graeme.blog

Category: diary

  • Hmmm, maybe time for a move

    Thinking about transferring the hosting for this site to an American host. Colleague at work has
    done the same, and all the twizzy stuff the host offers is very tempting. Maybe will sort that out
    this week. More on this as it happens.

  • BBC Backstage

    BBC Backstage is an interesting little bit of the BBC site. They are encouraging people to make use of the rss feeds on the site and do something useful with them.
    So far this has produced:

    All very prototypy, but very impressive thus far.

  • Google World Domination pt 888303

    Google Home Page is clearly their latest enterprise to run the world. A limited selection of RSS feeds, and
    one of your gmail for starters. I suspect you will be able to configure the rss feeds later on. I would rather they did something mimicking Gmail for RSS feeds myself, but I think that sort of thing will come together over time. I’ll certainly have it set as my homepage for a little while, see what they start doing with it over the next few weeks.

  • Firefox Extensions

    This is just a quick list of the essential Firefox Extensions:

    Will add to this later, hopefully.

  • Revolution

    Well not mine, but Nintendo’s. I have achieved nothing approaching such this past weekend, took it incredibly easy. Which was much needed.

    Anyways, to business. Details starting to emerge about the revolution, it is the size of 3 dvd cases stuck together, it has wireless controllers and wireless broadband connections, and it is called revolution. That is it. It is not THIS unfortunately, which is a fake, but an awesome fake that should exist, in a fair and just world.

  • Much more lively

    Have slept well for what seems the first time in ages, and thus the brain and suchlike are behaving far more like they are supposed to. Which is a lovely and wonderful thing.

    Need to start getting my head around XML and 3-4 other related technologies very soon. Have almost finished the first phase of my main project, which has only taken I think about a year and a half. Ouch. That’s time I’m never getting back you know.

  • Barely

    awake. Very poor night’s sleep. Dreamt I was in a bus crash, caused by a suicidal bus driver. I was ultimately fine, but it was still a bit odd.

    Having my usual listen to fighting talk on the BBC’s listen again site. This is a show built for me, sport, humour, rubbish, it is all there. Oh and Bob Mills quite often too.

  • Geekexs

    As I said yesterday, I need to get my thoughts together. I am learning some javascript, and finding out more about greasemonkey, css and dhtml. It is all starting to fit together, especially when I start to see Opera using greasemonkey scripts, and the Tiger OSX build for Macs introducing the Widget, which is not a funny plastic thing in the bottom of a can, but a tiny app written in Javascript and dss which gives you a small chunk of functionality you can call from anywhere.

    Basically, there is something in it. Where I am personally interested is in adding functionality to web pages, take a resource that someone has created, and give it more. As an example off top of my head, I like the imdb site for finding out details about films and actors. But it is a bit plain, and you often don’t get a photo of the actor (if they are obscure). This is fine, it has been designed to deliver information quickly. But I could write a script potentially to redesign it to my tastes. I could alter the look and feel of the site, and also say run a query at the same time on google images, and display the first 10 pictures it finds all in one page. Possibly.

    geekily interesting stuff anyways

  • backlog

    Wow, I have a lot to write about. Unfortunately it is all geek stuff, don’t worry,

    I haven’t got anything exciting to tell. Will try and get this all up over the
    next few days.

    Right, first up then is del.icio.us, which is a social bookmark manager. Save sites to here as your favourites, look them up from any computer. You “tag” bookmarks, which means that when you save them, you enter keywords at the same time, which groups them together by theme nicely. You can then also easily see what other people have saved under the same theme.

    Now this is all very nice on its own, but you can also do a lot with it under Firefox, such as right click to add any site you are on, and a sidebar with all your current bookmarks. Lots of .rss feeds on the site too, something I always like to see.

    I will explain more about the Firefox stuff soon, but in the meantime have a look at del.icio.us/flotsky to see mine. May well link to that directly for my links section too.

  • not Awake

    Sorted out for a trip to London tomorrow to see some mates. Hoping I can fit in a visit to Cybercandy which is basically my favourite sweet shop in the world. Hoping I can finally find in stock the holy grail that is white chocolate reeces pieces. I could always order off the site, but in some ways I enjoy the randomness that is the shop, you just never know what you are going to find there. Pocky goodness too.

    highly unawake today, am mainlining coffee at the moment in the hope that it vaguely rouses me into conciousness. Would be helpful. Have the ipod on my playlist of top flotsky songs, again to try and engage my brain.

    I think I am going to try and reawaken my interest in reading, and I think I am going to start with the basics, get a new copy of breakfast of champions and dive back in. I am shamefaced to admit I have only read one book this year, Douglas Copeland’s Microserfs, and even then I really should have read that several years ago. I actually found it a little depressing, in that even Microsoft sounded a fun work environment to me. Don’t take that the wrong way, very good book.