Disqus - Friends of kesava

Re: HP/Compaq nw9440: the purchase, review, problems and solutions

Phil Leggetter — Sun, 25 May 2008 10:45:28 -0000

Peter - I would have thought that you would be able to uninstall it since it is only a piece of software. You should be able to do this through Add/Remove programs (in XP) which can be found in your Control Panel. If it can't be found there then maybe try running the credentials manager installer again and see if it give you the option to uninstall it.

As far as I remember I uninstalled it the normal way that you uninstall things in Vista; through the Programs & Features console.

Re: HP/Compaq nw9440: the purchase, review, problems and solutions

Phil Leggetter — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 07:05:41 -0000

ZORKO

I have nvidia drivers version 7.15.11.6758 dated 02/01/2008. I've no real experience of trying to run games as I use the laptop mainly for work. Since installing this driver I don't remember having any real troubles but I guess I've not really been working the graphics card all that much.

Phil

Re: Politics and Social Media.

Phil Leggetter — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 07:19:51 -0000

A great idea. I'd just like to see it being applied to something a little more interesting. Maybe you could make the experiment a little more interesting by tweeting/blogging/photoshopping that DC has just punched someone in the face and see how quickly the news spreads? Now that would be interesting!

In all seriousness, I think that this style of journalism is the future but may have more impact in a "breaking news" scenario.

Re: Which is the worst Transformer?

Phil Leggetter — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:26:20 -0000

I've got to say that I generally disagree with your choices here. The main saving grace is that your choice of No. 1 naff Transformer is probably correct. I know you’ve got a car thing going on here but some of the Transformers you list were great characters which surely offsets the things that let the toy down.

My main objection is that you are slagging off a lot of the Transformers that were the main characters in the original 1986 Transformers the Movie that I think completely rocked! The 2007 version isn’t bad but has nowhere near the story or scale of the original move. Give me Orson Welles, Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy and Frank Welker (plus the obvious) any day of the week. Give me Unicron, Cybertron, Cybertron’s moons, Earth, The Planet of Junk and two massive battles! Wow, I’m going to get the DVD out after this.

Anyway: Blurr, Arcee, Kup (who doesn’t get a mention – good), Hot Rod/Rodimus, Springer and Ultra Magnus were a new group of Autobots who were main characters in that great movie. Ok, Blurr is a bit annoying, but isn’t that just because the guy doing his voice (Scatman Crothers) just repeated the same line over and over again. That’s not Blurr’s fault, it’s the fault of the guy who write the script. The toy may have been crap, I don’t know. Ok, I’ll give you Blurr too.

Astrotrain – the toy does look pretty pants! In the movie he transports the defeated Decepticons back to Cybertron and needs to “jettison weight”, whereby Star Scream gets rid of Megatron and we gain Galvatron. So, he has his purpose. I can only assume that the toy was that terrible that for you it justifies the No.8 slot.

Soundwave – What planet are you on? Soundwave is a great Transformer. He was there at the very beginning. He is a vital part of a majority of the Transformers stories. And... And.. And he can eject other small Transformers out of his chest. That’s Awesome! “Rumble, Frenzy, Ravage, Ramjet eject!” The toy wasn’t bad either. If I remember correctly you could get small cassette transformers (mentioned in the quote) and put them inside his cassette deck. No, he’s not a car but he was a great Transformer. You’re just plain wrong with this one.

Rodimus Prime - Have you ever seen Transformers the Movie?!? “This is the end of the road Galvatron”. He even gets to say Prime’s quote of “Autobots, transform and roll out” and it works. He also has a pivotal roll in bringing Optimus Prime back to life in The Return of Optimus Prime (brought back to life, eventually, by a Quinesson.....). So, NO, he’s not one of the worst Transformers ever (but his toy did look a bit like a mobile home, hmmm).

Wreck-Gar – Again, the toy may have been rubbish but that doesn’t mean he was one of the worst Transformers ever. He is the leader of the Planet of Junk/the Junkions. As you mentioned, he was voiced by Eric Idle, which IS cool. If his arms fall out he can just stick them back in again with some special blue glue (using his legs?). Now that’s cool, not crap.
Bumblebee A.K.A Goldbug – He wants to be friends with people so he’s rubbish? What? He’s one of the first Transformers and deserves to avoid this list on that fact alone. You just can’t put any of the Transformers that were on the Ark, which crash landed on earth with Prime, in the list. Period. Oh, and he’s a VW Gold...

Jazz - How can anybody say that Jazz is one of the Worst Transformers ever? Jazz wasn’t the best in the new movie but they got the character wrong. Jazz has been in Transformers since I can remember and killing him off was just wrong. His toy WAS great. It was one of the first Transformer toys to be made and wasn’t all plastic like the more recent ones. He was on the Ark AND he’s a Porsche.

Ultra Magnus – Firstly his toy was actually pretty cool. He could fire rockets. He was bigger than Prime. His cab was exactly the same as Prime’s and Prime was a great toy. He “couldn’t take over the leadership when the driving drumstick (Rodimus Prime) was in charge” What? Do you mean that he couldn’t open the matrix of leadership after Prime had been killed because it wasn’t their “darkest hour”? I got an Ultra Magnus one Christmas and my parents still speak to me, and I’ve just double-checked, like me. You ain’t justifying this one buddy! I think he gets a bad rap – leave him alone.

So, I’ll give you Arcee, Blurr and, at a push, Astrotrain. Personally, I’d list Wheelie and any of the Insecticons. I’m also surprised that the non-car Dinobots didn’t get a mention.

Nice opinion-provoking post.

Re: My reply to: Which is the worst Transformer?

Phil Leggetter — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 08:04:17 -0000

Gareth,

I had a feeling you didn't like the movie :-) As you can tell, I loved it.

Ok, we can agree to disagree.

I'm really looking forward to the second movie, I just hope they are true to the characters. There were a few moments in the last Michael Bay movie that annoyed me. They nicked some great lines from the original movie but twisted them a bit.

Prime: "One shall stand. One shall fall".
Megatron: "Why throw away your life so recklessly"
Prime: "That's a question you should ask yourself Megatron"

In the Bay movie Megatron waffles on about loving humans.

Anyway, fingers cross.

Cheers,

Phil

The original:
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The new version (which will no doubt be taken down by YouTube soonish):
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zU..."></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zU..." type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Re: Is the real-time web a threat to Google search?

Phil Leggetter — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 10:17:10 -0000

I think you are under-estimating the flexibility of Google search. You can do most (if not all) of the searches you've mentioned using Google. You just need to know the query syntax. It's probably even in Google's advanced search.

>> How about we search for all Tweets that talk about the Australian Fires?
You can do this with Google too:
http://www.google.co.uk/sea...

>> Can Google search show you all the Upcoming.org events that mention SXSW?
Yes you can:
http://www.google.co.uk/sea...

What they don't do, as you correctly point out, is pick up the results as quickly as friendfeed or twitter. But how many users to friendfeed or twitter have and how many do google have? google is indexing new pages as well as new tweet status pages.

Anyway, interesting article and I'm enjoying being part of the real-time web.

Re: Where’s the Web in “Real Time Web”?

Phil Leggetter — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:54:59 -0000

Ok, I'm a bit late responding to this article. I bookmarked it a while back and just got around to reading over it. I a software engineer working for a company who have components that facilitate the distribution of data across the web in real-time. I’m hopeful that we have the real-time web silver bullet. The section of our website that details streaming push server is here: http://www.caplin.com/capli...

The server is a highly scalable comet server (Liberator) that supports thousands of concurrent connections, manages connection problems, load-balancing, clustering (basically, it's highly scalable) and a whole host of other features that I think are exactly what the real-time web need. The really good news is that there is a free version available: http://www.freeliberator.com

I'm presently trying to pushing to encourage people to use our components in areas other than the financial sector since the Liberator is an excellent piece of kit that could be put to so many other uses. It can be used to distribute real-time updates across the Internet to a number of clients (we have APIs for Java, .NET, JavaScript/Ajax). Obviously the standard clients are web pages, .NET Web Form apps and Java applications but this doesn’t have to be the case. A web page example that I really like isthe Twitter website; they’ve experienced numerous problems and even today I saw the fail whale due to high load. By using Liberator and SL4B (the JavaScript API) there would be less frantic hitting of F5 to reload the page putting strain on the Twitter servers, updates would simply be pushed to clients as soon as they become available. Liberator also caches content taking additional strain from the Twitter servers.

I recently wrote a post about What is the Real-Time web which I think is relevant here: http://blog.caplin.com/2009...

Has anybody tried out Free Liberator? Does anybody think that this could be the silver bullet for the real-time web? If no, what is it missing?

Re: Trying to upgrade my O2 mobile

Phil Leggetter — Thu, 14 May 2009 06:58:18 -0000

@JP Thanks for following up. It's good to know that O2 do act on customer requests and that O2's presence on Twitter really is adding benefit to customers, even if I've not actually received any benefit from it. I was aware of the Fair Deal policy which is why I got quite annoyed at the difference in price. As it was I had a few hours of my time wasted and I still need to cancel my old contract, get a PAC code, and transfer my old number onto my new phone, but at least it gave me something to whinge about :-).

As expected my phone was delivered and I wasn't home. However, I did get my phone the next day from a locally delivery office/home. The O2 XDA Serra [really need to get a good affiliate text link ;-)] (HTC Touch Pro) is a seriously great piece of kit.

Re: Ron Conway To Focus On "Real Time Data" Startups: 40-50 New Investments In Next 18 Months

Phil Leggetter — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:52:22 -0000

I also slightly disagree with what we are calling the "Real Time Web" at the moment.

I think "data/information streams" is a valid description for what we are seeing at the moment but there is no reason why these can't be received in almost real-time. My argument is that the technology is out there as a wider audience has probably now seen from the Google Wave demo at Google I/O. However, the technology it's not being used by everybody at the moment to provide a truly real-time web experience. Twitter now have a real-time solution but this API is only available to choice vendors/partners.

Blog Post: What is the "real-time web"
http://blog.caplin.com/2009...

Re: Kodak Zi8 1080p HD Video Camera

Phil Leggetter — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:17:32 -0000

$179+ in the states. But how much is this bad body gonna cost in the UK?

Re: Synaptics scrolling not working

Phil Leggetter — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:11:31 -0000

@Mark - Glad it helped and thanks for taking the time to comment.

Re: HP/Compaq nw9440: the purchase, review, problems and solutions

Phil Leggetter — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:13:30 -0000

Hi Sigit,

I've just had a hunt around for any disks associated with the NW9440 and all I could find was the docking station disk. I think the disk for the laptop will be stored away with the packing deep in a cupboard that I can't get to without rearranging an entire room. If I get a spare hour over the weekend I'll see if I can find them.

Sorry I can't be of help straight away.

Phil

Re: Twitter’s New Avatar Takes Over Unsuspecting Accounts

Phil Leggetter — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:36:55 -0000

I noticed this 9 hours ago and Tweeted about it: http://twitter.com/leggette...

It's funny this should happen as I've been working on a little project for a few days because I don't think we should have to maintain our profile pictures in multiple places, we should maintain them in one and all other services should get our avatar/profile images form there. Gravatar (http://www.gravatar.com) provide just this service but unfortunately quite a lot of service providers don't support Gravatar.

Warning: plug...
So, I've written a web app that allows you to update your social media service profile with your Gravatar. It only supports Twitter at the moment but I'll add other services if it proves popular. It also doesn't automatically update your social media profile if you update your Gravatar but I plan to add this functionality.

I've unsurprisingly named the service GetGravatar (http://getgravatar.com). Give it a go and please give me some feedback. Hopefully services will natively support Gravatar in the not too distant future but until then we'll need these sorts of services to make our life a little easier.

Re: Tweetimag.es: An End To Broken Twitter Avatars

Phil Leggetter — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:49:07 -0000

Why don't people just use Gravatar? It's been around for ages and is already well established on most blogs. We should be encouraging Twitter to use this service. I put up a helper service a few weeks ago to push your Gravatar into Twitter as your profile picture (http://getgravatar.com) but I'd much rather Twitter natively support Gravatar rather than having to use yet another 3rd party service.

Re: How I approach problem solving in code?

Phil Leggetter — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:03:26 -0000

@Adam I completely agree with you. I moved the different problems into methods where the Odd Number functionality would sit very nicely in a class. Also, your use of IEnumerable, where an IList really isn't required, and using yield is a nice idea.

Re: How I approach problem solving in code?

Phil Leggetter — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 05:09:20 -0000

@dom I had to google ioccc# (International Obfuscated C[#] Code Contest) :)

I was originally going to call this post something like "the way people think and write code". My point with this original title was going to be that I believe that some developers think in exactly the way you describe; they see an elegance in being able to solve the problem in very few lines of code (succinctly) and find that code very readable (and maintainable?). Other developers, like me, like things to be broken out as much as possible. In this case I agree that the IsOddNumber may be a bit much.

My argument for breaking things down would be that code *will* evolve and by creating a structure to begin with encourages other to follow suit. I'd apply the same argument if I were to asked to explain why I've made the code handle odd numbers in ranges outside 1 to 99.

Re: Synaptics scrolling not working

Phil Leggetter — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:35:40 -0000

@Damian - I've updgraded both my machines to Windows 7 and I didn't need to install the drivers again. All I can recommend is ensuring that you have the latest version of the drivers. Sorry I can't be of any more help.

Re: Which Rich Internet Application Technology will dominate?

Phil Leggetter — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:31:52 -0000

@Rob - some good points.

if you restrict web development to those that can afford Visual Studio you won’t gain dominance

Microsoft do offer a free version of Visual Studio so this isn't as restrictive as you would believe. They have also started the BizSpark and WebSiteSpark initiatives to give developers access to excellent developer tools for no up-front cost.

it’s a very web dev centric stance to assume a dev environment will be a dominant factor in determining take up

My opinion on this is that most of the big success stories of recent years, such as Mark Zuckerberg and all the founders of Twitter, have been technology and development centric people. The developers have the opportunity to prove that a technology can meet customer expectations and not the other way around. A customer won't say "Oh, I don't like this Silverlight thing". They may say "I find this user interface really clunky". That will ultimately come down to technology capabilities and developer ability.

So instead of writing silverlight clients for twitter, why not try your hand at some dev tools for HTML 5 and Javascript?

If HTML 5 was supported by all browsers then I may well look into this. I'm working on a real-time Twitter solution during my R&D days with a few colleagues at Caplin and the front end will be an Ajax solution. The problem with Ajax at the moment is the support for cross domain access to web services and the development environment. Don't get me wrong; I think I'm a capable Ajax developer but I think that the level of difficulty will make others try Silverlight and Flex first.

Re: How real-time does real-time have to be?

Phil Leggetter — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:32:30 -0000

Good post here, including a video of Gary Vaynerchuk at the Sprouter event, by Ian Sanders on Word of Mouth which goes hand-in-hand with Small Town Rules.

http://scrambledup.blogspot.com/2009/12/word-of-mouth-is-on-steroids.html

Re: Which Rich Internet Application Technology will dominate?

Phil Leggetter — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:33:21 -0000

I've a feeling that the people that wrote this Adobe Flex v Microsoft Silverlight Celebrity Deathmatch style post (and then somebody continuously tweeted at people with a link to it) are on the side of Adobe Flex. The more I work with Adobe Flex the more I think that Microsoft are way, way ahead with their development platform.

Re: How two mad guys raised £2,000 for charity at ChristmasCrunch

Phil Leggetter — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:01:32 -0000

And there I was thinking my bid of £500 was going to win when I jumped in at what looked like a lull in the bidding at £450.

A very fun auction and the proceeds when to a good cause.

Re: Real-time web? Real-time search? No, it is WAR!

Phil Leggetter — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:34:49 -0000

Really pleased to see somebody else recognising that what is being called “real-time web” at the moment isn’t really real-time.

Hopefully the next evolution is to “‘true’ real-time”.

Re: Brain Dump of Real Time Web(RTW) and WebSocket @ Bamboo Blog

Phil Leggetter — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:22:18 -0000

>> Comet (aka Ajax long polling)
As you've hinted, Comet does not have to use long polling. Comet is a paradigm and can use long polling, standard polling, a constant HTTP streaming connection or WebSockets.

I personally believe that Comet is the best solution available at the moment. You can use any of the connection types as mentioned above (to re-iterate: this includes WebSockets), Comet tends to get around a number of connection issues including proxy and firewall problems, and it's a well understood paradigm. There are a number of good Comet servers already in existence and over the next 6 or so months I plan to create a number of examples of how you can use Comet to create Real-Time Rich Internet Applications (http://www.leggetter.co.uk/....

Re: Brain Dump of Real Time Web(RTW) and WebSocket @ Bamboo Blog

Phil Leggetter — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:22:18 -0000

Re: Brain Dump of Real Time Web(RTW) and WebSocket @ Bamboo Blog

Phil Leggetter — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:22:18 -0000