Google announced their Buzz platform in February to much interest and fanfare. The idea is to allow users to post short snippets of what they are doing etc. Twitter style. The “Buzz” is usually posted via mobile and mapped to a locationg on Google maps.
I jumped on board for a week just...
Right, over the last several posts I’ve got well into the tech. I still am, but there is so much more to this world. So, back to some soul.
One of my favourite music blogs is called Soul Sides, it covers more than just what its URL suggests. It delves into funk, prog rock etc. and is well worth a look. Today they posted about a fairly little known artist called Donnie. He’s been around for quite a while now. I heard about him in about 2001 on the then Jazz FM soul show. He sounded like Stevie Wonder and Donnie Hathaway (he even started singing at his church, like so many others). I managed to get my hands on some early releases of his music (which had different production for most songs) and managed to get to a gig at the Jazz Cafe in Camden. I waited for an album, and about a year later it finally reared up as a release on Giant Step records (later signing to Motown).
It’s 1am and I really should be going to bed. I received my Arduino board today which, for me, is very exciting. I had a few problems setting it up (nothing more than user error, by not selecting the right board). First stop was to get the light flashing, which I did, then to make a simple circuit with a button to light an LED. I then customised it up a bit to play about. And here’s where I got to.
I’ll finish here, it’s quite a thing re-learning stuff you learned at school roughly 16 years ago. Looking at ohm ratings for resistors, but the fun is all there! Just a nice little hobby to pick up, start from the start and then be able to get some decent little projects going once you’re a bit better at it. At this point, it’s just me and the learning curve.
I am waiting impatiently for something I have been looking for for a while now. A way of programming hardware in a fairly easy way, being able to build circuits and make real life things work. This thing I speak of is called an Arduino Board. There are other controller boards out there, but this is the one which is open source and has a huge community. Projects show how creative developers can get.
Arduino was built to be a simple device for artists to build cool installations. More recently, developers have become more aware of it and have created projects like Baker Tweet from the tech team at Poke and the singing sock puppet (see below).
I’m excited, very excited. I was pretty damn good at circuits at school, so something like this is potentially a dream come true, in a very, very geeky way, which is what I love. Come on Mr Postman, deliver me my board!
Today something has changed on my site and blog. In fact, all the sites I am hosting myself. I’ve changed servers to sparkly servers up in the sky that everyone is now calling the cloud. The servers are now based in California rather than London. I’ve loved my London based hosts Supanames for about 8 years. They’re cheap, reliable and get the job done (I’ll still be recommending them), but I needed servers that can deal with multiple sites better and allow me more flexibility with SSH etc.
Media Temple have stepped up now. The URL for my blog is now http://blog.whoisfrancisgilbert.com/ though everything should still work as with the old URLs, thanks to some confirguration magic.
For you it should all be the same, for me, it is very exciting!
This weekend something amazing happened. That thing is almost human, it is Wolfram|Alpha (ok, from now on I will stop putting in the |). It is a new way of getting answers, some say it’s like an encyclopedia. They’d be right really, kind of. It consists of a vast database and some very clever algorithms to make it a powerful way of getting answers to almost anything. You can watch a video here: http://www93.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html
I love this but it has baffled some. A lot are comparing to Google, saying it could be a “Google Killer”. Anyone saying that doesn’t quite understand it. Google is a Search Engine, it finds sites, people, possibly sites with answers you seek, but it doesn’t primarily provide answers (it does a little for calculations or “1 USD in GBP” etc.).
Wolfram is a tool to answer, purely to answer, and it does this pretty well (remember, it is an Alpha so is not complete) with a different template of answers depending on your question type. Have a play anyway. The tech channels have been going crazy about it (try 88mph or “how many roads must a man walk down?”). I like the humour on some answers.
I went to Open Hack London by Yahoo this weekend. Anyone who likes programming will probably love this event. As it is a Yahoo event, there is a slant towards PHP which is good and bad. But the main thing is to see what is coming out of the programming community at the moment! I always come away feeling refreshed and with too many ideas to actually execute. A curse about working with computers is that they are always changing, the revolution battles on. The blessing is they are always changing and it is great to be part of the revolution.
Anyway, it isn’t hacking as in cracking machines and making them do your bidding, this is the old style hacking. It is, however, taking every day objects such as a sock to platforms like the web and making them do something. You get an idea, get a team together and work through the night eating sweets, drinking beer and listening to music. I feel like a bit of a fraud as I was one of the guys who went purely to watch the talks and see people like Rasmus “I wrote PHP I did” Lerdorf do talks. Next year I will try to get myself in gear, find a team, and get the hack on! Why not!
Right, over the last several posts I’ve got well into the tech. I still am, but there is so much more to this world. So, back to some soul.
I am waiting impatiently for something I have been looking for for a while now. A way of programming hardware in a fairly easy way, being able to build circuits and make real life things work. This thing I speak of is called an 
Today something has changed on my site and blog. In fact, all the sites I am hosting myself. I’ve changed servers to sparkly servers up in the sky that everyone is now calling the cloud. The servers are now based in 
This weekend something amazing happened. That thing is almost human, it is Wolfram|Alpha (ok, from now on I will stop putting in the |). It is a new way of getting answers, some say it’s like an encyclopedia. They’d be right really, kind of. It consists of a vast database and some very clever algorithms to make it a powerful way of getting answers to almost anything. You can watch a video here:
I went to