If by a man’s works ye shall know him..

I love this business card idea – simple but creative. That and it features a text editor I couldn’t do without 🙂

Twitterlarity

Hello all! Gosh it has been a little while since I was here, so please bear with me whilst I clean the cobwebs and shoo the feral wildlife out.

The more keen eyed of you will have noticed my twitter feed (on the right of this page) receiving a lot more attention from me than my weblog and the reason for that is fairly simple, it is much easier to microblog and post little snippets than for write full articles. I have never been a fan of just regurgitating content without at least adding commentary or (hopefully) extra insight, hence the reason I have veered so sharply away from doing so on here. But on twitter, by necessity, everything is μ‘d down which is both appealing and restricting. Plus also I can periodically reveal the quirkiness of my personality in 140 characters or less. 😉

Irrespective, I have been tweeting a lot and noticing more and more how popular Twitter has become. Take a look at this snippet from my stats showing just how much the traffic has grown to my post instructing on the embedding of twitter into wordpress.

Twitter is more than a microblogging facility, but there are a number of different ways in which it can be used. I use twitter as an almost light version of facebook despite the fact that I know (or follow) less than an order of magnitude fewer people than on facebook.

Whilst I am on the subject of facebook, I can’t stand the new layout! Now I know facebook has a history of changing things and the public backlash is almost as predictable as the tides, however with the new ‘layout’ I believe is rather more than a stylistic change. It almost feels like there has been a paradigm shift within facebook to try to tap onto the twitter phenomenon and this I find both silly and uncomfortable. Both twitter and facebook serve two completely different purposes no amalgamation of functionality will make me think otherwise…

Speaking of which, I was just browsing through the recent wordpress news and found a new theme which appears to be the result of an extramarital indiscretion between Twitter and WordPress. I mean come on, has the whole world gone insane? Whatever next, Windows Live microblogging??? Oh… Again don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter, I just sneer at the less than subtle attempts by the other ‘major’ players to hump the leg of reinvention.

But enough of my rant. What else have I been upto in the last two months to warrant my silence you ask ? Well, not a huge amount really, my (now no longer that new) job has been keeping me busy both in terms of the work and the learning I am doing around the various subjects. It is both exciting and highly gratifying that the areas I am learning (and working in) are opening up new avenues and have precipitated a greater appreciation for the technologies I so love. Apart from that I have been gaming a lot in whatever spare time I can scrape together between one code block and one uninterrupted quantum of sleep. Recently I have played Mass Effect, Farcry 2, Doom 3, Supreme Commander Forged Alliance as well as a bit of Fallout 3 and I am looking forward to writing about each of these in turn, time permitting. I would also like to start writing about more technical matters (coding paradigms and JS / CSS / C++ code snippets) but given how widely that veers away from the rest of the content in my weblog, I may register a new website and do that there. I have some great ideas for domain names, just a case of figuring out the hosting and (*sigh*) if I have the time to maintain it.

Anyhoo, this has turned a little rambly. Comments / email / @KonradS follows welcome. 🙂

Leaked iPod preview on the money

I found on the BBC today a video preview of the next generation of iPod nanos and iPod touch. It seems the leaked images I posted a little while back were spot on, for a less blurry version, check out BBC’s website.

Not sure whether I like these new designs much, but credit to Apple for constantly refreshing (or just changing slightly to encourage people to buy new iPods every year) their range. When I get a chance, I will have a play with one of these ‘in the flash’ and report back.

UPDATE : I am starting to get the impression this market has matured drastically in the last few months. Apple have been making iPods for 7 years now, improving on the design and functionality as they go along, but is there any real selling point to these new iPods apart from the fact they are new? Sure the screen is slightly better, sure they have a motion sensor… but so what? When it is in my pocket, am I really going to care enough about how different it is to my 3rd gen nano?

Some tweaks!

So as you can see I have been playing around with my blog layout and design. I liked the previous template as it was simple yet functional, but I found I had a lot of wasted room at the sides. I am not yet sure if I am going to keep this template (really wish I could add a custom graphic) but for the moment I am fairly happy. Mind you it is now 2am (AND I have lost an extra hour of sleep due to the clocks going forward) so my judgement may be impaired, let me know your thoughts and feedback ! 🙂

The Vista Start Button

I was randomly came across a document on Microsoft’s website details hardware compliance for a new type of super key. Vista appears to have the option of allowing manufacturers to replace the plain boring Windows (super) key on the keyboard in favour of a more esthetically pleasing option.

“The Hardware Start Button, an update to the Windows Key for keyboards, is designed to be an attractive and discoverable actuator for launching the new Start menu and search experiences in the Windows Vista family of operating systems.”

The document is very detailed, even containing dimensions and material requirements for a variety of designs, finishing up with a proposed ‘Hero Hardware Button’.

“…is a transparent dome that contains a full-color Windows Start Button Logo and composes the surface of the Hero Start Button”

Given the trouble Microsoft’s hardware teams have evidently gone to, its surprising that we have not seen keyboard or other input devices with such ‘special’ Windows keys.