The answer? Really easy.Version 0.1 below – after remembering to reference the Skype4COM dll in VBA (Tools> References…), the following code pulls the current weather (from an Excel webquery which ends up in cell L4 of worksheet) pulls my location from my current Skype IP, and populates my rich Skype mood message. Took about 20 minutes, including reading Alex’s blog, the Skype API docs, and getting a Lemsip.

Dim oSkype As Skype
Set oSkype = CreateObject("Skype4COM.Skype")
ThisWorkbook.Sheets("weather").Cells(2, 2).QueryTable.Refresh BackgroundQuery:=False
oSkype.CurrentUserProfile.RichMoodText = Format(Now(), "dddd d mmmm yyyy") + " | currently in " + oSkype.CurrentUserProfile.IPCountry + " | London weather (" + Format(Now(), "hh:mm") + "): " + ThisWorkbook.Sheets("weather").Cells(4, 12) + " | <i>testing the Excel Skype Mood-a-tron</i>"
Set oSkype = Nothing

Anyway. I’ve made a little Countdown widget v0.1 to go with Peter Keung’s Countdown plugin. You can see it on my homepage somewhere in the sidebar to the right.  I’ll improve it at some point.

I’ve got as far as something which can index pages it’s fed (doesn’t spider yet) and comes up with keyword densities per page and then for the whole dataset, which it then indexes against each other… the idea being that you quickly identify if a page has unusual content versus its peers. Equally, words in common usage like “the”, “and”, “if” etc are automatically under-indexed as a result.

I’ve now developed it to handle multiple search keywords (it ranks the rarity of each keyword searched for and then weights the page rankings accordingly) and to reduce all indexed and searched words to their stems, making the system blind to the differences between “car” and “cars” for example.

The next challenge is identifying meaningful phrases (e.g. “Prime Minister”) then indexing them and possibly identifying associated words (e.g. “10 Downing Street”) by looking for pages which over-index for particular combinations of phrases. Strictly I’m getting into a world of Bayesian logic and matrices, but as long as I can avoid going back to my text books I will; though this excellent article summarising some work by Google gives me nightmares about Finals again.

I’ll publish some PHP code on here at some point, or maybe I’ll start a Sourceforge project and share the love. Having added a comma to a Wikipedia article the other day and been sucked into Facebook, I’m feeling very Web 2.0 this week.

It’s taking a long time to move all my travelling photos over, but I’m getting there.

And I might even transition by blog to Blogger, as there’s a nifty way to mirror it onto my hosting via FTP, I’ve been reading.

Have a look at my budding new gallery here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tcbutler/

I overcame this hatred to share this with the world. It’s the Bible, in Lego. I’m a sucker for anything involving Lego, and this is just great. I’m not sure if it’s blasphemy, but it’s painstakingly done, and I like it.

The Brick Testament

Role Playing Games – Free Multiplayer Online Games

Curiouser and curiouser.

Today I received my shiny new silver PS2 eyeToy and Play3 software. Bit of a spur of the moment purchase from eBay (saved about a tenner from the high-street price).

While watching a company webcast, I wondered whether the eyeToy works as a USB webcam on the PC. Well, it does, and I found a driver to make it work fully on XP.

The good news is that although I’ve got the ‘new’ silver eyeToy (which has a weird model number) the SLEH-00031 driver on the following site works just fine – even the audio works.

5 mins after plugging it in, it was working on Skype. Good luck!

The original link I pasted here is now dead. I’ve found some more drivers which work well now.

You can read a forum post about it here, or you can just click here to download the file directly. This will work with all versions of the EyeToy; just make sure you read the readme file if you have an older EyeToy as you have to rename a file to make it work. Enjoy!

Note: I’ve also uploaded a copy of the EyeToy drivers to my server – but please don’t use that unless the link above breaks at some point!

Great fun, and you can also challenge it by providing it with really stupid ’seed’ songs, like ‘Barbie Girl’ by Aqua vs ‘Babylon’ by David Grey.  And yes, it will find the common ground.  Strange but true!