Archive for May, 2011

Where did I meet you?

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

a vcard importer for AndroidOverview

A bit of Android code to add comments to contacts imported from vCards to remind you how you know the person behind the vCard.

Background

Remember poken? (Actually, “remember” isn’t fair, because they’re still around. I’ve just not seen them in an age.)

If you don’t, they were key-fob-sized gadgets. When you met someone, you tapped your poken against theirs, and it would handle exchanging contact details. They were a geeky way to exchange business cards.

They suffered from a bootstrap problem, in that, finding anyone else with a poken to tap against often proved a challenge. But I digress…

What I loved about them was that it didn’t only store the contact details, but details about when you met.

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Joining Watson

Friday, May 27th, 2011

I’ve gotten into a habit of using this space to record when I change jobs. It’s kind of useful – for example, a quick search here is an easy way for me to check when I left the WebSphere Process Server team.

With that fairly flimsy excuse out of the way, this is a post to say that I’m moving again!

For the last few years, I’ve been working as an Emerging Technologies Specialist. I’ve explained what that means before, but essentially we try out emerging technologies to solve customer problems, as one of the ways to inform the development of future IBM software products. My projects are typically short-term, rapid prototyping.

It’s meant that I’ve got to try out some very cool technologies including some fascinating things from our Research labs. But the most inspiring thing I’ve seen come out of Research for many years has been IBM Watson.

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Your Google Latitude history as a heatmap

Sunday, May 8th, 2011

Overview

I made a web tool that draws a heatmap to show where you’ve been if you upload your history file from Google Latitude.

What I made

See a heatmap of where I’ve spent the most time at heatmapforlatitude.appspot.com.

If you like it, you can upload a Latitude history file and make a heatmap of your own.

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Happy Birthday to me

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

XBox cake

Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me…

Secret Cinema

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

Last Saturday was our wedding anniversary, so to celebrate I took Amy to London for Secret Cinema.

I wanted to share what we thought, but as the current Secret Cinema is still going, I’ll try and do it without giving away any specifics which would spoil it for people who haven’t been yet!

If you want a real review, reviews of previous Secret Cinemas are good for getting the idea

In a nutshell, Secret Cinema is going to watch a film, without knowing what film you’re going to watch or where you will be watching it. But that doesn’t really explain why it’s so much fun…

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