Month: December 2009

Learning XQuery

I'm convinced that Xquery is somewhat the non-elegent child of the xml family of technologies. Every single technology from XSL to Xpointer, Schema to XMLencryption seem to pick part of the puzzle and do that bit very well. So you can forgive me for thinking Xquery would only be useful for querying data from a xml database, somewhat the SQL of the XML world right? Nope, in actual fact its not only SQL but also PHP and the XML doesn't even have to be in a database at all. The crossovers with XSL is quite shocking for such a elegent family. Fear not, Xpath forms a large part of Xquery meaning us XSL lovers can jump straight in and feel a little at home with its strangely non-xml syntax, I actually quite like writing xml to create/transform xml. And if things get a little too weird in Xquery land, you can run for the beach by telling Xquery to do a XSL transformation on a tree of data instead.

Although it doesn't quite fit, its actually darn powerful and beats messing with XSP or other templating languages. For example, in about 6 easy to understand lines of Xquery, I was able to pull down a XHTML document, rip off its head element and append the body inside a ATOM feed. I could do the same with XSL but it would be much more lines and the way Xquery is setup, it seems to make more sense. One of the big issues people have with XSL is that it doesn't know anything about its environment. So for example calling the present time would require looking up a webservice or some other external logic like PHP, XSP, JSP, etc. Well with Xquery, you get all that type of logic which you could even pump into a XSL transform.

I'm learning Xquery right now mainly through Exist DB and this nice wikibook, which I converted to PDF using the wikibook system for offline reading and reference on my Ebook reader.

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Hitting the credit card companies where it hurts

I'm one of those people who doesn't carry around much cash, I'm that person who will pay for a coffee with a piece of plastic if possible. I know most of you hate me for doing so but its so much easier to track stuff later (yes I know this also means i'm also easier track too).

But what bugs me is going to places like computer fairs and having to either carry lots of cash, fiddle around with a cheque book (which the UK has decided to kill by 2018) or only use certainly suppliers because they accept cards. Talking to most suppliers, the number one reason why they don't accept cars is because Visa and Mastercard charge quite a bit extra on each transaction (yep everyone knows this) and they charge a lot to rent those pin machines. Yep talking to one it can be as high as a extra grand a month for those machines. Which is fine if your a business doing lots of transactions but not so great if your selling small goods at a computer fair.

In steps a new startup called Squareup.com which is trying to bypass the whole special pin machines by offering small retailers an suppliers the ability to take card payments on there own smartphones. Visa and Mastercard still make there usual transaction fee but at least the supplier doesn't have to rent some expensive machine in the hope someone will use their card.

Its all pretty neat, and I wish the guys luck. I had wondered if this was a classic example of emulating the pirates which have been using a similar device to collect stolen credit cards for a while now. So power to the suppliers, but I can certainly see this being exploited for many peoples gain. Proceed with lots of caution!

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Essential software for modern working

I saw this on Ben Metcalfe's blog recently…

It’s my first time working with RoR and I’m really enjoying the experience. Pivotal Tracker continues to be an amazing productivity tool for development, and I’m beginning to wonder how I ever worked before DropBox, EtherPad and BaseCamp.

Got me thinking what tools do I use which I just can't work without.

Dropbox is high on my list. First thing I do when installing a new machine is install dropbox, because has my desktop backgrounds, application settings and all types of good personal stuff which I use day in day out. I've also considered there pro upgrade for the purposes of work. Its like the promise of Webdav without the stress. I like the way I can work on a file on any of my ubuntu machines and then flip to my work windows machine and carry on where I'd left off. Save and Sync, then i'm back to my laptop. I use symbolic links to do drop torrents from anywhere, sync bookmarks and exchange configs. I want dropbox on my Sony Ereader and on my phone (Windows Mobile 6).

Basecamp I do use at work a lot. But to be honest in recent times its starting to look and feel the poor cousin of Googlewave, Etherpad, etc. Basecamp is great because its project management done to the level which I'm confidential I'm not spending time filling in crap like project but acting too loose like on a wiki. The problem is basecamp is a web only system and not only does that restrict what kind of projects I put on it but also makes it a pain to pay for it out of my own budget. What I really want is Basecamp inside of Wave as a robot and series of widgets or Basecamp with the ability to install on your own domain/server and federation support.

TomboyNotes is where I store all my notes which I can't remember. Its great and simple but I do wish it would work on my phone or at least as a webservice (Snowy will solve this problem). On the gnome desktop tomboynotes is quite well supported (plus it runs on all 3 main platforms), so theres plugins for a lot of things you may want but its not really as smart as Evernote which I started using but got fed up of due to their attitude to gnu/Linux users. Using, I'm also meant to be able to turn Tomboynotes into a lot of other things like a basecamp backpack (although this doesn't work for me anymore). I do use dropbox with tomboynotes, so I can sync notes between machines without a problem.

Hamachi is my personal VPN network I have on most of my own machines. It runs pretty smoothly on most of machines even old Pentium 3's. I keep wanting to go the either the OpenVPN (which I just don't get), Ntop N2N which I struggled to get going too) Wippien which has recently come to my attention as a Hamachi but with open decentralised lookup server. But I find myself using Hamachi for its pure ease and clever things it can do. For example because every node on the VPN act like local ethernet, you can use mnds/zeroconf, run pulseaudio from any home machine or use ssh/samba/webmin/vnc over VPN into any machine attached to the vpn.

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Next Generation DJ Competition

Next Generation DJ is a competition bought to you by internationally renowned dance music brands Pioneer, Beatport, DJ Magazine and LetsMix.com. It is set to be the biggest and most wide reaching DJ contest of all time. And we don't use these words lightly…

We’re setting out to discover and launch the next superstar DJ, and it’s all taking place on the world’s fastest growing mix platform, letsmix.com.

So I'll be entering this one for sure. Once I sort out Virtualbox again with the pacemaker hardware, i'll start mixing up even more mixes that ever before. I got a massive back log of mixing to do. I had considered uploading one of my previous mixes. But the way the competition sounds, everyone will be doing plenty of post editing to increase the impact of the mixes.

Interestingly enough 8 of the top 10 djs of the world are trance djs.

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Lazy web: Podcast Scraper for XBMC?

I spent a good amount of time today sorting out my movie library in XBMC using the IMDB scraper. I need to do my TV programmes soon too but I've been thinking why isn't there already a scraper for Podcasts? There's already scrapers for all types of mainstream movies, adult movies, pop videos, tv programmes and regional films, but not podcasts. Whats weird is that podcasts have most of the information in one place anyway, so it should be trivial to get the info.

So although this is lazy web request, looking at the XBMC scraper page it seems it wouldn't take a lot to create the basic scraper. I just need to get better at writing regular expressions, I guess.

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Getting behind those numbers, is there really app for that?

Apple Apps Store

The Apple App Store has blah blah number of apps I keep hearing. Frankly its getting a little tiresome to hear.

As most of us know its not all about the numbers. I personally will never use the Apple iTunes store because although they might be the biggest on the planet, they don't do dance music like Juno or AudioJelly. Like wise I wonder how useful those thousands of apps are on the Apple Apps store. But thats not the only thing I wonder.

I wonder… how many windows mobile applications there are in the world? Just Freeware PocketPC alone has 6,700+ apps which are just for windows mobile.

On that same point, I wonder… how many Apple Apps are freeware or not lite versions of a paided version? Percertages or actually numbers would be useful.

Android has a open app store, a bit like Windows Mobile I guess. So I wonder… if the percentages of free/paid apps are similar?

I wonder… how many apps on non apple hardware are shared p2p instead of through some centralised server. How many windows mobile users share cab files over bluetooth? How many Sony/Ericsson users share JAR/JAD files over Bluetooth?

The Blackberry Apps store isn't doing so well, I wonder…. if its down to the price of the apps?

I wonder… how many Symbian Apps there are? Like Windows mobile, theres a huge cottage industry which I bet once looked at in detailed will surprise.

I wonder… what percentage of the Apple app store is games? Also what percentage of Apple apps work with some other device/service compared to other app platforms? Are they mainly self contained or connect to others.

Finally I also have the obvious questions like what percentage of apps are most people using? Is there a few which most people use and the rest is all over the map or generally everyone using the same apps?

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Boxee beta shows some serious promise

Boxee Beta, not only a new look but interesting app library with even more niche partners. Does seem to be as beautiful as Plex or XBMC but there's no doubt its getting better and looking like something worth using now.

But the really exciting news is that Dlink will be one of the first hardware vendors to feature Boxee software on there sunken cube shape boxes, which will be available from the start of next year. Costs are close to $200 but lacks a internal hard drive. It does come with USB, HDMI, optical, ethernet and composite video connections. Users can surf the Web via an included browser, but doing so won't be a great experience for users, Boxee executives admitted. An RF remote is also included, so that users can access the box from anywhere in the house.

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I’m loving my Blender

I bought a blender after years of wanting one. Amazing purchase, nice modern design and reasonable cheap at only 25 pounds. So far I've made some amazing smoothies since.

Last night I threw in 3 granny smith apples, about 6 ice cubes, juice of one orange, a squeeze of lemon juice and a small spoon of brown sugar. Let the blender go to work on the lot and out popped this green stuff which looked like crushed lemongrass. But it tasted so good, like a ice junkie you get from cinemas but without the stupid amounts of sugar. In actual fact I was getting 2 of my 5 fruits for the day.

Today, Green Grapes, Cranberries, Blueberries mixed together till it goes all pink, served in a large tall glass, yum yum.

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