BBC News had an article on the UK government opening up a bunch of data for developers to play with the other day. I think it’s a real flaw in what’s most likely their article/linking policy that the actual link to the data is hidden on the right under the “Related Internet Links” section: Show Us a Better Way.
I’ve not had a chance to look at all of the available data, but it’s an interesting competition.
I’ve been playing Rohan quite a bit lately. I started the year by playing RF Online quite a lot, but switched (with many others) in order to avoid the unstable servers at the time. Waking up to test the game at it’s exact release time of 4am in the UK was a bit much, but vaguely worth it by the fact that I got first dibs on my name of choice for a healing class: Faith. Inspiration of the name was actually Faith from the game Alien Swarm, which was the main game I played last year. All three are highly recommended.
I’m enjoying Rohan, especially since a lot of the people I play with are the same one’s I played RF Online with. I’m a healing Elf woman, fairly well valued in the game to keep parties alive in times of crisis - or more typically, to take on big monsters for an hour or so. However, even a healer has limits with great big fiery dragons…
Watch as the two strongest players run away in fear, which turned out to be the right choice as they were able to come back and revive me so I could heal the whole group and get us back in action.
New SMS notification: “nicholasclarke: A crazy week of work coming up! Never a good thing.”
Combine that with ability to intercept text messages into my own application on my phone, this basically means I can write a Jaiku application which keeps track of everyone’s Jaikus but doesn’t interfere in my day by beeping and flashing at me 24/7.
In theory, this means I could write a Windows Mobile Jaiku client that stays off GPRS.
I quite like being able to use my own tools to edit my website database, MySQL Query Browser rather than phpMyAdmin (although both are powerful tools). I was concerned today when I logged in that I got not only my own list of MySQL databases, but also everyone else’s!
A quick chat with Web Hosting UK’s support, notifying them of my security concerns led to it being quickly dealt with - although no information was given for the cause.
A couple of things stood out in the conversation:
The issue is fixed and I’ll check every now and again before my trial period is up to see if it resurfaces. If it does, I wonder if Emma, Lucy or Sharon will ask me for my password.