This weekend I thought I would get round to a project that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time – a new website for the Radio TFS podcast that I do with Mickey and Paul. I haven’t had the chance to play with WebMatrix before so thought that I would give it a try when building the new Radio TFS site.
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[](http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=615)On Monday I was a little under the weather suffering from the winter tummy bug that is floating around at the moment, but my day was cheered up by a phone call from Carl and Richard over at .NET Rocks.
Continue ReadingIn the latest episode of Radio TFS Mickey and I sat down for a chat with Jonathan Wanagel who is the Principal Development Manager over at CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting site.
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[](http://www.codeplex.com/) People using CodePlex can download Visual Studio Team Explorer to access a CodePlex hosted TFS instance free of charge, but what if you want to be a project team member and access the code from Eclipse or a non-windows machine?
Continue ReadingIn case you missed it, as part of Bob Muglia’s keynote announcing the launch of Visual Studio 2010 last week he also announced the launch of Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team Explorer Everywhere 2010.
Continue ReadingThat is the question that I am frequently asked by folks looking at the impact of Team Foundation Build moving to Windows Workflow 4.0 from MSBuild as the master build orchestration language in the TFS 2010 release. In general I would always think carefully about re-writing everything in WF 4.
Continue ReadingI've been an avid Windows Live Writer user since the early days, and for many years I've used Moveable Type for my personal blog. The reason I went with Moveable Type was initially because that was what some of the other blogs that I read where using.
Continue ReadingToday, Microsoft made some important announcements regarding the future of Visual Studio 2010 along with the availability of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2.
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I’m playing with a lot of cool stuff at the moment as we get ready for Team Foundation Server 2010, but accessing TFS from the Mac or inside Eclipse doesn’t give me as many of those “it shouldn’t work that well” moments any more.
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Just released the latest Radio TFS episode. We got the whole gang together so decided to have a catch up and a chat about our first impression from using Beta 1 of Team System for a few weeks.
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[](http://www.saasmadeeasy.com/Pages/default.aspx) Fellow MVP Paul Hacker just dropped me a line to share a great offer his company is making available for BizSpark companies.
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[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/bgervin/3320077849/in/set-72157614557110879/) Recently I had the pleasure of sitting down with my good friend and fellow MVP Ed Blankenship to learn about the Team Foundation Server deployment in Infragistics.
Continue ReadingIn TFS 2010 quite a few things have been fundamentally changed for the better, but from an end user point of view people hopefully won't notice. Things like hierarchical work items will very quickly because just how work items should work and people will scratch their heads when they go look at a TFS 2008 or TFS 2005...
Continue ReadingIn the days before I worked for Teamprise, I had a 3 hour, 120 mile commute. Luckily, at that time a new thing called “podcasting” was starting to take off and so my travels were filled listening to the few podcasts that were available back then. We are talking pretty early in the history of podcasting.
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Now that TFS 2010 Beta 1 is publically available, I thought it would make sense to share our plans with everyone. Teamprise has been working closely with Microsoft on the TFS 2010 release. First of all, can I quickly thank all the people at Microsoft who have been helping us so far.
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Last week at TechEd 2009 North America, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Brian Keller to discuss Teamprise past, present and future. If you have Silverlight installed you can watch the interview or you can download the video from the TechEd site. [](http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?
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This month I called Doug Seven and Daniel Norwood to talk about the work Quest are doing to provide Oracle support inside Visual Studio team System 2010. Doug Seven is a Senior Product Manager for Visual Studio Team System at Microsoft focused on technical advocacy of Team System as an ALM solution and Daniel Norwood...
Continue ReadingSadly, I couldn't go along to MIX this year. However luckily for me, Microsoft has followed a new trend with its conferences and made all the sessions available online for free for everyone to access.
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[](http://www.radiotfs.com/2009/03/25/AdoptingTeamSystemWithStevenBorg.aspx) Earlier this month I spent a very pleasant evening at the beautiful home of Steven Borg and recorded the chat we had about adopting Team System in the real world for this months episode of Radio TFS.
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[](http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/This-Week-Martin-Woodward-MVP-Summit-Web-Perf-Show-Off-and-a-VSTS-Pep-Talk/) This week I have been in Seattle for the MVP Summit 2009.
Continue ReadingOver the weekend we published a new Radio TFS episode. This month we chatted with Tommy Norman about his real world experiences using using Team Foundation Server in agile software development projects.
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[](http://www.platinumbay.com/blogs/dotneticated/archive/2009/02/18/team-system-on-twitter.aspx) Twitter seems to be going mainstream here in the UK. I know this because my wife asked me about it, so it must be pretty mainstream as I consider her my bellwether on normality.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/BacktotheFuturewithVMWare_1104/tfs2010_on_mac_2.jpg) One of the many pains of working with the October 2008 CTP of VS2010 (aka Rosario) is that on top of everything else, it actually timebombed on January 1st 2009.
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[](http://www.radiotfs.com/) Over the holidays we sat down for the last time of 2008 and had a relaxed chat with Jeff Beehler, Team System Chief of Staff. We talked about the history of Team System, how the teams in Microsoft go about shipping the Team System product and Jeff throws in some teasers about what will be...
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[](http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/) Brian Keller (of This Week on Channel 9 fame) has just announced a new weekly show on Channel 9 called 10-4 where you can learn about what's coming in Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. http://channel9.msdn.
Continue ReadingWe just released a new Radio TFS episode on check-in policies. You can listen to the show here, but don't forget that you can subscribe to the show using the RSS Feed in iTunes or Zune (http://feeds.feedburner.com/radiotfs).
Continue ReadingIf you haven’t heard the news already, Microsoft have officially announced the name of the next version of Team System, previously known by the codename of “Rosario”. For Microsoft developers, this will be delivered on top of Visual Studio 2010.
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In TFS 2008 SP1, a new feature was quietly introduced, WIT Client Metadata Filtering. This feature could boost the performance of your Team Foundation Server experience, reduce the amount of traffic flowing over your network and reduce the data porosity of your TFS instance. Yet it is not enabled by default.
Continue Reading[](http://www.codeplex.com/MigrationSyncToolkit) In a recent episode of .NET Rocks, we got talking about migrating to TFS and taking your SCM history with you. If you really wanted to go through the pain of doing this then the TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit project on CodePlex is a good starting point to...
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[](http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=373) The other week Brian Randall and I sat down with Carl and Richard to record a .Net Rocks episode. Honestly, you wait years for a Brian Randall podcast and then three come along at once!
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Team Foundation Server uses Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) to provide the project portal infrastructure. If you installed TFS 2005 then you will probably have WSS 2.0 installed, even if you later upgraded to TFS 2008. WSS 3.0 gets installed by default with TFS 2008 installations and is much better than WSS 2.
Continue Reading[](http://blogs.msdn.com/gertd/) Over on Radio TFS we've just published a special episode on the Database Edition of Team System with the man himself, Gert Drapers. In the show Gert brings us up to speed on how the product got started, where it is now and where it is going in the future.
Continue ReadingThat's right folks, 2008 SP1 is now available for everyone to download. Get it while it's hot! Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (needed for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System client, including Team Explorer), (exe version) (iso image version) Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 (needed for the server, build...
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[](http://www.radiotfs.com/) In this first episode back from the summer break we talk about the features available in TFS Version Control and talk about some of the fundamental concepts that you should understand to make your life easier.
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Over the years, I have tried many different approaches to software estimation. From the Ceiling and Weller method (look up to the ceiling, scratch your chin and say "Well-errr"), FITA analysis (Finger In The Air) through various variations (both formal and informal) of metric based estimation techniques to things like...
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I've been doing a lot of work with the Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 Preview, and even recorded a podcast about it (also see Brian Harry's blog post for more details on TFS 2008 SP1 features). One out of the many new features introduced in TFS 2008 SP1 is the "Last Check-in" column in the source control explorer.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/brian/wallpaper/) It turns out that the little video I posted yesterday has taken on a bit of a life of it's own. Last time I checked, it was in the top 10 Science and Technology posts for YouTube in Ireland.
Continue Reading[](http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/radiotfs/~5/296872926/radiotfs_005.mp3) I've just posted the latest installment of Radio TFS. I'm actually a show behind on editing so expect to see episode 6 up soon.
Continue ReadingI've just posted the fourth episode of Radio TFS. In this episode Paul and Mickey talk about Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition while I ask dumb questions and go off on tangents. Despite this, it is actually one of our better episodes to date.
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[](http://www.radiotfs.com/) Paul Hacker, Mickey Gousset and I have recently started a Team System related podcast called Radio TFS. While it is not going to win any awards any time soon, we've been having a lot of fun so we are going to continue to try and get one or two episodes out a month.
Continue Reading[](http://www.dddireland.com/) Developer Developer Developer is coming to the beautiful west of Ireland in May with GAMTUG hosting the event on Saturday May 3rd. If you are in or around Ireland at that time then I would encourage you sign up.
Continue ReadingIn a previous post, I talked about how Windows file sharing sucks over the WAN. This is particularly annoying for me when trying to view the log of a TFS Build - especially if that build has failed and I want to know why in a hurry.
Continue ReadingBrian Keller has posted a great interview with Brian Harry about Visual Studio Team System 2008, and a lot of detail on the improvements in Team Foundation Server 2008.
Continue ReadingI swear, one day I'll learn. Despite having promised myself to steer clear of the initial release of any Windows version of iTunes because they are consistently broke in some pretty severe ways - I read this report on Engadget and decided to upgrade thinking that they may finally haved solved the issues I have been...
Continue ReadingJeff Beehler has posted an update on the Beta 2 expiration issue. He currently see's three possible alternatives: Do nothing: if you don't need to use your VPC for more than an hour or so at at time (for instance for demos), then you can probably tolerate the behavior of the timed out OS.
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[](http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=348628) Ron Jacobs has posted up an ARCast video from TechEd 2007 in Australia. About 3 minutes in he does a nice interview with an organization using Team Foundation Server in a cross-platform environment.
Continue ReadingPeople go on about iPod + iTunes + Store being this all time great combination. I'll admit that I love my iPod, and if/when one comes out with similar capabilities to the iPhone player I'll be buying it. However, I don't think I'm being controversial here when I say that iTunes on Windows really sucks.
Continue ReadingLast night I had the privilege of being invited to a party hosted by the good folks running the Visual Studio Industry Partner program that Teamprise is a member of. The venue was the perfect place to host a party for nerds - they hired out the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center.
Continue ReadingAnyone who has spent time on the inside of the Microsoft LAN knows that they have a ton of great internal tools and utilities that never make it into the outside world. One of those ones that did is Microsoft LogParser.
Continue ReadingRecently I had the pleasure of chatting with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell about Source Control and Continuous Integration - this was recorded for DotNetRocks and the show is now available for you to enjoy. As Eric has mentioned, I've been a fan of DNR for a while.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/VistaTopTipHowtogetTelnetBack_952B/vista%5B6%5D.png)When debugging network issues, I tend to fallback to good old telnet as a way of opening a port to a machine.
Continue ReadingThis is a follow-up to a post I made over a year ago. I'm popping over to the US for a couple of days this week and I am currently sat in Newark airport with the New York skyline out one window, and Ikea out the other.
Continue ReadingThe Team Foundation Server Version Control Proxy is a wonderful thing - despite the not so catchy name. It sits between a remote office and your Team Foundation Server Application Tier and caches requests for file downloads from that remote office so that the second person to request that version of that file will get...
Continue ReadingToday, I am pleased to announce that Teamprise are offering complimentary licenses of the Teamprise client suite for anyone wanting to use Teamprise to connect to an open source project on CodePlex. If you want to take advantage of this offer, see the sign up page.
Continue ReadingI'm safely back from a fantastic week at the MVP Summit in Seattle / Redmond. The week itself was very enjoyable and packed with tons of useful information - thanks to Noah and the VSTS team for being our hosts for the week.
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Yesterday we made version 2.1 of Teamprise publicly available. If you've previously installed Teamprise, then I recommend that you upgrade to this version as it includes a number of bug-fixes that while not critical are definitely useful. People who purchased a Teamprise Client Suite for Version 1 or 2.
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One of the concepts that people need to understand when they begin to work with Team Foundation Server Version Control is that of the Team Foundation Server (TFS) Workspace. So I thought I would write a series of blog-posts covering the basics of TFS workspaces, with this post being the first.
Continue ReadingSo, next on my list was to get iTunes working so that I can easily feed my podcast addiction. I am very nearly at the point of purchasing a new MP3 player so I am ready for any excuse to tip me over the edge. Anyway, to get iTunes 7.0.
Continue ReadingWell. I've had the pleasure of clashing with some great presenters in my time - but today I have the opportunity to clash with the great Zen master of presenters - Steve Jobs doing the keynote at MacWorld 2007.
Continue ReadingUpdate: 17.15 Fixed now, nothing to see here. Move along. As of the time of writing, all the BBC Podcasts have broke. Attempting to access the link gives a 404 error (reported as "The URL xxx could not be found on the server" in iTunes) This is a bit of a bummer for me as I am about to get in my car and drive down to...
Continue ReadingI'm loving Windows Vista RTM. I'm actually considering moving my main development PC over - just need to be certain that everything I use will work just fine - in the meantime, I'll stick with it running from my Core Duo based Mac Mini. Today, I stumbled over a great blog from Tim Sneath, a Windows Vista Evangelist.
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Tomorrow (October 12th), I'll be talking at the first annual ICT Conference in Galway, Ireland. While having me attend is probably reason for you to stay away, Eric Lee (PM on Visual Studio Team System) is flying in from Redmond especially to talk.
Continue ReadingI've used my old iPod Mini nearly every day for 2 years (since I discovered Podcasting for the first time). Tomorrow I have a rather long car journey ahead of me and I have been saving up a few episodes of .NET Rocks, Slacker Astronomy, In Business and a new episode of Today in Parliament for the trip.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/PintSizedTFSProxy_F31B/tfs_proxy%5B3%5D.jpg) I use Team Foundation Server over the end of a VPN connection to from my house in the UK over to Teamprise HQ back in Champaign, IL.
Continue ReadingI use VMWare a lot. As we work on a cross-platform client to Team Foundation Server, I not only need to test our client on many operating systems, I also run Team Foundation Server in VMWare to talk to test our client against. Teamprise Explorer and the Eclipse plug-in use SWT for the UI Layer.
Continue ReadingPoster child of the Web 2.0 movement and all round general legends Meebo have just launched a new service called MeeboMe that allows you to host a flash based chat window on your website and allow people to send you IM messages. It is in Alpha stages at the moment so may well cause problems.
Continue ReadingI recently did an interview for Port 25 (the website for Microsoft’s Open Source Lab). If you would like to listen to the podcast then it is now available here. The interview was recorded in a week when NTLM authentication was high on my mind (as you can tell).
Continue ReadingBy default, the maximum attachment size for attachments to work items in Team Foundation Server is 4Mb. It is handy that this feature exists because people may accidentally attach massive files when they should really be attaching something a little smaller.
Continue ReadingIn a couple of weeks I’ll be presenting a MSDN webcast on Team Foundation Server Source Control For those of you that have attended one of the talks I did around Ireland it is probably nothing new, but if you missed the talk then now is your opportunity to join in the fun from the comfort of your own computer.
Continue ReadingGreat news from Rob Caron. CodePlex has been launched into public beta. CodePlex is an online software development environment for open and shared source developers to create, host and manage projects throughout the project life-cycle. It has been written from the ground up in C# using .NET 2.
Continue ReadingJust noticed that Google Labs has launched Google Trends, a nice tool to graph the differences in search volumes over time. Good way of making comparisons in to what people are looking for information about.
Continue ReadingTonight I had the pleasure of listening to Scott Guthrie talk about ASP.NET 2.0, Atlas and IIS 7.0 at the Keynote for the 1st Irish National Developers Conference.
Continue ReadingThanks to everyone that came along to my talk in Belfast last night. It was great to catch up with some old friends and good fun to stand up in front of my home crowd. As promised, here is the copy of the slide deck as a zipped PowerPoint File (2.
Continue ReadingIf you came along to my talk last night in Dublin, then thanks for your time. I really enjoyed the chat as folks got stuck in and asked questions rather than just listening to me drone on. It’s also the first time I’ve spoke at an event and then wandered through into the bar to have pints lined up in front of me.
Continue ReadingJust been listening to an excellent programme from BBC Radio 4 - The X Factor. Not a story of wanabe pop stars, but a tale of what it is like to go into space and how the experience is about to open up to more normal people. It is presented by veteran astronaut Jeff Hoffman, who is now professor of astronautics at MIT.
Continue ReadingI’ve been coding for around 25 years, since my parents bought me a VIC-20. I think it was probably a similar advert to this one by William Shatner that convinced them to buy it after seeing how much time my borther and I spent playing with our Atari 2600.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/vsts_google_toolbar.jpg)Well, having tried new new beta of Google Toolbar I just had to try implementing my own toolbar button. Here is one that will give you the top previous posts from folks around the VSTS blogosphere.
Continue ReadingI’m currently writing a diagnostics tool to perform all the same connectivity diagnostic checks that I do manually when I am having trouble connecting to something. The following code snippet is how I am checking to see if a web or proxy server is listening on a particular port.
Continue ReadingAnyone who watches the Simpsons or Ghostbusters (555 2368) is aware that numbers beginning with 555 in the states are usually fake. While looking for information about international dialing from the UK, I stumbled upon the official Ofcom list of fake numbers - UK number ranges reserved for drama purposes.
Continue ReadingScott Hanselman's Hanselminutes podcast continues with this weeks episode about Continuous Integration. Jamie Cansdale (the genius behind TestDriven.NET) has posted about the tool Scott was on the way to mentioning when Karl interrupted him.
Continue ReadingJust discovered the website - Pandora. Basically, it allows you to create a streaming music station by typing in the names of some songs or bands that you like. It will then play you music by those artists and similar ones.
Continue ReadingA new version of Snippy is out. For those of you not familiar - you'll be sorry to hear that Snippy is not a replacement to Clippy in Office 12, nor is it a helpful marsupial that will rescue Timmy from down the well. Snippy is a handy little tool to help you edit code snippets in VS 2005.
Continue ReadingProbably going to be a lot of talk about this over the next few days. Google has just released a first beta of Google Talk - ther own IM / VoIP client. Just giving it a try now, but it will be interesting to see how this competes with Skype, AIM et al.
Continue ReadingExcellent Google Hack via Scott Hanselman. Take a look at my guestmap Let me know where you live! It's a bit buggy and performance isn't great - but still pretty good.
Continue ReadingI'm probably late to the party, but I very rarely bother to update the firmware on my iPod. I'd heard the new iPod Updater (2005-06-26) contains support for podcasts but had not seen any details anywhere. I can confirm it is worth the effort if you listen to podcasts on your iPod.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/images/blog/itunes_podcasts.html)I downloaded version 4.9 of iTunes today that contains support for Podcasts. Overall it seems ok, very easy to use but no support for Bittorrent which means I'll be sticking with nimiq for a while yet to keep up to date with DotNetRocks.
Continue ReadingVia Wired, there is now a WinAmp plugin that allows you to sync your iPod from WinAmp. Called mlipod, it also allows you to copy songs from your iPod back onto your computer - fantastic. Anyone know a plugin for WinAmp that downloads Podcasts?
Continue ReadingAccording to Steve Gilmor, Apple's iTunes is to support enclosures in RSS feeds (podcasting). I have been looking for more details on this and have not found any yet so I could have mis-read the article but it would be a sensible move for Apple.
Continue ReadingA few people have asked me this recently, so this is the current list of podcasts that I subscribe to and enjoy on my daily commute. .NET Rocks! - _The_ internet audio talkshow for dotnet developers. Slashdot Review - A daily review of items of interest on Slashdot read by a southern guy.
Continue ReadingJust a quick post to say that my old buddy Jez Stephenson has started blogging. Why don't you pop by and leave him some abuse? He is also setting up a new affilliate site "Quick Sound" selling guitars and music equipment. Rumour has it that he is thinking of getting into podcasting...
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My wife was treated to the "Martin Woodward Excited Dance" this evening after I watched the trailer for the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy film. Superb. Looks like they have managed to update the story line while sticking to the Douglas Adams humour.
Continue ReadingSorry about the lack of posts lately. Had lots on at work and then lots on at home when I eventually get there so been too busy to play and find things of interest. Just for interest these are the podcasts that I listen to on my long commute. If anyone has any recomendations for me then let me know.
Continue Reading[](http://www.nimiq.nl/)I have been driven to desperation with iPodder, so thought I would go looking for another podcast client before I wrote my own. Looks like the guys at nimiq have beat me to it and done a great job!
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Broker - John Grisham" date: 2005-02-01T22:11:22.000Z post thumb images: "/images/post/2005/02/2005-the-broker-john-grisham.jpg" #author author: "Martin Woodward" description description: "temp_placeholder" Taxonomies categories: ["technology", "books", "gadgets", "web", "podcast"] tags: ["blog", "archive"] type:...
Continue ReadingI am now back on the first page of Google when you search for Martin Woodward. Not sure what's changed as I still have the same number of links to my site. I think perhaps it is because the discussion of the Wikipedia definition for "Podcasting" very kindly links to me, and this definition is now linked to in many...
Continue ReadingFantastic news. Belfast is to host the 2005 World Toilet Summit, very near to where I work. According to Cleanpoint.com:- _Hosted by The British Toilet Association, the Summit is being supported by the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, Belfast City Council, the International Fund for Ireland and Belfast Visitor...
Continue ReadingI've recently come across Podcasting (or blogcasting as it is sometimes called). Basically it makes use of a feature in the RSS spec called enclosure that allows links to downloadable content - in this case audio content.
Continue ReadingFantastic news. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is set to be extended this year with new editions of the radio series and also (finally) the movie that Douglas Adams tried so long and hard to get made. Update: 24/9/2004 Just listened to the first of the new radio series and it is superb.
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