Porticus (1.1) growl and sparkle

Reuters semantic web API

. So a bit of a gap between all this. Well back in the ‘Smoke’ London was nice and working in the East End, of Brick Lane so again interesting areas. Just a short contract with a digital media oriented company to take the baton from one programmer and hand it to the next and at least keep pace in the intervening period.
Not a real problem and because another contractor flounced out i ended up doing two sites one in French/English the other in Chinese/English.
Good place to work even if they played on the Wii a lot, rode around the office on their bikes and some brought their dogs in.

From there should have gone to Endemol but had what i thught was a better offer and anyway Shepherds Bush is crap.

So went to an agency again in Bermondsey. Ok people apart from the fanatical “Symfony is the only way to go programmer” who was in reality ok and put himself out to help but using a major framework to do a 10 page web site is not on, really, not on.

So after that headed East to the wilds of Battersea to work on really cool financial systems with a really laid back bunch of guys.

Facebook and The Myth Of Contextual Advertising

 here

So who has got it in for FB?

An interesting article entitled How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook about FaceBook and social networking from Cory Doctrow having a bit of a go at FaceBook, bucking the trend here a bit and with a few thoughts on the difference between on-line social nets and real ones.

I like this line “Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker’s cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts.”

I went to a Facebook Garage meeting the other evening, er my excuse is it was at the Sun offices and was free beer all night, and it is interestsing how some companies are betting the farm as it were on building FaceBook applications with no control over the direction of the platform and no real way. other than Google Ad Words to monetise them. I also have to say that the vast majority of them (the apps) stink and have about the same lasting power as a snowball in hell.

Well back in the big city now, art house again (i quite like it) but lots of meaty PHP. Nice.

Much has been written about Open Office and about MS’s OOXML and the battle for open file format’s. However it looks as if Sharepoint could be a bigger threat than any of these.

MS is pushing Sharepoint through its channel partners as an ongoing revenue stream and Ballmer calls it ‘The next big operating system’. MS may be struggling with file format lock-in but Sharepoint is Content Lock-In and it doesn’t matter what the underlying files in the store are if MS holds the key to the proprietary storage then the file type is irrelevant. Sharepoint needs Windows to work, and MSSQL server to work, and IIS to work and Office to work so once Sharepoint get embedded everything else is sucked through automatically, hence the revenue stream to MS and to Partners. There are open source alternatives such as Magnolia and Alfresco that put the customer in control by using open standards repositories.

As Matt Assay says in his conclusion “But one way or another, proprietary and open-source companies need an answer to SharePoint. Small wonder, then, that Oracle has been building out its content management capabilities, as have IBM and others. Content is the center of the enterprise ecosystem, when all is said and done. SharePoint is Microsoft’s answer for controlling the next decade of IT”

Above gleaned from various articles as well as my experience installing and programming Sharepoint see Mary jo Foley at ZDNet for starters.

well finished the 12 week contract locally, actually took 5 months but there you go. now picked up a very short term job working with xaraya a cms/ so i have to learn xaraya and write the application in a couple of weeks, no pressure you understand, no documentation you understand. well keeps me of the streets.

Well i did but it all came back in a rush.