Author: sven

Latest shared items from my Google Reader account:

• Most HTML templating languages are written incorrectly [from Simon Willison’s Weblog]
• Is Microsoft bidding up acquisitions on purpose? [from Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger]

Sorry if your feed reader has been going a bit crazy – I’ve been playing with a new script intended to copy my Shared articles from Google Reader over to here. It now seems to be stable (I did test it on a test blog but missed a few odds and sods). Perhaps shortly I’ll publish the code (it’s only about 15 lines of Python)

Latest shared items from my Google Reader account:

• Is Microsoft bidding up acquisitions on purpose? [from Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger]
• Are cellphones killing bee colonies? [from Boing Boing]
• “Hole in wall computer” LIFT talk up now [from Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger]
• Google Checkout arrives in the UK! [from Official Google Blog]
• A Simplified Version of Google’s Spell Checker [from Google Operating System]
• So You Want to Shoot a Rock and Roll Star [from Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection]
• quakr [from Simon Willison’s Weblog]
• Quakr 7d Tiltometer [from Simon Willison’s Weblog]
• Hamster-powered shredder [from Boing Boing]
• Showing Arrogance [from Photo Matt]
• Scan a File Using the Top Antivirus Software [from Google Operating System]
• Symbian-Guru.com: Using his N73 as a ‘computer’ for 30 days [from SMS Text News]
• Sexcameron [from Neil’s World]
• Cool virtual architecture video and powerful grid architecture video [from Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger]
• Sussex Geek Dinner with Glenn Jones speaking on Microformats [from Simon’s Software Stuff]
• Robotic jumping flea [from Boing Boing]
• What’s in Thomas Hawk’s Camera Bag? [from Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection]
• mail rail on Flickr [from Simon Willison’s Weblog]
• The Canon EF 50mm f/1.2, A Pretty Nice Lens, But Is it Worth the Money? [from Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection]
• The problem with pixels [from Simon Willison’s Weblog]

Wednesday night I made another trip to Brighton to attend the latest Sussex Geek Dinner. Attendance was good, although not full – it seems quite a few people (a third?) didn’t turn up for one reason or another – a little annoying considering the numbers are limited to thirty and spaces went pretty quickly.

The speaker was Glenn Jones (right), a developer and Creative Developer of Magdex Ltd. in Brighton, which “delivers websites and web based applications for the publishing and recruitment sectors”

The subject was (for the most part) Microformats, an attempt by various people and organisations to construct a psuedo-standard by building a condensed form of various existing standards to insert directly into web pages.

The idea is interesting – many developers find building around existing standards tedious and with little visible benefit. With microformats, developers can use classes for semantic markup (classes are often thought of entirely in the context of CSS, but they are also non-presentational markup).

Once implemented in the page, they are available for readers to pick and offer the user ‘value-add’ options based on the contents of the page. For example, if a calendar event is embedded in the page, the user can add that event to their own calendar. There are a couple of decent readers for Firefox: Tails and Operator.

Glenn spoke broadly about microformats and gave a good rundown of the various sites already using Microformats, as well as speaking about good practice for URL construction.

The event was helped by the organisation of a radio-mike (courtesy of Joh), although Glenn didn’t seem to like using it. Unfortunately the last event suffered from really poor acoustics so a mike of some kind would be useful – perhaps a hands-free mike next time?

As ever, thanks to Simon for organising a great event and I look forward to the next one.

Technorati Tags: sussexgeekdinner brighton geekdinner

Good news Glastonbury fans – there are tickets available on eBay. Unfortunately I don’t think they’re quite official…  good news for Michael Eavis then.

Serenity was named top sci-fi movie in an SFX magazine poll. It’s definitely very good, but I’d have trouble choosing one particular favourite (a bit like it can be hard to have a best friend).

Thrift is “a software framework for scalable cross-language services development”. I need to download and check this out, since it could be very useful. As far as I can tell it’s a CASE tool of some kind to develop API stubs in various languages.

Curiously, Facebook seems to think I produced it … I suppose on a user generated content level that’s true, but nonetheless I’m flattered 🙂

Finally got round to watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding last night. It was alright, fairly funny but “I don’t think you’ll see a funnier film this year” [Jonathan Ross] was a little more than exaggerated.

Been sat getting on with some work with the Budget on in the background.

Is it me or are the numerous silly little on-screen graphics getting out of hand? It’s like they discovered a few years ago they could have David Dimbleby walk around some virtual swingometer on voting day, and every year since the graphics have just become more & more obscure and (dare I use that clichéed phrase) dumbed-down.

Today’s presentation included a strange Lego model of Gordon Brown walking around on the desk doing nothing in particular, followed by a bunch of 3D Lego models of ambulances and other symbolic gestures to show where the money was going.

What do these things actually achieve? What’s wrong with a caption ‘Health & NHS: 10% increase’ and a description by the presenter about the implications.

Instead we get ‘ooh look it’s a Lego Gordon Brown’ and a bunch of dribble about how smart their graphics are.

I didn’t get the chance to switch over to other channels’ coverage, but given ITV’s news coverage normally seems to feature a presenter in a faux blue room with huge graphics swirling around I’ve hardly got much hope of a better alternative.