is. Will this be fine-grained enough to use at the application level?
Tags: Mgestyk, Microsoft, Surface, UI Interface, Webcam
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October 31st, 2008
We first encountered Yuengling in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was more the name that intrgued me at first but then we came to know it as the local brew. Its kinda like Ireland the the Carlsberg and Heineken thing.
Then we moved to Georgia. First of all it was a shock to the system when I tried to by beer in a gas station on a Sunday. The beer was taken from me with nothing said. Another customer informed me that alcohol could not be purcashed on a Sunday.
Then we discovered no Yuengling in G.A. Why? We then resorted to picking up cases when crossing state lines and having friends bring ‘gifts’ when visitng from out of state.
But, (I know never start a sentence with but), at last bridges have been built and now Georgia can enjoy cold, frosty Yuengling on the deck. Check out the red letter day that should now become an official state holiday!
Tags: Carlsberg, Georgia, Heineken, North Carolina, Yuengling
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October 31st, 2008
Is it just me or has Facebook become the playground of the over 30’s? I have tried Friend’s Reunited but never really got into it. Maybe it was the thought if parting with 5 quid that put me off but at some stage they decided to make it free to contact people. Was this because of Facebook?
We met with friends a couple of weeks ago, and we asked the 15 daughter ‘do you have a Facebook account?’. She answered ‘No, my dad has one of those’.
I know I have started using Facebook more, and colleagues have also. I have discovered more past friends, college mates and colleagues out there than on any other Social Networking site. So is Facebook the new playground of the over 30’s?
Tags: Facebook, Social Networking
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October 30th, 2008
For those of you who do not know about Microsoft Surface, shame on you:) Read up on it as it is pretty cool. Well the boffins have been hard at work and they have added another dimension to the surface table. Check out PC Pro’s report on this developing prototype.
Tags: dimension, Microsoft, PC Pro, Surface
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December 1st, 2006
So Thanksgiving has been and gone for another year. This also means Black Friday has been and gone as well. So the big 3 got together again for another day at the sales. What other day of the year would you get 3 blokes getting up at 3:00am to go shopping?
So bargains where not that great this year, but Wee has gotten a new camera. I opted this year for a Cannon SD600. Now normally I would go for something that takes AA batteries but not this time. Cannon make good digital cameras so lets see how this one does.
It also takes SD cards, of which I have plenty. These also fit Wee’s PDA so now we can travel even lighter on trips and still email pics to people:)
On our trip we also picked up some free software (after rebate) and a free laminator!
And my laptop at work finally took a turn for the worse. It got to the stage where if someone hit the desk I was working at, it would BSOD. So now I have a cool ThinkPad T60 (dual core for all you geeks and nerds out there). So far its very nice, but I need to find some software out there to give this a real test.
Cheers
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November 8th, 2006
So BABS has finally been tagged in Georgia. The cool thing over this side of the pond is, you can choose the type of license plate for your car. They all follow the same standard but you can support different things. We went with the Hummingbird plate in support of wildlife. Well you know our moto – PEOPLE SUCK – sorry to all, but its true.
One my favourite T-Shirts is from BearRock – on the back it says “Stuff people, not bears”.
Anyway, today I got our Vonage phone working. This is a cool device so at least the folks back home can call us again.
I also got my new cell/mobile phone today. I opted for the Motorola L2 as it does not have an mp3 plater nor a camera. Yip, its a phone. Thats all I want. If I want tunes, I’ll listen to my IRiver. If I want pictures, I’ll use my digital camera. Simple. So far, I think the phone is cool.
So things are settling down here. I have lots of work to be doing and I could easily create more for myself. Only 52 days until Wee returns to the US – hurrah!
Cheers,
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November 4th, 2006
… back to Ireland for a short period of time. I am referring to this as a business trip. Role on the 30th Dec. so we can start spending time together – that will make for an interesting change.
Anyway, this week we took in the highlights and ate our way through some of our more favourite places in Georgia. We hit Houson’s, Chilis, Ihop and even had time to try out some new places. We can now recommend Moes and Krystal’s. All excellent grub.
We went for walks, hung our with friends and Wee got most of our Christmas shopping down. Hurrah for that. It was a great week and we are looking forward to doing more of this next year.
So, come to Atlanta:)
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