Category Archives: Uncategorized

Use your head (update)

A few weeks ago I posted something about a jockey headbutting his horse. I also mentioned that there was a video of the incident on the BBC website but I couldn’t find a URL for it.

Anyway, I sent an email to the BBC explaining my dilemma and asked how I could link to a particular piece of video footage. To my surprise I received a response from the BBC this morning. Here’s an extract of the relevant bit:

Unfortunately we are unable to provide direct links to pieces of audio and video on the BBC Sport website. Instead we would suggest you link to our AV Search result page for Paul O’Neill:
http://search.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/search/results.pl?q=paul+o%27neill&scope
=all&edition=d&tab=av&recipe=all

So there you go: if you want to link to a piece of audio/video on the BBC website, point your users to the search results page.

Thanks BBC.

And check out the clip: it’s quite amusing; well, I thought so but then I would!

Lebanon

Here is a link to an article “Break The Silence” that discusses the current situation in the Middle East. It is written by a friend of mine, Miriam Azar who is half Lebanese — I don’t recall which half.

It was interesting to read the article to get a perspective on the situation from a Lebanese point of view. Usually I myself have no interest in politics or political statements; I find they tend to be subjective and biased towards whatever “beliefs” an individual may or may not have. I like to look at the cold, hard facts so I can form my own opinion. In this particular case I agree with Miriam when she says that the Israeli attacks are disproportionate in reaction to having two of their soldiers captured. Yes, that’s right: two soldiers. Not twenty, not two hundred. It seems to me like just a convenient excuse to allow Israel to “justify” their attacks. What I don’t understand is that if the problem is Hezbollah, as Israel claims, then why can’t both the Lebanese and Israeli governments co-operate to flush them out? Perhaps send in ground forces. It would appear to be a more effective and certainly less destructive solution than air strikes! Why hasn’t this been suggested before? What if the Lebanese government has no interest in getting rid of Hezbollah? I will leave you to ponder that one as I certainly don’t have an answer.

Finally, while reading an article on the BBC website about the current situation in the Middle East, I came across a comment that I found amusing made by somebody called Steve Goss:

” Israel is acting with tremendous restraint, were they targeting civilian populations there would be thousands upon thousands dead.”

Restrained? Interesting point of view. No prizes for guessing which country he is from! I guess everybody is entitled to their opinion; we live in a democracy after all as politicians like to continually remind us.

Don’t hassle the Hoff

… at least not until after you’ve watched this video. What the hell was he thinking when he made it? It’s atrocious! However, dare I admit it, it’s quite a catchy tune, especially the “Ooga chakka hooga hooga, ooga chakka” bit. Yes, those really are some of the lyrics in the song. Enjoy!

Google Office

In a previous post I mentioned that after Google’s purchase of Writely all they needed now was a spreadsheet program and something for creating presentations before we see an online competitor to Microsoft’s desktop-bound Office product. Well here’s the spreadsheet. I’m off to the bookies to put a bet on the presentation software appearing in the not-so-distant future 🙂

Distributed columns

I have just finished reading an article about the limits of Google’s limitless business model. I got to the bottom of the first page and clicked on “Please continue reading part two”. Suddenly I was taken to a different site – there appeared to be continuity with what I had just read so I continued reading. Same thing as before: I got to the bottom of the page and clicked on “continue reading”. Bang! Different site again! At first I was confused but then at the bottom of the final page was this little snippet:

[This is an experimental publishing format, a distributed column across different web sites. The first part is here. The second part is here. The first part leads you through all three sections.]

Oh. The article really was distributed across several web sites! First of all, why? Could it be they did this so that by having different parts of the article on different websites the reader is exposed to advertisements from both sites?

My initial impression is that it doesn’t work; because it is an unfamiliar way of reading a multi-page article spread I wasn’t sure if I was actually reading the same article. The navigation is broken too. If I do a search on Google for example and I end up on page two of the article there is no way to get to page one from page two – this because there are only links to each part of the article on page one.

It will be interesting to see what other publishing formats these media companies come up with in the future. Then again, if they are anything like the distributed method I have just mentioned, maybe it won’t be that interesting after all.

Blog list

For no other reason other than to fill in 5 minutes while I take a break from what I was doing, I thought I’d list the RSS feeds that are curently in my toolbar:

  • Joel On Software
  • Philip Greenspun’s Weblog
  • Microsoft Team RSS Blog
  • Paul Graham: Essays
  • Microsoft Research News and Headlines
  • Marc’s Voice
  • Official Google Blog
  • El Blog de Google México
  • Tim Berners Lee

Right. Back to what I was doing previously.

Amazon web services

Last night I attended a talk given by Jeff Barr, Amazon’s web service evangelist. He talked mostly about Amazon’s web service offerings, as you would expect from a web services evangelist, such as the Mechanical Turk, Alexa and S3, which stands for simple storage service — I had wondered what it meant.

He gave several examples of businesses that use Amazon’s web services to make money: CastingWords being the most interesting example. They transcribe podcasts but use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to get the work done. Interesting idea. Probably cheaper than outsourcing to India!

At the end of the presentation somebody in the audience asked him what proportion of web service requests were made via SOAP versus REST. Apparently 80% of Amazon’s web service requests are made using REST! I was quite surprised by this. I thought SOAP would have been used a lot more. Then again perhaps it’s not so surprising if you have ever tried to read the SOAP specification. I have mentioned this before. From a development point of view, making a request via REST is certainly much less work!

Overall the talk was interesting, especially some of the ways in which people are using Amazon’s web services. You can read more about Amazon’s web services on their blog.