The week in words.
It’s coming to the end of the week and month so I thought I would update you on the week I’ve been having.
If you have been talking to me recently then you will know I’m trying to re-design my website; as with many designers, I’ve grown to dislike the current design, it wasn’t bad for my version of the site, I think it needs something more professional and has more dynamic features which I’ve been adding this past week.
Tuesday was presentation day; Rich Willars & I, as part of our “Dynamic Data Interchange” module at Staffordshire University had to give a presentation on XML’s role in Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. I think it went quite well and we made a nice little Web 2.0 mashup which can be seen in the labs. It basically takes an RSS feed generated by iTunes which grabs the most downloaded songs on the iTunes store and using AJAX goes off to YouTube and then grabs the top 5 videos from the search which matches the the title of the track which can be watched in a lightbox style environment. At the same time it pops off to last.fm and grabs recommended tracks to the video that has been selected.
As my housemates and I are very big fans of the BBC’s Dragon Den television programme, We were very interested in watching Peter Jones’ new venture Stateside in “American Inventor” from Simon Cowell’s production team which brings you X Factor. We knew that it was going to be more X Factor and less Dragon’s Den but take nothing away from it, we have never laughed so much at other people’s crazy ideas for making themselves the “next great American Inventor”. With a panel of 2 American entrepreneurs, Peter Jones & George the “Lean, Mean Grilling Machine” Foreman on the show; I solely believe George Foreman was chosen for his pure amazement of any invention no matter how rubbish or ineffective and you are guaranteed at least one yes from the panel. The one we enjoyed the most has been put on YouTube by the guy himself so please enjoy as much as we did by watching this video.
Wednesday night has signalled the possible end for my iPod Classic. I received it as a Christmas present and have come to it today while it was charging on my laptop and have found that it had frozen which has happen before on my old generation iPod nano so followed the normal instructions given on the Apple iPod support website but to no avail, it seems to be in a constantly loop of showing me their logo screen and then making a flicking sound and then showing me the apple screen yet again.
I am going home for the weekend so hopefully the good people at the Apple Store Hull will be able to help me out and get my iPod up and working again as it one of my essentials of everyday life.
Thanks for reading
Tags: American Inventor, Dragon's Den, George Foreman, iPod Classic, mashup, Peter Jones, Reboot Loop, Semantic Web, Web2.0, XML