Technical & Software Blog – ssims.co.uk

Every once in a while its good to indulge in some of your alternative passions. In the spirit of new beginnings I have started this year well by brewing some mead! Mead is a wonderful honey wine, with arguably the longest history of all alcoholic beverages consumed by man. As a way of recording my [...]

Looking on to this new year, it seems it will be a period of change and uncertainty for me as well as ambition and opportunities. Project My university project is developing nicely, to the point I have a prototype demo and am in the early stages of marketing aspects of it as a commercial software [...]

It seems my blog is receiving a fairly respectable amount of hits, considering the specific and nerdy nature of some of the posts which is nice to know. If anyone reading does have feedback or is interested in further information about any particular topics please do let me know. There are a few things I’m [...]

I almost couldn’t believe it when I saw it. I emailed myself some rather long URLs to look at another time and on opening the email i was confronted with this: The message displays but cuts off the string of text at a certain point. It allows you to then click a button to display [...]

Has your installation of chrome stopped working? Have a look and see if the suggestion in this link helps: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=2680b41d121dc73a&hl=en (you may have to hunt for the directory in order to run the relevant file) I became frustrated by this problem myself which has occurred several times now on my Vista laptop. The solution, which [...]

After taking a lovely relaxed break in Scotland, I’m back home for some serious work over the summer. I’ve been very fortunate in securing some interesting software development work at a company that deals with, to put it in an oversimplified form, automated financial transactions. So far so good, but as a result I anticipate [...]

The recently launched Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine is to provide to ‘APIs’, or more specifically, methods of querying the system and retrieving results from web applications. The first query method essentially allows all types of search just as can be used on the Wolfram Alpha site, the second data method allows for more specific retrieval [...]

EDIT: You can view the page here – http://ssims.co.uk/Portfolio/examples/rsspage.jsp Creating a page to display RSS feed information proved surprisingly straightforward with Sun’s RSS utils package available at http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javaserverpages/rss_utilities/ Essentially RSS utils retrieves the XML page containing the RSS feed and processes it, allowing you to retrieve the feed by simply using the custom XML tag [...]

I intend to integrate this blog’s RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed in my portfolio website as a learning exercise in utilising dynamic feeds. RSS is a format of producing snippets of information, which are often news articles and blogs containing links. An RSS feed is essentially a manually or dynamically updated XML file formatted in a [...]

Well it seems I have succumbed to the procrastination aid that is writing a blog. But perhaps some good may evolve from this new venture, least of all it is a useful way for me to develop and sound aloud my own personal views on technical issues in a constructive way. I will start with [...]