I’ve just found out that MS have added the birds eye photos of my home town. So I’m emedding our castle and St Editha’s church for your viewing pleasure.
Having seen yahoo pipes and thought it was to complex for the normal user and then discovered thanks to the lack of defined date format in RSS I might have problems with sorting a combined feed, I gave up on it as a bad lot.
Until last night that is.
I have a friend who is currently studying in a foreign country, oooh lets say France*. Access to certain websites is blocked in that country. I was explaining RSS to him and what it was for and he thought that’s nice but did it work for the BBC news mirror site. Well no. The RSS feed link on that site is for the main one, which would be blocked.
Ah ha! I thought and jumped on to Pipes. I entered the BBC News RSS feed into a new pipe, then I did a search and replace on all the links to be the mirror prefix and hey presto one slightly modified RSS feed, and here it is.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=Aj12tULe2xGCUZBpnkartA
Finally a use for pipes, never thought I’d find one but, ta da
This is only good if you want English the other languages are not available on this mirror site, if they were then no doubt this mirror would be blocked also. So for those peeps who think I’m being subversive, that government can at anytime block the mirror, this is not a means to subvert that governments right to prevent access to information, that’s what web page proxies are for.
*It’s not France.
If you’ve never been to this site www.theyworkforyou.com and you live in the UK then do it, do it now. This is a site that can help you see what your MP is doing.
For most of the population you vote for your MP and hope they represent your views. Thing is unless your checking you will never know.
They work for you collates information from various sources about the work you MP has been doing.
The really cool thing about this site is now I can keep up with his work via RSS.
If we could just get the more of the population to keep track of their MP in this way then perhaps we wouldn’t have such party yes men and get people doing the job their constituents want.
I haven’t posted anything SAP for a while, thing is I’m the developer on the project whose goal is to implement a standard SAP solution. We are in blueprint phase at the moment hence my dabbling with sharepoint integration.
For those wondering what its like to work in SAP having come from .NET….its primitive. I have come from an environment rich in tools, with a seamingly endless supply of help and information. Microsoft has fantastic resources about its langauges and products with plenty of examples of how to use them. Then there is the army of users providing help on blogs and forums. Somewhere someone has done what you want to do, or at least tried something which could give you ideas.
SAP however I find a little different, yes sure there is a large online help section to describe the base product installations and language syntax but like for like its not a patch on the MS stuff, its enough to get you going if your good at what you do. Then when it comes to documentation about classes and API’s and process flow for SAP, well this is the point I tear my hair out. There can be a lot of documentation or none. When I asked my colleague, a SAP developer for quite a while now, “How do you find so and so?” his answer was you either know it or you have to debug the application!
Could you imagine having to debug excel to figure out how to locate a function to retrieve data ? Or step-through outlook-express to find the smtp server ?
The SAP community is a lot smaller but efforts by some in this community are admirable. The Sap developer network is a great place for finding answers, they tend to be answers to the technical side of sap and not the process side, but its a start. Many times a question I search for though is a almost googlewhack, I’m convinced I will find one thanks to SAP.
So its a challenge and because I have to fight my way through it at times I’m loving it.
For those interested in the interop SAP things I have been doing, there will be more to come. We still need to build a BI/BW system and get all the kit working as it should. When this happens expect to see more on iViews, sharepoint interop, bw/bi interop etc.
If, like me, you are sick to death of the advertised “unlimited” broadband then restricted in the small print phenomena which is spreading to more and more suppliers then visit this PM petition mentioned in the article in the register.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/27/fair_use_petition/
Now I don’t believe for a minute that a petition to the PM will actually do anything, this government is excellent at listening to people but rarely acts on it unless the pressure is coming from the media. Take St. Jamie Oliver’s campaign, without continued media pressure nothing would have been done about the shocking state of school meals*. The last petition about road pricing did not work because it needs a champion to rally the cause and batter the government with continued media pressure.
However if enough people sign this to raise its profile into the media then it puts pressure on the Agencies involved without any interference from the government.
As more of us get our video content from the Internet a 2gb cap or “Traffic Shaping” will hit you. These companies charge a lot for “unlimited” accounts and need to invest in the infrastructure to provide them, traffic shaping and capping allow these penny pinching companies to lie their way into bigger profits, profit is fine, abusing your customers to get it is not. It’s practices like this where competition fails the consumer, as all companies will follow suit in this practice to stay alive against their competitors, which is why we need regulation in this area.
So if you think this type of advertising is a worse form of lying to us than usual, sign it and see if we can make something happen, it only takes a minute.
*So you know and I don’t appear too much of a hypocrite here, my five year old son still has a packed lunch cos he is a fussy beggar. He refuses to eat spag bol, most meat, anything in a sauce all the things served up in school meals, instead he insists on eating fruit, vegetables, cheese, wholemeal bread, yoghurts and other such things. What am I to do ? He won’t even try a burger he’d rather eat his broccoli. As his tastes grow to include more carbohydrates and processed meat (mince) I intend to support his school’s meal program, but for now, enjoy your apple son.
I found this story in the register and had to share it.
“The driver of a £96k Mercedes SL500 had a lucky escape after her satnav directed her down a winding track and straight into the River Sence in Sheepy Magna, Leicestershire, the Leicester Mercury reports”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/26/subaquatic_merc/
I have to disagree a little, the satnav didnt direct her into the river pure stupidity did.
I’ve been curious about WPF applictions and have been trying various different ones.
Turning the pages at the British library is a great one, you can see scans of original manuscripts, well worth a look its an interesting and I’m sure for some will be facinating.
You may or may not know this, I have a love hate relationship with Flickr. I hate the interface. I hate the tools. I love the ease of use for family members, price, the space, the security model. Those good things outweigh the bad things enough for me to fork out the cash and use it. Doesn’t stop me hating it though.
Step in nostalgia, this is a WPF application that can view and sync to flickr, now its in early stages and there are no guarentees, but as a starter this thing is looks like it could be great.
I had some trouble, I don’t know why whether its flickr or vista (damn over-zealous security system) or nostalgia, but I never got it to sync new sets, also I cant edit the settings.
This is no production application by a long way, but its so good you have to take a look at it.
I saw this on the way to work yesterday. I know I think cars are A->B and thats it, but I’d love one of these.
I just came across this site, DesignBoom. It runs design competitions and you can see the results of each competition.
I can not recommend it enough, for those mad on toast take a look at the ceramics for breakfast competition, the glide is a thing of beauty.
http://www.designboom.com/competitions.html
I recently had an electric bill. It was a shock. Admittedly I used British Gas and its large tariff and because of this I changed tariffs to B.G’s ClickEnergy Tariff, which will be a lot cheaper. This lead me to wonder what on earth is using so much electricity ? I have ‘B’ rated appliances, I replaced my lightbulbs and I turn the TV off and do not leave it on standby.
Now whilst I go round turning off lights like my dad did when I was a child, I’m not convinced that the rest of the family do. Boil what you need should be a mantra if your going to save money on electric. Still it can be hard for people because they can’t see how much its costing. To help me with this I purchased an Electrisave remote monitoring gadget.
The Electrisave is a simple device that monitors your electricity usage and transmits that information to a display unit in the house. It claims it can help reduce bills.
The device sensors wrap around the main power cable by the meter, so almost 
anyone can do it (provided your meter is standard, if your not sure get an electrician). Once that is done and the batteries are in, a quick press of a button and it is up and running. It took me longer to open the meter cupboard, as I had lost the keys, than it did to fit.
Here is a close up of the connector on the fourth wire on the right of the meter, apparently this is a standard installation.
You can easily see the clip wrapping round the cable, no pliers or mole grips or hammers were required to do this. Once the devices are communicating you can immediately start to monitor your electricity usage.
The results of monitoring can be viewed on the display panel, a well built and attractive device. The digital display is very clear and the key values it can display are in large text.
First you need to configure this, the instruction manual is easy to follow. You enter the currency and the pence per kwH that you are charged, you can, if you know it, alter the default setting that calculates carbon in KGs per hour, sorry no imperial rubbish here.
The device has a number of features. It has a thermometer and humidity detector to help you know the temp of your room whether its you who need a jumper on not the thermostat turning up.
Then come the main functions that it measures
Kilowatts.
This is the current power consumption that is being used in your house. This is one for the techie of the house, it is easy to see how much a specific device draws when turned on in this setting, this can help identify if that budget power supply is drawing more watts than it supplies.Amps.
One for the uber geek. I know what they are but I have no clue what to do with this information, but its there if you want it.GreenhouseGas
The amount of CO2 you are producing in KG per hour. This one is for the eco warrior.What’s it costing me.
Probably the most useful and the setting most people will leave this device set to.
It takes some time and a fair bit of monitoring to figure out what your normal usage is, once you have that figured out then this device can be used to identify when you are burning more than you expect. An example on the website is that of someone not closing the fridge door, this will cause more power to be used and you can see this power being used, you can then choose to find the problem or let your milk go off.
Here is mine first thing this morning, I am merrily burning 2.3 pence per hour. This is slightly higher than my normal “rest” state as my PC is turned on, and the temp is a comfortable 23C.
What is key to this devices success is not the anal inquisition of the techie of the family but something else, something I noticed within one hour of “sharing” the unit with the family, a shift in mindset.
My five year old son loved it the instant gratification of turning off something and seeing the numbers go down. Within one hour my wife was turning lights off around the house where before she would have left them on. I’m hoping she sees it when she puts the tumble drier on and perhaps she will think, this lot could go on the clothes line.
For a geek like me this device is missing many many features. Firstly, its single tariff most UK tariffs are stepped or dual or both, (x) pence for (y) Kwh then (x) pence for the rest for the quarter. It only shows current usage, it does not try to calculate your bill, it does not even provide an average usage over the last 24 hours or max/min peak values over the same period. I can understand the not calculating the bill, these devices are not electric meters, but they could easily provide the features I just mentioned. Imagine coming home and seeing the average for the day shooting up, you can try and identify what happened.
Personally I want this thing to write to internal memory and provide a USB or Bluetooth interface to pull the tracking data into my PC, this would allow me to analyse peaks, try and identify patterns of behavior that could better manage usage. I found some information on the protocol so I’m investigating the possibilities of building a device to log this information.
If you have a family that needs training then this is the device for you if you have multiple devices left on 24×7 then this can be a gentle reminder of how much that Media Center and Home Server you’ve left on is costing you. If you already have energy saving lightbulbs then I doubt you will reap the kind of savings boasted about on the box. Only with logging and download to a PC or even at its simplest provide an additional averaging capability with split tariff monitoring to provide the ability to estimate a bill at current average usage is this going to be of any use to the already energy conscious consumer.
This device can be purchased cheaply from British Gas* .
IMPORTANT : Read instructions, hire electrician, don’t blame me if you blow your house up fitting this device, cos your an idiot.
*Cheapest I found at time of buying mine.
Technorati tags: Electrisave, energy efficiency
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