The lonely feed

While reading a day old feed email that i had previously no time to read something very weird became apparent even though many people subscribe to feeds via Email how many actually read the emails.

This became very apparent because in the email they gave away a code to a private beta invite.And usually these codes are snapped up in a matter of minutes. Wanting to try my luck i took the code and used it on the private site and lo and behold it still worked. Since the total number of users that could use the code was 200 and the total number of subscribers was close to 755 thousand users i think its pretty safe to say that many of those people dont read the feed at all.

Which brings me to the point, why have a feed that runs and distributes to so many users who i am quite sure just send the email to the junk folder. I would not be surprised if any of the statistics which the site draws up will be very skewed.

I will not give the name of the site , but suffice to say they are very well know and for any Techno enthusiast they are a must read .

So please dont be a bad boy/girl and go read that feed now. :)

GTA 4 is comming for you

Well this one was too good to miss up , GTA + Ghostbusters = awesome

CAD

The internet world traveler

So something happened to me that has almost never happened before, some one decided to follow me on twitter. I mean really besides this random person the only other person that follows me is steven (thanks man).

The guys twitter name is inwotr , i initially thought its another of my friends that finally decided to join up .But not taking anything for granted and being the curious person that i am i decided to do a bit of research .Turns out this person has a site in the same name is called the internet world traveler . And is trying to collect twtits from all countries in the world .

Now this sounds really interesting ,but what i am not sure about is whether it is a official twitter initiative or not .Also of all the many people in south africa why choose me .

So has anyone else been followed by this user or do you have more info let  me know

Zero Punctuation

New Vid Out

Kotaku

So true so true , hate the fact that some of the stuff towards the end actually made sense to me. I just hope i am not that “guy”

Unpacking and more

So i finally plucked the courage yesterday and bought my brother the xbox 360 mongoose edition.Based on the way the rest of the world was treating the poor thing i thought i had made a big mistake .

After picking it up the urge to unpack unfortunately i had to wait to get home to do that, the packaging is awesome by the way never seen box art like that before. I would have like to taken some unpacking pictures but unfortunately my brother was all over the console before i could say anything.

After all was unpacked and setup i must say it actually looks stunning in the flesh with the gold cutting in the right places to give a nice finish. Although i havnt opened the hardware it self i must say that it is a lot quieter than my other xbox 360 pro.

While the console didn come with any games added to the package it came with 2- 3 gigs of demos which i think wasnt too bad. But fear not my timing was spot on in that the day the xbox arrived 2 of my other games i ordered a while back arrived as well .So we got to play COD4 and Star wars on the new console as the opening games.

COD 4 Really amazed me , i have been playing it since it came out on the pc and have another of my buds bought the game for the 360 i thought i might as well take the plunge and get it as well. I cna definitely say i am not disappointed besides for the game play and other cool things the xbox version has one really awesome advantage in that it supports upto 4 player multiplayer on one xbox .And man is this fun , now i need to get me another controller and we can system link the game which i think will make for some good team games.

So wish me luck and may my i get many more controllers so that we can system link more.

P.S. if anyone is selling a bundle of controllers please let me know asap as im not really gona buy new ones

O How far do you go

O How far do you go
Penny Arcade

Really just how far have you gone , i have seen some really bad twits . But has it ever gone this far before .

Source Code Control

One of the bigger issues that a lot of people miss when running with a personal project is source code maintenance.

Its easy to say that keeping a copy of the code on your machine is enough , but this is not its all to easy these days to loose  a system to a crash or virus. Keeping a local source server doesn’t really help too much if you are a roaming developer as setting up external access is not the easiest .

So now the choice comes . make the project open source and host the project on one of the many open source hosting sites .Or rent a private hosting server if the project is closed source.

For a starting developer the open source hosts are usually the best as they provide free hosting and some interesting features that will help with project calibration. There are many open source hosts , but at the moment the 2 that i find to be the preferred options are Google Source Code and Codeplex.

Codeplex is very well designed and your project will recieve a lot .net responses as codeplex is a .net community. The only downside i found to codeplex is that the SCC is very annoying depending on how you look at it . They have 3 different SCC options ,a custom codeplex app that you need to use to access the code,a teamprise option is also available but this is not free and requires registration with the company to use .The final option is the team server option , which to me is the best , but it requries that you have a full version of visual studio with the team sever plugin installed. Now this is fine for a non startup company as VS can be quite expensive .

Google Code is pretty much the same in terms of hosting i.e. they host the code for you . Their SCC is done using subversion which is to me the preferred option as it the easiest to setup on a dev machine and not to mention the smallest in terms of size footprint. Plus Gogle allows for other hings suchs as wikis to be developed on line and off line as well with a interface provided by them.

While there are many options available i have just covered some of the more common and bigger options .Let me know if you know of any better places or ideas

First Impressions are always the most important

I can not agree more on this point ,while it is true that in the end as you get to know people personally and get more involved with them your perception is guaranteed to change.

But onto the main topic today we are not meeting a new person today we are being introduced to a new web application that has been generating a considerable buzz in the media.

So ladies and gentlemen i would like to welcome Evernote.

While there are many note taking applications out there on the web there are none i hope that come close to the functionality of Evernote. The basic idea that they have taken and expanded on is that most people are working or at least generating ideas all of the time at pretty much any time of the day and one of the down falls of this is that unless you are a genius ,you tend to forget things if they occurred to long ago.

While a majority of today older generation or the not so technically advanced still carry around note books to record there ideas, this is generally getting old fast. Please dont take this in the wrong way notebooks are brilliant but looking after them and managing them, fast becomes a problem that is uncontrollable. Evernote steps in at this point and makes every thing that you would want to record digital and accessible via the web. So you are never without access to the information that you jotted down quickly or scribbled while you were bored.

In my personal experience the only other application that came close to this was Microsoft’s One note. This is by far one of the most inovative ideas i have ever seen. You basically take note like any of the hudred other applications out there but you are able to type any where and record audio any where or write using virtual ink any where in the notebooks. These notebooks could again be shared by the local network with other users.

All this data that you recorded could be transcribed and was indexed as well to perform searches and the like on the data

The main problem that One Note faced and where Evernote exceeds is its platform of use and cost of use. Evernote can be used on anything from your Laptop or desktop down to your iPhone or mobile device. One Note on the other hand needs to be installed on every system and requires a license for each of them.

So back to by introduction ,while Evernote has swept me of my feet and convinced me that it is a winner only time can tell just how much i will love it or hate it.

Update : I have 10 invites if anyone needs

The future of portable gaming

In recent years the technology being used in potable gaming as increased in leaps and bounds but i have to say that now i have reached a stage that really makes the tech worth while .

The problem in the past and current times as well is that you are required to carry a separate gaming device from your normal cellphone or mp3 player .The starts becoming an annoyance once size size of these devices reach the size they are now (hand sized) keeping more than one on you requires that you walk around with a handbag or back pack of sort .While this isnt a major problem for women for men ,especially me , this becomes too much extra luggage when my laptop is factored in as well.

Enter the iPhoneTouch ( or the non-phone on) and you now have a multitude of devices in one. This really becomes handy with recent display of Quake 3 on the iPhone .This too me at least was an awesome game and being able to play it on my mobile with friends while waiting for a meeting or at lunch over wireless lan is the ultimate buying factor for a phone.

Head over to Engadget to see this in play. iPhone here i come

Lol Twitter is tooo advanced

Lol i just got my invite 30 mins ago.

Update : This post was an unforeseen effect of enabling twitter on my blog , it seems when i sent a twit out , it automatically created a blog post for me (need to find out how to stop this).

What the twit was about , google just released there new app engine to a minor test/beta for about 10,000 developers and i got my invite . So yay first ,secondly i have looked at it a bit and while it does seem interesting to use for rapid cheap application development i haven’t worked in python in ages ,so the first step is to brush up on that as the whole sdk is based on python. The other good thing is that you are allowed to use any web development platform (python only ) ,since there are some really great frameworks i cant wait to get started. The other thing that is interesting ( at least to you Steven ) is that they are implementing a loose form of Open ID that you can use built into the frame work. How this works is that you can use google to authenticate users for your application.

As soon as i get more time i will explain more on this.