It’s hip to be square

…but square I am no more. I am now in my prime.

And Happy Birthday to Mark Finnern for yesterday.

From the department of silly walks

In doing my research for the WordPress talk I am doing at SAPTechEd Munich, I came across…

A Compendium of 150 Monty Python Sketches – One Mans Blog

In a slightly related note  the book that James Governor has contributed to, Web 2.0 Design Patterns, is up on Amazon for pre-ordering. Check out that cover – beautiful ploomage.

Enjoy.

Meeting the Free Agent guys

Today I had the pleasure of meeting the team behind FreeAgentCentral.

It was great to compare notes with them and share some ideas about how and where the software is going.

If you are not aware of what FreeAgent is then here is the 25 words or less explanation.

It takes the pain out of running your accounts for UK very small businesses.

That is it. The interface is clean and simple to use with out the knowledge overhead that SAGE or QuickBooks does.

If you run a small business, you really should try it out.

Disclaimer: If you follow those links and sign up I get a month free off my bill but you will get an extra month free trial (3 Months instead of 2). Sounds like a Win-win to me.

Photowalking London Update

So how did the first Photowalking London go?

Well. Thanks for asking. Apart from the fact I left my camera at home. Never mind. I did get out of the office and head over to the Millenium Bridge to the Tate Modern and scouted out the joint and there is a stack of great thing to point a camera at.

I also went into the Tate and there is enough subject matter in there to keep you clicking for a long long time.

I won’t mention the Monet that took my breath away or the mirror cubes which can set up a nice infite loop effect. Come and check it out for yourself. Friday 12.30 near the spider at the Tate Modern. Next week I won’t be in London but don’t be shy go and walk somewhere else in London and tag your photos ‘photowalkinglondon’.

The turbine hall will be open this week (it opened again today) and the new exhibit will be worth a peek.

Yahoo

I am not sure what has been going on over at Yahoo but I have had a number of positive experiences with Yahoo over the past week:

1. Yahoo search get a fab new look and search assist functionality – hat tip to Sara Goleman and her team.
2. MyBlogLog is integrated with the yahoo id
3. Flickr is integrated with yahoo id
4. The new delicious service to be let loose soon is built on the symfony framework.

This is all good stuff and great to see some goodness coming out of yahoo. Particularly those new search features they really are quite cool.

Tweet Tweet

If a blog post is less than 140 characters long should it have been a tweet?

PHPLondon Yahoo Pipe

This is something i had been wanting to do for a while and I managed to fatally wound two ornithological specimens with a single lump of conglomerate.

Of the regulars at PHPLondon there is several of them who blog so I have put together an initial yahoo pipe to aggregate the content. You can subscribe to this as an rss feed or just visit the URL.

Enjoy.

If you are from PHPLondon and would like your feed added in the details are here as to how to contact me.

PhpLondon Meetup October

PHPLondon last night went off.

We had a great talk from Toby Beresford about creating facebook apps with codeigniter. The slides are here if you are interested.

Later Matt Mullenweg turned up and I had the great pleasure of having a chat to him for over an hour about all sorts of things not least of which was the plans for WordPress, having thick skin, having wordpress.com blocked in China and Turkey, free speach, presentation tips, open source, lol cats … it was a great time.

One thing he does care about is the user experience. For all the stuff that people say about WordPress it is so easy to install and so easy to use. But Matt wants to make it easier. The Automattic team are working really hard on the UI so that it is so initutive to use for people who have no idea what blogging is about.

I also dropped into the conversation that I would be doing a ‘WordPress meets SAP’ talk in Munich. He was interested and whether that was just polite or genuine I couldn’t really say.

I will say this though, it was an absolute pleasure to chat with him and he is a very genuine bloke and that just makes me a bigger wordpress fan.

Photowalking London

Richard George the other day was pondering about geeks and photography and as I was walking around the city at lunch today I was wondering if there was anybody doing any photowalking around London.

 It would seem not.

 

So why not. I am going to be at the Tate Modern from 12.30 tomorrow near the big spider for a bit of a photowalk. Join the fun or follow the tag. It’s going to be a pretty relaxed deal, meet take a photo or two and then head back to work for the afternoon.

Minority Report? No, Majority Desk!

I remember when Minority Report first came out that the director said ‘Yep in the future it will be like that’. I am referring to the through the air motions that the Chief John Anderton makes as he investigates the crime.

A little earlier in the year Dan and Ed did this Wii Demo and everyone was all over it.

Well, they have gone and outdone themselves.

Majority Desk is a wii-mote adventure and it makes for loads of fun. Not quite Chief John Anderton but not too far off when you consider it is built with ‘off the shelf’ components.

You will get your best look at redmonk.tv where Dan and Ed give an interview with Michael Coté.

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/10/PID_012730/Podtech_MajorityDesk_Wiimote_widget_d.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/4299/majority-desk-wiimote-3d-widget-desktop &totalTime=277000&breadcrumb=db2b31666406435bbc6c9737a07d935a]

Here is the consolation prize from the camera of Marilyn Pratt as the guys do the warm up for Demo Jam. (Photo credit Marilyn Pratt)

Well done guys. See you in Munich.