A place for Sharepoint and rantings
Archive for March, 2007
"Hey Steve, I can see your house from here".
Mar 30th
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.
Technorati tags: Tamworth, Virtual Earth
Yahoo Pipes, Useful after all
Mar 30th
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 More >
They Work for You
Mar 29th
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.
Technorati tags: they work for you
SAP progress
Mar 27th
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 More >
Unlimited Broadband
Mar 27th
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 More >
Love SatNav
Mar 26th
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.
Nostalgia
Mar 26th
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.
IWOOT
Mar 16th
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.
Technorati tags: DB9, Aston Martin
Design Site
Mar 16th
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
Technorati tags: designboom
Electrisave
Mar 15th
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 More >
