Author: andy

intraVnews: an RSS aggregator add-in for Outlook. Kind of like the excellent  NewsGator, but free for personal use.  I haven’t tried it as it needs Outlook XP or later. Shame.

Walter Smith points to a fascinating interview with Ray Ozzie:

“Now what if, as has happened in applications, the core abstraction of what is in a contemporary OS moves up by many notches? What if APIs become frameworks? What if a file system becomes more like a database? If higher level service-oriented architectures are in the underlying infrastructure as opposed to just generic standard C library runtime calls?

As a client side developer, I really want to take advantage of that stuff. It lets me be a whole lot more productive. But the more I do that the more I rely on higher-level infrastructure being around. So what I would ask you is the following: Are the Linux community and the Mac community prepared to step up their client-side investments to build higher-level frameworks to make it easier for me to code like Microsoft is doing?”

BBC: Oblivion threat to 12,000 species. If you’ve always wanted to see a short-beaked common dolphin, then now would be a good time. #

Bruce Sterling’s blog now has an rss feed. Unfortunately its broken, and RSSBandit refuses to have anything to do with it. C’mon guys… #

Boing-Boing has a link to some very impressive 3D maps of the London underground system. #

Auto Winer Generator from Victor Stone. Count me in!

Walter Smith points to a fascinating interview with Ray Ozzie:

“Now what if, as has happened in applications, the core abstraction of what is in a contemporary OS moves up by many notches? What if APIs become frameworks? What if a file system becomes more like a database? If higher level service-oriented architectures are in the underlying infrastructure as opposed to just generic standard C library runtime calls?

As a client side developer, I really want to take advantage of that stuff. It lets me be a whole lot more productive. But the more I do that the more I rely on higher-level infrastructure being around. So what I would ask you is the following: Are the Linux community and the Mac community prepared to step up their client-side investments to build higher-level frameworks to make it easier for me to code like Microsoft is doing?”

Wired: “…one of the largest “collections of collections” on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies” #

BBC: There’s now one Harry Potter book for every twenty-four people on the planet.

Wired: “…one of the largest “collections of collections” on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies” #

BBC: There’s now one Harry Potter book for every twenty-four people on the planet.

I’ve just cut the site over to a new version of the photo gallery software. The new URL is:

http://photos.andrewjohnson.me.uk/

This is essentially a full rewrite of the old software, this time using XML to hold the metadata for the albums and individual photos. Its also much more configurable, using web.config and CSS. There’s still a few things to do. Currently the code doesn’t use all the facilities provided by the schemas, but I’ll add those features incrementally. For now I’m done with it.

Next job is to add some new albums, including some of the photos I tool in Scotland during the summer.

Joi Ito: “I think the US is going down the slippery slope of becoming one of the most hated nations in the world when it still possible for it to be one of the most loved nation if only it learned to listen to, respect and understand the rest of us.”

Entropy: a Freenet-compatible peer-to-peer client with nttp browsing and message boards. They claim its faster than Freenet because it isn’t written in Java; an opinion that I have a great deal of sympathy with. (Via Declan McCullagh’s excellent Politech list.)  #

Identity Cards – The Next Steps (pdf) A “Consultation” paper from our own Reichminister of State Security, the Rt Hon David Blunkett MP.

Disposable digital camera hacked (via Gizmodo). “That $11 disposable digital camera that Ritz Camera sells has been hacked. Someone’s figured out how to get the images off of it without having to take it back to Ritz for processing”. Neat. A hack in the real meaning of the word.