Microsoft Songsmith Ad (via Duker91)
I can’t quite believe this is real, surely it’s a spoof?
A blog by Ewan Leith, sometimes about technology
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January 13, 2009
January 12, 2009
Using the Video Filter module with drupal
If you’re installing the very useful Video Filter module for Drupal, you might get confused like I did by it’s non-functional nature.
It turns out that to enable the module, after you have done the normal step to enable a module in the Administer/Modules page, you then have to go to the Administer/Input Formats page at “yoursite.com/admin/settings/filters” then configure the input formats for “Filtered HTML” and “Full HTML”, where you’ll see a new “Video Filter” option. Check this box, and suddenly you’ll be able to embed a Youtube or other supported website just by putting
[video:url]
in your normal drupal page. Magic!
Why this isn’t included in the minimalistic installation and usage instructions I’ve got no idea.
August 14, 2008
Using Blackberry Google Talk client to receive twitter notifications instead of SMS
Since Twitter disabled sending SMS messages to you when you receive a new message, I’ve been looking at options for receiving messages on my Blackberry. Twitterberry is fine for reading through the general stream, but it doesn’t to notifications when you get a new message, unlike the Facebook or Google Talk clients for Blackberry.
To work around this issue, I’ve come up with using a twitter-bot called Twitterspy to link my Blackberry Google Talk client to Twitter, mostly following these simple instructions
The steps are dead easy, open Gmail on your PC or Google Talk on your Blackberry, and then select “Add a Friend” in the menu. Enter twitterspy@jabber.org into the field, and hit ok. In a few seconds Twitterspy should appear in your contacts list. Then, open a new conversation with Twitterspy and send “track @yourtwitterid” followed by another message saying “on”. If you ever want to stop receiving messages just send a message of “off”.
Then, anytime someone says your name on twitter you’ll receive a Google Talk notification telling you the message. Clever, isnt it? You can even reply back directly in Google Talk, by following the more detailed instructions again.
Hopefully this will help other people out there too, it works well for me.
August 4, 2008
Unrequited Twitter Friends
After I wrote Your Idle Twitter Friends I saw someone mention about wanting to find out who they were following who didn’t follow them, and vice-versa, and I thought it might actually be more useful, so I’ve given it a go.
Unrequited Twitter is the ugly but functional result
August 2, 2008
Re: The Lazy and Smarter Web
Yahoo Answers has created a business out of it, it’s probably the only thing Yahoo have outdone Google over
July 31, 2008
Your Idle Twitter Friends
I wrote this simple twitter web app to find out which of the people I was following on twitter had gone idle, then I thought I might as well turn it into an page for everyone to use.
July 28, 2008
Techcrunch loves Cuil, I can’t quite work out why (and neither can they)
There’s a post up on Techcrunch about Cuil, a new search engine that’s just launched.
It has the quote below in it
We’ve been testing the engine for the last hour. Based on our test queries Cuil is an excellent search engine, particularly since it is all of an hour old. But it doesn’t appear to have the depth of results that Google has, despite their claims. And the results are not nearly as relevant.
And I seem to have missed something, how can a search engine where the results aren’t very relevant, and aren’t very deep, be “excellent”, as Techcrunch put it?
What else is there to a search engine?
Anyway, despite the $33 million in VC funding Cuil received, they don’t seem to have spent much on usability studies of search engines, or they’d know that if someone types in a domain name into the search box, you should give them that domain first in the results. Lots and lots of people use the search box as if it was the address bar in their browser, they type in “microsoft.com” and expect it to be the first result, not off the first page.
But, like Techcrunch says, it’s only been live a few hours, so hopefully they will be able to rapidly improve things.
In the mean time, I think Google, Yahoo, Live, Altavista, and Ask.com will all do a good enough job.
July 23, 2008
OpenNMS - the poor man’s network management tool, or the smart man’s?
About 5 years ago I came across OpenNMS, an attempt to build an open-source network management system, and found it was written in Java (so had to be slow), wasn’t very pretty (so didn’t look good in demos), and didn’t play very nicely with AIX (so was totally useless for my job at the time).
Fast forward 5 years, and OpenNMS has evolved into probably the best performing network management tool out there, all available for free from the OpenNMS website, and it’s even replacing existing Tivoli NetCool implementations which means it’s either very good, or everyone who knows NetCool has retired..
July 23, 2008
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
I saw Jay-Z at the MEN Arena in Manchester on Saturday night, read a full review here, and was blown away. Absolutely fantastic stuff, Mark Ronson was the support act with his band, Wiley turned up to do his “Wearing my rolex” song, and at the end of the show, Kanye West ran on stage to join Jay-Z in a brilliant 5 song encore.
In honour of Jay-Z and Kanye being on stage together, here’s Encore by Jay-Z, produced by Kanye.
July 21, 2008
Re: Fred Wilson Dot VC
It’s interesting to see a more “mainstream” band start to try alternatives to the major labels, this weekend in the UK a boy band called McFly gave their new album away on the cover of a Sunday…
