Tech News

I've just got back from the Champagne Sports Resort in the Drakensberg which was the location for the South African regional finals for the 2009 Imagine Cup. The global competition is sponsored by Microsoft who very kindly put us up for the 1st - 3rd December at the wonderful Champagne Sports Resort. Many universities from around the country were represented by one or more teams with the final winning team being flown to Egypt in June 2009....

Yay! I’m finally a “serious blogger” according to Paul. (Boost Your Blog Traffic). I've added Feedburner, joined Technorati, del.icio.us etc and submitted my blogs to a couple of other networks. I've been reading for the past day or so on how to increase traffic to blogs and needless to say there are tons of different opinions. But while sifting through all the information out there, I eventually came upon a few people saying roughly the same thing. I'm not going to get into what's been said already except for emphasizing that...

Technorati Prof...

Things have been really hectic over the past few weeks but at least I've got time to breathe again. We presented our beta version of the Radio Station System project on Friday which went fairly well. Apart from one problem with reporting all went smoothly and everybody seemed impressed. It never ends though - so now I'm trying to implement dynamically changeable look and feels for the portal component of the system.That brings me to my biggest problem with C# - Exception handling. Coming from a Java background, I've got so used...

"A 'Frankenrobot' with a biological brain" - They've built a robot that is controlled using a living brain. Amazing! LinkIn our quest for maybe the ultimate goal in Computer Science, strong AI, they've wired a living brain to hardware sensors and . I don't know if this will be the start of the biological supercomputer as there are many ethical issues regarding this, but maybe it'll shed some light on the functioning of our own brain. It may also lead to some interesting discoveries or development in the field of Artificial...

"London - Spending on online ads overtook advertising on mainstream TV in Britain last year, growing 40% to £2.8bn and accounting for 19% of all advertising, UK regulator Ofcom said.""Online advertising spending was dominated by paid-for search, in which sponsored links appear as internet search results. Paid-for search accounted for £1.6bn pounds, with the rest split equally between display and classified ads. ""In its annual report on Britain's £51bn communications industry, the watchdog found that Britons spent four times...

Google has some awesome tools available and free for use. Firstly as most people know, there's Gmail - 6GB of space and growing, POP and SMTP access etc. Most importantly for me, unobtrusive advertising. Yahoo on the other hand has tons of irrelevant and annoying advertising. So, Google 1; Yahoo 0. Then there's iGoogle - a nice portal which can be used to house all your bookmarks, email, calendar (another nice product), RSS news feeds etc. Something that I recently discovered while trying to submit my blog to Google's index...

It's been a bit crazy over the past two weeks. We presented an Alpha version of our project today. The project is a system which can be used to run and manage an entire radio station. The system includes management of the station's music store, broadcasting, inbound and outbound communication via SMS and email, show recording and a portal. The presentation went well with no bugs appearing and no crashes, which is always great! After the presentation, the comment was made that we had gone beyond the basic Alpha system requirements...

It's been a while - Much has happened. Well, I've been doing a bit of work in C# . Ughh.... I hate it. Ok, maybe it's a bit too strong, but I can honestly say there are things I don't like about C# (Visual Studio is pretty dam good though.) Well this is maybe for another blog entry.I'm trying to complete my SMS gateway but I'm stuck with the fact that the library that I was going to use is incompatible with my Samsung phone, and I'm really not going to download the AT command spec for my phone and fix it. So I've found another...