Google App Engine

Thanks Google, what a tasty birthday present. I’m thinking the Google App Engine is going to be a lot of fun. I guess the devil is going to be in the scaling. Haven’t read that bit of the docs yet.

Moved to The Werks

I’ve moved offices and joined the emerging coworking community The Werks on Church Road in Hove. A dynamic and interesting space full of dynamic and interesting people werking away.

For those that know the space a little, I’ve got a permanent desk on the First floor in the back corner, sitting across from Jim Callender.

Week off next week

Just to let you all know, am taking a short break next week (14th – 18th April 2008) — off the the Isle of Wight with family for a few days of (hopefully) sunshine and spring air.

I’ll still be around for emergencies, but am really trying to get a little break in before school goes back and the big work push towards summer begins.

Scouta Wins Australian Startups Carnival 2008

Scouta, our social recommendation service startup, has just been awarded first prize in the Australian Startups Carnival 2008. This is brilliant news. The competition results are here. More info and commentary on the Scouta blog.

This means we’ll have a stand and will probably be presenting at CeBIT Australia 2008.

Blogging for Change Agents

Libby has just started putting up info for her next series of authentic blogging courses to run this year: Blogging for Change Agents.

These are focussed on entrepreneurs, social, environmental and ethical enterprises, charities and other third sector organisations that are looking to spread their wings in the blogging and social media area.

For more info please head over to authentic blogging for the course details.

Lib at Lift08

Lib has headed off to Lift08 in Geneva. Here she is giving some reflections so far…

Empower Controls

I’m really pleased to say I’m embarking on some interesting work with Empower Controls to help them with some stuff that I can’t talk about yet.

From their home page:

There is a significant waste of energy in home offices, home theatres and office workstations. Devices are often left on or in a standby state. We often fail to realise that devices such as a TV, DVD player, PC, scanner, printer or mobile phone charger consume power all of the time, even when not being used or when they are in a standby state. Hundreds of millions of devices all left in a standby state adds up to a lot of wasted energy.

Empower Controls solutions allow everyday people to intelligently switch off these types of products when not in use and to significantly reduce their energy consumption, with a minimum of fuss.

It is so nice to see this awareness coming to automation. I’m delighted to be a part of this.

Hosting changes for barkingowl.com and presencelabs.com clients

Over the next couple of months we are going to be moving our hosting clients over to spanking new scalable virtual servers from slicehost.com.

As we do that, we are also changing the environment a bit to drop some little used services and update lots of things to make it easier for everybody. Here are some of the changes planned:

• We are moving to a single php code install for wordpress blogs, so we can easily track and keep wordpress updated. This means that you’ll always have the updated version of wordpress available to you, making blog spam catching better, security better, and keeping you at the leading edge of

• We’re moving to Ubuntu as operating system from the existing Debian. That’s a little change really, but makes the latest and best packages available.

• We are making web serving changes to enhance performance and security. You won’t notice anything here, except things will be faster.

More on this closer to the time — I’ll be in touch with you all personally to talk through the migration beforehand.

Oh powerbook!

My trusty Powerbook g4 is back in the shop again. Sigh. After a couple of days of fairly weird behaviour, it got to the point of presenting a black screen and running the fan full blast.

Dead logic board suspected.

This is the third major fault since July.

I’ve only had it back for a couple of weeks since the last logic board replacement. We’ll see what happens.

What this practically means is that I move all my non-online files to Lib’s old iMac g4, which works great but is a bit slow these days. Still a pleasure to use. And reinstall the current set of apps i’m using. MySQL, PHP5, gCal.app

Thankfully, a lot of my working tool and files are held online these days:

* email in gmail

* calendar in google calender

* more and more documents and spreadsheets in google docs

* code in subversion archives at online service providers

and so on.

What isn’t online: local app, experiments in code not yet in subversion. Offline writing. *My Todo List* grr.

I’m hoping Apple will come through with something, given how many failures I’ve had lately.

EcoTeams

I’m doing some work for [Global Action Plan](http://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/) for their [EcoTeams project](http://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/index.cfm?TERTIARY_ID=0&PRIMARY_ID=31&SECONDARY_ID=38).

The EcoTeams project is all about helping households reduce their environmental impact from energy, water-use and waste by working together and measuring and reporting on consumption and waste.

I’m so pleased to be associated with such a positive, practical project and working with a great group of people at GAP. I’m working on the EcoTeams website, which includes measurement capture, reporting and management of teams, plus a lot of database work.

Next Page »