I don’t know if I have any readers in East Africa, but just in case:

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Do you dream of developing an application for consumers globally? Do you have software coding and design skills you’d love to put to practical use? Or… are you simply a techie with too much time on your hands?

Google looks forward to hosting a competition for university students in East Africa. Participants from Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and Ethiopia can design and build gadgets and win prizes. Gadgets are small, simple applications that run on web pages. There are gadgets for easy email access, gadgets for football results, gadgets for fun and gadgets for frivolity. They’re simple to develop, given some knowledge of HTML (and ideally XML and Javascript too). And they’re easy to distribute – through iGoogleTM (Google’s personalised homepage), platforms such as OpenSocial(TM) and third-party websites. There are tens of millions of people who use gadgets globally, generating billions of gadget pageviews per week!

The competition will run between February and June 2008, with more details (including a dedicated competition website and explanation of terms and restrictions) to follow in January. In the mean time, there’s more for the curious and the technically-minded at http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets.

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Official Announcement

… because it was time for a change, and a new theme is easier than a whole new post.

I observed that the only way my readers (that’s you lot!) can tell when I upload new photos (short of checking manually all the time) is by relying on me to kindly post the links in a blog post. To somewhat remedy this situation, I modified the software I use to create the nice web gallery (iGal) to also update an RSS feed whenever I update a gallery. The astute among you will notice the fact that http://www.ockle.org/photos is now sporting a brand new RSS icon. For everyone else, you may point your browser at http://www.ockle.org/photos/rss.xml

I have made another discovery. Since my discovery of a few weeks ago, I learnt the value in re-trying things that didn’t work then again and again in case Google have changed things. What I re-tried this time was http://www.google.com.au/ig instead of http://www.google.com/ig to see what the differences were. (Last time I tried it, there weren’t any.) This time, lo and behold, not only is the weather in metric units (huzzah!) but also the Google News bit is the Australian news, and when I go to Add Content there’s Australian-specific stuff, like The Chaser, and Crikey. Of course, all my USian stuff is still there. I wonder if this means I can just go to, say, http://www.google.de/ig and put together my personal little mish-mash of stuff…

If any of you have been paying attention to the IP address of ockle.org (then get a life!) then you may have noticed I’ve moved to another server. Not that this should affect any of you that aren’t hawkishly watching my IP address. But some things might be different to what they were before, and if you’re curious, then that’s why. If things are more broken than they were before, I’m rather interested in hearing about them.

Bah, I should know that the reason Google leaves things in “beta” for years and years is so they can sneakily add features to them without necessarily telling you. Features you may have been waiting for.

So I’ve been using the Google personalised homepage (I think they call it “individualised”) for a while now… http://www.google.com/ig. And I only just discovered that sometime between the last time I checked and today, the weather module has been updated to include various international weather locations as well as the US (like, for example, Melbourne AU); and the “roll your own” module now lets you use a RSS feed, not just a Google search. Which is infinitely more useful, at least to me.

So now I’ve pretty much doubled the number of things on my Google homepage. Heh heh. Some of you may have heard my harebrained scheme for producing my own personalised newspaper with a few RSS aggregators, a bit of Google News’s parsing code, and an A1 printer… This homepage seems to be getting closer to that dream (without the A1 printer bit of course).

Screenshot:

You’ll notice, of course, that the weather, while being Australia’s weather, is still in American units. Feh.