Colin Charles Agenda

Twitter as a micro-news outlet
The other day, I was on a train, and witnessed something interesting - 3 drunk blokes were chatting up girls, got a little violent (throwing rubbish at people, asking a bloke to vacate his seat, etc.), and the cops were called in. Then, we stopped at Parliament and stayed there for about 40 minutes. On the last train of the night. Turns out, being an underground train station, a lot of other trains were backlogged, so Ben Barren told another train driver what the situation was, all thanks to the power of Twitter. What it looked like on Twitter - thanks Cris, aka Mr. Skitch :)

Google Code for Educators
Here comes free courseware, created especially for CS educators. There are currently tutorials on AJAX Programming, and Distributed Systems with sample course content as well. Video lectures exist just as well. So if you’re a busy professor, or sitting in a CS faculty and wondering what’s new and what might be hip to teach this semester, consider the Google Code for Educators site.

The Podcast Network
Cameron Reilly is the host of an amazing show, G’Day World, and he’s also the convenor for the Melbourne Online Digital Media. The other thing he’s done is create the world’s first podcast network (The Podcast Network - TPN). An interesting interview with him in an issue of the Australian Anthill, titled 24-hour podcast people. Cam’s a really interesting bloke to chat with - from podcasting to Facebook to Second Life.

Squeezed Books
One of the things I do after reading a management book, or biographies, is write summaries of my thoughts and take notes about it in my blog in my books category. This is what Squeezed Books is all about - summaries of books. If you’re too busy, or just want a summary before reading the book, this might be the exact site for you. Take for example the summary of The Tipping Point - now, when I write my quick summary/review, I’ll have to write less text :)

Technorati Tags: twitter, micro-news, news, google code, educators, podcast network, cameron reilly, squeezed books, book summaries

I’ve recently started doing more development locally on my Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) laptop (as opposed to being logged in via ssh to various machines, generally running Fedora), and have noticed some quick snags.

Ruby Gems
They’re currently installed in /var/lib/gems/1.8 which is not in your PATH. So if for example, you use cheat, you’re not going to find it. Fix it via adding /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin to your PATH (my .bashrc has it looking such as: PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin)

Mono, and System.Windows.Forms
I have no problems with Mono and .NET related applications, normally. I run Tomboy (which I like, a lot), I can fire up f-spot, and when I need to Beagle runs fine too. But of late, I’ve had to run an application that required System.Windows.Forms, aka WinForms. Little did I know I’d need to install the winforms stuff, so a sudo apt-get install libmono-winforms* fixed this for me.

This still hasn’t made my required application run properly, but I’m now a step closer to finding out compatibility with Windows-based .NET applications and Mono. All thanks to the useful Mono Migration Analyzer (MoMA). Hat tip to Ditesh for pointing me to MoMA.

Technorati Tags: gems, ruby, path, mono, winforms, system.windows.forms, moma

I was just listening to an episode of G’Day World, and Cam was mentioning that he owned Australian culture (Google g’day and his podcast ranks #5 or #6). So I thought I’d Google myself.

I hit up google.com, entered Colin Charles, and to my dismay, my blog ranks number 3 in the list. Its preceded by:

• Colin Charles Award Winning Wedding and Portrait Photography - it has the domain colincharles.co.uk and has a PageRank of 1
• Music Books, Charles Colin Publ Brass & Jazz Methods… - it has the domain charlescolin.com and has a PageRank of 3

And then my blog, which has a PageRank of 6. The above two websites have got the strings colin and charles highlighted in the URL, of course. So am I to understand that if I wasn’t bytebot.net and had my name in my domain name, I’d rank higher? Or is Google’s index just broken?

Technorati Tags: web, google, search, index, pagerank, domain, name