Sometimes you find something that is just earth-shatteringly cool. This week I found one of those things, ex.fm.

ex.fm is a extension to the Google Chrome browser that turns your browser into your music player. It has totally transformed the way I listen to music and only in a few days.

Ex.fm once installed puts a little icon to the right of the address bar in Chrome, when you visit a site with MP3s or a site like Soundcloud, a little blue box appears with the number of tracks on that page in it.

You click on the icon and a small media player appears and below it all the tracks on that page. You can hit play or add them to your queue. Every site you come across with compatible music gets automatically added to your collection.

You can then browse music by site or artist, add it to your queue and listen away!
Typically when you find a good music site it'll flag up 20-30 files, so after a couple of sites it gives you a couple of hours music easy. I've found I am listening to loads of music just from the queue.

ex.fm also has the usual social options. You can follow others and be followed. You can tweet a song or post it to facebook. It also scrobbles all your listening to last.fm too.

It's great stuff and if you start using it please let me know and follow me at http://ex.fm/lancew

Lance

p.s. you can follow their blog over at http://blog.extension.fm/ which has all the latest news, like today the picture of an iPhone which hints at an upcoming iPhone app. :-)

Hi all,
so after a very slow dev iteration, I have pushed the latest version of the Dojolist codebase up so people can download it from http://github.com/lancew/DojoList

For those of you unaware of the project, DojoList is the open source project I started to maintain a list of Judo clubs online (specifically for the Hampshire Judo Association website originally).

The software is evolving and the project website http://dojolist.org now lists in excess of 4,000 Judo clubs from all over the world! There is just about 40,000 lines of code and it is starting to be something that I think should be looked at by anyone looking to maintain a list of clubs.

The 0.8.0 release is pretty well tested and has some nice new features (not least a tidier dojo display page. I am moving onto the 0.9.0 release that is a pretty big piece of work as it is the one that has all the syncronisation functionality in it. It'll be able to keep club details in sync between installations in other words.

In this release I have made a variety of tweaks and bug fixes as well as the following specific additions:

* Improved data validation
* Update date field on each dojo record
* Ability to upload photo of the coach
* more tests
* automated build script
* PHP CodeSniffer improvements
* A number of import options

I have more time to work on the code currently, so shall hopefully get the 0.9.0 release out sooner rather than later. No more than a couple of months I hope. Then the big 1.0.0 release about mid 2011 once I am happy with the stability of the code.

Obviously, the more use the code gets and the more eyes on the code the better it will be, so any geeks wanting to critique and or assist me improve the code please do let me know.

Lance

Happy New Decade everyone!
2010 was a good year for me, 2011 I am intending to be even better.

This year I have lots planned already and lots I am adding to the plan. Between running my own business, running several Judo clubs, creating an academy, running a bunch of Judo websites and projects, doing a research project and continuing my education I expect to be swamped!

I shan't dwell on the work stuff on this blog, but will share a little about the Judo and Lance stuff here.

The first goal I have scheduled in the calendar is to run the Portsmouth Coastal Half-Marathon on February 13th. It coincides with when my fellow New Zealander Judoka Mahana Clutha competes in the World Cup in Austria.
I mention that because I have decided to use the run as a fundraising opportunity for Mahana. Sadly Judo in New Zealand does not get the millions of pounds that other countries (like Britain) get for example. So every trip is a huge investment, and it all comes out of the small amount of money Mahana has. To have a shot at the 2012 Olympic games, Mahana has to earn as many points at the international level that she can, so lots of trips. Just budgeting up to April is several thousands pounds.

So this is where you come in; you can have a huge direct impact on the hopes and dreams of a young Judo athlete! I am running 13 and a bit miles, if everyone who reads this blog threw a pound per mile Mahana would be able to easily pay the airfares and entry fees for the european leg of the World Cup circuit.

You can easily donate, it only takes moment online with Paypal. It would really mean a lot to Mahana and to me if you could donate something to the cause. Just click the button below and give what you feel comfortable with.



(The 13 miles is not all I am doing, there is the 60+ miles a month in training.)

It is not all for the fundraising, I initially started running again in part because I intend to get the points for my competitive 3rd Dan this year. So, I needed to burn some calories, get the spare tire under control, get some lung capacity and pretend to be fit again.
So (if you are in the UK) you may get to see me turn purple as I fight for points for my third this year.

As well as this, I want to work more on www.judospace.com and helping more coaches get academic knowledge of Judo coaching. I am also practising what I preach in this area and have accepted onto the EJU Level 6 coaching programme, which is a Masters programme from University of Rome Tor Vergata. This will be challange for me as there are only two native English speakers on the course (including me!). All this goes along with running and coaching three Judo clubs and also trying to grow the Hampshire Judo Academy project. My rough goal is to be working closely with 6 young athletes by the end of the year (with more involved of course).

In August, I plan to attend the www.judoresearch.org research symposium held during the World Championships and present my www.rwjl.net project, so I have lots of work to do there.

Then there are all the other projects I have on the go and also in my mind. I am going to get all my various blogs and podcasts and other projects onto a schedule, so that although the projects may move slowly they will move steadily. www.dojolist.org is a priority as I have let it slip lately. :-(

So, 2011 is looking like a very busy year for me. My hope is that it will be even better than 2010 and it’s already looking like it will be.

So, I looked at this site and realised that my last post was in AUGUST! Wow, didn't realise I had let it slip quite so bad. Anywho... so I thought I would put a quick summary of whats been going on, on the blog.

1. Working hard.
So, you know I run my own company right? Well, I do enVirtua. It's a wonderful thing running your own business, all the challenge, all the reward! Unfortunately it also includes all the stress, long days (and nights), lots of travel and it generally making you do things you never thought you'd do or would have to do.

I'm not knocking it, the cloud backup slash virtual network shared drive has started to grow in popularity which is good as it looked like it wasn't a winner for a while there. And I have been swamped with good work for over a year now. So much it is affecting how much more business I can generate (as in new clients) it's a wonderful curse to have!

2. Judo is taking over whats left!
So, for a longtime now (since I left Edinburgh almost), my coaching was pretty much short burst and my focus was theoretical, academic and geeky (websites). This has all changed over this year.
I now coach not one, not two, but THREE Judo clubs now! Kids in Alresford, Students in Southampton Solent and adults (military) at HMS Collingwood. And I should probably mention the soon to start after school club at the local Junior School.
Add on top of that my http://www.rwjl.net Judo research project, which I will post about at some point and also trying to help a young New Zealand Judo athlete... well, it's chewing up the remaining time pretty well.
Again, it's a great curse to have!

3. Getting fat!
People, I have a problem, I'm in my late 30's and I drive a computer for a living... and the result is I'm increasingly a tub of lard. :-(
More accurately, my BMI is rather higher than I like, or a doctor would like. I'm not fit and I feel it. So I am running again.
Being the type of guy I am, I've signed up for a Half Marathon in February. I am also signed up to a training programme from Jeff Galloway which I am following using RunKeeper. It maps and tracks all my runs, so people can stalk my panting around the village. :-)

What else.... loads of stuff, but for now that will do.

Oh did I mention RWJL? BLog post to follow soon. ;-)

Last night (23 August 2010), I released DojoList v 0.7.0 via the http://dojolist.org website. DojoList is my Open Source Judo club database system I have been working on for a while now.



V0.7.0 is the first update since 0.6.0 back on April 20th. It has been slow progress as other projects have taken much of my time. All the code as I have written it has been powering http://dojolist.org so I am fairly happy with the stability. So far I’ve not had any big data loss incidents.



In the DojoList 0.7.0 release I have added:



* Sorting of the data
* Data Validation
* Draggable marker on map (during create and edit)
* Ability to delete and replace in edit club logo
* GUID for each dojo
* Source url for each dojo in XML data
* RSS feed of updates
* SW Version embedded in XML data file



I also fixed some bugs:



* 4: XML data file too popular in Google
* 6: Dojo test causes <Dojo/> artefacts
* 9: Unable to click on map markers
* 10: Accented characters in dojo name prevent edit
* 12: RSS feeds do not update properly



In the next release I plan on adding the following features:



* Improved data validation
* Update date field on each dojo record
* Training session rating of level
* Ability to upload photo of the coach



Of course there will be bug fixes, both of those found already and those that will no doubt show up.



Summary:

It has been a slow development iteration this one, but it’s been a good one for me personally. I have learnt a lot and found the system even better. The system now incorporates data from http://judoworldmap.com and also from the rather rubbish British Judo Association “Find a Club” database. I can now finally find a club easily in Britain when I am travelling on business.

I have started planning on how to sync data between installations, that will I think be the main feature added in the eventual v1.0.0 release as it will require a lot of work.

In this release I enjoyed working out how to do the draggable map markers, which now update the latitude and longitude of the club. Data validation is proving interesting; it needs more work, but has been interesting to explore. The system has both server and client side validation. The PHP code checks for valid data and I am using the jQuery validation plug-in to make the validation experience a bit nicer on the client side (server side was painful as it was rather user unfriendly).



In the next few months I want to improve the installation process. To make it less manual and to check that all the pre-requisites are there. Preferably to adjust to cope with systems without all the modules required. Specifically this may be relevant for the internationalisation code.



The aim originally was very much to make the system work on pretty much any cheap hosting package. The initial versions I think retain that, but I know that 0.7.0 for example does not work on one of my target servers (cheap IIS hosting). And I have struck problems on another server too.



Finally, the big change I want to see happen with the project is that it goes from being a one man band to being a community developed project. To this end I added some basic info about the project on the ABOUT page of the website, created a mailing list too. Of course all the source code, bug tracking and planning was available freely online. But I want to go beyond “available” to a point where there is two way traffic. I push code and pull code from others.