Two things that I noticed and searched on the web for to see if anyone else noticed (and found nothing). Spoilers to follow for those who aren’t up to date with the U.S. airings.
Stuff that nobody else seems to have noticed about TV
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Monthly Archives: November 2007
An update on Zemobo
The reason I came back to New Zealand was to work on my own business, Zemobo. At the time, Zemobo was going to be an event-based social network. While I had done my research into the market, it turns out it wasn’t good enough, and there were several other players, including Yahoo! Upcoming.
So I went back to the roots of my idea. I envisaged a site where you could choose a time and a place, and read about what was happening there at that time. Sometimes you see something going on, but don’t know what it is. Well, head to Zemobo, and you might find that someone who was there had written about it. That’s the idea behind Zemobo.
Death Proof
I’m having a field day with writing stuff today aren’t I? I’ve obviously got nothing to do, or something else to do that I don’t want to do.
I saw Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie, Death Proof, the other day. It was good. Typical Tarantino. Not as much blood as Kill Bill.
Ok, I turns out I’m not very good at writing movie reviews. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. Plus, I don’t usually have reasons for liking movies.
But most people know it had a kiwi, Zoë Bell, in it. She is a stuntwoman. Used to be on Xena. But she was Uma Thurman’s stunt double in Kill Bill. She had the thickest kiwi accent though. She did say "sweet as" though. That’s good. I was waiting for a "chur bro" but it didn’t eventuate. Two out of the other three people in the cinema left about 4 minutes after her arrival. I’m guessing it was because of the accent.
That’s the end of that little story.
I like LINQ
LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query, a new feature of the .NET Framework 3.5. And it’s cool.
I have used LINQ to SQL on the My Flatmates Facebook application, and it made things a lot quicker. LINQ to SQL creates classes out of your database tables. Then you can use LINQ statements to create instances of the classes from your data. I think that Ruby is similar in that you work directly against the database. But I’ve never worked with Ruby before and haven’t read anything about it (I think Siggy from SilverStripe told me about it, discussing the performance of PHP vs the ease of Ruby, but I digress).
It requires a change of thinking though. I’ve grown up believing that stored procedures are the way to go, for performance and security. But LINQ to SQL is more flexible when you don’t use stored procs. I did a bit of a search for what this means for best practice and it seems that best practice is changing. (And in the MySQL world, stored procs are only a new thing and most people don’t think they’re needed.)
That is why I like LINQ.
It’s been a while
That’s the name of a song, isn’t it?
I have been neglecting this blog for a while now, so I thought I’d write something new. Here is a bit of an update of what I have been up to, in reverse chronological order.
Today I decided to move my blog from Blogger to a WordPress powered site. WordPress seems to be one of the more popular and better blogging engines out there, and having Google in charge of presenting my thoughts to the world.
This week over on Facebook I launched a new application: My Flatmates (or My Roommates if you’re American). It lets you add your flatmates to your profile, and your flat also gets a page with its own wall, visible to the friends of your flatmates.
I had been working on a television application that lets you put your favourite TV shows and characters on your profile, but now that there are Facebook Pages, which accomplish the same thing but let the TV show producers control the page themselves, it seems stupid to continue with it.
I have been reading up a bit on OpenSocial, though not a lot. Probably not as much as I should be. I won’t go into too much detail, because if you care about that sort of thing you’ll already know about it, and if you don’t care, then reading what I have to say won’t make you care, but it’s an API that lets you leverage other social networks, the same as the Facebook API does. It’s implemented in orkut (Google’s social networking site, that hasn’t been very popular outside Brazil) and will be implemented in a whole swag of other sites, most of which I had never heard of until the announcement.
A few months back I started the France 2007 World Cup Picks application on Facebook. It was just so that I could learn how to write Facebook applications, but it really took off, with over 35,000 users at its peak. It prompted me to create a few other applications for other sporting competitions, but now I wish I hadn’t, as it’s taking up a fair bit of time to maintain them, for very little gain (monetary or educational).
I have also been continuing to work on and relaunch Zemobo, but that deserves its own post.
Oh, and I am also moving to the UK in January. (That’s part of the reason I have decided to work a bit more on my web site – I’m going to be looking for work soon.)