http://www.davidcraddock.net Thoughts on technology from by the sea. Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:49:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en For some reason, under ubuntu-server, my default MySQL 5 character encoding was latin1. This caused no end of problems with grabbing data from the web, which was not neccesarily in latin1 characterset. If you are ever in this situation, I suggest you handle everything as UTF-8. That means setting the following ... http://www.davidcraddock.net/2008/07/06/character-encoding-fix-with-php-mysql-5-and-ubuntu-server/ I've been hacking away at BrightonSound.com and I've been looking for a way of automatically sourcing biographical information from artists, so that visitors are presented with more information on the event. The Songbird media player plugin 'mashTape' draws upon a number of web services to grab artist bio, event listings, youtube ... http://www.davidcraddock.net/2008/06/18/scraping-artists-bios-off-of-wikipedia/ I passed the adExcellence exam first time.. woo! It wasn't that difficult really. "David Craddock of iCrossing is accredited as an official Microsoft adExcellence Member. A Microsoft adExcellence Member has completed comprehensive online training on managing Microsoft adCenter search engine marketing campaigns and has demonstrated expert knowledge by passing the Microsoft ... http://www.davidcraddock.net/2008/03/21/adexcellence-exam-passed/ I have just seen Yahoo! Pipes, and am convinced this is going to change the web. For real. Data source sites will become 'content providers', data will be aggregated and filtered from multiple content providers, either by the user or by 'intermediary' sites. The user will be able to choose his ... http://www.davidcraddock.net/2008/03/17/yahoo-pipes/ We've been working on a Brighton music events Google maps mashup project: www.BrightonSound.com It's still developing, but it looks quite good, and we're ready to start showing it off to people. So check it out! http://www.davidcraddock.net/2008/03/15/brightonsoundcom/ I finally setup my Dell Lattitude D630 laptop the way I wanted it last night, and thought I'd do a quick writeup about it. Here is the parttition table: A 40GB Windows XP partition, with VMWare Player installed, which I will be using for Windows applications that don't play well in ... http://www.davidcraddock.net/2008/02/28/a-poor-mans-vmware-workstation-vmware-server-under-ubuntu-710-vmware-player-under-windows-xp/ I will be attending Brighton Barcamp 2 on the weekend of the 14th March, and presenting on a new web project I've been working on. See: http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/BarCampBrighton2 and http://www.barcampbrighton.org/ for more info. Update: Brighton Barcamp 2 is now over. This was really interesting, and I learned a huge amount in a very ... http://www.davidcraddock.net/2008/02/22/brighton-barcamp2/ This is going to be absolutely huge: http://www.davidcraddock.net/2007/11/24/opensocial/ My friend Adam has a blog featuring interesting internet finds. Check it out: One Idea http://www.davidcraddock.net/2007/11/12/an-interesting-blog-written-by-a-friend-of-mine/ I've been trying to learn a lot about search engines lately, as I've been starting at an internet marketing firm. I found this excellent list of online materials for university courses related to search engines: http://clair.si.umich.edu:8080/wordpress/?p=11 In particular, these seem especially relevant: The Structure of Information Networks - http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Courses/cs685/2002fa/ (a good introduction) Search Engine ... http://www.davidcraddock.net/2007/06/02/a-bit-of-theory/