While not technically a mashup, the theory is very similar – take two useful services and make tem work together with a minimum of effort – the result of which should be a better solution than the individual pieces.

In this case, it is also a brilliant method of marketing exposure.

Yugma Skype opens-up the door to contextual, just-in-time collaboration, making it possible for any existing Skype user to start screen-sharing, live annotating or giving remote control of the screen to anyone in a few mouse clicks. What’s more impressive is that Yugma for Skype supports up to ten concurrent users and is absolutely free.

By offering a free Skype plug-in, Yugma takes the best route available to those companies wanting to build a significantly larger user base without the marketing costs that this would normally entail.

Source: Online Collaboration: Just-In-Time Screen-Sharing With All Your Skype Contacts – Yugma For Skype

I fell out of the software developer track for a number of years. I was a strong (although not the best) C language developer and had some C++ talent but I shifted gears when Java took off at my company. Since that time, I have done mostly scripting based hacks and small tools as “brain exercise” but not project level code.

Because of my shift to scripting, I now gravitate toward script languages for my demo customizations and projects. So it has been a mix of Perl, LotusScript, JavaScript, and most recently PHP. Continue reading ‘Jump on the PHP Bandwagon’ »

I keep wasting hours tweaking and re-writing my blog’s look-n-feel. No sooner do I get it working the way I like, that I go too far and then decide to start over with some other theme.

The most recent activity was to leverage a theme with lots of cool JavaScript. I wanted it to be flexible width (i.e. to match the browser) but went too far and it looked a mess. I restored and did it again but left it fixed-width. I like the results but I think it is slow.

So now I’ve turned off all of the cool JavaScript. So I keep asking myself, what was all the work for ?

Word to all the rest of you out there on WordPress blogs, get something you like and leave it alone. And avoid “upgrade-itis” <grin>

We’re getting a *real* snow storm for the first time this year. It reminded me of a litle tool I created last year when I first got my Blackberry. I call it PocketRadar.

There are two versions of it – one for the older devices with only 320×240 screens and one for the newer devices with QVGA (480×320) screens. the user interface is very simple because the old Blackberry doesn’t like any of the Javascript shortcut keys (it has them permanently mapped to internal functions).

My Tag cloud implementation started from the Matt’s weighted-categories implementation on hitormiss. It was working fine but I needed two things (yeah, just 2)

1. the hover text to be more informative
2. WordPress 2.1 support

I only needed to change one line to make the hover text include the category name (for cases where my font size was tiny). However, all went out the window when I upgraded to WP 2.1. Most of the weighted-categories code had been deprecated over the 2 years since it was first authored. So, I did some digging and figured out the new implementation.

Here is Matt’s code ported to WP 2.1. I still want to replace the regular expression calls with Perl compatible regular expressions for performance reasons.
Continue reading ‘Tag Cloud – code Rewrite’ »