Molly Update

Molly (our new puppy) has been with us for a couple of weeks now. Its been a very interesting couple of weeks with lack of sleep, plenty of cleaning up and lots of learning (us more than Molly)! We are now slowly getting into our routine and I belive Molly is slowly starting to fit in and accepting our place as her new home. She met Jack (Fionas parents dog) who is still coming to the idea of having a small dog running around and Pebble (my parents dog) who totally loves having someone to play with even if she does not quite understand she is double the size and strength of little Molly at the moment. We booked her into have her second injection last Friday (so we thought); however it turns out that she has not had her first injection yet (which we were told she has had) she has instead had a booster jab. So she has had her first injection now and we have to wait another week until she can have her second injection and then another week until we can take her out and about. We cannot wait as we feel this will really help with getting her trained and fitting into a routine comfotably. If you would like to see some more pictures then check out my flickr stream using the tag ‘molly’. (I have also just found out that if you add /show/ onto the end of any flicker link you can view those pictures in a nice flash gallery! Nice!).

Tesco API – Tjam

Today I am heading down to London to take part in the Tesco Tjam event. There are two parts to the day. During the day customers and creative thinkers will meet to drive ideas and innovation around what they would like to see from Tesco’s as a service. This information will be gathered by Nick Lansley Head of R&D at Tesco.com throughout the day. The second part of the day is an event for developers, where around 120 developers will meet for a presentation of the days ideas. At the event Tesco will introduce the new ‘martini’ API which will provide access to many more features and functions than the currently available preview API.

Tesco’s are really trying to give the developer community the tools to create the future applications for Tesco. Facebook applications, iPhone applications or full systems which will sit in you’re kitchen… you name it, your going to see it once ‘martin’ is fully tested.

The initial stage is nearly over. People have been playing with the preview release of the API for a while now. I have just managed to get PHP to connect to the SOAP API and managed to create a little application which allows you to search the tesco products database and then add things to your basket. This all updates your actual Tesco basket live so once you log into Tesco.com you can just go straight to the checkout. I am really finding this very exciting and the possabilities are endless.

At first only the developers who attend the Tjam event will be able to register for an affiliate account. We will be able to earn money when sending new customers to Tesco.com and also on the cart total at checkout if items were added to the basket using an application key belonging to that affiliate (its quite confusing – more info available on the developers form).

Its going to be quite an exciting event. I have been contacted by Nick to see if I would show some of my php code however I am not sure if I could do that in front of 120 other developers from around the country! I have sent him FTP to my application so we will see what happens.

More information can be found on the Tjam home page. There is also a techfortesco blog or maybe you would like to follow them on twitter techfortesco on twitter.

Molly Time

Today is ‘Molly Day’! I am excited to announce we are heading up Newcastle way to pick Molly up this afternoon/evening. Those who have not yet been pressured into seeing pictures of Molly, you can view some on my flickr site. I will, of course, be adding more as she grows. Fiona and I are very very excited! I might even try to put a video together and post it on my Vimeo site over the weekend.

Some of you may have noticed the old blog feed will have stopped working, obviously because I have closed the old blog. Well, I have just set up the new one so if you are interested in subscribing to this blog, either use the normal methods or use this feed url. Thanks.

Fiona  and I decided to go to the cinema on Wednesday to see the Hangover. I used to have an Orange phone when I worked at Applaud, so we got into the routine of going out for tea and then to Orange Wednesdays to watch a film. We drove past the cinema and noticed there was a queue all the way out the door and down the path. Neither of us like queueing, soFiona (being the iPhone addict that she is) immediately thought to book tickets online using her iPhone so we could pass the que ue and pick up the tickets from the ticket machine. Our tickets were booked within minutes, we passed the queue, and got our tickets. I have to say, it was a great advert for the iPhone!

James Chorley Bike Trip 2009

I missed the opportunity to welcome my friend James Chorley back from his recent bike trip. He seems to do a bike trip once a year at the moment and when he mentioned that he was doing another one this year and that he would be tweeting his location with a picture every day my head started to spin with ideas. It gave me the idea of creating a bespoke website which would search through his twitter feed for the tweets he made whilst he was away, gather and process the information in the links and plot his location on a map along with the image and the comment from that days post. It was going to be a little challenge as he only told me afew days before he set off. With a few late night I managed to fit his desired design around the website and I am pleased to say it was a great success. James tweeted every day and his family and friends were able to track him on his dedicated site.

You can visit the site here

Or watch a video of the site in action here

Its time to start over

I have recently made the desision to close all other blogging sites and all other web services I do not use and concentrain on this blog. So that means the end to my blog on blogspot and and end to Netvibes, Posterous along with a few other accounts I have picked up along the way. Netvibes is a great service its just not for me. Psterous is an awesome service, my friend James Chorley has a Posterous page and raves about it, it truly is an awesome service… I am just trying to cut down on the things I really do not need to use and have a smaller presence online but one that is stronger.

I will continue to blog occasionaly on nebusiness however I am aiming to make a weekly blog to this site from this point onwards.

I have made quite a few blog posts on my old blog about services for web developers and also life tools which I thought people might find interesting. These will be lost so in time I will look at what I use now and post links and info about these services and others which I think are really worth it. I dont like telling people what they should and should not use on the web because I think people should do their own research but there are some services and websites out there which are unmissable. For example if your looking at getting a domain name then do not look anywhere other than 123-reg.

I am also going to have a facebook friends cull and delete some people who have sneaked onto my friends list somehow. I have never fully understood facebook as a service but I have always liked it. I will use LinkedIn for company and corporate contacts and facebook for family and close friends only.

Thanks for reading, I look forward to receiving comments from you as I begin to post my weekly updates.

Reply to the Telegraphs Milo Yiannopoulos

So I was browsing my tweets yesterday and came across this article by Milo Yiannopoulos – Sun Tech Mission 2009 its still grim up North looks like Milo has managed to upset quite a few people and in my opinion people are quite right to be outraged. I thought that the article warranted a reply. I started to put a few thoughts together myself and thought I would contact a few people in the region and collate some comments/replies and post them in addition to my response. This morning I received a few comments and also links to replies which have already been written. It looks like Milo has even responded to some of the blog posts and comments as well.

So I have scrapped my response as I fully agree with all the comments below in one way or another. There as also been a large number of comments on the blog itself so be sure to go and read.

To read the full story please visit my blog on blog.nebusiness.co.uk

One speaker, a couple of pizzas, a few pints and plenty of great minds.

The first Refresh Teesside meet-up was held last night (Thursday 2nd April) and I am pleased to report it was a great success. I would like to thank everyone for coming and making it a first event to remember. We had a great turn out with people from Barnsley and Newcastle coming to see what all the fuss was about.

The meet-up was kicked off with a brief introduction and welcome then a presentation from Craig Rothwell from the OpenPandora Project.

The Pandora is a unique machine. It was designed based on the input of thousands of forum users with one goal in mind – to make the ultimate open source handheld device. Craig also brought a fully working prototype and also a cardboard cut-out of his original idea. More information can be found at www.openpandora.org

We then took a natural break as the pizzas arrived and people asked Craig questions and took the time to get to know each other, putting faces to names which was one of the core reasons Refresh Teesside was started. Once we found out who everyone was we moved to the pub to carry on the informal style the Refresh meet-up events will follow.

The event has already had some great feedback and the response in the twittersphere (#RFTees) has been great. twitter.com/refreshteesside

Planning now starts for the next meet-up so keep your eyes on the website www.refreshteesside.org and please spread the word.

Refresh Teesside – Size does count, AND what you can do with it!

Refresh Teesside
‘Size does count, AND what you can do with it!’

I am pleased to announce our first ‘meet-up’ for Refresh Teesside members and friends.

Date/Time: Thursday 2nd April, 6pm
Location: IDI Building, Teesside University Campus, Middlesbrough

So what’s it all about: Let’s Gather Great Minds, Let’s All Grow And Learn, Let’s Promote Local Talent

The first Refresh Teesside meet-up will start at around 6pm and will be kicked of by a presentation from Craig Rothwell from OpenPandora project. We will then hold a questions and answers session and socialise! Then its down to the pub for a few pints. The main aim of the event is to have some fun and meet new people. Its not a business networking event, its an event for designs and developers to meet other like minded people although its not restricted to designers and developers… make sense, didn’t think so… basically if your in the creative or digital industry in or around Teesside then come and get involved and help shape the group into what you want it to be.

Please spread the word about the event in the twittersphere (#RFTees) – http://twitter.com/refreshteesside

Please signup to our upcoming group so we know how many people to expect http://upcoming.yahoo.com/group/5366/

Please blog and post and chat and message and tweet and… you get the message… Thanks for your support and look forward to seeing you there.

More about The Speaker – Craig Rothwell
The presentation will be given by by Craig Rothwell from the OpenPandora project. The Pandora is designed to be a handheld game console with high-end PDA capabilities, but may also be run as a low-powered full-featured Linux desktop. The unit uses a 1GHz Texas Instruments processor, 256Mb of RAM and a battery which should last 10 hours.

Find out more about Refresh Teesside at www.refreshteesside.org

Google Group – http://groups.google.com/group/refresh-teesside
Upcoming – http://upcoming.yahoo.com/group/5366/
LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/e/vgh/780867/
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Refresh-Teesside/32393234001
Last.fm – http://www.last.fm/group/Refresh+Teesside
Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/refreshteesside/

Koodoo Live

We are often asked what it is like to work as part of a dynamic team in a creative environment and it’s hard to explain.. so we have created a Koodoo Live page which will feed live webcams from our office during office hours.

We do have some other plans for the ‘Koodoo Live’ page which will include a ‘what we are listening to’ list and also incorporate some pictures and twitter feeds… this will all come in time…

It’s hard to say if this is something which will stay with the company or something which is a little bit of fun for now, whatever it is.. it’s fun and it means you can that little bit more involved with the team…

If you use twitter and want to twitter the team then please include the harsh tag #KoodooLive.

Soocial

Much of my digital life is online, publically or privately in one way or another… and if it’s not then I am looking for ways to get it online. I don’t mean online in the form of facebook etc., I mean online for synchronisation purposes or backup. I am going to tell you all about a great product called Humyo one day but for now I want to tell you about Soocial.

I use a desktop at home and a desktop at work and now and then I boot my historic laptop up. I also now have an N96 phone so being able to sync all these computers/devises is a must for me. I am just not happy carrying around an external hard drive or plugging things in here and there or running two calendars etc… I want to run a life where I don’t worry about backups of everything all the time. Synchronising between a couple of devises is a good way of backing up but I have found that syncing with an online tool and also keeping a local copy is a great way to go! I can also work anywhere anytime and have access to all my personal files etc.

I have invested quite a bit of my time making sure that all the solutions I find for things are easy to use and work and don’t require loads of messing about or installation of loads of different hacks etc…

My address book is the last thing I needed to sync and I have found the solution! Soccial… lets you install an outlook client on any desktop you use and it will sync the contacts with the online database… which also means I can sync with my phone without having to connect my phone to a PC…

Try it and let me know how you get on!