stumbled across Gnip, makes a lot of sense for such a service to exist. the problem with twitter is a) that it is entirely public, and b) single threaded. This makes it ill suited to system events, notifications, or multi-source and multi-topic similarly threaded announcements. In trying to find a fit to my all singing-and-dancing broadcast quest of business events, Gnip looks like the perfect solution.

The GET/POST protocol is very simple, and interesting to see them use other extensions including PUT and DELETE. These didnt feature much to date other than in vulnerable WebDav and Front Page Extensions implementations; yet comfortably fills the gap in this HTTP protocol message exchange.

Managed to set up an Intdev feed at: https://api-v21.gnip.com/my/intdev/activity.xml (probably not accessible without credentials)



Interesting concept, will seek some methods of how to employ this feed, ideally into a ExtJs carousel, or even better a very large LED display board reading "25 new leads to process, lets go!!"))

Last little update for the week, feeling awefully exhausted from the jetlag amongst the management meeting, risk management implementation consultancy and the coordination of soon-to-start renovation work.

I've managed to get Intdev a lil Twitter feed, not that I'm entirely blown over by the concept, yet it certainly realises Norbert Wiener's concept of Cybernetics of contineous feedback loops. Much like James Harkin, however, concludes in his recent book Cyburbia, the emphasis should still be on the message, not only the network. Of course, the network requires us nodes to participate in giving it value by participating, yet the endless, pointless flashing of of random boring messages has no value; the nodes must add value! I'll try to give the Intdev feed some value)))

The Intdev feed is published at: http://twitter.com/intdevinternet

Weirdly, within the first day we got 10 followers. Why? I have no idea who these people are, but yeah, sure... follow our all important Intdev announcements even if you're not from South Africa!

A little dev yesterday proved a simple experiment of publishing tweets from VBScript using the Microsoft.XMLHTTP POST method, and suddenly every event looks tweet-able: import scripts, end-of-day processes, up/down monitoring alerts, staff absenteeism, operational events...everything...))) though I have to enact restraint to avoid publishing noise and decided against))

On numerous occasions do the bucket shop operators of MT4 complement the amazing capabilities of this trading station. I've got little opinion about the large number of platforms out there, yet I do value breadth in a products ability to accomodate the large variety of trading possibilities. A bespoke platform might be good at transacting Spread contracts, and another FX, there are few on the market that cover more than one asset class well. Take for example the "new" feature of market depth in MetaTrader, finally showing 5 levels with limited details of the order book



Take a look in comparison at the IT Software (www.itsoftware.it) EasyTrade Desktop Client order book showing 20 levels, colour coded liquidity provider, the number of bids at each level and volume pressure bar.



I'll accept that MT4 is a turnkey install to enable any market maker, licensed or unlicensed, to facilitate retail flow; yet one has to admit that it lacks maturity to a) scale, b) integrate and c) meet user expectations.

Most exciting, received this invite from Google Voice! Having had a quick look at their service offering at http://www.google.com/voice I was most tempted to try it out. The mail read: Unfortunately that last part is most concerning, either they dont know that I'm not in the US, or they're simply trying to bring me to their site at which point I get bounced!! A bit annoying, looking for ways to improvise my location and finish the sign-up. Maybe an SSH tunnel to our Amazon EC2 US-East zone virtual machines, and then impersonate the source IP with locality (zip code) information from myus.com?)))

Today we stumbled across something I've never seen before, the drop down of the suburb selection of a prominent property site has injected HTML code in the resultset. Searching for a suburb returned a listing from a web serivce (.asmx) and rendered the possible results. The injected HTML appeared as in this below image:



The site was obviously reported and when navigating to it directly proactive FireFox noted a big warning:



The amazing thing about this injection is that the database was not compromised. The data set searched by the SQL of the web services was clean, no injection, no hidden text or values. Then, the code of the web service had a simple SELECT statement that acted as a mere pass-thru in sourcing the data, and then internally creating a reduced subset of possible auto-suggest matches. There was no adjustment to this code, no visible trace of this injected HTML.

Completely unsure how this can result, I adjusted the web service CS code and forced a w3p.exe restart resulting in a recompile of the entire .NET site including the web service (.asmx) service...and.... amazingly, the problem was gone!!! freaky but strangely true, the injected HTML must of been "loaded" into the running state of the web service code. Unsure of how it even got there, this completely unexplainable situation raises a few questions...

Stefan made some short notice changes to his flight from Japan via Singapore, prompting me to surrender the return and wait-list for an exit on the 14th. The universe conspired and we managed to spend a few constructive days workshopping ideas together in Singapore.

We booked into the fabulous and welcoming Quincy Hotel on Mt Elizabeth Road, just off Orchard. I was super impressed! The special we signed into provided for super comfortable accomodation, breakfast, lunch & dinner, free internet, free minibar, pool, gym, and 2 free pieces of laundry per day!! Of course we much enjoyed our stay with such abundance, and I'll go back any day under their amazingly competative rates)) Find more at www.quincy.com.sg

15 years after the families first trip to Oz... -- Sent from my mobile device

Place holder 4 pics of night w Jana, Nika, Pratish, Adrian, Brian and me. I think we tried Section 8 (old container serving welled wine))) and moved to this nearby 24 hour bar...






-- Sent from my mobile device

Place holder 4 weekend break 19 till 21 June -- Sent from my mobile device

Place holder -- Sent from my mobile device