Scattered Mind

After reading Imod’s post on his DivX player I just had to get me one too.

After doing some research I decided to go with the D-Link Div X Connected player(uses DivX connected technology), which provides much more than just playing movies, viewing pictures, but also has vast amount of expandability, as the player connects to your PC and all the work is done there, conversion, GUI processing etc.  This also means you don’t have to worry about Firmware upgrades, you just upgrade the server.

I ordered mine from WantItAll.co.za and should probably receive it next week.  Will post some feedback after I’ve taken it for a spin then.

As it is a Friday, I thought let’s just post a relaxing music video from the past.

Paul Van Dyk – We Are Alive

Highveld Sterero (94.7) Rude Awakening Team have had a friday song which plays every friday morning.

For long we’ve nagged at them to give it to US !!!!

They now released it in video and audio file.

Here’s my parody of the day,

I Kissed a Girl – Kate Perry

Original

Parody

At the moment, part of my work involves data integration from various sources, formats and locations into one major central database where important decisions are made from all the data ‘mined’.

I’ve evaluated a couple of products, from large enterprise scale level products(which does come with a big price tag) and down to simple macro/automation tools to perform ad hoc tasks(simple functionality and data reading like CSV files) on desktops and servers which can be used by normal non-programmer people.

One product I particularly found very powerful and useful is Talend Open Studio, which is an open source product but does come with company backing support just like MySQL does with their products as well.  It is abit more advanced for a normal user, but programmers will find it quite a breeze.

With a powerful GUI with nice workflow modelling makes this very powerful, click and drag the connections and what actions you want to perform into place and welll….Bob’s your uncle.  With a PERL/JAVA(you decide) backing you can build quite powerful data integration procedures and processes.  I haven’t checked how, but I’m assuming as well that the extensibility could also be very powerful.

Google Maps UK has finally added live traffic data to the major roads in England*. As with other areas in Google Maps that have traffic data enabled, you can also let Google predict what the traffic situation will be like on any day at a specific time.

Blogoscoped Article

Whilst browing on Youtube I stumbled upon some oldies from when I was a youngster:

Culture Beat : Mr Vain

John Scatman – Scatman’s world

Google has now entered the internet browser market as well with their latest release of Google Chrome. A best of breed compilation of different elements into one packaged deal. I’ve downloaded it only this morning, still checking if it is really any different than normal Firefox. Google Chrome 

A new Guidance project has been launched on Codeplex especially to help Sharepoint users,developers and architects to see what the general best practices for implementing Sharepoint as your intranet management software.

Project Description
We plan to provide guidance to customers on how to build SharePoint Intranet Applications. This includes guidance on how to Architect, Design, and Develop applications as well as best practices.

Intended Audience
This guidance is intended for software architects and software developers who are building applications on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Familiarity with Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and ASP.NET is useful for evaluating the guidance.

Guidance is not even Alpha
Please note that this guidance is in draft form and will change dramatically before it is released on MSDN. We provide you access to drops to give you an idea of our direction and get your feedback. The code will continually be refactored until the point we publish it on MSDN.

Another video from Weezer, this time with some Web Celebreties in their videos as well , I just love these web phenomenons happening around.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_jGlyqoYoo