A while ago I volunteered for a couple of days at the World Vision AIDS Experience. It's an eye opening look at how poverty and disease are threatening the future of the developing world, and how we can make a difference.

World Vision are not alone in seeing the problem, but it's interesting how many of the solutions revolve around the role of women in that environment.

With World AIDS day and Thanksgiving fast approaching, stop for a moment and consider the girl effect. What can you do to help fix the problem?

I've been really pleased with the Zune integration in the Mustang so far. The sound quality is great and it's really reliable (being able to sync wirelessly when the car is on the drive is a bonus as well) but I wanted to see how hard it would be to do a full head unit integration...

Well, SoundGate, the folks who made the original ZuneCORE module I was using have just released their head unit integration for a long list of manufacturers - and my Mustang just happened to be on the list! So I had a small challenge of getting the FDZN4 unit installed in my Pony over the weekend.

Installation was remarkably straight-forward. I'm not the most technical of folks but managed it with no more tools than a cross head screwdriver, one socket and some electrical tape to hold things in place. In less than an hour I was able to use the controls on the factory original stereo to control the Zune as though it was an integral part of the car.

They say a picture tells a thousand words, so here's some pictures of my little installation:

If you're not a Zune user yet you should check it one out. If you have a Zune and wonder how you can integrate it with your car or boat check out SoundGate or the Zune Accessories site for other ways to enhance your listening and viewing experience. I'm wondering if I can feed the video out to a rear seat monitor now for Rhiannon...

MIX09 is the Microsoft event of the year for all things web, so if you don't know what it is you should head over to VisitMIX and find out.

If you do know, you probably want to promote it... and just displaying the same old image for every visitor is so old fashioned, so I turned to my handy 4 lines of javascript to spice things up a little...

   1:  <script type="text/javascript"> 

   2:  var v1= Math.round(Math.random() * 6) + 1;

   3:  document.write('<br><a href="http://2009.VisitMix.com"><img src="http://blog.offbeatmammal.com/samples/MIX09/MIX09_BlogBling_' +v1 + '.jpg" border="0" alt="Visit MIX09"></a>');

   4:  </script>

or... even easier is to just insert this one line of Javascript into your page and as I find new bling I can update it automatically

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://blog.offbeatmammal.com/samples/mix09/mix09bling.js"></script>

if you define two variables in your javascript before you call the random blog bing script then you can over-ride the width and height - just like this

<script type="text/javascript">

var bling_width=120;

var bling_height=160;

</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://blog.offbeatmammal.com/samples/mix09/mix09bling.js"></script>

and you can see the results here (just refresh the page to see it change)

Although I started my adventures in programming in Assembler (65c02, 68000) it was probably the discover of BASIC (I still remember it stands for "Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code"!) that showed my that computers could be fun (nerd alert!)

I used various forms of BASIC on a wide range of machines - Atom, BBC B, MSX, Oric, RML, ZX81 etc - before PCs became a more regular feature in my life and QuickBASIC was often a quick and easy way to get things done in the days of DOS. With the rise of Windows Visual Basic became the de facto way that many developers were first introduced to programming.

Time passed and the development environment got more complex and VB "grew up", gained some object oriented type features and became a member of the .Net family of languages. It was no longer an easy starting point for new developers - and languages like C# and Java became more prominent.

Well, that simple, easy to get started concept is back. And in keeping with the aim the name says it all - Small Basic. It's not trying to be big and clever, but as a good way for kids to get started and see results quickly.

In it's default form there are only 15 keywords - but even so it's petty capable. The development environment features all the things you'd expect from a modern platform such as Intellisense and context sensitive help. The neat this though is that it's an extensible environment so other developers can add features and capabilities to the base product to help it grow.

Check it out at the MSDN DevLabs (the same folks who bring you PopFly), read more at their blog and don't forget to check out their "Hello World"!

I wonder how long it'll take me to re-write "snake" ;)

Thanks to a bunch of projects over the years I've learnt one or two handy tricks to make sure web pages load quickly, but there's always something new to learn!

In the past I've always tried to delay loading JavaScript files until the very end because most browsers block the loading of other files when they hit a <script type="text/javascript" src="xyz.js"> tag ... I guess it makes sense as the script being loaded may make some fundamental changes to the page layout.

But what if you do have a load of scripts that you need to load, but they won't really be relevant until the page is displayed anyway (ajax helper libraries, entry validation etc)?

Well, you can fool your browser into loading them just like ordinary files outside the control of the JavaScript engine - and the great thing is that the code is pretty simple and flexible (which was good as I had to drop it into a site where I've not looked at the code in over two years but other folks have added a bunch of scripts and couldn't work out why the page load had got significantly worse!

function loadJavaScriptAsync()

{

var args = arguments.length;

for (var i=0;i<args;i++)

{

document.write("<script src='" + arguments[i] + "'></" + "script>");

}

}

....

loadJavaScriptAsync(

"JSfile1.js",

"JSfile2.js",

"http://remoteserver.com/scripts/JSfile3.js",

"jsFile4.js");

Hulu and Netflix are two amazing examples of using the internet to deliver content but while I don't mind watching a 30 second funny clip on youTube or Soapbox there's no way I'm going to watch an episode of Gemini Division or Dr Horribles Sing-a-long Blog, let alone a full length movie unless I can lean back in my chair with the dogs at my feet and remote in my hand and enjoy TV as it's meant to be.

At home we already have a Media Center PC (it came with us from Australia and it great for watching DVDs that are not Region 1 encoded or has interesting codecs that need some extra support), an Xbox360 (can front-end the Media Center and play back content from network) and the majority of our content living on a Windows Home Server with some Maxtor external drives to extend that a bit further.

Until now most internet content has required jumping through hoops to get downloaded and delivered... but now it's time to PlayOn!

All you have to do is install the PlayOn transcoder application on a Windows PC (WinXP SP2, Vista, Windows 7, Windows Home Server - if it can run Windows Media Player 11 it should work) that's on the same network as your Xbox360, PS3 or HP Media Smart TV (they want to get it working on the Wii as well), follow some simple instructions and you're pretty much good to go.

On the transcoding PC (which takes the Flash video or other formats from the web to something that your Xbox or PS3 can display) you can enter your Netflix account details or Hulu credentials and the application displays your queue [Actually, at the moment they don't have the Hulu queue working, but you can still access videos by navigating categories and drilling down alphabetically]

You still get to see the adverts that pay for Hulu (or need a log in to get to a Netflix queue) so it's not a way to bypass the monetization models of the providers but it's another wake-up call to the old school TV providers that they need to deliver more content when the audience wants it rather than rely on their programming schedules....

I'd happily pay what I currently pay for Cable for an online, on-demand delivery mechanism that uses much better ad targeting to reduce the interruptions to make for a much better end user experience.