Richards Blog

August update

Just thought that I should write something on here as i’ve been really lazy since i started my new job, so here is a list (we all love lists right?) of what i’ve been up to, in no particular order.

• New job, we already know that.  But it turns out that if you mention the company name, then it turns up in a google alert at work and everyone reads your blog.  Well not everyone, but some people.  Lucky theres nothing incriminating on here
• Went to see former zoomf college’s band play in the legendary (apparently) Hope and Anchor, and they were quite good.  You can check them out at http://www.myspace.com/thecommissarsmusic.  And now i’ve mentioned zoomf, they are gonna see this in a google alert too.
• Went to the august london wicket user group, talked about wicket and geeky stuff in general, and drunk beer, the usuall really.  Wicket RAD looks like a really nice project for speeding up application development, if you don’t mind annotations.
• Went on Team Fortress 2 for the first time in ages, and I still kick ass

Thats about it, all the interesting stuff anyway.  I will get round to writing another technical post soon, provided I can think of something worthwhile to write about.

New Job

After 13 months at Zoomf, ive decided to move on and I start work for online supermarket Ocado on monday.  This should mean much less messing around with html and css which will be most welcome.

Web 2.0 crisis

I’ve recently had a web 2.0 crisis, specifically I decided that for a computer geek that works for a web 2.0 search engine I needed to be using more web 2.0 services than just facebook and google reader. So to rectify this I have signed up to twitter and and to retaggr.

I’m sure you have all heard about twitter, if you haven’t then what are you doing reading the blog of a computer geek? You can follow me here. I did have a niftly little twitter gadget on this blog, but twitter is a bit unreliable at the moment (overloaded) and was slowing down my page load too much.

Retaggr is a kind of on line profile aggregator, like an online business card. It provides a neat way of showing all of your online accounts, like facebook, linkedin, or last.fm all in one place. They also provide a wordpress plugin so you can retaggr enable your blog. This basically means that if you leave a comment and are signed up to retaggr then your profile card will popup when someone hovers over your name (sign up and make a comment here if you dont believe me). You can see my retaggr profile by clicking on the retaggr button in the right hand side of my blog.

I am also going to sign up to del.icio.us when I get time, which I know isn’t really that new, but is still something that I feel I should be using, especially since I now have nothing to synchronise my firefox bookmarks easily.

p.s. sorry for the over enthusiastic use of the term web 2.0 in this post, I know it doesn’t really mean anything

New look

I’ve had the same theme for a while now, so I decided it was time for a change.  I think you will agree that it looks alot better now, thanks to the free Statement theme from here.

Now I just need to brush up on my image editing skills to create a better icon for the top left.

A GMail eureka moment

Today I had a eureka moment with GMail.  As with many other people I get loads of so joke emails with embedded pictures.  Sometimes I get ones which actually are quite funny so I want to forward them on, but up until today GMail would always turn the mail to plain text and remove the images.

Its not just with joke emails either, any email which has embedded images, fancy formatting would get stripped out.

Turns out the solution to this problem is to make GMail send html emails rather than plain text ones.  To do this click ‘Rich formatting’ link just below the subject line.

Thankfully GMail remembers your preference so you won’t need to do it every time.

Happy Emailing

Foo Fighters @ Wembley

On Friday I was lucky enough to go to see the Foo Figters at Wembley stadium and it was, quite frankly, amazing.

We were quite close to the stage at the start of the set, but had to leave as my brother needed the loo.  We then got back on to the pitch, but right at the back so I had to employ all of my getting to the front of a crowd at a concert skills to get anywhere near the front again.  The key points to remember for this are

1. Always follow bigger guys pushing through.  This technique alone can get you from the back to quite near the front.
2. Move into any space as soon as it appears.
3. Dont try pushing bigger meaner guys than you out the way, this can only end badly for you

Zoomf does microformats

Last week we released a slightly updated Zoomf.  One of the less visible updates was the support of the hListing microformat.  We also GeoTagged all of the search results and property details pages with both GeoURL and Geo Tag formats.

hListing is a relatively new microformat, but has recently been thrust into the limelight by its adoption on the price comparison site Kelkoo, which is owned by Yahoo.  You can read the original blog post announcing this here.  Fellow property site Nestoria quickly followed suit with hListing support on their results pages.  I should add that I didn’t copy Nestoria in adding hListing support, its just that we were working on other important updates to Zoomf and didn’t have time to do an update of the main website straight away :).

GeoTagging is also quite new and basically consists of embedding geographic location meta data into your web page so that the content of a page can be linked to a geographic location.  For Zoomf this means that on any results page (eg for clowne) the page is geotagged to the search location, and for any property detail page the page is geotagged to the location of that particular property.

You may ask whats the point of all this meta data and embedded microformats, especially when afaik Google doesn’t take account of this stuff when they index web pages, and it is invisible to a user using their browser.  The answer is that someday the big search engines may take notice of this content and use it to enhance their search results, Yahoo recently announced that their search results will start to extract more semantic meaning from pages using microformats, so the so called semantic web, of which microformats are a key part may be closer than you would think.

Until then smaller more specialised applications will be able to use this extra meta data to do cool things with the content on your pages, one example is the Optimus microformat translator which can transform pages with microformat data to JSON, XML or RSS formats, try it on a Zoomf results page or a linkedin public profile to see what I mean.

Fancy OpenGL transitions in OpenOffice for Ubuntu Hardy

While OpenOffice isnt really something to get excited about, I was looking forwards to the fancy OpenGL page transitions that I thought were due to be part of version 2.4 (shipped with the new version of ubuntu).

However when I decided to try them out it turns out they arent actually available.

Luckily there is an easy way to install them, simply do

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-ogltrans

and restart open office and you will have some 3D goodness to smarten up your presentations.

Enjoy

Ubuntu 8.4

Rather than write something about programming this week i’ve decided to upgrade my pc and laptop to the latest version of Ubuntu which was released the other day.

So far everything seems to be working fine and i’ve been messing around with new themes most of the time because I don’t really like the default orange theme that ubuntu ships with.

I’ve settled with the ubuntu-studio theme with a different icon set.

For those like me that love playing around with themes then I would recommend that you install the Gnome Art Manager.  This is a little program that makes it easy to browse and install different bits for your Gnome UI.

sudo apt-get install gnome-art

Thats it for now, I will do a proper programming post some time in the week, and probably a zoomf update post too!

Google front page

After googleing for myself (we’ve all done it, don’t deny it) I found that i’m now on the front page for the search ‘richard wilkinson’. Last time i tried i got bored of looking on page 15ish.

Considering that my name is quite common, and that there are published authors with my name I think that its quite impressive, I should be happy all weekend now