In a few weeks I should be getting my room re-decorated and when this happens, all my servers and computers will get moved into my bedroom and they will all be set-up neatly. To keep things extra neat and save me having to keep going into the cupboards, where my computers will reside, I would like face plates above my desk that give me all the ports I could possibly need!

An example of a fully assembled double gang wall plate

I would like a wall plate or a set of wall plates with the following connection (in order from left to right):

• 2x RCA Jacks (Red and white)
• 1x Optical S/PDIF
• 3x RCA Connections (Red, White, Yellow)
• 2x Cat6 RJ45 conections (not required though)
• 2x PS/2 connections (Keyboard/Mouse)
• 2x 15-Pin D-Sub (VGA)
• 2x PS/2 connections (Keyboard/Mouse)
• 2-4x USB connections (USB Hub)
• 1/2x 6 pin Firewire connections
• 1x 3.5mm Jacks
• 2x RCA Jacks (Red and white)

All connections should be female and have 2.2m+ (maybe even 2.5m to be safe) of cable with the male connector at the end of the cables. A modular system would be best as it would allow for change in the future and offer expandability.

Key:       Optional – Preferable – Required

On Friday the 5th of February, at about 6/7pm GMT there appeared to be a strange anomaly going round on twitter! People who already had high tweet counts were suddenly getting even higher ones! I first notice this when reading a tweet from @MOn321 on twitter! My initial reaction was “WTH? I could have sworn that @MOn321 only had 12,000 tweets or something likt that the other day and there is no way he could have tweeted 24,000 times in the space of a week without me noticing!”

@MOn321 with 35,906 tweets!

I was right! There was no possible way that he could have tweeted that much! When @MOn321 told me that it was a glitch I was highly jealous of him and way wondering what had happened until @MOn321 noted that the same glitch had affected me in a much larger way!!!

Me with 52,915 tweets!

At this point I had to do some investigating! Was this glitch affecting everyone? What were the exact details of the glitch!

From what I could tell, it appeared that the glitch affected users with a tweet count greater than about 2,000-5,000(I would have needed a snapshot of before and after the glitch to be more precise) and it trippled the users tweet count and the moment of the glitch occurring!I have no indication as to whether it has any relation to the API and whether it did not affect users using the web or not but if you have any information, please leave it in the comments bellow!

Most user are finding this annoying but I am satisfied with this as compensation for the way that twitter normally penalises its most dedicated users!

This post is designed as a way for me to test moBlog on my mobile. moBlog is a Windows Mobile program that allows you to blog remotely from your mobile. It is quite easy to set up and works with a variety of blogging services and allow you to have multiple profiles and muntiple blogs set up simultaniously!

The interface for writing blogs is in HTML but has a preview option to view the blog before uploading. The writing sceen is very simple and is literally a large text box but you do have limited formatting features which just allow you to insert the appropriate HTML tags for whatever formatting you want!

Examples of the formatting avaiable:

• Bold
• Italic
• Underline

Note: Bullet points are not avaiable but I know the HTML for them and using custom HTML tags seems to work even on the preview.

The last feature provided when writing a blog is the ability to insert pictures. If this works you should see a stock photo from my HTC Touch Pro bellow:

As a basic bloging programme, this is acceptable but there are some major flaws which make the program difficult to work with! My main issue is when you try to write a blog or use the software in landscape. Th way the screen reorganises is impractical and require lots of scrolling to navigate. Rather than resizing the input and preview boxes to a 480 x 640 screen, it simply adjusts the width for 640 keeping the height as it is when in portrait mode. This result in the software being appropriate for a 640 x 640 screen and since this does not fit on the screen, a second scroll bar is added so that you can navigate the larger area. So that this makes more sense I will upload some screenshots late

Although the formatting options are limited they are much greater than those offered by my alternative which is by using the browser and full sized WP admin panel. The advantage of using the WP admin panel is that although the WYSIWYG does not work in Opera Mobile 10, it is better than the preview in moBlogs as it shows a more precise representation of what the output will actually looks like! For example, in WordPress, I have notice that using line breaks in the HTML view results in a line break in the output however the preview in moBlog does not acount for this.

Another disadvantage of moBlog is that it is not very user friendly. It uses a basic Windows CE design and is not as asthetically pleasing as using the online interface.

Overall I would not recomend moBlog forf the mobile blogger as it just doesn’t provide all the nessasary features required by a blogger today.

I am testing if it is posible to write a blog post natively from my Windows Mobile phone using Opera Mobile 10 Beta. By the looks of it it is possible and the WordPress admin panel is surprisingly eay to navigate using my mobile! However, it does appear that you can only write blogs in the HTML view and NOT by using the WYSIWYG editor. This is unfortunate, but for basic blogging it should not be too difficult to adapt to! Posting images may become a problem but what you have to remember is that I would not use my mobile as my primary editor for my blog.

Before now you have been able to subscribe to me on twitter, however when doing this, you would get ALL of my updates and this was not convenient for those who were only interested in updates from my blog or to use the twitter subscription, purely as a way of subscribing to the blog. You can now follow @flungoBlog on twitter to get the latest updates from my blog. There has also now been a Facebook page set up which will also host links to new blog posts.

This now provides readers with 4 ways to subscribe to this blog:

If you have never watched Star Trek you probably wont know what I am on about for the first part of this blog but you should still find this pretty interesting! In Star Trek their is a device, on-board the star ships called a replicator.

“…a replicator is a machine capable of creating (and recycling) objects. Replicators were originally seen used to synthesize meals on demand…”

What a crazy idea! Like something that far fetched would ever become reality? Well…. Although scientificically and technologically the idea would be imposible (as far as I can see) the concept of a machine that can “synthesize meals on demand” is a reality. Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran from MIT recenly posted a concept design of the Cornucopia.

Cornucopia: Digital Gastronomy

This inovation brings us one step closer to fiction becoming reality and shows that the people at MIT willing “To boldly go where no man has gone before”

This blog is simply a personal experiment and may be of no interest to you unless you too have a WordPress blog and ask yourself the same question:

Often I post a blog post without updating the permalink to something sensible. This means that after posting I have to change the permalink, and this could mean that the links posted on other sites automatically (like the link automatically posted on my twitter) may point to the wrong place. But what I want to know is whether when you change the permalink, the old permalink still exist, so that the the link is not broken? I will test this theory on this blog and let you all know with an update to the blog

UPDATE: Well that was simple enough, and I know have my answer If you update your permalink after publishing, the old permalink will redirect to the new location meaning that no links are broken! However, it did appear that the TweetMeme ReTweet widget reset to 0 when doing this!

A few days ago, @MelissaAmbrose_ suggested that I made a blog post about GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle.com! Now when I first looked at the site, I was not impressed at all and was just going to make a quick blog about it to appease @MelissaAmbrose_ and make her happy  However, what first looked like a simple site set up with 4 frames that just simply load Google up in each, was a bit more complex than I anticipated. After a short while of playing with the site I found that it actually had a lot more thought gone into it than just 4 iFrames.

The homepage of GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle

Semi-Dynamic Sizing

I am starting this review on the negatives. My first assumption was that the site was either designed to fit nicely on a 1280×800 display (which would have been awfully designed) or that the frames would dynamically resizes as the size of the window changed (which would have been the best thing). Unfortunately, I soon discovered when resizing the window I discovered that the size of the content stayed the same. This then made me question if it was statically set to look good at a size of 1280×800 or whether there was actually some cleaver JS running in the background. To my relief there was some JS running that would detect the size of the window on the page load and then resize. My main question to the makers of the site would be “Why can you not make an event listener that resizes the iFrames dynamically?”

GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle loaded when the browser window was smaller.

The above page maximised to fullscreen without refreshing. Note how the frames stay the same size as they were when loaded!

Loading Sites in Frames

The controls for each frame.

The site is adaptive, it isn’t just limited to having Google. At the top of each frame there are some special controls which you can see in the screen shot on the right.

The purpose of the first 2 icons should be fairly recognisable and obvious as the favicon of Google and Wikipedia. By clicking on these icons it will wither load the Google homepage or the Wikipedia homepage within the frame bellow. The last icon shown is the green arrow! By clicking this icon it will make a dialogue box pop-up requesting a URL to navigate to and this will allow you to go to any site of your choice!

Make a frame go to any site using the green arrow

Here is an example of the site with Google, Wikipedia, this blog, and a Google Search for my name loaded in the 4 frames.

GoogleWikipediaBlogGoogle

Customisability

Another way that the site adapts in though the customisability of the layout! The main control of this is through the Cross that is shown on the screen shot of the frame controls. Clicking this will get rid of that frame and stretch an adjacent frame to fill the space. To see what this might look like and the look of a customised workspace, look at the images below:

GoogleGoogleGoogle (3 Frames)

GoogleGoogle (2 Frames Stacked)

Pretty Design

Last but obvious not least is design. Although it is not amazing the coloured border around each iFrame is a nice touch and goes well with the Google them of the website

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would say that this is a cleaver idea and I can see some uses for it but I will stick to the normal Google site and multiple tabs

By the way there are a few more features and if you want to find them, go and have a play at GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle.com

The Facebook NewsFeed is giving me bugs, and I was just wondering if it happening to anyone else? This is the problem that I have:

"No posts to display" when I know there are!

I am theorising that the cause of this bug may be an update to Facebook, but we will have to wait and see

I was happily tweeting away yesterday when all of a sudden, TweetDeck started giving me a “Recipient not following you” error which is what TweetDeck’s last resort error is; if it does not recognise the error that has been returned it will return that error! Strangely TweetDeck have’t got an error message simply saying “An unknown error occurred” but this blog is not about the issues with TweetDeck (which I love dearly but being in Beta, obviously has bugs). At the time, I was ReTweeting and one of the common errors that I get that TweetDeck (once again strangely does not recognise), is the error that the Tweet I am trying to ReTweet has already been Tweeted by me!

At first I took this as the case and tried to ReTweet something else. I got the same error again! I knew for a fact that I had not already Tweeted this and then attempted to send a normal Tweet. I cannot remember if I got the “Recipient not following you” or another undescriptive error (however I am pretty sure it was that same old “Recipient not following you” error) but at that point I presumed TweetDeck had stopped working (as it had done the week before). To check that it was TweetDeck and not that twitter was having issues (which I doubted as I was still receiving Tweets on TweetDeck, which was what happened with the problem I had with TweetDeck the week before) I went on to Twitter and successfully send a Tweet.

From this I presumed it was the same problem as before and thought I would have to close TweetDeck and open it to rectify the problem (as I did last time) but before I could do that, I had to RT anything that had been loaded up in to TweetDeck already and reply to any tweets that were loaded and required a reply so I opened all those tweets on the web in multiple tabs, doing 5 at a time (so that my computer would not get filled with open tabs and end up confusing me) and I then clicked ReTweet on each and then confirmed it quickly changing between tabs in an attempt to get though it all quickly. When I returned to the first tweet that I ReTweeted to confirm that it had been ReTweeted, I could not see any sign that it had been successfully ReTweeted so clicked ReTweet again, and went to then next tab which had the same problem but by the time I reached the third one I realised something was up so clicked ReTweet then remained on that tab until I received an error message. After a few seconds of attempting to ReTweet, low and behold a message pops up at the top saying “whoops! Something went wrong, please refresh the page and try again”

Initially I did not associate this problem with the problem I was having on TweetDeck so refreshed all the open tabs and had a look if it had made any difference. It had not so I then tried again getting the same message each time! Since I was able to Tweet, I presumed there was a problem with the Twitter ReTweet function , but when I went to make a tweet asking about this, I was greeted with the following error:

"You are over the status update limit. Please wait a few hours and try again."

I was shocked by this and it resulted in me having to stop tweeting for over an hour! I totally understand why Rate Limits are in place but I find that is penalising the dedicate users of twitter. If you look at my recent TweetStats you will notice that I tweet over 2000 times a month and in my opinion this show true dedication to the service. In my opinion, Twitter need to improve their data centres to accommodate larger rate limits. If twitter require more funding to provide this to their users I would be more than willing to pay an additional fee to have raised API limits! Just to clarify, I do not think twitter should charge for their service but I think that those who want higher rate limits should be able to pay and receive this!

Twitter do currently offer Whitelisting which raises API calls to up to 20,000 a day but this is only for developers and applications in production and will only affect the API calls and not the Update Limit.

The one thing that has really got me confused on this situation is the actual guidelines on the limits. The Update and API Limits state that you are limited to “1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices (web, mobile web, phone, API, etc. )” However, if you look at my statistics for yesterday, you will see I was no where near this limit!

Tweets on 08/01/10

Admittedly, I was tweeting (well ReTweeting) at a rapid rate but if there is an additional limit which is on a per hour basis that would affect that, it should stated in the Update and API Limits.

I am still very confused about this but I have to live with this! Have any of you ever got that error? Please leave your comments