I just came across this site yesterday (Wordle) while looking at an interesting twitter stats site, amazing what you can do with a bit of xml and some imagination.  This site takes your blog or twitter feed and analyses the word count, then creates you an image based on the frequency of the words used...

Once you've created you Wordle you can then save it to their gallery for world to marvel at, this is mine

The strange thing is that this post will have changed my wordle now as new words will have been added, but then that's the fluid nature of blogging I guess.

My Twitter Wordle is there too

Merry Christmas Everyone and a Happy 2009 :0)

I saw this little gem this morning, it's pure genius.. excellent time wasting.

Just when I thought I'd got C# syntax sorted, I come across a statement which looks like some sort of alien script language.  So I decided to look it up and see what it's all about. The statement is what's known as the ternary operator. Simply put it's a way of doing an if else statement in one line of code. Making it more readable and I assume more efficient.

Lets say for example we have a function which returns a dataTable, in some cases the dataTable may have a null value, and trying return the it would cause an exception. So we would have to return null in this case.  The usual syntax might go something like.

if (dt == null)

   return dt;

else

  return null;

But using the ternary operator we can distill this down to one line:

return (dt == null) ? null : dt;

A lot nicer, once you understand it.  I believe this also works in JavaScript, but I haven't tested it.

Thanks for my friend Kirstin for this post but looks like the hunt is on for who is going to be the next Doctor.

The BBC now has an official story on David Tennant's departure:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7698539.stm

The rumor mill has kicked into high gear, and if you're a betting person, here are some published odds, courtesy of Outpost Gallifrey:

WILLIAM HILL ODDS ON NEXT DOCTOR (30th Oct 2008)

5/2 David Morrissey

3/1 Patterson Joseph

6/1 James McAvoy

7/1 James Nesbitt, Robert Carlyle

8/1 John Simm, Rhys Ifans

12/1 Anthony Head

14/1 Alan Davies, Jason Statham

16/1 Nigel Harman, Bill Nighy

25/1 Daniel Radcliffe, Burn Gorman

33/1 Stephen Fry, John Barrowman

20/1 Next Doctor To Be Female

50/1 Christopher Eccleston

Other rumors are out for a whole lot of others, including Catherine Tate, Peter Purves, Sean Pertwee, and so on.  We can expect to see probably every male actor in Britain between the ages of 30 and 70 being suggested, and quite a few of the female ones as well.

To futher add something interesting to the mix Kirstin did some calculations for us: 

Ok I didn't want to do this because basically I'm only perpetuating a quite pathetic story, but here goes.  The number of stupid people who jumped on the shock bus (band wagon) last week regarding Jonathan Ross & Russell Brand, just goes to prove how stupid the general public can be.  And frankly I'm quite scared that mob mentality is still alive and well in this day and age.  How on earth did this story end up on the front pages and headline stories, over 2 weeks after it was first broadcast?  Especially in a week when:

• There was a massive earthquake in Pakistan killing 160 people
  
• A human catastrophe on biblical scales is going on in The Congo
• Car bombs go off in Spain, Croatia & Quetta killing innocent people

It just seems to me that we are spoon fed rubbish by the media like children, and we get upset by what we're told to get upset by (right on cue).  Why can't people see or are we just becoming headless children living our lives as we're told to?

Wake up you sheep - because of the thoughless action of 30,000+ idiots radio 2 have lost people who have brought happyness into millions of peoples lives.  Lets face it Andrew Sachs is happy with his apology, his grand daughter from what I've seen isn't really in any position to be throwing stones and the people involved have admitted they over stepped the mark.

So can we all get on with our lives? 

I've just been asked to find a solution to stop users choosing dates in the past in a calendarextender control.  After using a little google-phoo, I found a couple of solutions which involved extending the extender itself.  Altering the calendar.js then recompiling it and putting it back into your solution.  That just seems a bit excessive to me.  So I got to thinking couldn't I just use some in page JavaScript to trap the date entered. The Solution was pretty simple:

First we add a text box and a calendarextender:

<asp:TextBox ID="txtDate" MaxLength="10" runat="server" ReadOnly="True"></asp:TextBox>
<cc1:CalendarExtender ID="CalendarExtender1" runat="server" Format="dd/MM/yyyy" TargetControlID="txtDate" OnClientDateSelectionChanged="checkDate"> </cc1:CalendarExtender>  

you may notice that the CalendarExtender has an event attached (checkDate) - this is the JavaScript function you want it to call when ever you select a new date, add this function the top of your aspx page:  

<script type="text/javascript">
    function checkDate(sender,args)
    {
    //create a new date var and set it to the
    //value of the senders selected date
    var selectedDate = new Date();
    selectedDate = sender._selectedDate;
    //create a date var and set it's value to today
    var todayDate = new Date();
    var mssge = "";

    if(selectedDate < todayDate)
     {
        //set the senders selected date to today
        sender._selectedDate = todayDate;
        //set the textbox assigned to the cal-ex to today
        sender._textbox.set_Value(sender._selectedDate.format(sender._format));
        //alert the user what we just did and why
        alert("Warning! - Date Cannot be in the past");
     }
    }
    </script>

 Simple and the nice thing is it's reusable for all the calendarextenders on your page, just add the checkDate function to your other extenders.  

Happy Coding

Personally I love mashups the idea of taking two or more datasources and putting them together to give a brand new application seems such a good idea.  I've just come across this application which takes the whole idea of mashups to another level.

The SekaiCamera takes information from your iphones camera and using your location feeds you information about the area you're looking at as tags, so for example say you were on a high street you could look at your phones screen and it would tag each shop with information about products, prices, etc. Or highlight events or online photographes taken in that location from say Flickr.

It would be amazing to take this idea one step further and have it as a HUD display on your sunglasses but I guess I'm getting into Minority Report territory here.  I wonder how long it will be before marketeers realise the potential of this application to drive people to their store with offers etc.  

Microsoft has ‘had discussions’ with studio, say sources

Brothers In Arms developer Gearbox has been approached to create Halo 4 for Microsoft, according to Hollywood sources.

An insider told Variety that the Gearbox had “definitely” had conversations with Microsoft about the project – and was “very excited” by the prospect. However, they confirmed that no deal had been agreed as yet.

The rumour first kicked off yesterday, after a the Official Xbox Magazine in the US pointed the finger at Gearbox as the new developer of the title.

Bungie created every previous Halo title as part of Microsoft, but became independant in October last year

A woman in Croatia died in 1966 while watching television in her apartment, and was just now discovered.

Hedviga Golik made herself a cup of tea and sat down to watch some television in her hometown of Zagreb, Croatia. Sadly, she died in her chair. This was in 1966. She was just found, 42 years later, in her time capsule mausoleum where she's been sitting ever since. She never finished her tea.

What's absurd is that she was in fact reported missing, but somehow no one ever checked her apartment, which leads me to believe no one checked anywhere. I mean, where else do you look for someone when they're missing? I don't understand it. Her neighbors apparently just assumed she moved out of her apartment, and she was finally found when the police broke in to figure out who owned the place.

A police spokesman said: "When officers went there, they said it was like stepping into a place frozen in time. The cup she had been drinking tea from was still on a table next to the chair she had been sitting in and the house was full of things no one had seen for decades. Nothing had been disturbed for decades, even though there were more than a few cobwebs in there."

 Daily Record