I have been quiet of late as I have been working on a Open Calais parser tool to enable people to work effectively with open calais output - the output is fairly complex RDF and my little tool should allow quick extraction of terms and values so you can plug open calais into your .NET apps etc. Its been a sharp learning curve in terms of how RDF works (and how to parse it)  but the results now are working rather nicely.

I felt some of the other taggers / parsers let a lot great data slip by as they were just concentrating on the tags (which is fine and is probably what you want) but there can be a lot of rich relationships stored in the documents (such is the joy of RDF) and I wanted to enable people to get at that data if they wanted (which is why it took so bloody long hehe)

Quick sneak preview as you can see .. all entities resolve to real .NET objects populated with all the data and values.

It is on the sanity check stage and I will post some info about it very soon (I am tempted to write a live writer plugin but I think thats me getting disctracted and I just need to get the core thing finalised).

This may all be pointless work and Ive spent too much time getting it to extract data no one wants but it turned into a personal challenge so I had to finish it hehe :P

Well I nearly fell out my seat when I heard that Launchball had won best game at SXSW and was even more suprised when I scrolled down and found it had won 'Best In Show' (almost like Crufts but with more gadgets). I was smiling all the way home knowing that something I had been so directly involved with makes so many people pleased.

As I said before the main kudos has to go to the amazing hard work of Henry @ Preloaded for an outstanding job creating the game engine. My work involved plumbing the underbelly, creating the web services that communicate with the flash, the Sitecore CMS and the underlying databases so to give the science musuem the freedom to create the type of system they wanted for the users.

I had a quick poke in the database and current data is as follows:

91501 Registered Users
57927 Custom Levels have been created so far

.. eek! Poor server :)

Well.. here I am .. running in IE8 , freshly released, along with a host of other goodies, from MIX08 happening right now somewhere in Las Vegas. Ive never really got on with Firefox .. I know, I know  .. shoot me .. but I find the temptation to install all those plugins a bit too much and soon poor firefox is crawling to a halt. So I was quite excited to get my hands on IE8.

Developer Tools 

At first I thought they had just included the regular developer toolbar into the main program but on further investigation the developer tools they've added have some very powerful features and should make many developers very happy (me included!) 

You will now find a lot of the debugging and CSS analysis features found in the new Visual Studio 2008 sitting in the 'Developer Tools' console.

Open it up and you find you can now set breakpoints in your javascript code the step through line by line

You can create watches, see autos and effect variables directly with the immediate console. All great stuff ! Also locating problems in CSS got a whole bunch easier (now I dont need have to switch back to Firefox just to use FireBug hehe)

Web Slices

One thing I quite like are the addition of Web Slices I just wanted to quickly note how to get them up and running :) As afr as I can see they are a way to wrap your normal feed in some custom HTML so it looks like it came from your site (so mine would have bad spelling and lots of transformers icons everywhere)

Its essentially creating a small piece of HTML within a page with the correct classes applied. IE8 then picks up these and allows you to subscribe to the 'slice' (jazzed up RSS)
(The important classes are in bold)  

If all is working, when you view the page you will see a new little swirly purple icon (where your RSS feeds normally appear) with the name of your WebSlice in it...

... clicking on the link will bring up a dialog asking if you want to subscribe to this webslice ..

.. once done the 'slice' will appear as a link in your toolbar.

You do need to tweak the code in your RSS feed to include a new namespace ..

 .. it will then use the HTML you defined originally to display the slice in the browser drop-down .. so you can now add a bit of personalisation your RSS feed :)