Martin Woodward

Poster child of the Web 2.0 movement and all round general legends Meebo have just launched a new service called MeeboMe that allows you to host a flash based chat window on your website and allow people to send you IM messages.  It is in Alpha stages at the moment so may well cause problems.  Anyway – if you want to drop me an IM message then feel free to click here for a chat window.  I’ll not have this on my main page quite yet because a)  I’ll probably get tons of spam and b) It’s alpha so will probably break in loads of nasty places.  Anyway – worth a try!

Just discovered the website - Pandora. Basically, it allows you to create a streaming music station by typing in the names of some songs or bands that you like. It will then play you music by those artists and similar ones. It is great for discovering new music and re-discovering tunes that you have heard on the radio but forgotten who they were by. Currently it is free and also free of audio adverts. They also offer a subscription service which will remove all commercials. Pandora is currently only available to people in the US. I'm in the States at the minute so I can't tell if it is doing any IP resolving to determine location or it is just using the ZIP code which you enter on registration.

At the risk of inventing a new Web 2.0 buzzword, the interface could be described as FLAX (FLash and Xml) - it's pretty nice and does a good job of masking the restrictions imposed by the music licensing deals that the company has struck.

If you (like me) spend a lot of time tied to your computer then this is an ideal source of background music. So far I've done a couple of quick "Stations". A relaxed one and one full of pop. Be warned, I like my music like my movies - unchallenging. However, thanks to Pandora this is changing and I'm listening to stuff I would never have thought to buy myself from iTunes.

Google has recently announced it's new Analytics service. I've just added the tracker to this site so we'll see what the data looks like in a few hours. From all the screen shots it looks pretty nice, will post an update when I see what it thinks to my small site traffic...

Rather than being a 20% time project, this appears to be the result of Google buying Web Analytics firm Urchin back in March. Looks like they've done a Keyhole and are now giving away the basic service for free. In this case to massively bolster Google's AdSense scheme.

UPDATE: As of 20:09 on the 15th November (24 hours after adding the tracking code), still not got any reports to look at in Google Analytics. I guess that a lot of people signed up for the service yesterday...

I colleague of mine, Mike Cooper, just pointed me towards the "Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming". Hopefully not because he thinks I need to heed the advice - but it is always good to think about your own behaviour when revewing and pairing. Reading the article made me think back to the first code review sessions I've held with people where they often need to take things less personally, but also to some great pairing sessions I've had with people that really adhere to these rules whether they knew they did or not. I can't help it, I'm in a retrospective mood just lately.

As you've probably discovered by now, Google has launched Google Reader - a web based RSS reader with all the fancy AJAX lovliness you'd expect.

So far, I'm a little dissapointed. The site looks nice, and the keyboard shortcuts work well - but I had loads of problems importing my subscription list - also the performance is a little slow. I tend to read my feeds in categories, and there are some categories that I care more about reading every artcile whereas others that are very high volume and I just scan the headlines.

Basically, Google Reader is interesting but Bloglines has my RSS traffic still. I expect Google Reader will start working better as time goes on, at first I didn't like gmail that much...

Occassionally, I come across something that is soo good I think twice about recommending it to people because I don't want the site to get so busy that it becomes un-useable. But this thing is just too good to be quiet about.

Go check out meebo. Check it out right now, and I mean right now - you won't regret it. It is like Trillian, but over a web site using some of the best Ajax since Google Maps.

Proof, if it was ever needed, of the power of modern browsers. Nuts to Google Maps, DHTML Lemmings is the perfect use of your browsers power. This works for me in Firefox 1.0 and IE 5.5. Oh No!

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. We are due a new release of my latest project at work in a couple of weeks and in my spare moments I have been investigating my new play project, a VSTS plugin for Eclipse. Anyway, I have just uploaded the website for the VSTSEclipse project to sourceforge.

It is ages since I have done a static HTML website and not been messing around with some server side functionality or other. There are a couple of features I would like to add but didn't want to delve too deeply back into the world of php that I haven't touched for at least 4 years, possibly longer.

This site is not the most inspirational design I have ever done, but it is all div / css based, tested in IE 6 and Firefox 1.0.3 and I hope to post a handheld version of the stylesheet shortly. As ever there is hardly any content at the moment, but there you go - you would expect nothing less from me, it would all be spelt wrong anyway.

Take a look at let me know what you think. The project itself is really interesting and quite challenging. Looking forward to getting stuck in to it (just need to finish off installing Beta 2 of VSTS at home).

Just wanted to take the time to plug the JavaCoder.Net web site - a handy site put together by one of my pals that is helping me stay in touch with the world of Java. If you get the time, please take a look. It's very fast and completely free of adverts.

The bit of the site I really like is the rapid way of accessing information about java design patterns (much quicker than Sun's site). The java discussion forum is also worth a look and I would encorage you to contribute to make the site richer.

In case you haven't seen this yet, take a look at Google Suggest. I hadn't seen it until one of my colleagues pointed me to it this morning - very cool autocomplete feature.

One of the things I love about Google is taking a look at the source of their web pages. You gotta love a company that thinks so much about performance that the html and javascript are heavily optimised to be as fast as possible to download. Also helps obfuscate the code somewhat ;-).

Interesting article in Wired about "Numbers Stations" that broadcast on Shortwave. These are high-powered transmitters across the planet are are broadcasting strings of numbers, letters, backwards music, or even the noise of a fruit machine.

Spectrographic analysis of the signals has revealed that modulated data bursts are sometimes contained within the transmissions. A subculture of obsessive listeners has built up around the stations, despite the fact that they have little hope of ever decoding the signals.

Undoubtably some are used by intelligence agencies around the world for transmitting one way signals to agents, but another use is probably to reserve the frequency for emergancy use. By broadcasting noise on a particular wavelength it prevents others from using that signal.

The tactics involved in the use of the EM spectrum can sometimes be quite fascinating. Recently there was quite a bit of fuss about the EU's Galileo system broadcasting it's unencrypted positioning signals too close to the frequency used by the US for its encrypted GPS signals meaning that the US would not be able to jam the EU signal in times of war). During the recent US led attack on Falluja in Iraq, mobile and satallite communications were jammed in the area.

All this just goes to show how much electronic warfare goes on and how little we usually hear about it.

Ten by Ten is a new interesting project to capture the words and images that are making the news every hour of every day. The top 100 word and images are placed in a 10 x 10 grid for you to browse. The site has been produced in a developer friendly fashion so the possibility of site plugins is a possibility I may investigate. Worth five minutes of your time at any rate, plus it is an interesting experiment in information architecture.

The BBC have rather quietly released a new version of their website, with related links powered by their Newstraker system. This appears to automate the production of links to external news sites.

According to the BBC Story this is in reaction to users comments that:-

Our users tell us that one of the things they value most about our service is our policy of linking openly to other websites.

That as may be but you can't help thinking it may be a reaction to the recent report from the Department for culture, media and sport. At a time when the BBC is positioning ahead of its license renewal they want to be seen as positively not competing with commercial companies. Featuring links to commercial news sites helps argue their case.

Personally, if it makes the BBC News site better I'm all for it. As far as I am concerned the license fee is the best value of all my "information" subscriptions (GBP 30 pcm for broadband, GBP 30pcm for Sky+, phone bills etc). I just wish they would drop their habbit of publishing technology articles that are little more than a re-worded press release advertising some companies product.

Just watched SpaceShipOne go into space for the first of its X-prize runs. Looked like a natsy spin at the towards the end of the rocket firing but it seems to have sucessfully crossed the boundary into space and is now gliding back to Mojave Spaceport in California (sporting its fancy new Virgin logo).

Update: According to BBC News, the spin may have been caused by the pilot, Mike Melvill, accidentally pressing on a pedal during the rocket burn. Cool

I've been a regular user of programs from Sysinternals for a while now - today they just saved me again.

I've just been getting an "Access is deinied" error when I was trying to delete a directory telling me that it was is use by another process. I re-booted the machine and the directory was still in use. Then I remembered the Process Explorer from Sysinternals. This handy peice of freeware will tell you what files and registry keys are being access by which processes on the system. It even allows you to search for the file as a handle and it will show you the process that is using it. If only this feature was built into windows...

Another program I use all the time is BgInfo. This is installed on all my Windows servers and quickly tells me what the machine is along with its IP addresses and free disk space. Again, this has saved me loads of time traking down which server is which when connected to them remotely or through a KVM. Until this was installed, the quickest way I had to figure out which machine was which was to log in and eject the CD-ROM drive tray. Though this approach is funnier, it is not always practical...

Just started to leverage BuzzWhack. Some very funny - some a bit too close to the mark (see Salad Doger)

The new version on the Core J2EE patterns book is now online as part of the updated java.sun.com site.

Just had a look at this page on the Eurdora web browser (on the palm) and it works really well. It seems to use the stylesheets but igore the display:none bit.

It is text only on my m125 however due to the re-design it still works fine. I guess dropping tables was the right way to go!

MIT course note are now available online at MIT OpenCourseWare. This reminds me of the time I attended a full lecture course and actually typed up the notes. It was about the only exam I passed. Anyway, if you are interested in learning more about anything from anthropology to particle physics then this looks good.

One of my collegues pointed me at the css Zen Garden. I have to admit, I knew CSS was powerful - but I had always avoided learning it due to the flakey support in some browsers. Now nearly everyone is using a decent browser it may be time to stop using tables for layout purposes.

I always knew that table layouts were to be avoided to make sites accessible but I had never really found a better way - until now. I think I may just have to rebuild this site...