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 :)

While I get stick in the office for my Visual Studio theme (Yes, I like a dark background, I'm old, my eyes hurt) one thing I must recommend is the Dina monospace font .. I started using it mainly for the output windows (black with a green font looks lovely!) but now its replaced Consolas as my IDE font of choice. I often remote desktop into work and Consolas, while being very nice, only looks very nice when using ClearType .. without ? .. freaking awful! I switched over to Dinas for my main font on a whim, loved it and havent looked back. Im sure another font will trump it one day but for now Ill stop rambling !

Dina Programming Font - by Jørgen Ibsen.

FYI - All my code snippets here use this font so if you want to see them how I intended please go, grab and install this right away (hey its only 1 file !) :)

( Some folks like Liberation which is a nice font too and worth checking out if your looking for some new fontage :P )