Whilst investigating Windows Live Writer I was shocked to discover just how many other applications under the “Windows Live” banner either already exist or are in beta. Spaces is probably the best known, aimed at the blogging/photo sharing market. The Toolbar adds some of the forthcoming IE7 functionality, such as tabbed browsing and feed reading via Onfolio, to IE6 providing Firefox like capabilities. Messenger looks to be targeting Skye with calls to phones and an advert for integration with a Philips cordless phone. The Search site does a good impression of Google with options for images and news.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Windows Live Everything
Wednesday, September 27th, 2006Blogging clients
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006Having used w.bloggar as my blogging client for a while, I’d become frustrated with the apparent lack of continuing development (not to mention the American dictionary). I gave the Windows Live Writer beta a quick spin along with the Firefox based Flock. Although both have very slick user interfaces they were missing two features that I use extensively: support for excerpts and the ability to back-date posts. So, these posts now come to you courtesy of BlogDesk (complete with UK spellings).
Meeting and greeting in Second Life
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006As promised, I went along to the IBM meeting in Second Life (SL) yesterday evening. I was first struck by how closely the experience imitated real life. I turned up at the last minute having rushed away from dinner with a customer and was quickly ushered in to an auditorium. It seems that there is a limit to the number of people who can fit on any one island so the 130 attendees were distributed across four venues. Unfortunately the ‘projector’ was broken in our room, leaving us with just the live soundtrack for the presentation.
Upgrade time
Saturday, September 9th, 2006Though it was about time I upgraded the various technologies running this blog. After a few heartstopping moments where nothing worked, I’m now successfully running Gallery 2.1 and WordPress 2.0.4 with WPG2 2.0 tying the two together along with the newest WordPress Gallery theme. There’s probably not much to see for the viewer but WPG2 was certainly easier to setup this time and the TinyMCE plugin now lets you add wpg2id tags which is bonus.
I’ve also added the remote module to Gallery so that I can now used Gallery Remote to ease the process of uploading photos.
Starting a Second Life
Saturday, September 9th, 2006I finally succumbed and signed up for Second Life this evening. I have resisted to-date on the basis that I have more than enough to do in this life without trying to run a second one in parallel. However, I’m interested in whether such virtual worlds can enhance collaborative working in a distributed team. So, if you bump in to Tom Wright at the IBM meeting next Tuesday, say hello!
PlusNet lose database connectivity
Thursday, September 7th, 2006Anyone trying to access this site yesterday will have just received an error message about lack of database connectivity. Fortunately, some twelve hours later, PlusNet have managed to restore database access and, on this occasion, without losing any data. Memo to self: backup tonight and increase urgency of search for new host.
Supported J2SE JMS client
Thursday, August 31st, 2006I’ve previously mentioned the “Client for JMS on J2SE with IBM WebSphere Application Server” on alphaWorks which enables Java clients running in a non-J2EE environment to access destinations on a service integration bus defined in a WebSphere Application Server (or Process Server, ESB or XD) cell. This client has now graduated to a fully supported version. There is now a small install process to take you through the license agreement but you still end up with a JAR file that weighs in at only 2MB. If you also need to suport retrieval of JMS resources from JNDI then that adds around another 0.5MB.
Canon 400D announced
Friday, August 25th, 2006As Andy reports, my “new” camera has already been trumped by the recently announced Canon 400D. Improvements include a 10MP self-cleaning sensor and a larger LCD. You can’t win with electronic gadgets though: there is always something better just round the corner. Just think how much I’m saving on disk space though.
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