Month: July 2003

Ignorance of technology

I dont know it kills me everytime. Its a struggle and I'm just lucky to be young enough to see it as a challenge, I guess…

How long do these people in a creative sector such as design expect to exist in this field if there ignorance of technology is what it is? I cant answer that one at all. I wont go into detail, protect the innocencent and all that.
But ravensbourne prides its self on its technology influence, I mean its core to the colleges mission statement. And we want to bring this the fore front with the move to greenwich by 2006.

So why oh why do these people see _technology_ as a extra bit? It drives me nuts, then it only gets worst. Miles said it best today when he pointed out a example. The example is difficult to explain in the abstract, but consists of people pretending to embrace the technology (would be more than there jobs worth not to) but then fighting the rapid change of technology in there usual hours of work.

Its nasty to believe the percentage of such people! Anyway, I hope its all making sense.
I just wish these people would do there research, you know try and understand, try and learn even a little. Not just dismiss everything as thats too technical or thats coding.

Anyway, yes it will be very interesting to now see how things go now the educational boards are asking for information online and the like. I even got passed a document on the 'freedom of information act'.
See if these people did there research they would natrually understand how things are moving forward. Open source movement and open exchangable format. Is there anything else to get?

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Matrix 3 – The Revolutions spoilers

Dave droped me a email last night about matrix 3.
What a cruel thing to do to me…!


Matrix fan forum

Dont read it, you'll be upset ;p

—

Regards,
dave

So as you'll expect, I am now reading it, but only scanning at a slow pace so I'm not digesting any names or scenes.
All I can say so far after reading for one minute, is the plot is packed! And I mean really packed, well beyond reloaded. But more later…

Ok just finished reading the whole thing, yet to get throught the comments though. But there are massive holes in the plot it would seem. I think its more about the way the guy told it than anything.
Seems interesting still and I'm still going to watch it somewhere different than London when it comes out on Novemeber 5th.

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Semantic blogging, navigation and tree

Semantic navigation
Tree view navigation, with Developer weblog
Almost worked on my new ipaq too!

Seriously these guys at HP, are truly coming up with some very useful applications using simple technologies.

Oh also saw this on my travels,
New updates from the author of Blucene. I have not installed or looked at the docs yet, but it allows you to post and delete using a form i believe?

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New in HP 5550 ipaq

So yesterday evening my college bought me a HP 5550 ipaq with pocketpc 2003, 128meg update and a 256meg sd card. Which honestly is far more than I expected. Thanks Niz and Miles

Anyway, i'm honestly going to blog it from now on, which will make up my report if I have to do one later on.

First thoughts, the screen is so beautiful and bright specially when compared to my old compaq 3630 ipaq. The colours have jumped to 16bit from 12bit but the contrast is perfect now. I never get enough glare to not see the text, even when reflecting the suns position into my own eyes.

At last I have wireless and bluetooth in the same compact framework and with the 128meg upgrade and sd card, I have enough memory to run anything I want. So now I use wifi when i'm in range and bluetooth with my t68i mobile phone for a slower gprs connection. See this is the reason why I needed my 3g phone to be bluetooth! Then I could dialup with that instead.
Oh and also you can redirect all mic and audio to a bluetooth headset! So if I cant get my old one working again, I'll buy one of 3's branded ones as there only 59 pounds and all i need.

There are some neat little things in pocketpc 2003 besides connectivity. At last theres a built in spell checker! Which makes a massive difference to someone like me.
Everything is so much quicker too, I played my old megadrive emulator on both ipaqs side by side and the new one can be alot faster than the old one but also generates the kinda of framerates i didnt think were possible.
I would also like add the biometric scanner is very good and at last I can secure my ipaq without using some complex unlock sequence. It would be nice though if you have the choice of strong password or biometric scan. At the moment i'm using pin or high security biometic (default). Tried out very strong biometric security but you got to get it perfect each time which isnt possible when performing normal tasks.

Found the new ipaq is compatable with the old jackets so I can still use my compact flash cards too. So imagine 256 + 128 + 60 = 444 meg of available space! And I got a 80 meg cf card spare too.

Anyway this also means I can plug into ethernet using a network pcmcia card, which is useful for friends houses and non wifi areas.

In my portable triangle the weak link is now battery life. Which I have yet to try out. As wireless and bluetooth has to be banging the battery for power. Which is good because the main battery is now removeable. Maybe I should have asked for a spare battery too? Well at least the usb cable charges and syncs as standard now.

I was a little disapointed with the software built in as standard, but have quickly realised that it doesnt matter because I have so much memory unlike the old ipaq where i had to put everything not needed by wireless onto the cf card.
But yeah i did think the remote control software would be there as well as the voice over ip software. Maybe there on cd I forgot to take with me?

My own dilemma is what to do with the old ipaq, as my wife wont use it for more than a couple of days. I dont want to sell it as I will get nothing for it and i dont know if i can keep this new ipaq (i'm pretty sure i can). So for now I'm going to retire the old ipaq and put it back in its box. Once i finish transfering files over bluetooth of course.

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SVG drafts published

Yep its all happening in the svg arena, I kinda of wish I could have gone to svg open 2003 but Vancouver Canada? Would be the envy of the office. Oh and also would never have got my HP 5550 ipaq with pocketpc 2003, if I had gone.

The SVG Working Group has released an updated Working Draft of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.2 outlining potential areas of new work. SVG delivers accessible, dynamic, and reusable vector graphics, text, and images to the Web in XML.
The Working Group explicitly encourages public feedback on this draft. Visit the SVG home page.

I know I will be getting involved in this one for sure.

And also…


The SVG Working Group has released the first public Working Draft of SVG Print. The document assumes the reader is familiar with SVG 1.2, and is a guideline that explains how to use SVG 1.2 features for printing.


Havent yet read this draft, but could be very useful to graphic designs and the print world. Imagine SVG being the format of choice for graphics, illustrations for printed documents.
And why not? This is a area where flash has not gone, and very much douht will go.

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Describing pictures using rdf

Oh my goodness, I dont believe what I am reading. It started off by reading Steve Cayzer's blog. And before I knew it I had 4 tab open looking at different sections in this area.

I truely can not point out how amazing this really is. I've always thought of wrapping images up in xml, not embedding it in. Actually tell a lie, I didnt think it was possible? think of things as if your in the matrix. its just code, so why not?
Anyway heres the w3c rdf photo site outlining the spec. Seriously it brought tears to my eyes.
The goals of the project are partially personal, partially to promote W3C technology. The personal reasons are that we, the authors, have large numbers of photos but always have difficulty finding the exact ones that we want to show to somebody. Digitizing them and describing them in RDF should make it quicker to find the ones we are looking for at any moment.

So what does this all mean? Well in the case of david mark's project os david. (see david if you used xhtml instead of flash, i could link directly to the project, and if xpointer was working fine I could quote directly from your own text).
David has wrapped up his images and videos with xml and wrote a very beautiful interface to navigate around the data. Now if we applied this, we could query the images themselves rather than xml documents.
However one of davids problems was calculation speed, so he used a xml database. Which makes me wonder if there are any databases which support images but wont destory the rdf? Now that would be a good project for someone.
Also on the same tagent, what would photoshop or something like that do to this rich rdf data? I know it kills camera data.

Rdfpic, a real working application written in java, hoping to experiment with it over the weekend
The other side, jpegrdf, getting the data out.
Now if someone wrote a serializer for cocoon which did this, I would be xstatic. And why not? its written in java, sure some one will work it out soon.

There is also talk of intergration into Adobe's Extensible metadata platform which I havent looked at for over 3 years now. Will have to spend more time looking into this later.

All this also bring me back to thinking about Annotea which is a advanced annotation/note tool.br/>
Anyway yes I would like to experiment with this too, specially now they have a client built into Mozilla – Annozilla
Have a look at how powerful this could be Screenshot from current version

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Topic maps

Even though I know there not compareable, opml and topic maps. I will use them in simular situations. Or at least write down notes using a outline tool which supports opml then convert them into topic maps.

I'm finding more than ever the need to keep a track of the actual relations between different things. Not just the things themselves.

Good starting points

Topic map.com
Getting started with Topic maps
Xml.com's Introduction to topic maps
Company selling topic map software and a free topic map viewer, they also have some ok papers on topic maps. Including topic maps, rdf and other semantic languages

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Art direction vs. design

Zeldman talks about Art direction and design.

Zeldman talks about the message being less important than the design, the product being 2nd to the design. The fact that most of us decorate instead of communicating.
This all comes on the back of talk I've been having with Miles about titles. The designer / developer paradox is what I refer to it as. I for one want to communicate not decorate and clutter.

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Real Hot desking


My new office desk, dont you love the heat stained look?

Yes i'm in heaven, the sun is out in south London and its hot but breezy. So natrually i dont want to be inside working.
So recently I've been sitting outside on the college benches working in the sunshine. As I talked about in my post sunshine and wireless , things dont get much better than this. The only problem i've mainly had uptill now is screen visability with the sun and battery usage.

But its now solved, with a long extention cable hanging out of the fashion department. Now I can have the screen on full brightness and charge the ipaq without a worry in the world.

The alloy metal of my tabletpc does get quite hot in the noon sun, but isnt so hot it feels uncomfitable to use. Which is actually suprising when you consider i was outside from noon till 2000. 8 hours with a hour break from the sun for a meeting in the hot and sweaty college.

Anyway heres some pictures of the view from my 3g phone.
The view from the front
The view from the left
The view from the right
Weird thing my 3g camera phone does with the lens edges. More reasons to hand it back soon…?

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Digital Shoplifting pictures

Here are some pictures taken from my digital shoplifting in Borders. I was tempted to reduce them but what the hell, sorry to all 56k users. 172k is kinda of large but check out the quality of the shots.





Heard so much about the 3 above, need to read them really.



Looks ok, but the content is told in a nice way. Perfect for lending to friends.



How ironic.


The book i was trying to decide if I should get. About how realitivity and quantium physics are linked in this superstring theory.

Yep and a few programming books which I'll just link to

Apache – the best apache book I found. I want to get rid of iis now and i'm going to install apache 2.0 for sure. This would be a great start…
RSS by Oreilly, maybe a bit out of date but still good

XML-RPC by Oreilly, enough said once again
XML databases – Just what i need to compare xquery to xpath and it has a really decent look at xbase, xlink and xpointer
Wireless security, end to end. Thinking of setting up a radius server on my wireless access point.

I was thinking to myself while posting these, if I could get pop3 to blog working. I would be able to post directly to my blog from my 3g phone.
Now that would be something, maybe this is the outline of mobblogging, but i've only seen mms to blog and java app to blog. Not email to blog.
This gets me thinking again that the motorola phone is more useful than this nec e808. It also does 640×480 pictures I believe? Unlike this piece of crap. Need to do more research into this and quickly before i cant return the phone to 3.

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