Project Natal

So when Microsoft demo’d the venerable Xbox 360 add-on called Project Natal at the most recent E3 on the 1st of June 2009 Dewald and I where checking out the videos and going through the whole range of emotions from awe to disbelief and finally settled on “I’ll believe it when I see it”.

If you don’t know what Project Natal is then I suggest you watch the little Youtube clip I include below, but in short its a motion sensing camera that will allow you to use your whole body as the controller to take on the Wii motion sensing technology on a whole new level (Think an eye-toy on steroids)

Anyhoo .. now that your up to speed you will appreciate this gag from the guys over at Penny Arcade. Kind of puts the whole thing into an entirely new light, altogether not so pleasant, but exactly echoes my current view on the technology. LOL

via http://www.penny-arcade.com

Tomato Au Gratin (Potato Bake)

Was lusting for some French Italian fusion and had a pile of potatoes lying around, so invented a quick recipe.

Sloppy plating effort, but yum!

Came out pretty well, this works beautifully as a side dish with some lamb or other meat and taste’s best after allowing it to cool down a bit and have the flavours blend and mellow a little. No little packets of powder required for this one, but you could mix in some mushroom soup powder with the cream for some extra punch!

Ingredients
===========

12 Medium Potatoes
2 Medium Onions
1 Can Tomato (400g drained)
1 Tub of Ricotta Cheese
400g soft Mozzarella Cheese
400g Mature Cheddar Cheese, grated
500ml Fresh Cream
Handful of fresh sweet basil
2 Cloves garlic
Olive oil
Salt and Pepper
Origanum

2 cups cornflakes -> optional

Getting ingredients together

Instructions
============

I use a flat bottom potjie (cast iron pot/dutch oven) to cook this with the lid on, but you could also use a fireproof dish covered with some foil.

Slice the onions into fine slices.

Slice the potatoes into max 5mm slices.

Chop the basil leaves and garlic, combine with a few tablespoons of olive oil
with some salt and a teaspoon of origanum, bash a little (use a mortar and pestle if you have one).

Drain the juice from the tomatoes and mix in with the basil and garlic mix.

Layer potatoes with the onions and tomatoes (break the tomatoes a little),
adding cheese (alternating between mozzarella and Ricotta) between your layers.
Do 3 layers or so leaving enough potato to cover the top, finish by placing the grated Cheddar on top.

Add salt and pepper between layers to taste.

Pour the 500ml Cream into your container.

Bake in preheated oven at 180 deg C for 90-110 minutes until potatoes are soft and cooked through,
test by passing a baking needle or thin knife through to the bottom, there should be little to no resistance.

Optional
========

Crush 2 cups of Korn Flakes and mix in with half a cup of olive oil,
spread on the surface of the dish during the last 20 minutes of baking and leave uncovered.

Ready!

That’s it enjoy!

Personal Brand Gold Rush: Is the end nigh?

Dave Powers is a charismatic character by anyones measure.  He runs a little site called RCPowers.com where he orginally shared his passion for R/C aircraft via the mediums of Video and Text and has healthy activity on his YouTube channel. This quickly turned into a fulltime career that branched off to a secondary activity, that being consulting (through web video) to those other hopefuls that are looking to make their mark on the “Web Cottage Industry”.

cottage industry

n.

1. A usually small-scale industry carried on at home by family members using their own equipment.
2. A small, loosely organized, yet flourishing complex of activity or industry: “The study of Gandhi has become a virtual cottage industry in the last 30 years, producing schools, museums, foundations and more than 400 biographies” (Jean Strouse).
   

Dave is not alone there are many people that share the passion of pushing there personal brand through the internet, some backed by larger corporations, some selling products they themselves produce, other’s making money from advertising and affiliate programs. These others include people like Gary Vaynerchuck, he who took his love of wine to the internet fulltime and managed to achieve huge success through his Wine Library TV.

This morning I receive a strange note through twitter from Dave (@RCPowers):
“The personal brand Internet gold rush is coming to a close. If you are not in it by now its gonna be 1000x harder to get in later.” — @RCPowers

This worried me, because like so many others I thought this cottage industry movement we where seeing online was really interesting and inspirational, here we could sense the real value of social media interaction, truly speaking to the brand and not just a figurehead for the brand. I too had starry ideals of providing niche products to loyal fans. So what does this mean, is Dave heralding the end of the opportunites?

Furthermore, RCPowers.com recently underwent a major overhaul, Dave introduced other channels like Outdoor/Survival and Fitness to his offering, effectively diluting his R/C brand (thats for another discussion), which was worrying as I felt that possibly the R/C stuff wasn’t bringing in the money any more or his growth rate had stalled.

So now I wonder, does the rapid addition of more and more “noise” even in niche markets started taking its toll on our attention, capacity? Perhaps. Or maybe its just the Economic Recession takings its toll, are people spending less money on their passions, and has advertising expenditure cuts meant that the little guy is suffering?

What’s our solution? Maybe going more and more niche? I hope their still is some opportunity out there for people wanting to be like Dave, I really do.

Youtube: Transformers 2 – CGI Megan Fox Even Hotter This Time

Funny parody of the movie coming on the 26th of June.

Celebrity madness

Oh dear, I just witnessed 5 minutes of E Entertainment TV, probably 5 minutes more than any person should ever have to bear. They where discussing the terrible incident of the Miley Cyrus nose ring, the shock the horror! How dare she, she is only 16, what will “people” think!?! Blah f’ing blah!

Is this really what the world has come to, do we really need to sit behind a TV in the comfort of our own homes and analyse the lives of socalled celebrities? I mean really, I wonder if people even acknowledge what their own kids are up to? Perhaps I should start a personal daily 10 for people at home (at a fee), everything your child has been up to for the last 24 hours on one DVD, perhaps people will then start worrying about important things… I mean, lookie its on the telly darling!

Jeez people, seriously?

Vodacom “gift” box

Vodacom wants me to use the what is left of my remaining free anytime minutes so I can get 10 gift minutes. One has to wonder how cheap service delivery is to make this worth their while on the off chance I may use some billable minutes, I suppose they make their money from the pricy contracts already. Bloody bean counters have us all figured out!

I love Steri Stumpie

Seriously, it’s no lie.

This is what I am thinking on my day off (thank goodness for tuesday holidays = looong weekends) as I am slowly sipping a perfectly chilled chocolate stumpie. Some might crack a beer to sip on the couch, but me, I crack a Stumpie. hmmmm.

The last week or so I have been dragging the occasional Steri Stumpie to work, much to the dismay of my colleagues who tell me its not the manliest thing to be seen drinking behind your desk. I think they may just be jealous, envy is such a nasty thing. If you don’t have anything good to say you’d better just ‘sharrup’, so there you bastards!

*Sip*, hmm velvety chocolate delight.

Funny I was “off the stump” for a long time, you see I had a short affair with Super M from Clover, but that ended in tears, tragic really. Then as if the planets aligned in just the right way I spot this case of 24 Chocolate Steri Stumpies in Makro and through a combination of blind lust and price miscalculation I tossed the case in my trolley and wham, 13.5 bottles later and I am hooked.

One sec … Bloody hell, that was a good sip …

I see there is a social media campaign brewing for the elixer of the gods over at http://www.steristumpie.com/ you can become an “Ambassador” if you perform some wacked out stuff on video using a Steri Stumpie .. hmm .. maybe later, I am enjoying this bloody milkie too much. Oh I see there’s a twitter account as well .. cool .. @Steri_Stumpie.

You know what life is good, who needs the Land of Milk and Honey? SA is the land of MILK, that’s good enough for me.

Now my only worry is to remember to get a new case before I run out!! Erk.

The Facebook Mobile Texts experience

While there has been a lot of talk afoot about the newly launched Facebook Usernames feature, I took some time to evaluate the Facebook Mobile Texts experience.  I was blissfully unaware of the SMS features that existed previously, until receiving a prompt on my Facebook to go and check it out, which I did,  and I must admit it seems very handy and quite alarming how much money they could be spending on this little feature that is buried away in the bowels of the site.

The sign-up process was very simple and involves sending a text to a shortcode which then replies with a subscription code that needs to be entered on the site to confirm your mobile number.

At the moment Vodacom is the only listed provider and South Africa is the only African country listed, one of 19 countries in all. So we seem to be very lucky.

There’s a comprehensive config where you can tweak parameters such as delivery times, which types of notices you want etc. Most interesting is the option to receive status updates via sms, when you combine this with the ability to send in your own status update via SMS one starts to see the beginning of a very powerful little group text delivery system which could prove to be a very cost effective real time communication tool to your group of friends. Yes, it seems there is no charge above normal operators charges. Ofcourse MXit is still cheaper in the long run but its not as real time as an SMS, which the recipient is immediately made aware of. To prevent this from turning into a fullblown free-for-all you cannot easily subscribe to all of your friends status updates, but have to manually key in their names on a form.

Furthermore their is a nice keyword language you can use when sending in updates in order to perform different actions like, “wall john smith happy bday” to write on a friends wall and “note this is a mobile note” to write a note.

If they start releasing this to more African countries I can see this developing into a popular “chat via status” tool via SMS if it remains effectively free.  (I will be keeping an eye on those charges)

I wonder how facebook looks to recoup losses, perhaps they are planning to make some back on mobile ads, but right now it seems like a dead loss.

A bit on RESTful webservices

Today I was put on the spot and asked to explain REST as it pertains to Web Services, unfortunately I found that I could not articulate that which I know and ended up basically flubbing the opportunity. Uggh, I was so angry at myself.

The truth is that REST is not easy to use and/or explain. Yeah, its simple but its not easy, in fact its hard. So I thought to avoid that particularly uncomfortable situation recurring that I should come up with some basic points to explain it, I shall call them Conrad’s 4 basic cornerstones of RESTful Web Services. Those reading here should also see it as an opportunity to chime in and help by providing feedback as I think there are a lot of people that THINK they understand REST but don’t really grok and I am certainly not excluded in that statement. I am not going to go into the benefits and what not, read wikipedia for that. This is purely some notes on the very basic principles.

Conrad’s 4 Cornerstones of RESTful Web Services (HTTP)

REST = Representational State Transfer

1. The service exposes application state and interaction as resources that can be represented (sic) as a unique URI over HTTP
2. Resources are manipulated (maybe not the right word) through a uniform interface, these are POST, GET, PUT and DELETE verbs
3. The service is stateless.
4. The service is strictly client-server

Right I believe that is enough for my purposes, there are some other bits around Caching and Layering, mime types and response codes that my points don’t cover but IMHO we are ok as HTTP takes care of that for us to some extend and the rest are less crucial to grokking the concept and thus removed for simplicity.  (opinions?)

What does the URI address for the resource look like?
A simple example:
http://mysite.com/api/user/1
Here we are addressing a specific resource in the user collection .. though we are not expressing any intent as we are not providing a verb.

Throw a verb in the mix:
GET http://mysite.com/api/user/1
Ah, now we are getting somewhere we want to retrieve the data for that specific resource.

OR

DELETE http://mysite.com/api/user/1
I would like to delete the addressed resource..

Similarly POST would create a new user (drop the resource identifier “1” here) and PUT would alter and replace the resource.

Thus the verbs loosly map as follows for out purposes:
POST = CREATE
GET = READ
PUT = UPDATE
DELETE = DELETE

Responses on these actions will return status codes, another handy HTTP freeby that REST can use e.g. 200 OK’s and 404 Not Found etc..

To state or not to state?

Um REST is stateless and the so-called gray area of using cookies for auth purposes is not gray, its broken. Just deal with the fact that your are not 100% compliant and leave that there.  Alternatively look at Amazons Rest Auth implementation which operates via headers sent to and fro. Also adding the session identifier to every URL is not valid as this breaks the uniqueness of the resources’ address as each user will utilise a different URI to address THE SAME resource!

Ok I am tired now, I still want to talk about using RESTlike URL’s in your web application/site (as opposed to API’s for webservices) as I have done in the past which raises issues such as the difficulties of using PUT and DELETE via browser forms often addressed by repurposing the POST method somewhat .. maybe subject matter for a next time.

PS whats up with Facebooks so-called RESTlike API?

Methods like admin.getAllocation etc??? Looks more like RPCLike what with method names getting sent in the requests? Use of HTTP and XML does not a REST service make!

Who’s the coolest guy on the internet?

Well, I dunno. Apparently it’s up in the air at the moment according to google.

But Dewald Botha is trying to claim the fame for entirely selfish reasons (something about a SEO prize??). For a brief moment he pipped the Brad Fallon and the Justin Hartman (no links, cause that’s not fair to Dewald, and that makes him a sad panda apparently)

Link to the bloody oke if you care, he said he would hurt me if I don’t ask (but I am sure you don’t care about either point anyway)

Oh and visit his stupid website http://coolestguyontheinternet.com/ because he is slipping down the ranking quick because he had illegal pages up at the wikipedia and the hubpages and they finally caught wind.

If anything it should be funny to see if he wins, in which cause he may buy us all a beer, but I doubt it because he is also a poor panda getting married on top of being a sad panda, which has nothing to do with the panda in Kung Fu panda but that panda was a funny panda, so I just wanted to mention it.