As a break from my contract work, I took the W3Schools PHP Certification. I didn’t do any revision, which probably wasn’t wise. It was a bit more difficult than I thought, but I passed still.

Volunteers on the OLPC project have developed a low-cost heart rate monitor that can be plugged into the XO laptop, making steps towards an affordable monitoring system for hospitals in developing countries.

For more information on the development, see the: OLPC Goldenstate project. People in the US can currently buy the sensor here; unfortunately there is no international shipping yet in place.

If you use Google calendar, and you’ve got an iPhone, or Windows Mobile phone like me, then you’ll be pleased to hear about the new Google Sync for Mobile tool just brought out into beta by Google. There were various ways to sync Google Calender events to Windows Mobile devices before, but nothing officially supported. Google uses an ActiveSync server to push the events to your phone, making things a lot easier. To quote:

Google Sync for Mobile is available for most mobile phones. On iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices Google Sync enables over-the-air synchronization of Google Calendar and Google Contacts to the built-in Calendar and Address Book applications on your phone. On most other mobile phones, Google Sync enables wireless synchronization of Google Contacts to the built-in Address Book application.

I did something out of the ordinary this Christmas. I bought an “XO” laptop for a child in a third world country. I also bought an XO laptop for myself, so I can develop software designed to be distributed to the 1 million+ XO laptops out there in the third world.

The laptop runs a Linux operating system, with an special interface programmed almost exclusively in Python. Most apps, called ‘activities’, run as python programs. This is ideal for me, as I enjoy hacking around in python, and Linux is – of course – very familiar to me.

I hope to use the laptop to contribute to health informatics applications that allow the laptop to be used in hospitals where there are no existing comparable health systems. If you wish to get involved in this project and give something back, here in the UK you can now order your own laptop from Amazon.co.uk.

I’ve started my own blog consulting business, helping people setup their own blogs, either for their company or for personal use. It’s called The Blog Factory, see the site for more information on what we do. In a nutshell, we can:

1) Setup and customise WordPress blogs.
2) Design custom WordPress themes.
3) Develop tailored WordPress plugins.
4) Host the blogs on our servers.
5) Use our SEO expertise to improve traffic to the blog.