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The views and thoughts of a dyslexic british designer/developer

Archive for November 14th, 2009

Software ahead of the curve: Gwibber 2.0

Nov 14

Posted by admin in technology-and-computing | View Comments

Gwibber 2.0 Screenshot

Gwibber is an open source microblogging client for GNOME that supports Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Pownce, Identi.ca and other popular social web services.

Yes I know its not Tweetdeck but hey hello, it supports more account types than just Twitter and Facebook. Its also got interesting support non microblogging services for Flickr, Brightkite, Digg and a few others. I've been pretty vocal about knocking Gwibber's stability in the past but now its rock solid. Currently I have 7 different accounts running through it and it doesn't even blink. So solid, that I have dumped the Air app Twhirl. The only thing which I have seen which is close to Gwibber is Eventbox/Socialite which is mac only. There's already talk about making a QT version of Gwibber which could work on the Windows and Mac platform too. I expect most people will look at it and say, yuk. But to be fair its using my own custom style from ubuntu, and it will get better. The concept of Gwibber and how it works puts it a few steps in front of a crowded microblogging market.

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The yin and yang of Ubuntu 9.10

Nov 14

Posted by admin in technology-and-computing | View Comments

So I upgrade my dell XPS laptop to Ubuntu 9.10 pretty soon after the launch of 9.10, and to be honest its been pretty good to me. However I have had a couple of problems. The first major problem which still needs to be solved is shutting the lid doesn't send the machine to suspend. I had this problem way back in the 7 series and Glyn fixed it for me by creating some custom script. I got a feeling that script might be causing problems now, so hopefully it won't be too much of a hassle to fix. I just have to remember to set it to suspend beforehand till then. I have no idea if hibernate works but I don't really use it anyway.

I have reinstalled Ubuntu 9.10 twice already, once because the display got really messed up (no idea why and all my messing with xandr made no difference) and the first time because there was some major problem with finding partitions in fstab, from my previous 9.04 install. Each time, a reinstall has been pretty easy, pop the disc in give it 20mins and we're back to scratch again. Nothing lost except the applications. All preferences and personal files stay untouched which is ideal.

There's not a lot of new stuff in 9.10 from what I can tell, instead I'm getting a real feel that things are getting very stable, ready for 10.4 which is rumoured to be a LTS (long term support) version. I've been using Firefox with between 20-30 tabs over the last few days and its been pretty flawless. During that time I've been using Youtube like a fiend for reasons which I may blog about later. In the past going page to page with so much flash would cause all type of chaos and slowdowns. But its not only Firefox which seems fine, everything seems super tuned. Memory usage is way down on previous versions, even with 30tabs open, evolution, gwibber, skype, pidgin, banshee, rhythmbox, tomboynotes, specto, keepass, etc all open at once, my memory usage just hit 1.1 gig of physical memory.

Compiz feels solid as a rock now, don't get me wrong its been good and worked well but now it feels impossible to crash. Pidgin, Gwibber, Evolution and Gnome-Do all seem very stable too. Not only that but Gwibber 2.0 is cleaned up and and I have now dropped using Twirl and Tweetdeck because of Gwibber 2 (I might do a blog post about just that alone). Specto and Conduit have added new social features which makes it extra useful with tracking things like RSS feeds. Generally everythings good and the day in day out applications are solid.

Heck even the battery monitor reports the time better that ever before, not only does it know my battery is screwed and only shows theres a maximum of 25% capacity counts down correctly from that point in minutes. Theres a few new things I've noticed which I've not really had time to play with yet. Pulseaudio has been tighten up and now includes support for Apple airtunes and DLNA/UPnP devices. I had a quick try to see if XBMC would pick it up but it didn't although I can see its working on other machines and the UPnP discovery tool. The general style of Ubuntu and user experience has also gone up in the latest version. Software centre bugs me a bit but its much more usable that add/remove apps. I still have my own custom themes (sandy box and jade garden) but I've left the default boot and login screen alone as there very attractive. Oh yeah and boy does Ubuntu boot up fast.

The last sting in the tail is the external display. For some reason external displays have changed since 9.04. There seems to be some kind of autosensing which picks up anything plugged in and tries to sync with it. Hence 2mins before starting the BarCamp welcome talk, everything went very wrong with my laptop. I have since installed the Grandr which is a gui for RandR, I hope to have this issue under control.

So all in all, a good upgrade but be careful, its not all blue skies

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Google specs worth checking out

Nov 14

Posted by admin in xml and web 2.0 | View Comments

Its been ages since I've written in my blog, so I'm hoping to try and make up for that with a series of blog posts over the weekend.

While at BarCampLondon7, I attended a couple of sessions about some very cool technologies which Google are behind. Like most of you I'm skeptical of anything any large company does, specially specs but its hard to pick any hole in any of these I would say. Adewale also did a excellent job of explaining them and there context for use.

oEmbed – oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly. Its already being used on Youtube and many others. You request a resource and it gives you back xml or json for the resource instead of returning a nasty piece of html or javascript. Very neat.

Salmon Protocal – Salmon aims to define a standard protocol for comments and annotations to swim upstream to original update sources — and spawn more commentary in a virtuous cycle So from what I understand, its an attempt to standardise all these commenting systems like cocomment and disqus (which I use on this blog even). They shouldn't really feel threaten because they could support Salmon and add value to the basic concept.

Wave federation protocal – Well this goes without saying but I learned that its now very easy to setup a wave server. So I expect I'll be playing with that soon. There's also a lovely guide to Wave by Gina Trapani which will grow into something much more complete in time.

pubsubhubbub
 – A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS. Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks) when a topic (feed URL) they're interested in is updated. This is a difficult one to explain but generally its a clever way to poll for updates without polling the server. Instead you submit a request and a status server alerts you to when the change has happened. It sounds complex but its actually not and its quite neat. Like most google things, its worth flicking through the presentations on the site.

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Pablo the drugs mule dog spawns a meme

Oct 14

Posted by admin in media-and-expression | View Comments

I got to say I like the Talk to Frank anti-drugs adverts (although there more about drugs education that anti drugs, which is maybe part of there success). They've been on UK tv for a while but because I don't watch much live TV, I tend to miss clever advertising like this one. But whats more interesting is the meme its created on the web. There's some amazing remixes which work in a similar way to the Pablo advert. For example here's the best one, Perdo the Drug Dealer Cat because cats are too smart to be drug mules according to the comments. There's also other Pablo videos including Cocaine bag tries to seduce Pablo the dead drugs mule and Ben's Banknote. All good stuff.

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Tunekit is just HTML

Sep 14

Posted by admin in xml and web 2.0 | View Comments

HTML with Tunekit

As a lot of people know, I'm not the biggest fan of Apple or what Apple does but I'm happy that the more I look into iTunesLP and iTunes Extras, the more I'm liking it. its seems its all underpined in a new thing called Tunekit, which seems to be related to a new framework which some people are calling Cocoa for the web, SproutCore. So generally its all just HTML, CSS and Javascript. So hopefully if all goes well who know where it might go. It certainly beats some nasty things your seeing on Bluray discs. And even better we're back to the internet has won type territory, aka goodbye to disc technology, good stuff Apple.

I certainly think HTML5, CSS and Javascript on the TV screen is a killer move. I can't even imagine what's possible once Canvas and Canvas3D get mixed up in all this too. Adobe should be worried, their open screen project is interesting but being built around extending Flash is a big mistake. In the same category Silverlight scares most people. Nope HTML is good enough. It certainly seems Apple will lead the pack on this one.

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Liberation vs Portability

Sep 14

Posted by admin in home entertainment | View Comments


So Data Liberation or Data Portability? They sound like the same thing but one is a adhoc group of people working together and the other is ummmmm, well run out of Google's public policy.

Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you – not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you're like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it's also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all.

Don't get me wrong, the google guys have got the right idea, but this isn't the same scope as the data portability group. Data liberation is Google's attempt to get its house in order but its not trying to change the world. When the Data Portability group started, the group spoke to many companies and other groups. We also looked around and considered the bigger picture. Actually by the time autonomo.us had come around I had already started moved away from the data portability group. My friend Dave isn't a fan at all, but he's a Free software guy and finds anything but Free software too loose and insulting (did I mention he's talking at London Geekdinners on Thursday). In the end its interesting to watch but don't expect any major changes outside the goodge suite, actually autonomo.us have a good look at the Chrome OS in regards to privacy and portability.

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The Time Travellers Wife spoils all

Aug 14

Posted by admin in media-and-expression | View Comments

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Rachel McAdams
www.thedailyshow.com

Rachel McAdams pretty much gives away the plot of the whole film in this interview on the Daily Show.

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Time to clear up our Home

Jun 14

Posted by admin in culture-and-politics | View Comments

We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth's climate. The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being. For this purpose, HOME needs to be free. A patron, the PPR Group, made this possible. EuropaCorp, the distributor, also pledged not to make any profit because Home is a non-profit film. HOME has been made for you : share it! And act for the planet.

I watched this film today and was very impressed by the whole thing. Not only is the overall message not too breachy but its also just amazing to watch and listen.

Where to get home? The home site, The Pirate Bay, Vuse, Youtube, TEDTalk,

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It’s actually not (still) grim up North

Jun 14

Posted by admin in culture-and-politics | View Comments

Newcastle Quayside

Its been all over my twitters recently but I thought it was worth blogging for those who do not follow me on twitter for what ever reason.

Manoj Ranaweera from Northern Startup 2.0 in Manchester did a event (tech mission in London using Northern startups, Milo Yiannopoulos writes a article for the Telegraph about the event and how he felt Northern startups “were clearly being crippled by a lack of good advice and useful connections.” Then a massive amount of comments but the best comment is from Herb Kim who wrote what might as well be a blog post.

One other thing you should know about Nick is that his start-up, Quick.tv, is actually primarily funded by North East money between NorthStar Equity Investors (www.northstarei.com) and other North East angels. So, he’s probably “Geordie and proud” for more reasons than merely where he happened to have been born. NorthStar alone have invested £33m in more than 200 North East tech companies in just the past few years.

And continuing the Geordie theme, this is what the Economist wrote in an article entitled “Geordie Tech”..

‘Nor does Newcastle, known more for shipbuilding than for software, sound like the natural home for a high-tech company. Actually, it is. According to Rebecca Harding of the London Business School, of those firms that have started life in the north-east in the past three years, 20% are using or selling technology which was not available a year ago. In Britain as a whole, the figure is 11%. Only London has a higher rate of tech start-ups than the north-east.”

And from the Guardian..

“Just take a walk around the streets of South Shields, Gateshead or Wallsend and you won’t be far from some shiny new IT company. The once-notorious Pink Lane – Newcastle’s former red light district – is currently home to a suite of software developers, while the old casino now plays host to Mere Mortals, a chart-topping game development firm.

And it’s not just Newcastle where the chips are up. Any tour around the region’s hi-tech hotspots should include Sunderland, Middlesbrough and the digital delights of downtown Darlington. Away from the cities, even small Northumbrian towns are proving capable of growing innovative IT companies. Venture to windy Rothbury and you will find a company pioneering technology that simulates touch, while down the coast, the sleepy former coal port of Amble supports one of the UK’s leading companies in the emerging field of locative media.

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