MT Blog

Started a new blog to document the build of my multi-touch table. http://mtblog.iamhigham.com

Free UK Postcode lookups

Recently figured out a way of getting addresses for a UK postcode from M$ Virtual Earth for free! Its not so bad! I basically reverse geo-code a postcode to a long/lat address and then sample a 100m square area around that point and request addresses from that area at regular intervals of about 10 meters.

http://ve.iamhigham.com

Singletrack love

The only bike riding I have been doing of late has been commuting on my road bike and as much as I love that thing I kind of miss mtb'ing. The reason I haven't done any is due to the lack of a decent mountain bike, thieving scum in Liverpool you know who you are. So anyway, I do have a piece of crap that I have been hiding in my mum and dad's garage, which I took back today!

So i decided to go for a dusk hack round my some of my old haunts in Woodbridge, it was ace! the piece de resistance was finding my way through Melton woods in the half light, there is some good singletrack round there which you can ride at speed I might add! Good to see that at 31 I still have what it takes to tear it up!

Nildram bandwidth police

Got busted by the Nildram bandwidth police this week. My DSL connection is now capped at 64k, funny thing is I have 6gb left for this month according to their site! Life in the slow lane sucks!

Revision

Trying to find the motivation for my impending examination on .net and struggling. I find myself sitting here considering other things, like how best to index my mp3 collection with Ruby and Ferret! Meh!

Free postcodes

My friend Lee linked this on his blog and I shall do the same as I think its a great idea. http://www.freethepostcode.org/ is a website aiming to build a database of postcodes / latlong co-ords purely from user submitted data, nice!

Datamapper 0.9

A new version of Datamapper was released shortly after RubyConf 2008, I am currently upgrading existing bits and pieces I have been working on now. It promises some really nice new features including the ability to reference more than one repository per environment which is really nice. Merb + Datamapper FTW!

Ubuntu Hardy Setup

Slicehost have some great articles on their site including this one

.Net Bootcamp

Day one, of in-house training at work for the giant memory test that is Microsoft .NET Framework, Application Development Foundation.

Dry subject matter, warm meeting room, beginning to feel slee...

Blog rework ... again!

Reworking my blog again after catching up with an ex colleague of mine who kindly pointed my towards Yahoo! pipes. I am really warming to the idea of building applications or sites using already existing services.

Yahoo! pipes allows you take data feeds from the web and manipulate / merge them in to one feed. I still need to add a replicated feed on the site itself so you can aggregate using an RSS reader. I also plan to start a Flickr account and display recently added photos. The site is powered by Merb.

Ubuntu 8.04

Its out soon, so I thought I would show my allegiance to this fine OS by adding a countdown. I have set up a dedicated Ubuntu box which I can reach anywhere via NoMachine, no problems yet and its pretty much like being at the box itself, who needs RDC!

Worlds apart

It appears to me that the IT industry is filled with tech-sheep who just plump for the more popular solution rather than the best, why is this? By day I work on a Windows laptop, I have to wait for Windows to boot and then complete the login process and then have to wait for ages whilst Visual Studio loads a massive solution containing 70 projects. In the evening I use Ubuntu which takes a negligable time to load, I am currently building a project using Ruby (Merb and Datamapper).

The whole experience is a joy in comparison. I realise now how much this impacts on my enthusiasm towards what I am trying to achieve. It really makes a difference when you can acheive loads in a small space of time and be proud of the quality too.