Fruitful weekend

... or at least I'd like to think so.

I have been toying with the Linkedin services, and have found them extremely useful. I have managed to get in touch with some of my old friends whom I met during my active days in the Singapore Java Users Group. It is wonderful to know that some of them have progressed quite a bit since we last met. Hmm... but a little depressing that I am still very much a nobody. In any case, if you are looking to do some serious networking, Linkedin is a good start. My profile is now located on the right. If you are from Google, please feel free to add me to your connections. ;)

Over the weekend, I have managed to give limetree the required additions to the SC website. One of the features was to pull blog feeds and list them on the SC website. Initially, I wrote a ATOM parser for this purpose, but later found a ready library to parse both RSS and ATOM. This is useful because we have not identified specific blog providers and a decision of which standards to support (both of course!). Magpierss decides on the appropriate parser depending on the type of feed received. Now that's so cool. Made development work a lot shorter.

I got myself a backup drive yesterday. It's a Western Digital My Book Premium 500GB. I'll put a picture up later tonight. But this is a really cool-looking black box that is helping me to sort my gigabytes of data/photos/mp3s and later for backup. What I especially like about it is the auto-start and auto-shutdown features. The drive turns on and off whenever it is used and not used respectively. It connects to the PC using either USB 2.0 or Firewire 400. I would prefer the latter, but I will first need to move my Firewire card from my old PC to the current one. I walked around Sim Lim Square quite a bit (up and down, round and round) before finding stock at Videopro on level 4. I think it might be the last piece. I could not find it at Fuwell and Bell as they had no stocks. Btw, these are the only three shops I found selling this model at S$299.