I have decided that I’m going to get everything prepped and then rebuild PlayerFind over the Christmas break into Umbraco – I’ve been playing with membership scenarios in Umbraco over the last few days and I’m pretty sure with a little bit of fiddling I think I can come up with a good base which will allow me to easily develop and administer PF next year. More...

I got an email from my Granddad in New Zealand over the weekend with some amazing photography, so I thought I would share it here.  The images are by a photographer called ‘Clark Little’ and the email came with this little bit of text and these amazing photos

“These incredible images of waves were taken by the #1 photographer of surf:  Clark Little.  He has dedicated his life to photographing the waves and has published a selection of the the best images of his career.  He captures magical moments inside the "tube", as surfers say” More...

Just like a sheep, I have been very keen on having a play with the cloud computing ‘buzz’ that everyone seems to be throwing around.  I have heard only great things about using cloud computing to host your applications, things like “Great for start ups”, “Inexpensive way of developers launching their new apps”, “Completely scalable” and so on. 

I currently have two dedicated Win2003 servers with 1&1, basic models with only 1GB of ram and a pretty useless processor.  But you get unlimited bandwidth, and use of their mail server which is pretty good but the problem comes if you start to max one out you’re stuffed!  Its either get another server, or try to find the best way of spreading the load across both servers.  My thoughts were that I would have a play with EC2 and if I can get it setup, I’d look at switching some smaller sites over to my EC2 instance run it for a month and if all went well look at keeping a single 1&1 server and a single EC2 instance knowing I can easily give my EC2 instance more resources if needed. More...

We are looking at doing a few viral videos within the company over the next few months, so thought I would have a look around and invest in a little handheld HD camera.  After shopping around I found some great reviews for the Sanyo Xacti CG10, and even better found Amazon offering it for only £149.99!!  That's right… £149.99 for an HD Camera.

Well thought for that price I’ll give it a whirl, as even if it is shit I can just use it at home to video the kids playing footy or Tennis and its still a bargain.  But I have to say, for a cheap camcorder the HD video is just astounding.  Don’t get me wrong, its not like watching The Dark Knight when I play the vids back on my laptop but it really is impressive.  AND I haven’t even started tweaking any of the advanced settings, I just opened the box, turned it on, selected HD format and off I went.

I seriously recommend anyone wanting a nice looking, small, cheap HD camcorder to get it, you won’t be disappointed.  Only thing I will say is the zoom while recording is a bit dodgy, and I bought a 16GB SD Card as it DOESN’T come with one and you’ll use up the memory very quickly.

EDIT:  They seem to be going even cheaper on eBay!!

I know I am probably about a year too late, but I have just stumbled on http://stackoverflow.com

Man what a totally amazing site!!  I asked a (Really dumb) question that I have wanted to know the answer to for a while and 58 seconds later I got two excellent answers – I’m just amazed I have only just found this.

If like me you struggle to get your head round some of the more advanced ASP.NET stuff you see people like Haack and Mr Gu doing then just ask on http://stackoverflow.com!!  Excellent resource and a really well written site, some very clever features and I think very clever algorithms for matching questions.

January last year I was asking round my friends if someone would be interested in having a few games of Tennis so I could get back into playing, but alas not one was interested! So I hunted around and found the only way I was going to find someone local would be to join a club which a) I just didn't have the time to go all the time on a certain day and b) would cost me quite a bit of money. 

So I had the idea of building a site where I could find a Tennis partner, I then saw the bigger picture and started mapping out a site that you could find another player for any sport or activity!  Well soon after I fired up Visual Studio and jumped straight in...  Shit... After about a week I realised how much work would be involved to make it work, as the search had to be good, site easy to use and most important needed to be a mini social network to make people want to come back! More...

I am currently revamping ASPLD to version 3.0 which will mainly focus on letting the software become more of an Article directory than just a link directory - In my searching I stumbled across this list, which I thought I would post up for my reference

......................

http://biz-whiz.com/

http://ezine-articles-planet.com/

http://ezineprime.hubprime.com/

http://freezinesite.com/

http://garticles.theguruonline.biz/ More...

I have just found a great post from John Sheehan who has created a screencast on setting up windows in Amazon EC2

You can view the video here

I have been wondering about it recently, and really glad the community is growing and people are willing to do these kind of tutorials - It really helps people like me a lot.

I was chatting to a friend the other day and we started to reminisce about all the old cool TV programs we use to watch - And how cool the vehicles were in them (Then saying the old... Well they don't make them like they use to!).  Anyway, I thought I would start Googling some of these shows and watching them on the old skool TV channels

OH MY GOD! My memories of these great vehicles is a lie!!  To convince you really how shit some of the icon shows looked, I thought I would remind you of a few below More...