Me and my team, Rediverse entered the Web Development invitational for the 2007 Imagine Cup competition in Korea run by Microsoft and other companies.
Stage one consisted of around 200 teams and required each team to produce a document detailing what we would do if were to go through.
Our plan is secret at the moment, as we don’t want people to nick ideas off of us, but it involves education, the web, ASP, .NET, C# and plenty of pizza, beer and late night coding sessions!
We and 59 other teams go through to the second round, and get to actually make our product. We will also present our final product to judges at the UK Finals around the 20th May.
I’m so excited about this; I can’t wait to get my little fingers whirring, coding a complete web system with my friends.
I read PCFormat and I have done for many many years but of late, standard have been more than slipping. With a bleak circulation, PCFormat decided a rebranding was the answer… smoother fonts, better colours, and the most white cover-girls you'll ever see, wearing as less as possible of course.
Being male, a Computer Science University student and heterosexual, I am exactly who PCFormat consider their key demographic, and by putting as many white girls with barely skimpy clothes on the cover and throughout each month they plan to keep people like me reading. It'll also hopefully distract people form the fact that the magazine has shrunk about 20 pages every year, and has even got smaller width and height wise in the last few months.
What really grinds my gears is that PCF have never put a non-white girl on the cover; I'm afraid this leave a very sour taste in my mouth indeed.
However, I am not impressed (which would be obvious if you've read the above and get sarcasm… duh!). I will see how the magazine pans out over the next few issues, to see if things get better. But for now, this is a long standing subscriber who is not at all happy.
All I can see in the future is a tiny little flip-book with a pair of breast on the front to attract someone at least when buying a magazine.
During watching the UK show, Newsnight, a opinion-politics based show (you just have to watch it), there was a five minute piece from the notorious UK politics blogger, Guido Fawkes. He anonymously created a feature which tried to reveal the conspiracy of news representation in the on the BBC in the UK – as they can never give a completely unbiased story. He also claimed that as political correspondents working for the BBC have contacts with or even are friends with some UK politicians, that they naturally protect their contacts and friends within government.
What was hilarious about this feature was that when Guido interviewed the presenter of the show Jeremy Paxman (Paxo), Paxo called his accusations, (on national TV)
… absolute bollocks…
and refered to his ideas as being,
… stupid conspiracies …
Legend!
A look through Fawkes’ blog, and I can quickly see what Paxo’s talking about – half of the articles this week were about whether or not Gordon Brown picked his nose during the Budget speech that Blair was giving. Is this news, or even worth watching?
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You may recall recently, that I had some virus troubles with Vista, where reading university banned me from the network temporarily while my virus was on my machine… Well, I perform a full system scan the other night, and Avast finally got rid of it. I was shocked however to find where the trojan was hiding.
The bloody trojan not only was able to surpass MS's 'most secure OS ever (bullplop)', but was also able to install itself into an .iso of MS XP Pro, so that everytime I tried to install the burned image of XP Pro, on Virtual Machine or as a native and lone copy, the trojan wa installed too.
Picture shows Avast's report showing that the virus was found on the Virtual Machine's own virtual hard disk.
Grahh! I still firmly use openSuse linux for day-to-day stuff, like internet banking which I'll never trust Windows to do… ever…
I decided the other day to ditch WP for Movable Type, when being extremely annoyed at WP's lack of speed and it's amazing ability to fall over regularly on my server. From the offset it was easy to extract my posts out of my mySQL db, using a simple php script.
WP is simply no match for MT. WP is a very good platform to get started on, but thats about it in my opinion. MT pre-builds it's pages from cgi scripts and mySQL so it means that all the pre-processing is done in one big lump rather than whist the person is trying to view the page, slowing WP down.
Even if WP-cache enabled and homepage caching, it simply isn't as good as MT. So, I hope you like the theme, as I'm going to be chopping and changing it from time to time.
Huzzah!
After weeks of coding, bottle upon bottle of IrnBru, and OS re-install, two network outages, lots of loud swearing, countless ganders and cplusplus.com, and some 900 lines of code later, and my C++ chatbot finally works!
Boris chatbot working
When these sweet lines were returned to the screen, I kissed it… no joke, I literally kissed my screen!
Look soon for the finished product, all in it’s open source glory.
Many rumours have been spreading the web recently about the new gPhone – just a rumour that Google could create a iPhone style smartphone, with it’s own embedded software and technology.
Google have now confirmed that they are to be making a new smartphone-like device which ‘makes it easy to search the web, wherever you are’. Executives from the multi-billion pound UK based phone operator Orange have flown to the Google-plex to attend preliminary talks in a joint venture over the new phone.
It has said that the new phone will feature all the normal feature of a modern smartphone; 3G, GPS, touchscreen, querty keypad – but also offers what the Apple iPhone cannot – to allow 3rd party apps.
The major problem will be for Google will come with identifying who will buy the phone. Will it be converted iFreaks? Converted Win Mobile customers? A huge majority of the users of Google technology only use their search. Will they see Google as a viable brand to trust enough for the average buyer to go with?
For us programmers and expert users, the Google phone will be a huge opertunity to write programs onto it’s platform which will undoubtably come fit with SDK and be open source.
Is it even out of the question for the Goole-Orange partnership to buy such technology and expertise seen in the openMoko.org project?
What ever may happen, Apple and M$ must be crapping themselves at the prospect of open source software becoming common place in the comsumer market, and Google taking another step towards world domination.
It may sound stupid, but Microsoft are thinking way into the distant future (3 years) of what using their collaboration software will be like in 2010.
This is one of the most corniest things I’ve seen in a long time, but they say it’s ‘visionary’.
Video: Microsoft’s Vision of 2010.
