A place for Sharepoint and rantings
Archive for March, 2008
Eco Kettle – Review
Mar 12th
A while ago we got an ecoKettle. It’s won awards for energy savings awards, but is it any good ?
It’s really simple to use. You don’t need instructions to figure it out just plug it in fill it up and go.
It’s larger than a normal kettle, as it has to store more water than a normal kettle, you can fill both reservoirs if you want before starting a boil cycle. The idea being that you fill one side and release what you need into the other as and when you want a cuppa, ideally only boiling one or two cups at a time. Of course when you have visitors you can fill it up once and get two cycles out of it. When really full this makes the eco kettle quite heavy, but time saving. Filled as intended and the kettle feels off balance in your hand, it’s like the top volume of water is pressing the lever of the kettle split and trying to force it down at the wrist joint. So stronger wrists might be needed, not a pressie for your gran, unless she’s strong of course.
Earth Hour
Mar 11th
Whilst I’m of the opinion that green things are generally good, like saving energy, there are some things that really don’t make much sense to me.
This is one of then http://www.earthhour.org/about. A bunch of cities are going to turn off the lights for an hour including many businesses, here’s a quote
On 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour – Earth Hour. This massive collective effort reduced Sydney’s energy consumption by 10.2% for one hour, which is the equivalent effect of taking 48,000 cars off the road for a year.
The turn-off time was from 8pm-9pm.
So presumably all of these businesses and cities agreed to turn off the lights, because it would not effect public safety, in the case of city infrastructure, and would not impact on a businesses income as their workers would not be working.
DeepZoom / PhotoZoom
Mar 11th
Straight of the back of the deepzoom announcement capabilities of Silverlight to comes photozoom.
PhotoZoom is a site created by mslivelabs and incorporates the DeepZoom technology. Don’t expect a full blown flickr site here, this is a demo obviously, but it demos beautifully the possibilities of DZ on a photo site.
So if you don’t know what DZ is or have seen PZ then pop along to my album I created here. Use the Mouse Wheel to zoom and left mouse to grab and move the canvas.
http://photozoom.mslivelabs.com/Album.aspx?alias=BinaryJam&album=1&lc=2057
For those who really have no clue as to what DZ is here is a description nicked from MS. Note Seadragon is the original name.
Seadragon is an incubation project resulting from the acquisition of Seadragon Software in February. Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.
Tells you loads that don’t it. Essentially you stitch a whole bunch of photies together creating a huge photo I mean really really huge, then the processor rips it apart into tiles. Those tiles are loaded dependant on viewpoint More >
IE8 Ajax Navigation – Integration with the browser
Mar 10th
One of the things that’s being touted as an improvement to IE8 is the integration with the navigation of the browser in AJAX. One example is your looking at a map and zoom in then you press the back button and it goes back to the previous page. In IE 8 you can get it to go back to the previous zoom.
One of the great things about AJAX apps, one of the things I was asked for by customers was get rid of that damn back button. The great thing about AJAX was the removal of the back button.
So who asked for this ? Honestly unless they ask for it its not something I would not implement as a default, I want people on the site and use the site navigation not the back button.
The Keynote and Talk T04 of mix mentions this. By the way the speaker of T04 a talk entitled, “Developing cutting Edge Web Applications with IE8″, was singularly the most boring so far. If you entitle something cutting edge you better damn well have some enthusiasm about the topic
I’m listening to it right now ….ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Technorati tags: ie8TEsting IE 8
Mar 8th
WebSlice Test
I’ve installed this on my dev box at home and god everything has slowed to a crawl.
Still there looks like some intersting features built in like web slices.
I’m gonna try and make this post one of them.
NIN – Music download
Mar 5th
From The Register.
When the music costs nothing, why do freetards prefer to leech?
Nine Inch Nails has followed the Radiohead example and is giving the music away for free. Not all of it, but nine of the thirty six tracks from Trent Reznor’s instrumental LP Ghosts I-IV are available for free, with a PDF thrown in. The other 27, in higher quality bitrate or lossless format, cost just $5.
…..
Despite this throat-cutting gesture, Reznor’s sprawling instrumental release is going gangbusters on the world’s torrent trackers. Pirate Bay has eight thousand concurrent downloads at time of writing, divided fairly evenly between the “free” release and a 320kbit/s bitrate version of the package
FFS!!!! £2.50 for what is essentially four albums ! And its still being pirated. I can have a tiny bit of sympathy when purchasing overpriced garbage you might find in a high street music shop, but considering that most albums cost around a tenner and that in the 1980′s they cost about a tenner music prices have dropped massively.
But when someone like Trent releases work like this in a lossless format for next to nowt it blows any arguments people have about stuff being too expensive out of the water. You are More >
Of backups and Earthquakes
Mar 3rd
For those unaware, we had a little earthquake, 5.2. Largest in the UK for 25 years. So for those of us who are not used to these geological events it was bad enough.
Bad enough when you live an a house only 8 years old made of paper, or seemingly so, I certainly felt every bounce and wobble, if that’s what earthquakes do. Whilst in my house, the effect felt amplified by the banging of the mirror against the wall in time with the wobbles. It lasted 10 seconds they say, I say it lasted a lot longer, as the mirror continued to bang as the lesser quake ripples continued for another 20 seconds or so.
I wasn’t sure if we were in for a second larger quake or what, not being used to quakes, it was only my third after all. I wondered whether or not to wake the kids and go wait it out in the car, well it was dark and late I was tired and a little worried to say the least.
The last thing on my mind was to remember to pick up the external USB disk drive that holds my backups, or the pack of dvd’s More >