Simon Buckle’s Weblog

Google Talk : “Unveiled on 24 August, the Google Talk system unites net telephony with an instant messaging network and builds on the Gmail e-mail service.”

Last night I went to the The Porterhouse in Convent Garden. If you like beer, you’ll like The Porterhouse. Its beer menu is huge and it has all kinds of beer from all over the world with interesting names, and tastes. There’s Crocodile beer brewed in Sweden (how many crocodiles have you seen in Sweden?), […]

I have been using Skype for around 6 months or so now. Skype have a service called SkypeOut that allows me to make phone calls to landlines or mobile phones, either locally or abroad, from my laptop or PDA. It’s cheap too, much cheaper than calling from a landline. I always thought it would be […]

Occasionally I have more to say than a few sentences but if I write a long post I don’t want all of the text showing up on the front page. What I want is a link that says something along the lines of “Read the rest of this post”. I never could figure out how […]

Over the last few days I have been playing around with Google Maps. To be more precise, I have been building an online pedometer tool for Wendy Bumgardner over at walking.about.com. Users can draw their walk on the map and the tool tells them how long the route is as well as giving the user […]

I have just modified my DNS settings so this site can now be accessed using the URL http://www.simonbuckle.com/. Hopefully it will be a bit more memorable than the previous one. The old URL will continue to work.

I have just completed a draft version of an article I wrote this afternoon titled “Distributed Computing”. It gives a brief overview of web services with examples using Amazon’s web services API. More importantly it describes how to read Amazon’s WSDL file. It doesn’t contain all the details, just enough to get you started.
If you […]

Keep It Simple Stupid. Yes, that’s right. Simplicity. Simple isn’t it. Apparently not. Somebody clearly didn’t tell the guys over at the World Wide Web Consortium when it came to writing the specifications that are supposed to define how the web works!
The other day I attempted to use Amazon’s web services API. In order to […]

So you are heading off to New York for the weekend. What are you going to do? Visit the Statue of Liberty? Go shopping on 5th Avenue? Go for a run? Me neither, but if you do feel like dusting off your trainers then check out Running Dave’s running database. No, it’s not a database […]

No coffee or tea for me for the next week. The last time I tried doing this I lasted about 3 days. Why? Mostly for health reasons but I will probably save a lot of money as well. I overhead a guy in the gym the other day tell somebody how he stopped going to […]