Spam by any other name

This was dropped in my email today from partricia500@yahoo.com.

Hi cubicgarden

pice23 (a SlideShare user) has sent you a private message.
'HELLO My name is partricia i saw your profile today at(www.slideshare.net) and became intrested in you,i will also like to know you the more,and i want you to send an email to my email address so i can give you my picture for you to know whom i am.Here is my email address ( partricia1000@yahoo.com ) I believe we can move from here. I am waiting for your mail to my email address above.(Remeber the distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life ) p/a/r/t/r/i/c/i/a/1/0/0/0/@/y/a/h/o/o/./c/o/m/'

(*note: This is a private message. You can message back “pice23” on his/her profile page)

(**You can change your message permissions by editing your profile here)

How did I know it was spam? Easy, look at the writing style first, very child like and very jumpy. Speilling is also bad. Why the hell would I send a email to the email address which is spelt out twice (as to beat most spam catchers). The call for action “I am waiting for your mail to my email.” Then the profile page has no slideshows, joined in Jan 2008, no contacts or friends, no activity and last logged in 5 hours ago. Go social engineer someone else losers.

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Traveling in style, wifi and power what more do you need?

Free Wifi on National Express trains

Free Wireless and a plug per seat, National Express trains get a double thumbs up from myself. GNER use to have power in every seat but charged 9.99 for a days worth of Wireless access. National Express took over and dropped the price to zero, awesome. Only problem is that it would seem some ports are blocked and the speed shared across the whole train is close to 1meg at the wireless edge and about 256k of real usage.

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URL X shutdown again

urlx.org shutdown again

I like URL X because the shorten URL's it makes are still human readable and there's a very simple API. However its been shutdown again.

Bad news: Dreamhost has shut down url(x)! (Again.) They don't think the service should exist in its current anonymous incarnation. I disagree with their assessment and will be moving the site to a new server. I will be tightening some things up, but the service will return in its current form. Sorry for the inconvenience — we will be back shortly!

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Facebook, Google And Plaxo Join The DataPortability Workgroup

Dataportability

Forget Open social, this is huge! This a huge win for interoperability, portability and fair use. Chris told me a while ago but promised to say nothing till now. It also shows how much influence characters like scoble have, but I'm sure these companies were looking at Data portability long before scobles account got suspended.

After publishing an invitation to Facebook to join the DataPortability Working Group January 4, we never thought that Facebook would accept it. Today changes everything you’ve ever thought about social-networking data and lock-in before, because today Facebook, Google and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup.

Google and Plaxo joining are a positive, however given that both have previously joined together for platforms such as OpenSocial it’s not that significant, but Facebook is another matter. On January 4 Michael sort of defended Facebook’s stance against Plaxo pulling data from Facebook on the grounds that “Facebook also has a very good reason for protecting email addresses – user privacy.” Today, by joining the DataPortability Working Group Facebook is embracing open standards and open access, and that is a huge fundamental change from its previous stance on being locked in to closed standards.

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Xbox media centre on a linux PC

Xbox media centre on linux

I've made up my mind. Forget the XboX 360 and PS3, they suck for a home entertainment centre. MythTV and Windows Media Centre are too heavy and too focused on replacing the DVR/PVR era of devices. To hell with the seriously underpowered AppleTV and Wii, I might as well stick to the Xbox if I was consider one of those. Nope its all about Xbox media centre on Linux, Mac and even Windows. Jon's experience of the next XBMC is certainly of interest to myself, however Jon doesn't go into details about how to install it.

It's been a long time. I haven't even been an XBMC user since May. In May I got a new HDTV so I needed to move to something that could render my HD content. That path brought me to MediaPortal. The old xbmp fork. And well… its garbage.

I don't mean to sound like an ass, but compared to the codebase of XBMC, MediaPortal is junk. Its full of bugs and just feels terrible. The devs at least know this, and are working on MediaPortal 2. So that should be interesting to watch. But all in all, running my mediacenter on Windows just blew.

So last Saturday I decided to check on XBMC for Linux's progress. And to my surprise it is practically feature complete! It all works! Now, for how long is another question. Lets just say that I wrote a trusty Ruby script to watch for XboxMediaCenter, and if it crashes, it gets relaunched. So yeah, its not really primetime, but it works great and is fast.

So I decided to go check it out myself. First port of call was the xbox media centre linux wiki. For Windows users the easist way to get XBMC is to run VMware's Player and grab the virtual environment images. Theres a few staticly hosted files or a torrent file. There's a whole thread here on setting it all up in VMware. I opted for the compile your own which is detailed in a readme file in the VM image.

The steps are pretty simple for Ubuntu 7.x

  1. # sudo apt-get install subversion
  2. # cd $HOME
  3. # svn checkout https://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/branches/linuxport/XBMC
    1. For Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn):
      # sudo apt-get install make g++-4.1 gcc-4.1 libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-sound1.2-dev libsdl-stretch-dev libcdio6 libcdio-dev libfribidi0 libfribidi-dev liblzo1 liblzo-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev libogg-dev libsmbclient-dev libsmbclient libasound2-dev python2.4-dev python2.4 python-sqlite libglew1 libglew-dev libcurl3-dev g++ gawk x11proto-xinerama-dev libxinerama-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev libmms-dev pmount
    2. For Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon):
      # sudo apt-get install make g++-4.1 gcc-4.1 libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-sound1.2-dev libsdl-stretch-dev libcdio6 libcdio-dev libfribidi0 libfribidi-dev liblzo1 liblzo-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev libogg-dev libsmbclient-dev libsmbclient libasound2-dev python2.4-dev python2.4 python-sqlite libglew1.4 libglew1.4-dev libcurl3-dev g++ gawk x11proto-xinerama-dev libxinerama-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev libmms-dev pmount
  5. # ./build.sh
  6. # ../BUILD/Xboxmediacenter

Its not working for me right now, because (I think) Compizfusion is screwing up the display. But I'll know for sure once I try it on another machine. Stay tuned…

IT WORKS! Ok its 4am and I've just got Xbox media centre working on my workstation which doesn't have compizfusion enabled or installed. Like Jon said its all there except 3d and special effects. I found it very slow at larger resolutions and unstable at anything over 800×600 but it could be my cheap onboard graphics or slow single 2.8ghz AMD processor. I've uploaded a load of screenshots on to Flickr before going to bed. More about this when I get home tomorrow.

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Life explained on film, Video Jug


VideoJug: How To Clean A Laptop

Sheila showed me a site I've never seen before. Videojug.com, explains how to do things in real life. Its a simple concept and honestly when I first saw it, my first thought was so what? But then I started thinking, this is actually really good idea. Its like Sclipo but centred around those situations in life where you may or maynot know how to act, behave or start. I started watching “how to choose the right Television” just to see if the information was correct and upto date. And I got to say I was pretty impressed with the information and tips it gave in the short time.

To most of us the idea of using a web video to teach us how to cook a Rib Eye steak, check your prostate or even How To Fold Trousers Without Creases seems silly, but actually think about it. Where did you ever learn this stuff? School, College, Parents, Friends or even TV shows? Well he's a great site if you ever missed out or was ever too proud to admit you don't actually know.

I have to do my eight things you don't know about me post one day soon, and I was thinking about some really abstract ones. Well this is great because I can now throw some really weird ones in and link to them on Videojug. Nice!

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Scoble calls for dataportability

Thanks Tom for the heads up… Straight from Scoble. A very good reason for dataportability. You should be able to export your data even when your account is disabled.

Facebook disabled my account

If you are trying to contact me on Facebook, please don’t. My account has been “disabled” for breaking Facebook’s Terms of Use. I was running a script that got them to keep me from accessing my account. I’m appealing. I’ll tell you what I was doing as soon as I talk with the developers who built what I was using and as soon as I talk with Facebook’s support (I sent an email in reply to the one below, but haven’t heard back yet).

I run this stuff so you don’t have to. 🙂

UPDATE: Rodney Rumford, who runs the FaceReviews Blog about Facebook says that all traces of me have been already removed from Facebook too.

UPDATE2: Tonight I learned about DataPortability.org and signed my name to that effort.

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Cheating for the right reasons

So I only watched the film Cheaters. It was excellent and put across the true story really well. Anyway here's a really good user comment which sums up my thoughts.

What I absolutely loved about this movie is the fact that it displays a genuine moral dilemma without necessarily preaching anything. It doesn't provide viewers a standpoint for moral ascendancy, instead, the viewers get the pleasure of interpreting the situation, thus gaining that threshold for ascendancy.

I'd say the film did play out a bias, and the bias was in favor of the students from Steimetz High. I'd say that it is rather a fair bias, because it is rare to see the cheaters as the protagonist. Amidst this, they weren't portrayed as the over-glamorized heroes that will promote a cheating society. What John Stockwell did was to give us a dose of reality, an arena for sympathize with cheaters, at the same time, displaying the consequences of the human act.

I love the mixture of documentary footages. Opening Credits was awesome, wherein there were raw footage in grainy stock of actual American high school. It played greatly on the emotional framework that the film worked on and I'm so glad my parents were able to find a copy of the film on DVD.

Nice work John Stockwell, I don't usually like Jeff Daniels but he did a great job in this film. If you get the chance to see this film, do watch it, you won't be disappointed.

I love these moral dilemma's and coming from a not so great school I can certainly agree with what they did. Sometimes you do need to break the rules to get things changed or at least make a difference. This isn't justification to break the rules but I guess most people know when the right time is.

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Steal this film II

Steal this film 2

Steal this film II is out but what's more interesting is the next project the League of Noble Peers are working on – The oil of the 21st Century

'Intellectual property', said Mark Getty, 'is the oil of the twenty first century'. Getty is chairman of Getty Images and one of the world's largest intellectual proprietors. His comment offers a unique perspective on the conflicts evolving around information as it penetrates and shapes every aspects of our lives — from nutrition to medicine, from markets to civil liberties.

Camming the steal this film

This film explores those conflicts. Established and developing
economies wage war on each other through restriction and promulgation of information, with devastating consequences on lives and ways of life. Nations like Britain and the US, once information 'pirates' themselves, now support the rights of massive corporations to protect their pharmaceutical patents at the expense of lives in developing countries. Meanwhile, burgeoning Asian economies exploit difficulties with enforcement to create multi-billion dollar pirate industries that are increasingly seen as a real threat to Hollywood.

oh by the way I noticed the abstract blur was filmed at Ravensbourne College, I have thoughts who the blur could be but I'm not going to say in public.

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The Smartphone…

The Smartphone segment

So over the Christmas period I've been at my parents house and they read the Mirror. I was flicking through the Sunday Mirror's pull out magazine called life and came across six pages of anime about new technology from the Far East. Its a reasonable piece and the illustrations are done by Anime artist Kanako Damerum.

One of the pages talked about the smartphone and showed off the Sharp W-Zero3. Which can scan business cards, includes a 3inch VGA touchscreen and Qwerty keypad. Wifi, 256meg of on board storage and MicroSD expansion. I was a little puzzled, my current phone does all that (I discovered Worldcard Mobile only yesterday). Yes I'm not rocking with a VGA screen (I had planned to get the glofish x850 which does have a vga screen) and the HTC Kaiser is 19mm instead of 17mm but its not far off.

So what I never quite got around to before was the fact that Smartphones are still quite novel in a lot of circles. I pulled out my Kaiser in the pub with some friend during a night out and they were like “what the heck is that? is that a computer or something?” I wasn't do it for effect but I did have it with the keyboard and tilt on (i was answering a couple of texts). I guess add the bluetooth headset blinking in my shirt pocket and they thought I'd gone all futuristic or something. But whats fun about the Windows mobile phones is that HTC make them pretty cheap. So you can get a windows mobile phone for the same price as a LG, Nokia or Motorola. So its not about the phone prices.

Maybe people don't like the complexity of the phone? But I would say the Windows Smartphone platform is no more complex that any other phone. Maybe its the style? Could be on something there, but Ted Baker now have an edition of the HTC Touch, LG Prada anyone and what about the most loved gadget of 2007? The Apple iPhone?

2008 is going to be the year of the Smartphone for sure. There is very little reason not to get one and I'm sure the phone shops will be pushing them harder that ever.

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Magic enchanted objects

Nabaztag

Just a quick post to highlight this great talk from O'reilly's Emerging Tech conference which I attended last year. The talk is titled the coming age of magic by Mike Kuniavsky and here's a quick quote.

Yes, 'magic', meaning enchanted objects. “I do not advocate that we pretend that technology is a kind of magic, but that we use our existing cultural understanding of magic objects as an abstraction to describe the behavior of ubiquitous computing devices,

Mike's discussion about Animism is well worth listening to, later in the talk he points at objects such as the Wiimote, Nabaztags and security wand you see at airport security as examples of enchanted objects. I also found these 7 rules very interesting.

I’ve enumerated the properties of enchanted objects that I believe make them particularly good for
designing ubicomp devices:

  1. They are everyday objects.
  2. We’re familiar with how to use them, at least on a basic level
  3. They are physical. You grab them, you swing them, you twist them, you push them.
  4. They do not have a screen. There isn’t the assumption that somewhere there’s text output.
  5. Behaviorally, magic objects are not humans, and we do not expect them to act human. This is contrast to, say, the implications of something like “ambient intelligence,” another metaphor for ubiquitous computing devices. How smart is that intelligence? Is It like me? It’s not clear.
  6. They are not superhuman. They may be hard to control, but ultimately it is we who are in control, not they, by definition.
  7. There is a healthy disbelief in magic, so it's likely to be treated as an analogy, rather than as the literal truth.

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My New Year Resolutions

Happy New Year everyone…So in the usual vein, I'm going to blog my new years resolutions. I don't usually care or do these but I think the process of blogging them will maybe help because you guys might help me stay on track. I'm all about getting things done…

Finally go to Tokyo
I've talked about it for years and seriously know I will just explode when I get there. But have never got anywhere close. If I can go via Hong Kong then even better. So how is this going to happen? Well I'm looking for a site (besides Travelocity) where you can set a specific price on tickets and it will alert you when that price is close no matter which route or time of the year. RSS would be great too.

Not to do another BarCampLondon unless the BBC is the venue
So at BarCampLondon3 I decided I wouldn't want to do another BarCampLondon because people are starting to expect me to do it and thats not fair on others. Also BarCamps are poping up all over the place now (leeds, brighton, cork, etc) so this is a good time to say thanks to everyone who's kick started BarCamps in the UK but now its time for others to take it forward in their own vision.

Work on something very different but cutting edge this year
This is already happening. I think it wouldn't be a secret to say I could be working on an Alternative reality game (ARG). My feeling is that Play is when we are most open to learn and I think ARGs can be used to educate without the usual guff you get about educational games. So look out for that because I think the small team which have formed could pull off something very special.

Dataportability
I'm going to spend more time on this subject next year. Its a worthwhile cause and I think the link between all the trends like open data, the data web, authentication (like openid and oauth), etc is data portability. Giving people not only access to the data but also to move their data around. This was also part of my flow/pipelines concept anyway but much more tangable. I'm also looking to pimp this at a few conferences in the near future.

Small Routines
So I'm going to build up a few routines including reading my rss at regular times and going to certain events and not others. My Blogging has finally picked up which is good but I do need to keep it up. Theres also a bunch of other stuff I'm going to do including visiting friends and family regularlly.

Play a team sport
I've tried many thing to keep fit but what works best for me is playing in a team sport I enjoy. So something like joining Basketball, Volleyball and Handball team would be great. I've been looking around and there seems to be some new teams starting up in Jan.

Geekdinners and Geekvenues
So as you may have all noticed geekdinner.co.uk is down at the moment. I'm going to try and get to the bottom of this really soon but till then I'm going to move the geekdinners blog to my own server. The plan for the future of geekdinners was like the girl geekdinners to make it a charity or non-profit but this has been put off for a while because I need more help on geekdinners. Plus maybe its time to get a little more regular? I've not added enough to geek venues, and I do plan to add a lot more soon.

Start learning Python
So Python seems to be everywhere. From the xbox media centre scripts to conduit provider scripts. This seems like a useful programming language to learn or at least understand enough to hack around with. I'm also liking the idea of python with xslt using something like uche's 4suite.

Use the technologies around me better
I've been making do with some services, but actually I've been compromising with the limits attached to the free account. If I just pay the small fee, it will much more useful and effective. So for example paying for Plaxo means I can now sync between linked-in, plaxo and my windows mobile phone. On top of the syncing between Plaxo, Google Calendar, Outlook and Sunbird.

Go to more comedy clubs
I love comedy and I don't go to enough comedy clubs. So its a no brainer right?

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iPlayer content on exotic devices

So since my pled for streaming iPlayer content on the Xbox media centre platform. I've been doing what I can to alert the right people to the effort which is happening in this area. The hope is that once the Xbox media centre hackers get there teeth into streaming iplayer content to the xbox, others will follow suit. I've already heard about Wiidia player project through the blog posts and forum entries. I thought it would be possible to create a mediaplayer through Opera but wow the video going back to August 2007 looks good, so things must be really good now. Specially with the release of a server.

Anyway, about other platforms. The obvious one which will make the management sit up and take notice would be the iphone but that looks like a no go for now. The AppleTV should be able to playback the iplayer streams no problem if apple allow access to the browser, otherwise modified appletv's will find a way. I don't think we have a chance on the Xbox 360 platform but the PS3 should work with a version of Linux installed. PSP and DS I've yet to check and I'm sure windows mobile phones along with Nokia phones will work either now or very soon with iplayer streams.

The problem seems to be the propitery Adobe streaming protocols (RTMP, RTMPT and RTMPS) not to be confused with RTSP. But this is being worked on by the guys at Gnash, who have a working lib for decoding RTMP already but doesn't seem to be in a state where others can take advantage of it? Anyway its all really exciting and also means people doing everything legally. No DRM reverse enginnering, no transcoding and we're not even breaking the Geo-ip rules even. I just hope the prototypes and examples will be enough to keep things as they are on the BBC end of things for a long while. I would hate to see drm being added in the middle of this period of development. I'll certainly do what ever I can to keep the field as open as possible to others and I think the BBC iplayer API will drive even more creativity when it goes live.

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Old Skool tunes

I recently spent some time at a old friends house. We were going through his old vinyl and tunes as he reminded me that I had actually taught him to mix on decks years ago. He also played some amazing tunes which I had forgotten about till today. He's some of the better tunes… (any with a star mean I don't have a decent quality version of this tune).

  • 2 Bad Mice by 2 Bad Mice
  • Sugar is Sweeter by CJ Bolland
  • Trip II the Moon by Acen
  • Energy Flash by Joey Beltram
  • Such a Feeling by Bizarre Inc
  • Ecstatic (dry mix) by Zentropa
  • Papua New Guinea by The Future sound of London
  • The Bouncer by Kicks like a Mule
  • LFO by LFO
  • Waterfall by Atlantic Ocean
  • I need your loving (original mix) by Baby D
  • You got the love by Candy Statton
  • Gonna make you sweat by C&C Music Factory
  • Injected With A Poison by Praga Khan
  • Passion (do you want it right now edit) by Gat Decor
  • Not over yet by Grace
  • Rock my heart by Haddaway
  • Hurt you so by Jonny L
  • Feel real Good by Manix
  • Acid Trax by Phuture
  • Go (rainforst mix) by Moby
  • Insanity by Oceanic
  • We got to live together by R.A.F
  • Searchin for my Rizzla by The Ratpack
  • Break 4 Love by Raze
  • Instruments Of Darkness (The Prodigy Mix) by The Art of Noise
  • Move your body by Xpansions
  • Far out by Sons of a Loop Da Loop Era
  • Le Voie Le Soleil by Subliminal Cuts
  • Renegade by The Terrorist *
  • Playing with Knives by Bizarre Inc
  • Rush in the House by Xenophobia
  • Trip To Trumpton by Urban Hype
  • Some Justice by Urban Shakedown *
  • Salva Mea (Epic Mix) by Faithless *
  • Let me show you (vocal mix) by Camisra
  • Rip Groove (RIP mix featuring TopCat) by Double 99 *
  • Spin Spin Sugar () by Sneaker Pimps
  • Sugar is sweeter (Armand's drum n bass mix) by CJ Bolland
  • Professional Widow (Armand's Star Trunk Funkin' Mix) by Tori Amos
  • The Chopper by The Terrorist

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The long tail of Torrent sites

Trance traffic logo

I really miss Trance Traffic. It was my primary source for the music discovery and music download. Problem was and I'm sure others have had this problem too. The Torrent site has RSS feeds but doesn't use a passkey system on the torrents so once you have the torrent file you can just download it and I guess share it with others. Unlike other sites where the torrent file is attached to you via a passkey system. Anyway the downside of not using a passkey system is the torrent site does not know when your using it unless you login via the website. Which kind of makes the RSS pretty useless, right? Well I would say so. So thats how I lost my trance traffic login although I was a regular on the site.

I've been looking around for other torrent sites which do trance and dance music but there all closed to the public. Trancetraffic, Puresound, Deepbassnine, etc… (wow UKnova is getting big) If anyone has passes to trancetraffic, please send me a email please.

Whats interesting about the search for a new site is the amount of small torrent sites which do a couple of smaller genres. I bet if you did a graph it would map the long tail perfectly. At one end you have huge sites like thepiratebay, mininova, etc but quickly the curve turns towards sites like uknova, torrentreacter, etc and before long into the smaller sites which include lots of porn, anime, games and music video, trackers. I would draw that out in inkscape tonight, but its bloody 4:30am I shoudl be sleeping.

Things may not be so bad, now the head sites like piratebay have started adding long tail categories and tagging. So for example I found the latest dance music here on mininova and obviously there is RSS too. I can even do a search query for my favorate trance show (a state of trance) with RSS too. Although I will miss the comments and special trance traffic packs that would be uploaded by people in the community.

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