James Simmonds

I'll let the videos speak for themselves (2nd link below).....but this has got to be the smash hit present for this Christmas. Launches 18th August, available from HMV for £299...you can even pre-order it now. http://ardrone.parrot.com/parrot-ar-drone/en http://ardrone.parrot.com/parrot-ar-drone/en/how-does-it-work

I've been VERY critical of Orange lately. They sweet talked me into 18 months of mobile hell with a "you don't want one of those iPhones, here's a great deal on a Windows Mobile that's just as good" patter... Their website is completely mental and their client "portal" even more so...it's a self-service thing that's never working and to cap it all cos I never used it (only once in a blue moon) they removed my account... All is forgiven though... They announced the "register your iPhone4 interest" across all the major uk carriers earlier in the month. That day I headed over to the Orange site - haha, there it is, a banner saying click here..so I did and got a standard ASP.NET error page, it looked like no default document on the site..what if I try adding /register.aspx to the url? Bingo - I'm in and have my "interest" registered. Today I get an email from them saying as I'm a good customer that's ju...

So, 10 days since getting my iPad 64GB/3G and what of it? Well the only previous Apple product I own is an iPod 3rd gen - it's battered and bruised and not been touched for about 18 months now but I'm sure it will fire up just fine if I tried it. I've never had an iPhone and barely played with one - 18 months ago when I decided I wanted one Orange talked me out of it with an amazing airtime deal (going from 120 to 1200 minutes a month for £4 less) combined with an HTC Diamond windows mobile device. Based on my experience with the HTC - I've been very very very disappointed with it - the touch screen and gesture recognition are very poor and it's unbearably frustrating using it...so when the jumbo iPhone - the iPad was announced I was thinking that this might finally be the start of my Apple journey...why though? Well I read quite a lot of books so iBooks looked useful A lot of technical info is available in PDF format so portable reading is a winner Read a...

One of the big topics on our project is SEO - luckily we have an SEO ninja called Glyn and he's going to be revealing and rounding up some of the SEO magic that makes or breaks a site. Check out Glyn's blog for more useful SEO information. I've been doing my own reading and can recommend this book - ok, it's a year old which is a looonnng time in web terms but it's got a good approach and walks you through things very clearly.

I'm working on some personal projects that involve geolocation, mapping & location based smarts - so this use of Google Maps is sheer brilliance ! Ed's CV has 954 hits as of 13:21 9th Mar 2010 - let's check back on this number later on - this story is sweeping the blog-o-sphere...I'd expect a couple of zero's on the end shortly. Update : 13,453 hits @22:25 10th Mar 2010

I'm pleased to make public the fruits of my late nights.... FluentGeoApi ! I previously mentioned that I am working on a private/personal project - well it's got an element of geolocation to it and after a bit of internet research I found GeoAPI.com . In order to interact with GeoAPI I decided to write a fluent style wrapper over the top of it and I've just released v1.0.0.0, a .Net 3.5 C# library to take the pain out of making REST calls and dealing with the GeoJson wire format used by GeoAPI. It's not 100% coverage of the API but I plan on getting there ASAP...however I've implemented Create/Modify/Delete a user entity, Simple and Keyword Search which is enough to release it. If you are working with geolocation data/features in your .Net application I would check out GeoAPI.com - I've been really impressed with what if offers (and if you hit the api < 20,000 times a day it won't cost you a penny!) - hopefully you'll also consider using FluentGe...