January 8, 2008

Ajax chat for PHP

One of my recent projects needed to have a chat facility built in that works between staff and clients. I wanted to build an Ajax chat system and thought rather than re-inventing the wheel, I would look for someone else’s solution to an Ajax based chat system. I came across this website by Cristian Darie. I had read through some of Cristian’s scripts and articles in the past so I knew that he wrote quality code and made quality systems. His book about PHP and SEO is well worth a read.

I found lots of other examples of Ajax based chat but most of them were dirty, buggy, and smelly. So I heavily modified Cristian’s code to suit my needs and used it in the project. Thanks Cristian!

January 7, 2008

Data portability

To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.

As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.

Visit DataPortability.org

January 6, 2008

5 dangerous things you should let your kids do

Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, talks about our new wave of overprotected kids — and spells out 5 (and really, he’s got 6) dangerous things you should let your kids do. Allowing kids the freedom to explore, he says, will make them stronger and smarter and actually safer.

This talk comes from TED University 2007, a pre-conference program where TEDsters share ideas.

This is a really interesting talk about the over-protective society we live in. Im only 24 years old and dont have any kids so I dont come from the perspective of a parent, but I still think this is worth watching.

Check out the video.

Adium 1.2 has been released

AdiumI use Adium every day at work. Its late on Sunday night here in New Zealand, but I have just learnt that Adium 1.2 has been released. I’ll be looking forward to installing the new version tomorrow when I get back to the office. In the meantime, below is the blog post from the Adium developers:

Adium blog post.

The Adium team is proud to announce the availability of Adium 1.2. This is a major feature release with a ton of fantastic improvements as well as a a ridiculous number of bug fixes. We’ve discussed many (but not all) of the new features themselves previously on the blog, including the improved Adium menu item and account management features, various and sundry improvements to Jabber support (including SSL certification authentication, server-supplied action support, and discovery services browsing), fixed Bonjour local area network messaging with file transfers, better group chat (conferencing), a completely rewritten Applescript dictionary which should lead to all sorts of powerful new interactions with other programs, and detachable groups. (One ‘advertised’ feature which did not make it into Adium 1.2 was MSN personal messages; development efforts for these are still in progress by the libpurple team. A future version of Adium will have this enhancement once it’s ready.)
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