Now that the fuss over Bing‘s launch is already over (that didn’t last long, did it?), what is the future for it? According to this article‘s source, Bing had a 11.1% share of the US Search market. Microsoft apparently haven’t hit above 10% since 2007, so that could be seen as quite a positive thing. But Google seems pretty confident this is just a blip on the radar and they are unconcerned, and that could potentially be true.
I’m no expert by any means, but it will be interesting to see how this pans out.
Whats more, if Microsoft really love the Bing name, will they start replacing all the Windows Live products after replacing Live Search? Will we start using Bing Messenger, Bing Hotmail and so on? Will they do a last minute re-brand of Windows 7 to be Windows Bing? That would be quite funny…
It looks like we’ve taken another step towards never leaving our houses. It’s nothing new I know, but Luke reminded me yesterday of it’s existance – Microsoft’s rather impressive stab at mapping software à la Google Maps.
Instead of Google’s angle of just taking pictures of everything, Microsoft are going down the less intrusive route of just making 3D models of all the buildings. When I last saw this last, it was much less impressive, but looking at it today, you could almost say it’s better than Google. Although having said that, Google Earth has this same 3D view, but in a standalone app.
My opinion though, is that they both have their merits – Google Street View is pretty cool, and so is this 3D view… I suppose it depends what you want it for.
Regardless, with competition from these, and probably other mapping software, combined with online shopping, online chat, video gaming, home offices and a whole host of other software, it’s looking more and more likeley that I’ll never have to get off my bum ever again.
As we’re off skiing tomorrow (wahey!), I was setting up Hannah’s laptop with Eclipse PDT, and after installing Subclipse, I decided to have a go at setting up Mylyn to use my Trac install with the Mylyn Trac connector. It all went well until I tried adding the Trac repository, where it decided that it was invalid. A quick Google revealed the general concensus that Trac 0.11 (the most recent Trac version) doesn’t work with the Mylyn plug-in.
Thankfully, it turns out that this isn’t the case. It was a simple case of running:
easy_install http://trac-hacks.org/svn/xmlrpcplugin/trunk/
Then restarting apache:
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Now go into your Trac admin page, and enable XMLRPCSystem, XMLRPCWeb and all plug-ins with “.ticket” in the module name.
Now in Mylyn when adding your Task repository, specify the XML-RPC (rev 1950) access type along with the rest of your settings, and it’s as easy peasy as that.
There – I told you I’d blog something soon!
I’ve been having a look at Adobe AIR this evening, just to get an idea of what it’s all about. The first impression I get from reading the website is that it’s a pseudo-browser-come-Flash player. Which isn’t really that new, or exciting. Reading their Browser vs. Desktop app comparison, I’m not sure they’re really selling it well to people like me. Let me start with the way I see technology moving forward at the moment. There’s a slowly growing movement towards Netbooks and cloud computing, and I see that as a really dynamic way of moving forward. The need for powerful clients are hugely diminished, and the power is left at the hands of other people who can afford to buy huge datacentres to power widely used apps like Gmail and Facebook, as well as office tools like Google Documents. There’s movements towards putting everything on the web, to the extent of some people experimenting – and even making a living out of – webtops, such as eyeOS and other similar products. Personally, I think having an “OS” on the web is going a little too far, but there is huge potential for moving to only using web apps.
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Has your host got allow_url_fopen = Off and they’re too stubborn to turn it on? Got this error?
Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /url/to/file.php on line 62
It’s a pain for writing cool API clients that add cool functionality into your website, like using the Last.fm API, Amazon Associates Web Services, or the YouTube API, because they all use XML based services that you have to retrieve.
The simplest way is to use file_get_contents($url);, but that doesn’t work if allow_url_fopen = Off.
The next simplest way is to use libcurl, which although is very useful, has given me a lot of grief throughout my programming life, so is sort of my arch nemesis. I tried it on 1and1 trying to access AAWS, but it didn’t work anyway.
The last solution is my hacky little method to draw wget results into the script. This method is probably the slowest as we’re calling an external binary on a shared web server, but it works.
$url = "http://api.somesite.com/rest/xml?query=string&goes=here";
$user_agent = "My Awesome API Client v1.0";
ob_start();
passthru("wget -U '{$user_agent}' -q -O - '{$url}'");
$response = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
$xml_document = simplexml_load_string($response);
