Webcoding.co.uk - Nothing to see here

Merry Christmas Geeks. - James Holden

So, you can always visit the wordpress version of this blog, knock yourself out

Prison Break Season 3

Interesting to note that the US and UK TV schedules are starting to become very close together. The usual "months" of time between show A starting in america and england have dropped a lot. Take a look at Prison Break - Season 3, this is out tonight in the US and follows on the 24th September in the UK. Seems like the online world has forced a lot of change.

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'Prison Break Season ...' | 17th September

Humax 9200 TB Freeview Recorder

I've just recieved the Humax 9200 TB PVR Freeview Recorder.

Initial impressions (visually)

First impressions are good. The case is good quality with easily accessible points though I'd be happier if the USB connection was at the rear of the device as opposed to the front (within the pull down flap). Those of us with PC's acting as media machines could have a constant and hidden access.

The remote control is a breath of fresh air given the usual rubbish which comes with some freeview recievers. It's large but it seems easy enough to use though the design doesn't seem to meld itself with the black pvr.

In terms of size - the device is around the same size as a VHS player or one of the larger DVD players. It's not sleek but it isn't bulky either.

Installation

The installation is a breeze. Connect the wires and the box takes care of itself. It's wise to run through the documentation and study the remote control pages.

Operation

I can't recommend this device enough. The picture quality is superb (and recorded), the sound is great and the operation is easy. I think there are some elements where the UI could be improved but as a general rule it's awesome. Streaming recorded files from the device to a the PC was a little slow but they worked however they come through as TS files (Transport Stream MPEG-2 Video Stream) which are large and will probably require converting at a later stage to something like xvid or mp4.

If you're looking for a great PVR for freeview get this :)

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'Humax 9200 TB Freevi...' | 17th September

Microsoft Surface

Microsoft Surface aims to be the ultimate home system. The multi-touch system is essentially a glass topped table with a touch screen interface allowing you to directly interact and achieve "stuff". The similarity (especially the photo manipulation) is strikingly similar to Jeff Han's multi-touch demo which I know caused a lot of comment back in 2006. Much of the demo focuses on image manipulation, games, mapping, music etc..

Obviously a lot of companies have been working in this area and Microsoft's latest product (good name by the way) is an attempt
to bring it into the family environment. It's attractive, sleek and potentially quite good fun. At a cost of around $3000+ for a
30" system I think this will be the playtoy for the very well off and not a mainstream product. As with all things the price will tumble and eventually achieve "normal people" penetration.

I must however comment on the "demo" on the MS Surface site (link above). Yes it looks attractive, yes some of the things it does look fun but heres two some (1) gripes about the demo and (2) concerns

Gripes:
1. Placing "random" hardware items (read camera/phone) onto a glass table computer and within a millisecond pulling off and placing all photos onto the desktop seems totally unrealistic. Firstly, you have to assume the item is already connected "somehow" to the system be it by bluetooth or wifi. Second to connect, find, access and read "data" from these devices is never a millisecond job - the demo tries to convince you it is..

2. The credit card scene is just nuts. I cant begin to say how much i hate this. Maybe it is possible but the giant "leap" of advancement from our current method to this...

Concern:
Whats the point? I understand its a new interface to work with computing but it's limited in scope. Looking down at the screen and not actually being able to face it directly means you're more than likely not going to be able to use this as a workstation/proper computer.

I can only conclude it's destined to be an entertainment centre of sorts and even then who wants to watch video on a screen in the middle of a table, its not like you can sit back in your chair and watch a movie..

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (2) | Perm. link to 'Microsoft Surface...' | 31st May

Dasher

I was watching some videos over at Google Code and I came accross Dasher which is an attempt to do away with the good old keyboard.

Now, I understand the idea behind it and I also like the idea of moving ahead with newer ways of getting information from our brains into computers but I just couldnt really get this to work.. at any speed atleast. The idea is good but for me the suggested letters start to take up too much of the view whilst the actual letters I wanted tended to stay hidden.

For instance typing "I am not going to be af" was easy and very quick but when I want to complete the last word to say "afraid" I am presented initially with options they think are more important thus loosing the focus on the letters I want and in turn making me slow down my approach. Now, next I wanted to write "of" but on entering "o" Im presented with N, R and U as priority letters and "f" is hidden away. I think this is an interesting idea but I would prefer the letter all FLAT allowing me to quickly shift into the correct location because I know exactly what direction to go given a symetric A-Z vertical list.

Im not sure this will take off as I dont really think its any faster and the keybaord is to ... easy by comparison - I dont even have to look at the keyboard anymore to type so its not a hardship to write.

What are your thoughts?

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'Dasher...' | 26th April

Creative Vision W

I have one :) Great device, good playback (note: this device has serious issues with supporting certain DIVX/XVID codecs and wont go near AC3 sound).

Anyway, I was at the pub, I stepped on mine and smashed the screen :( :( So! Creative offer a £125 price for exchange of the device - not a bad deal since a new one will set me back another £220.

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'Creative Vision W...' | 1st April

Apple iTV

I've seen one :) I've touched one :) I've played with one!

So what do I think? Not bad, small and descreet with typical Apple styling. They get hot, quickly, but overall I think they are a nice design and the plug and play straight into the HDMI of your nearest HDTV is quick and simple. I had a go on the 63" Samsung Plasma (720p) and it was nice.

Connectivity to ethernet or wireless is easy (though the keyboard and nav stuff to enter passwords is... interesting :). iTunes needs to be v7.1+ to work with iTV. I'll play around more with it when I get the chance - so far the resultion of the media clips available via the web are.. poor when you consider that Apple is specifically aiming this product at the HDTV market where we expect HIGH resolution content.

Personally I'm going to wait and see. Ill only give this thing the slightest hint of my OWN money when there are reliable hacks for XviD, DivX, maybe H.264 and MPG. I have no interest in paying Apple a bean until the content I have plays without issue. Nice try, but eventually they WILL learn. It's funny that Apple has no issue pushing out MP3 playback on it's devices but denies XviD and such which are the most popular media codecs out there.

Ill post a pic when I get a chance.

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'Apple iTV...' | 1st April

FOWA (Future of Web Apps)

FOWA (Future of Web Apps)

I was at the conference this week and it was pretty good. Some interesting things were shown and said and I’ve come away with perhaps a few more ideas and new things to try out.

I have to say that the conference does seem to be a lot about the sponsoring companies getting significant air time to big up their own products which isn’t something I really appreciate.

Chris Wilson did a decent talk about Internet Explorer, it’s evolution and where it is today but I was more interested in his ideas for the next generation of web browser. For me personally, I felt as though this was more a talk and promotion of MSIE 7 than a talk about where we are going next. He is obviously influential in the development of the browser and it would have been great to hear about what things he thinks and perhaps we are going to see in future revision of the browser.

Rasmus was awesome, I thought he gave a decent enough talk and the tools he was using to profile PHP loads was very interesting. If you can get a hold of his notes then you should, I scrawled down references to KCacheGrind, Valgrind and Callgrind, all of which combined to profile the load times within a PHP script. Very cool.

Simon Willison was good too actually. He was enthusiastic about openID (which looks good) and he gave a decent rundown of what’s involved and why its good but also bad. I think we’re a long way off from seeing this adopted in the mainstream but I think with some time and development it will become big. I think the best question from the floor came at this point when asking about single logins from non-web applications. Simons answer was that we should solve one thing at a time (UNIX style) and he has a point. Bringing up a small browser window in an application is no big deal so login could be easy and information easily obtained back into the main application – actually I may try this tonight.

Anyway, it was a good day and it’s good to see other people hyped about all this stuff and ending on Brice’s talk about contactoffice.com was great – he was awesome 

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'FOWA (Future of Web ...' | 22nd February

Ajax objects

I've been writing a few ajax objects, but im pretty fed up of rewriting ajax stuff to suit specific onreadystate changes. The following object I've done basically pushes the ajax onreadystate process to a new object which you pass into the core ajax object. The source is here, take a look.

Simply put, the following is how it works.



function ReadyStateHandler1(){

this.parseparseAjax = function( __ajaxobject ) {

if ( __ajaxobject.readyState==4&&__ajaxobject.status==200){

//etc etc

}

}



var handler1 = new ReadyStateHandler1();

var ajax = new Ajax();

ajax.setCallingReference(handler1);

ajax.setUrl("/Some/Url");

ajax.process();

Anyway - it might be of some use in something you do.

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'Ajax objects...' | 13th February

SVideo Resolution

So I was playing with the Sony FX1E HDV Video Camera (one of the first to record at 1080i) and the request was to push video out to the 63" Samsung Plasma at work (yes, 63 :))

We got an S-Video lead and it worked fine but the question came as to why the resolution seemed a little blurry/low. I didn't know this but S-Video only outputs at 480i or 576i resolutions (so basically standard def resolution). To actually push out the content at a cool 1080i you needed to connect up the composite out and then into the composite IN on the TV. It looked lovely and was running at a cool 720p - the quality difference is significant to say the least. For those of us in England, high def stuff is still fairly new and not common place so actually seeing a film of yourself and people you know in HD is very cool :)

ON a complete side point I'm going to be wiping Vista from my hard disk (i hate it - i've been through all the versions since longhorn previews and the final thing is far from finished). I will be creating a lovely XP SP2 system with a partition for Ubuntu 6.10 EDGY. Im probably going to push myself to start using Ubuntu permenantly - I did for a bout 6 months a few years ago but I fancy going back to it!

Current setup: AMD 64 3400 - Fatality ABIT board - 2x200GB Maxtor SATA II - 2x350GD Seagate SATAII (1.1 Terrabytes :)) - 2 GIG Corsair - 6800 GT Nvidia (Note: I dont play games much so I dont really need a great GFX).

I'm tempted to go forward to the Intel Core Duo but Im going to wait a while and see what happens - I hear that AMD is going to push out QUAD core soon so I am waiting on this.. I am an AMD fan boy!

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'SVideo Resolution...' | 9th February

Charlie Brooker Rules

Charlie Brooker over at the Guardian writes a great piece on why Mac's are crap. Loved it and more so since those truly useless adverts currently being aired.

Charlie Brooker Article

Charlie missed out a good point too.. Mac's are apparently so cool and amazing that Apple decided to launch boot camp to enable people to load Windows on Mac hardware.. hmm... sounds like they recognise Windows and the PC are pretty good. Utterly lame adverts. Next!

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'Charlie Brooker Rule...' | 5th February

Uncle Guy is live!

Please, take a look at UncleGuy.co.uk and contribute. The best shots of every month will get a free uncleguy t-shirt sent to them!

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'Uncle Guy is live!...' | 1st February

XQuery Northing/Easting to Lat/Long

This is why the internet is great. A while I go I found a Javascript implemention of converting an easting/northing to latitude and longitude written by Roger and Carabus.co.uk. I decided to port this to java for my work and now Adam Retter from the "Devon Portal Project" has pushed this out to XQuery for his work. It's good example of community :) Anyway, below are the links to the original JS version aswell as the ported ones.

Northing/Easting to Lat/Lon in XQuery - Adam Retter
Northing/Easting to Lat/Lon in Java - Me
Northing/Easting to Lat/Lon in Javascript - Roger @ Carabus

Appologies to Adam for not seeing his email, my account gets SPAMMED to death.

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'XQuery Northing/East...' | 1st February

Samsung F71 and Xbox 360

Take a 40" Samsung F71 (LE40F71BX) 1080p LCD TV and mix it with a XBOX 360 - the result?

Frankly, pretty damn good. It's often dependent on the game in question but so far it's difficult to not be impressed with the combination.

For those of you thinking this will be ultra amazing, you may be a bit dissapointed - the graphics were pretty good but for me personally, they didnt hold a patch to a PC game running at full 1080p resolution. I haven't played with the XBOX enough yet to give any meaningful blurb about it apart from the sound is amazing and the screen holds up really well when running games.

I also noticed the LE40F71BX is now available for around £1200-1300 which is reasonably annoying - but I think i've had a few hundred quids worth out of it so far :)

After seeing the TV my parents are now on the big screen hunt and despite my arguments they are probably going for a 42" Pioneer Plasma (The Pioneer PDP 427XD). Reviews are pretty good and since they'll be doing the TV thing more than any PC stuff I can understand..

Link to PDP-227XD

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'Samsung F71 and Xbox...' | 24th January

Samsung F71 Versus Plasma

Click here to view this older article

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'Samsung F71 Versus P...' | 15th January

Samsung F71 and Media Center

Click here to view this older article

Make a new comment | Show/View comments (0) | Perm. link to 'Samsung F71 and Medi...' | 15th January

Play podcasts whilst you read..

Currently on UK TV

My Projects

BBC Have Your Say

Oct 2006

Win (C# ) app for monitoring and reading the BBC News' "Have Your Say" features. (more)

Directory Monitor

Nov 2006

A directory watcher. (win/c#). Quite simple really, me experimenting with creating a program to monitor file activity of any directory and it's sub directories. Also seems to work on private shares! (more)

LondonTown HotelMap

Sep 2006

A fully featured mapping system for purchasing hotel rooms. A really good and well featured system which makes finding your room easier. (more)

RSS Weather

Jul 2006

Added RSS feeds for the exisitng XML sets I was doing for the weather.. Should be compat. with all RSS readers now. (more)

Tide XML Feed

Apr 2006

I've been told to cease on this project.. Most likely a rights issue. (more)

Aria Products Feed

Apr 2006

RSS Feeds for the Aria.co.uk product range. Simply enter your query to the end of the URL and add it to your feeds. Utterly unofficial :) (more)

Weather XML Feeds

Apr 2006

*new* - Feeds for 24 hour and 5 day forecasting. A large number of UK locations supported and many other countries. Supported by backstage. (more)

AJAX RSS Ticker

Mar 2006

A fully working RSS Ajax Ticker implementation. Utilises a PHP requester for the remote feed. You should be able to extract and run. (more)

Top 40 XML

Mar 2006

Converts the BBC's top 40 html chart to an XML feed using a bit of scrape 'n' shape :) (more)

Photo Resizer 0.0.1

Mar 2006

Batch tool to convert directories of images files from one size and format to another. freeware, enjoy! (more)

BBC Page Archive

Mar 2006

I've written a C# webpage capturer to archive the homepage of both the main BBC site and thier news site. More to come. (more)

iMP Hacks

Dec 2005

I've released this after the trial. Essentially some small bits of info for having multiple users per single iMP install plus a few other bits. (more)

RSS Ticker

Sep 2005

NEW - Platform independent RSS Ticker built for BBC Backstage. Highly configurable Java Swing application. Updated to v1.1 (bugfix) which fixes a few problems spotted by some kind folks! (feb 2006) (more)

Work: Ajax Search

Dec 2005

New Ajax based search system for work. Predictive listings, real-time interaction. [beta..ish phase] (more)

Code Bites

Dec 2005

Little code samples of bits I've needed help on recently or interesting things i've done or have found. (more)

AutoNZB/Tor

Nov 2005

Automated downloading app for legal torrent and NZB files. Very useful for sysadmin type stuff. Currently not available as release as there is a bit more work to do. (more)

Office 12

Nov 2005

Constantly updated bug list for Office 12 (more)

TV System

Nov 2005

Starting a new TV system website/app which will rock. More soon on this, currently in development

Car Puter

Nov 2005

First stage of my car puter. Installation success with success use with mapping application and GPS. Next phase to install properly in new car (more)

Win RSS Ticker

Nov 2005

Windows RSS Ticker built in C#. Based around original java RSS ticker built for Backstage. Currently in development. (more)

Webcoding

Nov 2005

Webcoding.co.uk redesign and code implementation - what you see here :) (more)

Backstage BOT

Oct 2005

MSN Bot which alerts you to upcoming TV shows. Website allows users to set TV preferences which the BOT will automatically alert you too.

BBC Search 2

Oct 2005

Prototype of BBC search intergrated into the BBC design. Searches produce results which intergrate directly into the standard page template (more)

BBC Search 1

Oct 2005

Search device for the BBC news. Utilises Ajax for real time search results as you type. Articles stored using backend cron'd JAR app. (more)

Lat Long Java Obj

Jul 2005

Roger at Carabus produced an amazing javascript util to convert UK northings to eastings. I've turned this to a java object, enjoy! (more)

TVAnytime Pull

Jul 2005

Simple bash script to pull the latest BBC TVAnytime results and extract them locally to your machine ready for processing. (more)

Previous Webcoding Posts

17/09/07 - Prison Break Season 3

17/09/07 - Humax 9200 TB Freeview Recorder

31/05/07 - Microsoft Surface

26/04/07 - Dasher

01/04/07 - Creative Vision W

01/04/07 - Apple iTV

22/02/07 - FOWA (Future of Web Apps)

13/02/07 - Ajax objects

09/02/07 - SVideo Resolution

05/02/07 - Charlie Brooker Rules

01/02/07 - Uncle Guy is live!

01/02/07 - XQuery Northing/Easting to Lat/Lo

24/01/07 - Samsung F71 and Xbox 360

15/01/07 - Samsung F71 Versus Plasma

15/01/07 - Samsung F71 and Media Center

12/01/07 - Hiper Media Case

11/01/07 - Javascript Image Zoom

08/01/07 - Sony NS76H HDMI DVD upscaler

03/01/07 - Samsung F71 40" LCD update

26/12/06 - I just bought an LCD TV

24/12/06 - Windows Mobile

28/11/06 - BBC "Have Your Say" Reader

07/10/06 - LondonTown.com Hotel Map - Ajax

21/09/06 - Get well Hamster

30/08/06 - Vista 5536 Pre RC-1

15/08/06 - Get your own terror alert!

24/07/06 - RSS Weather feeds

24/07/06 - Links 24 July 2006

22/07/06 - Sat 22nd July

21/07/06 - Friday 21st July 2006

19/07/06 - KOSS Ear Budz

19/07/06 - BoingBoing, two years out of date

19/07/06 - Stuff 19-07-2006

18/07/06 - Links

20/05/06 - Outlook 2007

18/05/06 - Big Brother UK 2006

18/05/06 - ReadyToSurf Hack

18/05/06 - Snap.com

17/05/06 - TechCrunch "ClusterFuck"

16/05/06 - Google Notebook

09/05/06 - Eriksson picks unknown 17 year ol

08/05/06 - Top Gear, Season 8

25/04/06 - IE7 Beta 2 Preview 25th April

22/04/06 - Office 2007

20/04/06 - Firefox Security Updates

13/04/06 - Weather Feeds

30/03/06 - Javascript Ajax RSS Ticker

28/03/06 - UK Top 40 in XML

18/03/06 - Photo Resizer 0.0.1

17/03/06 - Incorrect versions of .NET

09/03/06 - c# web screen capture

09/03/06 - Google Analytics

22/02/06 - Multi Touch Interaction Experimen

16/02/06 - Resin Server 3.0.17

07/02/06 - IE7 Beta

19/12/05 - LivePlasma.com

19/12/05 - Google to buy5% AOL stage at $1bi

19/12/05 - MS Vista December CTP

13/12/05 - LondonTown Ajax Search Beta

09/12/05 - Ajax Search

08/12/05 - Pandora

06/12/05 - Experts Exchange

05/12/05 - TeleAtlas & Ajax Search

04/12/05 - Flight plan, Finding Neverland, T

01/12/05 - 10MEG 10MEG

25/11/05 - XML RSS & XMLHttpRequest

24/11/05 - Javascript objects

23/11/05 - Change for the better

18/11/05 - Messenger

17/11/05 - Flex 2

17/11/05 - A google to far

17/11/05 - New website

16/11/05 - XSLT, do we need @blocks?

15/11/05 - .NET Framework 2.0

09/11/05 - BBC RSS Port

09/11/05 - RSS for tasks

07/11/05 - Car GPS

07/11/05 - Beard Goes

01/11/05 - iPod Woes

31/10/05 - BackStage v1.0 RC-4

31/10/05 - New MAIN puter bits

31/10/05 - Carputer

31/10/05 - The 2.5inch disk enclosure

RSS XML Feeds

This website provides RSS XML feeds of it's projects and articles along with links

	Webcoding - Project RSS
	Webcoding - Article RSS
	Webcoding - Links RSS

Travel Links

LondonTown - Londons no.1 website

LondonMonthly.com - Monthly events

News Links

WinSuperSite - Windows News

Slyck - Filesharing news

Slashdot - Geek News

Ol'Reg - Biting the old IT hand

BBC News - The News Site

Labs / Web2 Links

Macromedia Labs - Flex2, Flash 8.5..

Google Labs - Google Labs

Google Base - Google Data Sets

Google Analytics - Free site stats.. nearly

Backstage - BBC Backstage Project

Fun Links

VCDQ - Stuff

BoreMe - Viral Attachments

Computing Links

Ubuntu - Linux for people

NTL - UK Cable

Microsoft - Microsofts website

Code Links

W3C - W3C Consortium

PHP - PHP Language

Mysql - Mysql Database

Javascript DOM - Good ref on JS DOM

Java - Java Language

Code Project - Amazing C# place

Blogs Links

Davy Mitchell - Backstage fellow

Ben Metcalfe - Ben from the BBCs blog

Andreas - Andreas Blog

Backstage Links

Mood News - News listed by mood

Mightyv - Backstage TV Site

Quick Biography

I'm a twenty seven year old programmer who works in London and lives in Surrey. Most of my work hours are spent programming web sites in Java, Php with XML and XSLT. Currently enjoying experimenting with C#, Ajax and sampling some Ruby stuff. I'm available for freelance work so please give me an email anytime at jim (at) webcoding.co.uk.

Articles | Projects