Seems like Python is the hackers choice for everything… Great example and great fun, Flickr for the xbox media centre by Jon. Excellent cant wait to post more shoots to the xbmc flickr group.
Flickr for Xbmc
Day: 10 July 2005
As the police request for media of the blasts…
…bloggers, grassroot journalist and the cameraphone carrying public can be proud of the great work they have done. Not only some of the best pictures and videos of the tragedy could also be used for evidence in capturing the actual people who took part. Like Dan Gillmor, I turned to the BBC then the guardian then to the blogosphere, wikinews and google news.
Some of the highlights of the terriable tragedy,
Flickr: Photos on day of bombing in London – Flickr becomes a great resource for the latest pictures.
Wikinews: Coordinated terrorist attack in London – Collaborative news finally starting to work
LA Times on cameraphone coverage of London bombings, indeed the watershed moment in the history of media journalism.
Forbes interviewing Adam Stacey about his natrual reaction to film and take pictures from the choas underground.
Some signs, large media is starting to get the future picture of breaking news and the longevity of such terriable stories.Public provides new dimension to media coverage by the guardian.Mobiles capture blast aftermath and lots more by Jo Twist of the BBC.
Missing persons groups, although the BBC one will get more views flickr really allows for the interaction which could in the end be that life changing result.
The infinite space of the internet allows for voices which are sometimes hard to swallow and sometimes unvalued voices which the mainstream media wouldnt be interested in. For another example of this, I recieved a Spanish Trackback on my blog entry (sarah tried to translate, but found her spanish tougue a little missing). Its really intereting to hear from other countries besides america what they thought of the attacks. And it would be great to hear what the people of madrid (or even spain) thought of the attacks in light of there own attacks last year.
Everyone can take the opportunity read and write no matter how small there involvement but not only that do it on there own terms. My wife gave an telephone interview to her local paper back in Racine (near chicago) where her parents still live. However the Journal times misquoted and screwed my wife over for the story they wanted to write. Nothing new, I hear you say but in this new world Sarah can have her say and call them on the crap there writing it in a way publicly which was never heard of. And even if things do kinda of work out but not quite Sarah can keep them on there toes.
Bluetooth keyboard almost here
Nizam dropped me a im to say, my Bluetooth Keyboard has arrived I just need to pick it up and pay. I'm glad its the ThinkOutside keyboard because Mobileburn just reviewed the top 3 bluetooth keyboards and it came out top. Lets just hope its at least compatable with my tablet and pocketpc. If it works with my mobile phone I will be truely amazed.
In Case of Emergency, call ICE
A Cambridge-based paramedic has launched a national campaign with Vodafone to encourage people to store emergency contact details in their mobile phones. Titled the “In Case of Emergency (ICE)” campaign.
The idea is that you store the word “ICE” in your mobile phone address book, and against it enter the number of the person you would want to be contacted “In Case of Emergency”. In an emergency situation ambulance and hospital staff will then be able to quickly find out who your next of kin are and be able to contact them. It’s so simple that everyone can do it. For more than one contact name ICE1, ICE2, ICE3 etc.
Simple and effective… but I decided to added 3 ice's with a combination of home and mobile telephone numbers (defaults set to mobile). Then add how there related to me in the last name section of the contact. So for example ICE1:wife, ICE2:parents, etc…
RSS Software bugfixes and feature requests
Ok first lesson in blogging, get your facts sorted. I started writing this entry with a long list of bugfixes and feature requests for my common RSS readers. But then I went to the sites for PocketRSS and Blogmatrix Sparks! and realised that they both have upgraded there versions and I just was not keeping up to date. But on the PocketRSS front its not my fault because they dont have RSS feeds on the site. Oh dear oh dear! Anyhow, here's my list of features…
- In PocketRSS, theres seems to be no way to import linked OPML files. For example my IanForresterfeeds link to my other OPML files. luckily Sparks! does which is great
- In PocketRSS, there seems to be no way to automatically reload opml subscriptions without doing it yourself. It would be great for it to happen every X days or everytime you start PocketRSS.
- In Sparks, is it only me or is help needed in Sparks! I still dont quite know the differences between “Add this OPML directory to Sparks!” and “Import every weblog in this OPML directory”?
- In PocketRSS, there seems to be no way marking a whole RSS feed read. And on top of that theres no way to do this to multiple RSS feeds. At the moment you need to go into the RSS feed and mark each entry as read.
- In Sparks, what is the difference between the blue sphere global things and the podcast and weblog sections? When I import a OPML file shouldnt it automaticly work out what a podcasting feed is and what a normal feed is? Jager already does this, why not sparks?
- In Sparks, how on earth do you actually delete a ton of feeds in one go? I right click on the containing folder and the Remove category is always greyed out. And following on from that, hitting delete key should do the same as right clicking and selecting delete right? Wrong!
- In Sparks, is there anyway to stop Sparks using IE as the default browser for displaying blogs? On top of that, is there way to force it to use a external browser like Jager does?
- Generally about PocketRSS, why does searching under google for PocketRSS still take me the old site? And the old site still points to PocketRSS 1.42 rather than the nice new PocketRSS 2.x. A simple redirect should do the trick AtomicDB guys
- With Sparks and Jager, why is the licence attached to a indivdual machine? I have jager installed on 4 machines I use every week. Couldnt the licence be attached to myself rather than the client?
- With Sparks/jager and somewhat PocketRSS, as mentioned above I have Jager running on 4 different machines. There needs to be some kind of attention data between them soon, otherwise its going to be unmanageable. I read a feed on one of them and then switch to another client. I then have to manually tell the 2nd client I already read that entry or feed. This is nuts when your using 4 clients and then add in the fact I'm using 2 other RSS readers, PocketRSS and Sage. Yes this is CRAZY! Please can some one start using Attention.xml please! Theres a GAP IN THE MARKET here for someone to setup a nice webdav service which could sync attention.xml across multiple RSS clients. Blogmatrix this would be ideal for you guys!
Of course I'm not knocking any of these pieces of software, I actually bought PocketRSS a while ago and am considering buying Jager (Sparks! still doesnt fit with my style of rss reading).
The affect of iTunes and Mdns on digital mixing
Now I have my tabletPC up and going again, and survived the move to the darkside (Apple Mac). I reinstalled virtualdj and atomixmp3. First thoughts is how poor atomixmp3 is now compared to virtualdj. Its very cheap and does the job but loop control and beatmatching is really not as tight and flexible as virtualdj. So what's new in virtualdj? well a feature I have not yet tested but have been talking about for ages! Yes you guess right a bpm timecode over the network. Yep at long last its possible to DJ on two or even more separate machines which are networked. Whoooohooo! I'll give it a try today for sure, I'm really hoping its using mdns (zeroconf and rendezvous) instead of some proptery rubbish to connect together the machines. The disadvantage of using mdns of course is that its not portable online which indeed would be useful for remote mixing, but how many people will make use of this feature? I know I certainly could see a great community building on cooperative mixing but dj's are not really into this mix sharing idea. Anyhow the other reason I'm hoping for mdns is so virtualdj can access a iTunes client. Now this may sound like a step too far but I've also been checking out the other mixing software out there. Traxtor DJ studio 2 already reads your itunes playlists so theres no need to make 2 lots of playlists (one of general listening and another mixing). I mean I still dont like iTunes for playing music and podcasts but nothing is even close for arranging and sorting out audio media. I've been sorting out my tunes on the way to work everyday and I dont want to sort out all my playlists, etc. Then have to do the same in virtualdj next week. Its crazy virtualdj hasnt followed traxtor by enabling access to iTunes already. I swear to you this is why open source software is doing such a good job. My next entry will be a set of suggestions for bugfixes and new features in two pieces of open source software. I bet atomix productions will never pick up on this blog entry and still will be using a internal playlist format into late summer.
Google Maps supports XML output
Well well, after only a couple of days at the most? Google maps has been found to give off simple XML when you add ?output=xml
to the query string. So for example – http://maps.google.com/maps?q=minneapolis&output=xml will give you the centre and span geo's of Minneapolis in North America. Its not alot of information I grant you that but its not bad at all. Here's Sarah's home town – http://maps.google.com/maps?q=racine&output=xml. I honestly think this is what Web 2.0 is all about, a data only/machine readable view of a servie. So where from here? Well first some more data would be great, not to say you couldnt just query another service for information but its google and its free for use – not even a api key in view. A public schema, no matter how simple it may be. It would be useful in the case of a error like this – http://maps.google.com/maps?q=15%20Kings%20close&output=xml. Jon Udell goes into more depth and builds a simple XSL to demostrate whats possible. I am tempted to do something with it myself but it supports nothing outside of North America, which is little use to me. Till a european service is open, here is some interest queries…
Pharmacies in Chicago
Walgreen's pharmacies in Chicago
Sex shops in Minneapolis
Churches in Racine, wi
Racine to Minneapolis and the interesting XML version
There's lots more comments on google maps at slashdot as usual.
Seems SVG is only mentioned once, while its being used in backend map building all around the world. Damm I wish I had the time to build prototype using SVG and the google xml.
Google Maps XML output has now been disabled. Oh well it certainly was fun while it lasted.
Into the Dragons’ Den
The Dragons' Den was a six part series where entrepreneurs pitched their ideas to secure investment finance from the Dragons… elite business experts.
I missed most of this series and only caught bits here and there on TV. It also seems very few people were interested in seeding a torrent of the Dragons' Den, but I'm slowly getting them down. Anyhow I have to say its one of those programmes that the BBC do so well. Yes its reality TV but actually its got all the elements of ideas and thoughts which I expect from the BBC. Great programming, well shot, well thought-out… I may even considering checking out the Apprentice which starts next week on BBC2.
Some of the ideas for businesses are sometimes laughable like in the pitch when a couple of guys suggested turning old tyres into wheelchair ramps. But there have been some gems like Paul Thomas' Truffles – plantation system. The pitches can make one hell of a difference (as we all know too well) and honestly the winning entrepreneurs tend to have a good pitch and the business figures to back themselves up. Best example has to be Huw Gwyther who pitched for a high quality magazine called Wonderland (shame about the nasty flash website, hardly says quality or good taste in anyway!). I know just the person Huw should speak to about this…