Archive 7/2006

Natalie Jost has a nice post about how to track who else is linking to your blog but also a question: "How to get this information out of Technorati?" The answer is a little bit more techie than it should have to be, but anyway:

Technorati is offering an API for getting exactly this kind of information out of it. What do you need for that?

1. An account on Technorati
2. An API key which you can get here

The last thing you need is a script that actually uses this API. How should it work? That absolutely depends on what you want. I personally prefer a small script that polls that data let's say once per day and stores the output inside of a PHP file that I could then simply integrate in whatever CMS I'm currently using.

According to next-gen.biz the worlds most famous video and computer gaming expo is facing drastic changes. Seems like the whole show isn't worth the money the publishers put into it each and every year.

However, we understand the larger exhibitors have jointly decided that the costs of the event do not justify the returns, generally measured in media exposure.next-gen.biz

... at least in the US. Seems like there is yet another great US-patent around, granting the Washington based company Blackboard basically exclusivity on e-learning platforms. [Michael Feldstein] has a nice quote from that patent which seems to be written general enough to threaten applications like Moodle, Claroline or "Your School/University's e-learning platform".

But since the patent was filed in June 2000 I don't think this will hold that long thanks to some probably existing Prior Art claims as Seb Schmoller mentioned on his blog. He also mentioned, that the patent seems to be pending in the EU ... good luck with that

I'm currently evaluating FreeBSD as some kind of alternative to Gentoo for one of my machines I naturally also installed VIM right away. A little bit later I noticed a quite annoying problem: In the upper left corner the string "25h" which seemed to be the rest of some loose escape sequence. The same string also got appended to the rendering of any character I wrote.

As you might have noticed by now: I like the idea of having a question of the day. But since the questions posted on Vox are normally not really tech-related, it is quite hard for me to use them without getting on your blacklist. So I will try to just pick those, that I can answer in a techy way

What or who is your favorite product mascot? Why? questions.vox.com

Just got slapped around by Patrick by yet another mem. Since it is German, I will write this post in English and German, esp. because of those people that will be next in the chain

The first thing I read this morning, was Marshall Kirkpatrick's post on TechCrunch informing the world about Google's new idea of becoming a SourceForge competitor. Since I'm one of those people who experienced quite a lot of problems with SourceForge in the past, I went over there and created a small project (mainly for testing purpose) right away.

The registration of a project is very straight forward. First of all you need to have a Google account (GMail or whatever). After you've logged in, simply hit the "Create a new project" link, give your project a name, short description, description and license (tags are optional) and you're done.

This Monday I once again was in that dangerous phase where you shouldn't let me near online shops. But since no one was there to hold me back, I bought another game for the PSP: Field Commander. Field Commander was actually one of those games why I wasn't all that upset when I got my PSP and noticed, that besides Wipeout Pure there weren't any interesting games out there. But many, many months and at least 2 delays later, I nearly forgot that game until I saw articles about it all over the gaming sites like 1up and IGN.

IGN just reported, that when you finish version 1.01 of the LocoRoco demo, you will now get a password to access some special content on the PlayStation site probably as some kind of thank you... Ey, I have that game, and I also want to have these goodies Now I'm just curious if you also get something like that, when finishing the actual game.

When I heard and read about New Super Mario Bros a few months ago I was really exited. While I never played through Super Mario Bros 1-3, I loved Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, and basically all the Gameboy installments of the series.