After years of searching the best Macbook Pro cooling solution I have come across is a glass topped desk sitting directly underneath a refrigerated cooling unit. That keeps the temp down – and keeps the room cool as well.

Possibly not the most appropriate solution for cooling your laptop, but I’ll take whatever works.

I’ve spent the last two days at the beach which has been a welcome break from what should have been a rather relaxed start to the new year.

When you are forced to take a holiday from your “holiday” you know that you are still too connected to work.

Definitely something I will be working on this year.

Twitter is such a wonderful service for discovering new things. The other day I came across a website called Blue Lounge, a company building very cool products to solve common, every-day problems.

From their cableyoyo for keeping your cables tidy through to their Cool Feet for keeping your laptop elevated off the desk for cooling.

Sexy design meets common problems. I am definitely looking at picking up some of this gear. If anyone is already using these products I would love to hear about your experiences with them.

In true form I haven’t posted in over a month, the past weeks have been non-stop and even when I wanted to blog I lacked either the time or energy to sit down and think about it. Christmas and New Year has been a welcome break from work, even if only for a few hours here and there. 

2009 is set to be an interesting year given the financial crisis and the inauguration of Barack Obama in the coming weeks. 

I think 2009 will be a good year for technology companies, especially those working in web services, as companies withdraw from print advertising and seek more measurable options they will increasingly turn to the web to reach their audiences. This is not going to help the print industry, given an accelerated decline in advertising, unless there is more effort put into discovering new revenue streams and changing their business models. This was a key discussion during Asian Publishers Conference in August ‘08 and certainly rings true now. 

Only time will tell.

Well I must say I am impressed. The upgrade process from 2.6.3 to 2.7 beta3 was as simple as the document stated. It took under 2 minutes, was flawless and once I copied across any custom modifications I had made everything was up and running again. 

The new administration layout is very simple and user friendly. I prefer it over the 2.6 admin interface. The reorganisation of the new post screen is very nice and shows a maturing product that is continuing to consider how to improve the usability of the interfaces. This is certainly something eZ Systems should be considering more, especially in the case of the administration panel. 

The core upgrade functionality is very nice, when I clicked on the upgrade button it notified me there was an upgrade available, prompted for appropriate details and proceeded to update the installation. This obviously causes a few issues if you have made manual changes to your core files and isn’t suitable for everyone, but a nice feature nonetheless. 

I look forward to seeing what 2.8 holds in the future.

I decided to download the iPhone app for Wordpress and give it a whirl. I am writing this blog post from my phone so lets see how it goes. It certainly looks and responds like an app should, and backs this up with stability.

The interface design has been well thought out and typing a blog on the screen isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, provided you mind your spelling.

The photo interface is nice and the fact you can take a pic on the fly or pull one from your library is great. The preview tab told me it couldn’t access my theme but the default one looked fine. I will have to look into why it can’t access mine.

I don’t know when I will find a need to blog from my phone but then many people said the same thing about twitter. In any case I now have the app and I think it is here to stay.

Well it seems the blogosphere is filled with news regarding the release of SearchWiki yesterday, a new social user experience approach from Google. 

I can’t say I am all that surprised with the move, it certainly is bold for Google to make such a dramatic change to the look of its search results, but with the growing traction of OpenSocial and Google’s understanding of socially driven content with the likes of Blogger it makes sense. 

Hell, it makes sense anyway. Google exists simply because they provide the most appropriate search results to queries made by their users, and whilst their fancy algorithms and thousands of engineers have gone a long way toward providing accurate results, there are still things that remain very difficult to cater for through programming.

Whilst the current release allows you to only influence your own search results, with comments being available to all logged-in users, Google has not ruled out the idea of using such influence in future versions of their algorithms. User influenced rankings adds another dimension to the search results hopefully providing increased accuracy, the same thing that has gotten Google to it’s current 75-90% market share depending on country. 

I welcome the change, it’s something that has been tried by other startups recently, but they all lack the clout Google has in the market, not to mention its index of over 120 billion pages. Any search start up that can’t provide such a comprehensive index of searchable results is obviously going to find it hard to compete, but I shouldn’t diverge. 

Congratulations to Google continuing to deliver technology to the masses, whether it’s through innovation or simply implementing someone else’s idea with your corporate clout it’s good to see that my search results will continue to improve.

It certainly isn’t surprising to see that HDCP has managed to find it’s way into Apple products, although I highly doubt this is something Apple would be endorsing at this point in time. Wired has also recently covered this.

Following the shipping of the new MacBook’s the Apple forums have lit up with outrage from customers purchasing and renting content from the iTunes store, only to find they cannot play it on external monitors or projectors due to the HDCP supported DisplayPort.

It is unfair on consumers to be expected to fork out for new displays to discourage copy protection, all this measure will do is bring new workarounds to exploit and disable HDCP or simply drive what would have been legitimate purchasers of content back to P2P file sharing and ripping. 

The studios just don’t get it.

I rolled out Wordpress for my blog yesterday and migrated the post data using the in-built RSS import tool. Overall the migration was smooth and easy, there are still some templating issues I need to resolve on this site, but overall I am enjoying Wordpress despite it’s terrible template language. 

The administration interface is very polished and easy to use, it makes writing easy and enjoyable. The iPhone app for Wordpress is sexy and works, but I couldn’t imagine writing out entire blog posts on my iPhone unless I was lost in the desert or extremely bored. 

I am a strong believer in using the right tool for the job, and whilst I still deploy a number of blogs on eZ Publish, to use it purely for blogging involves a lot of work which has already been undertaken in Wordpress. 

In any case this will allow me to purely get back to blogging and spend more time on more important things than trying to maintain my blog. It will be interesting to see how my thoughts on this change over the coming weeks.

Well I can’t say I am overly surprised at this given the recent DMCA actions. It is of course a very scary move that sets a precedent no one particularly wants set.

“

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

“

This should be considered a warning to any web startups considering storing user and usage data. How will your users feel if you are ordered to turn over your records of their actions?

It does however raise a much more important question… why would you want to keep storing that data?

RFID socks… the future of tomorrow must involve RFID socks. It is a match made in heaven. Quite often mankind has managed to apply the technological advancements to the most incorrect of applications. In this case RFID socks will solve a problem that has plagued us our entire lives… where did that sock go?

Yes, it’s my first post on this blog, even as I continue to put the style together and think about what other information I might want to provide. I must admit I have been relatively lax with this blogging concept, and whilst bestowing its virtues for all my clients I never found time to consider doing it myself.
As I write this I am laying in bed, have been here all week infact, suffer the effects of the bad strep bugs as they do nasty things to my throat. But all is well, I still have my laptop and the internet so the work can continue in somepart, without the need to visit the office.