One of the books I’ve read this Summer is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. I read this as I was helping a small company set themselves up for working in a distributed virtual team environment for their software development (the kind of stuff I’ve been using with Overpass), so I found the book to be very relevant to what I was working on at the time.

Wikinomics is the authors’ term for the new economy of Web 2.0. It centers around open source, open APIs, and collaboration between companies and customers. The book talks in great depth about the new trends and technologies that have been emerging in the last two or three years.

Web 2.0 is a strange term that I don’t really like very much. It’s something that marketing people and senior managers like to use to impress each other. But after reading this book, it is easy to see all the changes in thinking that have occurred in the past few years. It’s been gradual, but the world has changed significantly since 2004–at least as far as the internet is concerned.

I highly recommend the book. It’s not aimed at software developers, but it really opened my eyes to what other developers are doing out there. It’s definitely worth a look if you have the time.

Time Magazine had an article about plastic bags and reusable designer plastic bags last week. The article included a graphic showing how much oil and resources are used in making all of the plastic bags used in the US. You can read the article here (but without the graphic online, unfortunately).

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

The trouble is that California is one of the few places to mandate that stores offer plastic-bag recycling, and the industry has been slow to volunteer elsewhere. Less than 1% of bags are recycled in the U.S., according to the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute. Major chains like Giant Foods are trying to improve that statistic by giving rebates to shoppers who return plastic bags for recycling, although few consumers take advantage of the policy. In March, Ikea began charging a nickel per plastic bag and selling a reusable tote for 59¢. While it’s still too soon to tell how this strategy has affected U.S. consumers, a similar program launched in the U.K. last year reduced plastic-bag consumption 95%. Ireland has reported a similar decline since the country instituted a roughly 20¢-per-bag “plastax” in 2002.

A few months ago, I heard of a UK company that produces a bag called Onya (the name meaning “you always have it on ya”) which makes bags that fold up very small and are made up of parachute material. They can carry something like 14 kilos and fold up into a little bag which will fit on your keychain.

I ordered one last week and am very pleased with it. My only problem is that I forget to tell the people at the till that I have my own bag before they start putting things in a plastic one. So I make them take everything out of the bag so they have a crumpled used bag they don’t know what to do with (they probably throw it away, defeating the point).

The bag I bought cost about £7. It does fit on my keychain, but is slightly too bulky to put it in my jeans pocket with my keys. Still, it’s a nice bag and I hope it catches on more.

You can look at the Onya bags on their website here. (BTW, from a web developer’s perspective, their site needs to lost the Comic Sans font.)

For the past few years, Scott Hanselman has been posting his list of Ultimate Developer tools on his blog. If you are into .Net development, it is definitely worth a look. Check out http://www.hanselman.com/tools.

Some of the tools he mentions are tools that I’ve started using over the past year. Others are tools I plan on using very soon. My favourite tools to date are Fiddler, Web Developer for Firefox, and WatIn Test Recorder. Most of the items on the list are freeware or open source and none are available as part of the standard Microsoft Suite of controls.

I bought a USB TV Stick last week which is supposed to work on Vista, but haven’t been able to get it to work until today. I kept getting an error sayding that PMCLoader.exe was closing. I got this on my 64bit desktop and my 32bit laptop. Frustrating.

I got it solved and will just post what I did in case someone else comes across the same problem and finds this through Google (I couldn’t find anything).

For Vista, you need to download the proper drivers for the stick. These are not on the normal drivers page, so you need to look around a bit. I went to http://cdn.pinnaclesys.com/SupportFiles/PCTV%20Drivers/ReadmePCTV.htm to download the the 64 bit drivers (currently in Beta) for product 71E. Then, go to Device Manager and manually install the driver. The incredibly long Pinnacle software installation (it took over 30 minutes and required a reboot) is worthless. Even now, it tells me I don’t have .net 2 installed (which I know to be false).

For this TV Stick, use Windows Media Centre instead of the bundled Pinnacle software. I’m still setting it all up after four days. I’m not too pleased with this so far.

Last Thursday I had an entire afternoon to myself. It was a perfect time to take the motorcycle out for a few hours and explore. I’m negotiating another London contract at the moment, so I thought it would be the perfect time to find out what it would be like to ride into London on a motorcycle. The train is one of the biggest pains involved in working in London. So I left Wantage and headed down the A34 and M4 and really made good time.

When I got to the Reading services, I put my left foot down to shift down into first. The gear lever wasn’t there. I was going about 60, so I couldn’t really look down. When I pulled up to a stop at the services, I saw that the bolt holding my gear lever in place had fallen out and my gear lever was only held in place by the kick stand. This gear lever, by the way, is the same one I posted about a few months ago that I repaired myself (not so well, I guess).

I took the bike into downtown Reading looking for a bike shop. The bike would still start in 6^th gear, but it sounded terrible and very wobbly. I headed to a motorcycle shop near Caversham bridge that I knew of when I worked in that area?but that shop is now closed. I ended up riding around for an hour before finding the Reading Honda dealership. They were able to look at the bike right away and fixed it while I walked down the road for lunch. It was really great service.

I need to put a list of Honda dealerships on my PDA for these occasions.