Normally I would waste a lot of time actually typing out the entire alphabet string:

$alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz';

which can take a lot of time (Go on try it, I’ll bet no matter how fast you can type, typing out the alphabet quickly will be tricky!) then looping through the string like so:

for($i = 0; $i < strlen($alphabet); $i++)
{
  echo substr($alphabet, $i, 1);
} 

However there are 2 other much simpler methods:

Method 1 – Loop through the ASCII numbers

for($i = 65; $i <= 90; $i++)
{
  echo chr($i);
}

or my new personal favourite using PHP’s range() function:

Method 2 – Using range()

foreach(range('A', 'Z') as $i)
{
  echo $i;
}

Then all you have to do is add in any code to make sure you set the right CSS selectors and highlight which letter you are currently viewing and add the ability to filter by first letter to your list function.

Simple.

<cloud>

What is this? Well currently most Feed Aggregators will poll selected RSS feeds and check if there are any new items. This can be slow and resource heavy especially for someone like Google who has to check millions of feeds many times every day with their reader technology

The cloud element has always been available in RSS 2.0 however most have ignored it or failed to appreciate its possible uses.

Anyone who is familiar with a Blackberry mobile phone will know just how much money they save in data charges by using the Blackberry’s Push technology. Push technology means that the phone doesn’t have to keep connecting to it’s mail server and asking if there are any new emails available. Instead the server waits until it has a new email and then contacts the phone to deliver it. This results in far less load on the mail server and means you don’t have to wait to receive your email.

The RSS cloud works in the same way, feed readers that support the cloud element will be informed every time a blog owner publishes a new post, meaning readers using that reader will be able to start reading instantly after posting.

Find out more from the Official Announcement by WordPress or add support for the RSS cloud for your wordpress blog here

I have recently stopped following some blogs and websites, not because I find their content irrelevant or or lackluster, but because my experience whilst on these sites has become so tarnished by advertising that I can’t read the content. Some of these sites are industry leaders in breaking news for the technology and IT worlds, but if I cannot read the content I am not going to bother coming back.

Now I am not saying that advertising is all bad, most of these blogs and websites depend on it to remain publishing. However as the average user learns to automatically and involuntarily tune out the distractions, advertisers keep coming up with new innovative methods of annoyance.

I am at breaking point.

First we had JavaScript pop ups loading advertising pages up continually in your face and these were easily stopped by blocking JavaScript. These were soon replaced by flash banners normally at the top or sides of a website, which flash, scream or try to get you to shoot a duck.

Oh yes the ones that really drive me mad are the holding page adverts, where if you don’t have a cookie for a particular site you have to sit and wait for 10 seconds while several adverts are paraded in front of your face.

Now we have the CSS/Ajax pop up windows asking stupid questions like

“As a valued visitor please take a moment to tell us what you think about our site, and then if you wouldn’t mind visiting one or two of our sponsors…”

So I am quite certain that the vast majority of Internet users will agree with me here, but by charging less and less for more intrusive adverts, the only long term success that will be gained will be in driving readers away, not wealth.

The web is now one of the most powerful mediums on the planet, surely there is a better way of generating revenue whilst still maintaining a meaning?

Tom Watson MP, minister for digital engagement, said open source software would be on a level playing field with proprietary software such as Windows.

Open source software will be adopted “when it delivers best value for money”, the government said.

It added that public services should where possible avoid being “locked into proprietary software”.

It is great to see that even governments are realising that there is quality community built software around that fulfils their needs just as well and probably better than any proprietary softare can do.

On several occasions I have argued the whole OpenOffice.org vs Microsoft Office and the only argument I ever really get is that Microsoft Office is what they know. This indicates towards how much the average user is afraid of moving away from ‘what they know’ and finding an alternative. Even though the alternative has all of the functionality (and more), has fewer bugs, is more stable and doesn’t cost a penny to use, upgrade or be supported compared with the product that they are used to. In the case of OpenOffice.org their alternative even looks like Office so that you can instantly feel at home using it.

With the recent economic climate there is also another reason why proprietary software isn’t such a great idea. Smari McCarthy talks about a new crisis about to hit businesses in Iceland:

Smari McCarthy:

The companies and institutions that buy these generally don’t buy these directly through Microsoft. Instead, they sell contracts in bulk to Microsoft Certified Partners (MCPs), which are local companies that lobby the software, generally at a loss to themselves, as they know that Microsoft’s lock-in is powerful enough that they can only get service contracts from the company if they offer a substantial discount on the Microsoft products.

Now, the licensing term is three years, but the licensing fee is made in the form of annual payments. Here is where the fun begins.

Now, say an economy collapses. Say some fifteen hundred companies in your local economy go bankrupt. Now, say that Microsoft comes to collect its annual fee from the MCPs. The MCPs say, of course, “wait, the company that we sold this license to has gone bankrupt, we shouldn’t have to pay.”

“Aha!” says the suit from Redmond. “You made a contract with us, and another with them. Their inability to uphold their end of the contract does not invalidate your commitment to us.”

One of the biggest mistakes users make when trying out Open Source software is that they immediately want to know if they can use their favourite application. The answer is often ‘No’ however there is always an alternative. I have already mentioned OpenOffice.org for Microsoft Office. Here are a few more:

• Internet Explorer – Mozilla Firefox
• Outlook Express/Outlook – Evolution, Mozilla Thunderbird, Kmail
• Adobe Acrobat – Ghostscript, OpenOffice.org
• Windows Media Player – Amarok, Rhythmbox, Songbird, VLC, MPlayer
• Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro – Gimp, ImageMagick
• Adobe Illustrator – Inkscape, Sketch

This is only a few highlights from a much larger list but if you look at the list you will quickly see that your options in the Open Source world are far greater, than any paid for software.

Lets hope the British Government really mean what they say and start to advocate the use of Open Source software so we the public can stop having to pay for all to often shoddy software…

Why do IT Pros seem to have so much free time?

eviljaymz.com

Lighttpd - Fly Light

This site has always been hosted on shared hosting, along with a few other blogs I maintain for friends (On The Wrong Planet and Darth McCarth to name a couple…). Even while I was freelancing I have always used shared hosting as it has always been perfect for my needs However the popularity of this blog has grown a lot in the last 7 months so I felt it was time to invest in some meatier hosting to something that would give me more control over the resources available to me and my site.

I don’t think that I require a dedicated server quite yet, especially not considering how much they cost for a reasonable one, so I decided to take the Virtual Server route. There are many very decent offers around, I chose to go with CheapVPS (A brand of VAServe Ltd) on the reccomendation of a colleague and Linux Engineer. Right lets get started then!

Install Lighttpd (Lighty)

I am assuming that you already have Ubuntu 8.04 installed on your VPS here as most VPSs come with the operating system pre-installed or provide a system like HyperVM to manage your server setup. I am also assuming that you have root access to your server, which is also provided by most VPS. If you don’t have root access then you will need to prepend these commands with sudo.

Log in as root and type:

apt-get install lighttpd

Watch as Lighty is downloaded and installed on your system. Once Lighty is installed you may want to remove Apache as it will probably just get in your way! To remove type:

apt-get remove apache2

If you have installed with a default setup then you will find Lighty’s main configuration at /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and the service script will be located /etc/init.d/lighttpd

to start, stop, restart or reload Lighty use these commands respectively:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd start
/etc/init.d/lighttpd stop
/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart
/etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload

Configuring Lighty for Virtual Hosting

In a similar fashion to Apache, Lighttpd keeps its configuration files in one location and expects you the create a symlink to them from another location to active certain features. These two folders can be found at /etc/lighttpd/conf-available and /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled.

To enable virtual hosts and create the symlink type:

ln -s /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-simple-vhost.conf /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-simple-vhost.conf

Before creating the Lighty configuration for the virtual hosts we need to create all of the folders and files that are going to be required. As I allow my friends access to the server to modify their own websites I need to make sure that they don’t have access to other users websites. To create a user type:

adduser username

Where username should be replace by whatever username you want. Once a user is created we need to create the folders where their website files and logs are going to be stored and give them the correct permissions and ownerships. Again replace username with whatever you like and domain.com with your domain:

mkdir /home/username/domains
mkdir /home/username/domains/domain.com
mkdir /home/username/domains/domain.com/html
mkdir /home/username/domains/domain.com/logs
touch /home/username/domains/domain.com/logs/access.log
touch /home/username/domains/domain.com/logs/error.log
chown -R username:username /home/username/domains
chown www-data:www-data /home/username/domains/domain.com/logs/*

You can repeat this process for however many users and domains that you require. Or if you know what you are doing you could create a script to automate this process.

Now lets edit the virtual hosts config file:

vi /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-simple-vhost.conf

Now here is an example config block for pureroon.co.uk:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "(^|.)(panicroon|pureroon|roon)(.co|.me).uk$" {
    server.document-root = "/home/roon/domains/pureroon.co.uk/public_html"
    server.errorlog = "/home/roon/domains/pureroon.co.uk/logs/error.log"
    accesslog.filename = "/home/roon/domains/pureroon.co.uk/logs/access.log"
    url.rewrite = (
        "^/(wp-.+).*/?" => "$0",
        "^/(sitemap.xml)" => "$0",
        "^/(sitemap.xml.gz)" => "$0",
        "^/(robots.txt)" => "$0",
        "^/(xmlrpc.php)" => "$0",
        "^/(favicon.ico)" => "$0",
        "^/(cgi-.+).*/?" => "$0",
        "^/(icon.+).*/?" => "$0",
        "^/(.+)/?$" => "/index.php/$1"
    )
}

The first line

$HTTP["host"] =~ "(^|.)(panicroon|pureroon|roon)(.co|.me).uk$"

is telling lighty which domain to look out for, you can use regular expressions here and you can see that I am capturing panicroon.co.uk, pureroon.co.uk and roon.me.co.uk. I then let wordpress redirect the user to the correct domain (pureroon.co.uk).

The next 3 lines are telling lighty where to find the document root (the location of your web files), and the locations of the error log and access log respectively.

To be able to use URL rewriting in your wordpress blog you need to set up the url.rewrite lighty module. The problem I have found with the url rewriting is that lighty doesn’t support the Apache ‘if file doesn’t exist function’ so you have to give it a list of files that shouldn’t be rewritten:

"^/(sitemap.xml)" => "$0"

will redirect ‘/sitemap.xml’ to itself. The final line:
"^/(.+)/?$" => "/index.php/$1"
redirects all other requests to ‘/index.php’ and the wordpress software will take care of everything from there.

That’s it, restart Lighty and you are ready to start installing MySQL and finally WordPress, check back soon for the next two stages

From NASA Spitzer Project

NASA scientists have discovered that one of the closest solar systems to ours shows some very striking resemlblances to how are solar system looked when it was a lot younger.

The star at the center of the nearby system, called Epsilon Eridani, is a younger, slightly cooler and fainter version of the sun. Previously, astronomers had uncovered evidence for two possible planets in the system, and for a broad, outer ring of icy comets similar to our own Kuiper Belt.

The outer comet ring around Epsilon Eridani is denser than our comet ring, called the Kuiper belt, because the system is younger.

This new discovery should assist scientists and astronomers to model what our own solar system was like around the time life started taking hold on earth. Astronomers have discovered similar systems before but never one as close, only 10 light years away, to us.

“Because the system is so close to us, Spitzer can really pick out details in the dust, giving us a good look at the system’s architecture,”

said co-author Karl Stapelfeldt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Asteroid belts are often the left overs from planet formation. The formed planet will then shepherd the nearby belt keeping it in its disk like orbit around its star. An asteroid belt is much easier to detect than an individual planet, but its existence allows astronomers to deduce what the size and composition of nearby planets. Asteroid belts are detected by using infra-red telescopes which can pick out the small releases of heat given off when dust and particles in the belt collides.

When a manufacturer or software provider uses closed source systems those systems are then not open to modification and customisation by it’s user. A user is essentially restricted by what that manufacturer or provider allows you to do, which is often not a lot. Closed source systems don’t allow interaction with other company’s products and whilst this may be preferable to that company, as it ties the user to their products it doesn’t really benefit the consumer leaving them frustrated and annoyed.

Apple’s iPod is a great example of this problem. Originally Apple didn’t allow interaction between their product and 3rd party products. This meant that a Linux user couldn’t use an iPod as they had no method of song management because iTunes is not compatible with Linux Operating Systems. Similarly if you had an iPod dock to play your music out loud, you couldn’t use that dock to play music from a 3rd party MP3 player. This has since changed as many developers and hardware providers have found ways of ‘hacking’ into the iPod and forcing it to be compatible with their systems.

“We were convinced we had to develop an open platform that would allow for open software since the speed in the infotainment and entertainment industry requires us to be on a much faster track,”

said Gunter Reichart, BMW vice president of driver assistance, body electronics and electrical networks.

“We invite other OEMs to join with us, to exchange with us. We are open to exchange with others.”

A great example of the power of Open Source systems that most of us can relate to has to be the Mozilla Firefox Internet Browser software. Thousands of add ons have been developed by a thriving community of developers to enhance the functionality of the browser and talking from personal experience, I simply cannot use other web browsers as they just don’t provide what I need.

Well done BMW, lets hope you can convince the other manufaturers to follow your example.

Many of you here are either involved with the marketing of a web site for another company or operate a web site or blog of your own. For either case, being able to immediately see if a page is cached by Google would be invaluable. That’s exactly what the Google Cache Checker extension for Firefox offers.

Google Cache Checker is provided by Gadget Advisor

I have been using this plugin all day, and already it has come in quite handy working out which pages on my site are indexed by Google after switching my domain from pureroon.co.uk to panicroon.co.uk. I have already noticed that its the older posts that Google has picked up the move for so far, which was quite unexpected. I thought that it would be the newer and fresher posts first working backwards. Well the Google gods are extremely fickle.

This plugin simply displays a green tick or a red cross in the corner of your firefox browser to indicate whether or not the url that you have landed on is indexed or not. This can be extrememly useful for making snap descisions on the relevancy of the content of the page.

Google Cache Checker

Seeing things, thinking things, writing things.

Andrew Hatch wants you to find out why he says this

An input audio data stream comprising speech is processed by an automatic censoring filter in either a real-time mode, or a batch mode, producing censored speech that has been altered so that undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible. The automatic censoring filter employs a lattice comprising either phonemes and/or words derived from phonemes for comparison against corresponding phonemes or words included in undesired speech data. If the probability that a phoneme or word in the input audio data stream matches a corresponding phoneme or word in the undesired speech data is greater than a probability threshold, the input audio data stream is altered so that the undesired word or a phrase comprising a plurality of such words is unintelligible or inaudible. The censored speech can either be stored or made available to an audience in real-time.

I feel a little skeptical here, the intention may be honorable however I think the implementation is going to be a little more difficult than Microsoft think, or at least more complicated than they have made it appear in the patent.

Consider the phrase (found on Metafilter):

Did you enjoy your shitaki mushroom, Mr. Fukawa? Excellent. Are you still planing on going to the bird sanctuary today? I hear they have a new display of boobies and great tits, as well as some chickens. I just love those cocks and hens. Also, I hear that they have set up a petting zoo outside with an ass, a bitch, and a couple of pussy cats. If you have any problems finding the place, just give us a call and ask for the manager, his name is Dick Kunt.

if this phrase were to be censored using the methods that Microsoft proposed, it would end up becoming completely unintelligable. I am all for censorship of intentionally offensive or inflamatory web and media content but censorship without analysis of context is not going to work.

Crater on North Polar Layered Deposits. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

From the HiRISE Website

The north polar layered deposits, and the bright ice cap that covers them, are very young (by geologic standards) features. To try and figure out the age of an area, or how quickly it’s being resurfaced, planetary scientists count up the number of craters at different sizes. An older surface has more time to accumulate more craters whereas a younger surface, or one that has a lot of geologic activity that destroys craters, doesn’t have many impact craters.

These polar deposits have a very low crater count so it is possible that the ice cap (bright white in this image) might only by about 10,000 years old and the surface of the layered deposits (orange-brown in this image) may be only a few million years old. This sounds like a long time but is very short compared to other surfaces on Mars.

The ice has not melted because it is being sheltered from the sun by the high crater walls, keeping the contents of the crater well preserved.

So much for Mars being a dead planet, what with ice, avalanches, rain, moving sand dunes and weather systems, it seems quite alive!

Quote

The Reg took up the challenge and with the help of a pencil and the back of an envelope came to some startling conclusions.

Youtube puts up approximately 10 hours – or 600 minutes – of new content every minute. Classifying that material would take 600 people watching 24 hours a day. Assuming that individuals could function productively for six hours, YouTube has just gained an additional 2,400 employees.

Now that is just the numbers for Youtube, is Lord Currie seriously suggesting that all sites should be regulated, that would require an extremely vast number of eyes. Its all very well proposing a way of helping with unemployment, however how would all these new employees be paid, would it be down to Ofcom, the government, the owners of each individual site. If it came down to owners of each individual site, small blogs would probably cease to exist as they would be unable to afford regulators.

Ever since the realisation in the late 90′s of the power of the internet, commercial entities have sought to control it, and governments have tried to censor it. The current method of group regulation (the open source ideology), whereby Internet users actively point out inflamatory or intollerant websites has been quite successful, but this doesn’t sit well with most power hungry governments who continually look to control and tame the thoughts and writings of it’s people.

I am guessing a few of you are nodding in agreement?

Well Google in their ‘make things better’ way have come up with a way to reduce embarrassment, and they have called it Mail Goggles.

Mail Goggles is simply activated late at night and before you are allowed to send an email using your Gmail account you will be challenged with a few questions that hopefully should determine your sobriety…

Mail Goggles

If you can solve the maths questions in less than a minute then you a deemed to be sober enough to send your email, easy as that. Quite simple and clever really, but I know next time I am off to the local boozer I won’t forget to activate my Mail Goggles!

Link

Muji Chrononotebook

Quote

Because of the numerous hours in a day (and various other constraints), the lines in a diary are typically very narrow. They are also usually equally distributed (somewhat). But our information is a hierarchy. Some are more important to us. Some we feel happier about. We want to highlight stuff that’s important to us. We want to write things that are more important in BIGGER sizes. Our lives cannot be so easily and clearly divided into equal parcels

Normally when we make notes they follow the same pattern, you start at the top of the page and work your way downwards adding notes. The Chronotebook allows you to organise your notes using time. Not only can you use it to sort your thoughts, you can also use it to keep an eye on the length and time of any particular event.

Being a developer who uses nothing but relational databases all day, I tend to organise my notes using my own simplified UML structure, something my colleagues find mystifying! Everyone is unique, however I find that my method allows me to analyse a problem or scenario as I am making notes which helps me understant the situation before I sit down and properly think about it. However I have to be careful that I don’t spend too much time thinking about how I am going to make notes, rather than listening to what the client is actually saying!

The Chronotebook won the Muji Award International Design Competition for 2007, find out more at the link above…

It may be cliche, but it seems that people who get good at writing software are motivated by laziness. If everyone was as constructively lazy as a good programmer is, the whole world would be more efficient.

[..]

I wish I could grep my keys.

[..]

Programming teaches you that the universe is predictable and deterministic. I’ve personally found that this has shaped my expectations and fed my impatience with people and things that are not.

There’s a positive side to this – I think that spending time in an environment where you can’t “fudge” the answer or bullS**t your way through (you can’t “kind-of” sort a set of integers, and it won’t sort unless you tell the computer exactly what to do, and correctly) has sensitized me to b.s. in other environments, from commercials to claims about tax cuts – I just find it much more obvious when people are clearly hand-waving/fudging an answer.

If you are a bit geeky, you will be lol for hours!

Paschalepist — one who believes that on the Sunday following the full moon closest in time to the vernal equinox, a fluffy white mountain hare (of the species lepus timidus) hides chocolate eggs.

Apaschalepist — a person who does not believe that the Easter Bunny is real.

Vampirist — one who believes that pale, fanged immortals stalk the night, sometimes in the form of bats.

Avampirist — a person who thinks that un-dead, bloodthirsty demons are mythical.

Pastafarian — one who believes that the universe has been created and tended by the great Flying Spaghetti Monster, blessed be His name.

Antipasta — a person who doesn’t believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists.

A good point well made…

NASA Reconnaissance Orbiter

Quote from Universe Today

Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling Mars for over two years now, and has provided unprecedented views of the Red Planet with its HiRISE Camera. But did you also know that MRO is a weather-monitoring satellite, too? The Mars Climate Sounder instrument is examining the Martian atmosphere and has issued its first Mars weather report. “It has taken 20 years and three missions but we finally have an instrument in orbit that gives us a detailed view of the entire atmosphere of Mars and it is already giving us fresh insights into the Martian climate,” said Professor Fred Taylor of Oxford University. Within a paper issued by the Mars ‘weather team’ comes surprising news: during the freezing Martian winter the atmosphere above the planet’s South Pole is considerably warmer than predicted.

I wonder if a Mars forecast will be just as reliable as the forecasts we get on Earth?

In a software-centric world where we already have many, many languages to program in, from scripting to bytecode compiled languages, to frameworks on top of languages and embedded languages, now Redmond wants to bring ANOTHER language to the table, titled ‘M’ (for Microsoft?).

The new language is to be a part of Microsoft’s new Oslo development and service-oriented strategy, incorporating features from XAML while being textual and domain-specific. M is to be used directly with 2 other components to be released with M along with Visual Studio 2010: Quadrant, a tool for building models visually, and a repository for storing and viewing models in an SQL database.

Microsoft are claiming the new language will be completely cross platform, but with a little catch. Microsoft won’t be building the back end for any other platforms and the database used must by MS SQL. Well I suppose that for Microsoft that is a large step in the right direction!

A testing preview should be released this month at the Microsoft Professional Developers’ Conference, but there is no word on a final release date. I would guess it’s going to be included with Visual Studio 2010, so some time next year.

The language should be geared towards Object Oriented Programmers however its reliance on MS SQL and .net is hardly going to make it very attractive to open source developers, whom Microsoft seem to be making an attempt to please recently.

The name makes me a little suspicious here, is this just Microsoft trying to get hold of a slightly more funky image? Well I guess we will find out when programmers start using it, you never know ‘M’ might even be part of Microsoft’s vision to finally see off C.

In jumped PostgreSQL to the rescue, along with my own query caching method and the software was back up and running!

Quote

MySQL vs PostgreSQL is a decision many must make when approaching open-source relational databases management systems. Both are time-proven solutions that compete strongly with proprietary database software. MySQL has long been assumed to be the faster but less full-featured of the two database systems, while PostgreSQL was assumed to be a more densely featured database system often described as an open-source version of Oracle. MySQL has been popular among various software projects because of its speed and ease of use, while PostgreSQL has had a close following from developers who come from an Oracle or SQL Server background.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

MESSENGER is the first mission where a space craft has been sent to orbit Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. On October 6th 2008 at 04:40 the probe came within 200km of the toastie planet’s surface and took as many pictures as it could.

NASA is hoping that the probe will be in full orbit around the planet by 2011 and that MESSENGER will be Mercury’s first artificial satelite.

The very bright crater just south of the equator is Kuiper which was identified using photos from the 1970s. The area east of Kuiper has never been photographed, until MESSENGER.

USB Webmail Notifier from USB Geek

Quote

Webmail Notifier connects to your private email account when you can not, and let you know what is going on!

It works in the background to inform you every time you receive a personal email and even the capacity of unread emails!

No external battery required, power by USB

Soft Illuminated Blue, Red, Green indicator

Webmail Notifier supports: Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express, POP 3 mail

Need I say any more, other than you can get this for just $17+pp!!!

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Hundreds of millions of users access our services through the web, and supporting this traffic requires lots of computers. We strive to offer great internet services while taking our energy use very seriously. That’s why, almost a decade ago, we started our efforts to make our computing infrastructure as sustainable as possible. Today we are operating what we believe to be the world’s most efficient data centers.

This is quite blatantly a mission statement rather than a report. There are no specifics or detailed facts or figures. There is a lot of uses of graphs like this one, that have no scales on them, which makes them rather meaningless.

I am quite happy to accept that Google have become more efficient, but exactly how much?

Cloud computing’ is a term used to describe a situation where applications are based on web servers and accessed through internet connections, rather than being installed on clients. This leads to a new business model of subscription-based applications, generally known as ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) but dubbed by Microsoft as ‘software plus services.

[..]

“Every time there’s a big new trend, a big new opportunity, we write a new operating system,” Ballmer told delegates at the conference. “We’re now in the process of writing a new operating system. For lack of a better term, before we announce it in four weeks, I’ll call it Windows Cloud.”

Quote

Ballmer also hinted at what would be built into the new OS, including geo replication, how to design apps intended to commingle [we think he means appeasing regulators by providing more interoperability], management modelling and an SOA model, to effectively create a new platform.

“We’re not driving an agenda towards being service providers but we’ve gotta build a service that is Windows in the cloud,” admitted Ballmer.

He also hit out at internet kingpin and pesky rival Google.

“If you talk to Google they’ll say it’s thin client computing but then they’ll issue a new browser that’s basically a big fat operating system designed to compete with Windows but running on top of it,” he said.

Please excuse my heavy quoting…

Illustration of the flare from magnetar Swift J195509+261406. A starquake is probably what triggered the object

Quote

Swift has made another unusual discovery. The orbiting satellite detected a very strange star that “twinkled” with gamma rays, X-rays, and light — and then vanished. Back in June the satellite detected a spike of gamma-rays that lasted less than five seconds. But this high-energy flash wasn’t a gamma-ray burst — the birth cry of a black hole far across the universe. It was something much closer to home. During the next three days, the object brightened and faded in visible light. It flashed over 40 times! Eleven days later, it flashed again, this time at infrared wavelengths. Then, it disappeared from view!

Jupiter from the VLT. Credit: ESO

Quote

Everyone loves twinkling stars and moonlit nights—EXCEPT astronomers. But astronomers are crafty people, so they’ve come up with ways to mitigate the distortion that Earth‘s thick atmosphere causes for ground based telescopes (from which stars appear to twinkle). And now, a new image-correction technique has delivered the sharpest whole-planet ground-based picture ever. The Very Large Telescope (VLT) performed a record two-hour observation of Jupiter using a breakthrough technique to remove atmospheric blur. And what a result! Just take a look at that gorgeous image…And this new image reveals changes in Jupiter’s smog-like haze, probably in response to a planet-wide upheaval more than a year ago.

After 2 years of excuses, laziness, constant turnover (complete waste of training time when the guy/girl buggers off and leaves you with a new muppet), terrible or copied-from-Google code, never-ending bugs, headaches, baffling phone calls where no-one understood each other, emails that promised to “do the needful” but went ignored, applications that just didn’t work, MILLIONS of dollars, and much, much more……. we had enough, and told the Indian coding behemoth we’d had enough and brought our dev team back in house.

Saying that things go more smoothly is a massive understatement. Don’t know why we bothered. Oh yes, some spreadsheet said it would be cheaper.

When writing software the developer needs to be in constant communication with both the project manager and the author. Out-sourcing your coding just doesn’t work. In my experience a programmer often has a completely different take on how to solve a problem to most other people, they will often find the simplest and most efficient way of producing software, which while it sounds good is often not the best method.

Any well rounded developer knows that sometimes the specs given to them can be illogical or not well thought through by an author or project manager that doesn’t fully understand the coding process. This means that the full team building a particular piece of software need to be flexible to some degree and this cannot be acheived when outsourcing.

It doesn’t even have to be incomplete specs that will upset the process, clients love to change their minds, especially when they see a prototype of their software. Things I hear all to regularly are ‘can we move that to there’, ‘what if we swapped this round’ or the dreaded ‘Oh, actually I don’t need that bit any more…’

So on paper it may look like it is a lot cheaper to outsource, but in the long run the lack of communication, understanding and flexibility will have you wishing you had seen sense when that email from an asian coding beast offering you the chance to slash your development costs drops into your inbox.

Q: How will you fix the economy?
A: The economy and putting it back on the world. I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think it was an unfair attack on the war on terror. And I asked President Karzai, “Is that what you are seeking, also? That strategy that has been the Washington elite. I don’t know if the task is from Alaska that we take the fight to them. We never again let them come onto our soil and try to destroy not only our democracy, but communities like the idea though of taxpayers being used to bailout these corporations. Today it was AIG, important call there, though, because of the status quo, going with the energy source that is needed to help shore up our economy and putting it back on the right reasons and serving something greater than himself and not just let one party try to destroy not only our democracy, but communities like the idea though of taxpayers being used to talk about, America being the beacon of light and hope for those who are hell bent on destroying America and our allies.

Ask Sarah all the questions you want

What is this?

Optimist: an investment banker who irons five shirts on Sunday evening.

Procrastination Flow Chart

Ever wanted to have a definitive way of planning out just how effectively you can waste your time?

Now you can! Use this flow diagram to effectively plan your working day. All bases are covered, decide how you are going to surf the web, where and what to eat for lunch, efficiently process your social networking daily dosage and if there is any free time left; how you can crowbar a little work in…

Thanks to Project Sidewalk

Something about the vibrant colors, stark contrasts and vivid depths of an HDR approach lends abandonments to HDR photography like few other subjects. Beautiful HDR pictures bring dead places and long disused spaces powerfully to back to life.

HDR Rusted Truck

HDR Photography can have some extremely interesting results, some of these photos are quite spooky when portraid with such vivid and high contrasting colours.

HDR stands for ‘High Dynamic Range’ and uses various techniques, generally orientated around blending a range of exposures or range of light and dark areas.

View an impressive range of HDR photography of abandoned buildings and places

A True Image from False Kiva Credit & Copyright: Wally Pacholka (Astropics.com/TWAN)

Explanation: Is there any place in the world you could see a real sight like this? Yes. Pictured above is single exposure image spectacular near, far, and in between. Diving into the Earth far in the distance is part of the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy, taken with a long duration exposure. Much closer, the planet Jupiter is visible as the bright point just to band’s left. Closer still are picturesque buttes and mesas of the Canyonlands National Park in Utah, USA, lit by a crescent moon. In the foreground is a cave housing a stone circle of unknown origin named False Kiva. The cave was briefly lit by flashlight during the long exposure. Astrophotographer Wally Pacholka reports that getting to the cave to take this image was no easy trek. Also, mountain lions were a concern while waiting alone in the dark for just the right exposure.

This is a fantastic photo, as an amateur photographer I can really appreciate how difficult this shot was to take and the amount of patience required to get exactly the right exposure!

Lighting the cave with a flash really gives the whole photo quite a surreal effect, very impressive.

Follow NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive (no RSS feed I am afraid, you will have to do it the old fashioned way and just visit the site!)

Rain on Mars (Credit: NASA

Images of layered sedimentary deposits and deltas on Mars have provided evidence for lakes and flowing rivers that carried eroded material downstream. A team of researchers also believes there is evidence for precipitation in the Red Planet’s past. “For years scientists have been suspecting that the current appearance of the landscape has, in part, been shaped by rivers that cut into the surface,” said Ernst Hauber of the German Aerospace Center. “We can see layered sediments where these valleys open into impact craters. The shape of certain sediments is typical for deltas formed in standing water.” Hauber and his team also believe that surface runoff from rain or snowmelt completes the picture of past water on Mars.

There seems to be more and more evidense coming from NASA’s HiRISE that Mars was once very similar to Earth, in both it’s surface and it’s atmosphere. At some point however Mars has taken a very different tack and ended up as very cold, very dry and very barren. Other recent photographs from Mars show dried up lakes, river valleys, estuarys and other features associated with a once wet planet.

Whatever did happen was very brief in Mar’s overall history and any precipitation that did occur dried up around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.

Read more on Universe Today

Windows 7 Media Player

You can see a much lighter interface for Windows Media player and a few changes to the control panel. Maybe cutting back on the graphics a bit might actually speed up Windows 7 a bit as Vista was a dam nightmare!

Windows 7 Solution Center

Go here to see loads more, but hurry they probably won’t hang around forever!

Hands on Ruby on Rails has become a popular framework for developing database-based web applications using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Before Ruby on Rails, though, PHP was hogging the web-development limelight. Problem was, there was no Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for PHP.

With Ruby on Rails, though, PHP developers have come to realize the timesaving benefits of MVC – a fact that led to the development of various PHP frameworks that are actually based on Ruby on Rails.

Among them, the Akelos framework and PHP On Trax.

In this article we shall develop an MVC Create-Read-Update-Delete (CRUD) application using the PHP On Trax Framework. Why this particular framework? Simple: it is a direct port of the Ruby on Rails framework.

I haven’t managed to try this out yet but it I didn’t see anything in it that would’t be able to be set up in a linux environment, The article goes into a fair amount of detail (3 pages) in how to get it working. If anyone has had a go at this let me know how you have got on, I don’t really have the time at the moment!

Serve and Protect with the Peacemaker

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The Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff’s Department (that’s them above) just obtained an armored personnel carrier, complete with a belt-fed, .50-cal turreted machine gun. Sheriff Leon Lott has charmingly named the vehicle “The Peacemaker,” and insists that using a caliber of ammunition that even the U.S. military is reluctant to use against human targets (it’s generally reserved for use against armored vehicles) will “save lives.”

[..]

Like most of these military toys obtained by local police departments, the Peacemaker will inevitably be used on drug and gambling raids—that is, to enforce laws against consensual activities. Or, as we’re now seeing in Minnesota, perhaps on raids against leftist political activists.

Umm what exactly can I say to this, I could come up with something cliched like “Only in the US” but I think that everyone has become used to the fact that appears to be hiding behind a collective intelligence that only a privileged few have access to. Oh and in my experience the ‘chosen ones’ don’t appear to be in the US they are all over here in Europe.

Who on earth do these boys think they are going to be arresting, I just don’t understand how an apparent pioneer of world peace can think it needs to treat its own people in this way?

For all developers everywhere, we all share the pain…

Inspired by an article in NYT about Google becoming a media company, I decided that something had to be done. So I created a way to Search with Google without getting results from Google sites such as Knol, Blogger and YouTube.

Timo Paloheimo has built the search engine using Google’s Custom Search Engine and has filtered out all links to Google Sites. Other ignored google domains include Jaiku, Gmail and Blogspot. Strangely whenever I put anything in I get Wikipedia as the top link, but then you get the same when searching Google anyway. A good step forward would be to filter out all of the big fish; Wikipedia, MSN, Yahoo, etc and all domains added by them, maybe even chop and choose which domains you want to filter out allowing you to find pages swirling around at the bottom of the tank?

Timo runs a blog called Startupbin and is aiming to find out as much as he can about web startups, with a goal of finding that ‘idea’ to kick start his own. If anyone has any of those ideas, please share them with me before passing them onto Timo!

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So what, exactly, are they doing together? Well, we already know Dell provides servers for Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook, but what other plans the two have hatched together beyond that is unclear. The event is scheduled for next Tuesday, but other than sending out a nicely worded invitation, the only thing the companies are saying about the partnership is that it involves “the next generation of cloud computing.”

Facebook recently borrowed $100 Million as reported by Data Center Knowledge, I would guess a fair proportion of that money will be dropped straight into Dell’s pockets as part of a new deal. The announcement is planned for next week, so lets see what happens!

Eee PC 900HD removable baseplate for upgradable HDD

Here comes another version of the Asus Eee PC. This one is being thrown into the 900 series and will come with a Hard Drive. This new version hasn’t been announced by Asus yet but it has been spotted on the FCC website getting it’s wireless certification.

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Pictures from the FCC website show an Eee with an much larger baseplate hatchway. That’s a good sign, since it surely indicates the drive will be easily upgradeable – a key advantage the Eee line generally has over rival Small, Cheap Computers.

There are no details available yet other than the photo above showing that the baseplate is much larger than the other models.

Do you think there are too many versions of the Eee PC yet?

LG KC910

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LG has confirmed it will release an eight-megapixel cameraphone this year – even as details and juicy pictures emerged online of what the release is expected to be: the KC910.

The cameras on phones are now beginning to rival some of the latest compacts, not only does the camera on this baby come with manual focusing if you need it, it also has face, smile and blink detection, standards in the latest compact cameras. To keep the feature list up it also has a Xenon flash and image stability too.

The KC910 will have space for micro SD cards, USB, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. It also has a 240x400mm touch screen display

Should be released “Some time this year” and a price is yet to be announced.

Beijing 2008 Photography

Click on the photo above to see some fantastic photography from the Beijing Olympics 2008, everything from the ecstacy of winning to the pain of losing, and it is all stuff I bet you didn’t see on the tv coverage!

UPDATE (26/08/08): Appears the link is no longer available, sorry!

Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA

Have any artists complained or is this just the RIAA on their high horse?

To enable the module (apache2) try something like:

# cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/
# ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/deflate.load .

Then add the following line to your apache.conf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

Now restart apache and all plain text, html, and xml files should be compressed before being sent to the client.

Easy!

Anti Piracy, adverts and DVDs

Now I’ve got to site through an unskippable anti-piracy advert every single time I put the disc into my dvd player, even though I own a legit, shop-bought copy for fucking fuck’s sake

One day when every has really had enough and every one stops buying their products completely, these companies might, maybe, possibly, doubtfully, get the message.

Oh and I have just discovered that all the England away football (soccer) matches this season are on Setanta Sports this season, great so now I have to pay to watch my own country qualify for the world cup!

Rupert Murdoch = Money Grabbing W*&^$%

Please excuse my profanity in this post, it’s one of those days…

Leading online marketing specialist Text Internet Marketing has launched a revolutionary new website diagnostic tool which will be invaluable for all website administrators.

[..]

Text’s Business Development Manager, Graeme Hastings commented: “Unlike other internet marketing agencies, Text Internet Marketing does not believe in shrouding services such as web design, SEO and pay-per-click campaigns in mystery,” adding “there are no dark arts involved, it’s common sense and hard work.”

The Free Express Web Test enables webmasters to review their sites instantly to gauge their effectiveness in search engine rankings, enabling the reviewer to ascertain areas within the site that need to be addressed.

Manchester based Text is at the forefront of internet marketing, specialising in content based web design, PPC campaigns, banner advertising, link building, online PR and much more with clients ranging from Haydock Park, to Baines and Ernst and Donington Park (a list of Texts web design clients can be found on Text’s portfolio page).

You can try out the new Express Web Tester at the Text.co.uk Website

Good bye and thanks for all the fish…

Well done to Theo, my little bro!

You can listen to the whole set and find out more about the band at their website:

http://www.myspace.com/TheAviatorsFunkBand

Phoebe Reith — Vocals / Drums,
William Harrison — Electric Guitar,
Joseph Ziegler — Bass Guitar,
Theodore Smith — Drums/Sax

Influences Average white band, Herbie Hancock, James Brown, Chic, Bijoumiyo, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Joe Walsh, The Eagles, Kool & the Gang, Mike Stern, Queen, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Police, Stevie Wonder, THE FUNK… to name but a few

I have had these photos for nearly a year now and done nothing with them, suddenly at half 11 in the evening I got the inspiration for a collection.

Venice was a fantastic city architecturally however it was extremely overcrowded which damaged some of it’s mysticism. There was so much rubbish around it got hard to look past it. Thats why I decided to go for this rather subdued look for these photos. Some of these have people’s faces in but noone is smiling.

View the whole album here