Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Its official now, no dirty work arounds needed. Amazon goes RSS
Amazon now provides RSS feeds embedded inside the HTML pages. To actually subscribe to the RSS you will need to take a look at the source of the page and then find the link to manually add it to your RSS newsreader
Now if only others could do the same…
I'm still to this day unsure of what trackbacks are, and even more confused after reading the moveabletype documatation about it.
I'm not the only one, Bob DuCharme is having issues. And he tries to explain in his post about the same issue.
I'm sorry but I was one of the people in love with vrml. It was amazing to think about for me at that time.
I use to write my 3d scenes in pov ray. And yes it was hard going but I learned so much, and loved watching my old machine do pixel by pixel rendering.
But anyway, I always wish I could make my scenes come alive, you know walk around them, explorer the views from many different directions. Hence when I heard of vrml I was blown away and wanted to use it in the same way I wrote my povray scenes.
Fast-forward past the 1st wave of vrml and at long last vrml is also going to be xml-ised. Could we finally start seeing increase use of vrml? I somewhat douht it, but still feel optimistic that like svg this will grow and become ubiquous.
Anyway heres a article on xml.com titled Extensible 3D: XML Meets VRML, which gives a overview of where the new standard sits at the moment in relation to others such as 3dml, xml, mpeg4, etc.
I'm kinda of glad x3d supports binary, vrml and xml. As everyone is supported then, its in the same way svg supports svgz which is gzip compressed svg for super small sizes, perfect for delivering over gsm connections.
Its also good to see theres java and ecmascript bindings, as I was worried java3d would take off and take people down the wrong path.
I had wished there was more intergration with other xml standards such as smil for animation and svg for texturing (specially with its filter effects, could have been a killer). But all that will come, x3d basicly keeps vrml syntaxes but puts them in the xml world, which isnt a bad thing for the first major release.
I had thought about converting stuff to vrml using xsl in cocoon, but the thought of turning well structured data into a C/C+ text syntax, sounded like too much hard work. Now x3d is available, it would be a trival task to convert other content into x3d. I should do it soon as a proof of concept, just to make sure i can do it cleanly. I would really like to join a aggergator to x3d, so all the elements would be live but exist in 3d space. Which would give new possibilities for navigation and viewing.
Ok so this is something I've been meaning to blog for a while now.
I've been going to the meetups in London, and I've got mixed feelings about the whole thing. First up its very american rather than european as we bump into people all the time.
I went to 3 different meetups over last week, graphic designers in vibe bar, wifi in the media club and webdesigners which was in the best venue to date. So, quickly because its getting late…
_Graphic designers_ – no one else turned up and spent all the time asking people if they were part of the graphic designers meetup with friend dave. Left one hour later.
_Wifi_ – meet a interesting guy from india, who runs a business from there where he gets uk businesses coding done over there for a cheap. Specialises in tradional webservices. Needs designers, meeting up at college tuesday to talk about students working for him. Could be good for both parties.
Meetup was crap otherwise, left one hour later. What a silly place to have a public meetup? A private bar! Well done. Spent 10mins outside thinking of ways around the security guard.
Odd police presence afterwards though, wonder what that was all about. Will need to check bbc site later. About 3 police cars 2 bikes and a unmarked police car surrounding the media club block.
_webdesigners_ – Odd location down and around Angel station. Up 2 flights of stairs. Nice venue shame about the guys toilet, very cute bar lady. Anyway, no wireless in the area which was a shame and were going to leave about 1947, when Lucas turns up and sees the laptops on the table and I must have though, "Yep those two must be webdesigners".
Anyway, yeah we had a good old natter about everything web related and swapped email addresses 2 hours later. Cool guy from Argentina just moved over from Miami, sure I'll be seeing more of him soon, which would be good.
Theres a bloggers meetup this wednesday in Waterstones – Picadilly of all the places to have a meetup. Well at least its public and wont shut till 10pm.
I'm undecided if I'm gonna go or not.
Bloglines is a server-based RSS aggregation system. Many blogs and newsfeed services publish RSS feeds, special files containing the content of the site formatted for easy parsing. Bloglines allows people to subscribe to these feeds. Once subscribed, Bloglines periodically checks the feed for changes or additions.
My first thoughts are this is good for those without access to a server of there own or no broadband connection. And its looks very simular to flock, but it says there using a combination of things. On the minus side it doesnt allow you to collect the aggeration outputs like flock does. So no sharing onwards which is a bad idea. I will need to sign up to check it out for sure.
It does however let you use opml to inport and export feeds, which makes me wonder what they would make of my many feeds
I wonder what there revenue model will be? email marketing or feed in advertising into there listed feeds? The easy subscription bookmarklet sounds dodgy as heck.
How Much Does Bloglines Cost?
Bloglines is completely free to use. Text advertising and additional fee-based services will be launched in the near future.
Using mailinator for the first time then it would seem. Using the email address testuser@mailinator.com with the password testuser.
Got my validated email a sec ago
Hello,
Your email address has been validated and your Bloglines membership has
been confirmed.
Now that you have a Bloglines account, you can subscribe to blogs
easily. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs to see a list of the
most popular blogs on Bloglines. Also see http://www.bloglines.com/newblogs
for a list of new blogs, updated daily. If you already have a list of
subscriptions in OPML format, you can import them automatically. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/manage for more information. For an easy way
to subscribe to new blogs that you find, see http://www.bloglines.com/help/easysub
How can we improve Bloglines? We would appreciate your feedback. Go
to http://www.bloglines.com/contact to send us comments.
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The Bloglines Team
Uploaded my opml file from flock and it worked!
So its now, my own flock server vs bloglines. We shall see what happens, you know I'll blog the results.
I've always said I want to be more involved with the -standards- sorry reconmenations the w3c.org do. One of the top ones would be CSS3 or the next one.
Anyway mezzoblue's blog about the new standard has been recieving some interest.
My thoughts are simular to mezzo's, about why designers dont get involved. I mean no disrespect to anyone but wasnt xslt ment to be for designers to use? Thats a serious gap between reality and wishful thinking.
Anyway the spec looks good so far but yeah this will keep a few flash heads happy for a while…
Transparency will be available anywhere you can use colour.
I was alerted to this Inaccessible Website Demonstration through mezzoblue. Which gets the message of accessability over very quickly. Its not just about the technology its about the way you design the sites. The blury example is one which touch me, as I've always been told my sizes are too small on cubicgarden.com
The question of what I do with my old compaq 3630 ipaq still bothers me. I cant just sell it as I wont get much for it and I would rather make sure it makes a difference to someones life than sell it. As such…
Anyway I found something to do with it. Thanks Infosync. Install Opie Linux on it.
So I did.
Its alot of hassle to put opie on the ipaq, but if you follow the instructions to the T it works fine. The scarey part was when you first boot up the ipaq from cold and it sits there booting up opie without much feedback. Anyway it all looks good now.
When you start up opie the screen is a little low res and it flickers a bit, but my old ipaq screen wasnt the best anyway. Looked at the updated packages and downloaded a few bits and bobs like web server, samba server, etc. To note it doesnt support 3com wireless cards, but it liked the oroncio and compaq cards. Never had a chance to read the opie user manual till now.
I was wondering if the open source xml database exist was dead? Well it seems no, there was a 0.92 update a few days ago on the 11th August 2003. Seems the biggest feature is XUpdate
xmldb's xupdate information page. Yeah just as though, xupdate will allow you to modify xml data on the fly though a query, just how you do with sql. I also believe you will be able to change xml structures using xupdate too? Yep the xml schema is gonna be more inportant than ever before if that is the case.
The future plans of exist look interesting too.
XML schemas
An existing XML schema could be used to control the indexing process. Currently, it is only possible to exclude or include selected nodes from the fulltext index.
Stored procedures/Constraints
I would like to enhance the pre- and postprocessing features of eXist, probably by using concepts similar to Cocoon. Each collection could have a collection configuration document, which defines how to process documents.
Right I found it again, if anyone asks me about newsgroups or p2p tools.
Go to Slyck's guide, I only wish he'd sort out his rss feed because it keeps crashing my aggerator.
Oh I dont forget zeropaid too, there rss feed also does the same thing!
Useful link if your ever planning a conference presentation by Mark Jason Dominus – Conference Presentation Judo
And Tufte?s presentation tips never go a miss here either. Edward R. Tufte?s Presentation Tips.
Dave, alerted me to the fact that this years poker world series was won by a guy who regularly played poker on the internet. He had hardly played in real life and entered the world series only because he won a internet tournment which had cost him 40 dollars. So yeah from 40 to 2,500,000 dollars aint bad for the american bank accountant.
Some links dave sent me,
gamble.co.uk, google search for chris moneymaker and this months wired's magazine A piece of the action
The greater question I guess is how much is poker reading and how much is reading players? Most poker players upto now subscribe to reading players and cards second. What does Moneymaker's success say about this? Maybe poker is all about rounders after all.
Some interesting links I picked up about stratergy using computer ai.
The New Card Shark and
The University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group and there Java Poker Client for Windows and for Linux/OSX
Man I feel so lame sometimes, there is so much to read online and I dont ever have the time to sit and read it. I thought having a personal aggerator would be a good way of filtering the noise. And it is but I'm finding so much I cant run through it because there not rss feeds.
Now my solution to this problem is using cocoon's aggerator generator, I can grab a html page, tidy it into xhtml and extract the bits needed for a valid rss feed. And I can see it working, but its alot of hardwork for a simple job.
_life is ment to be hard_ says me.
Anyway the sites I would start off with, phrack and ntk.
If you dont know phrack, then your've never heard of 2600 or anything like that, its time to learn. It describes its self as 'a Hacker magazine by the community, for the community'
and yep they've been there since the mid 80's believe it or not. I still remember getting there txt files from bbs's and ftps on my old st. Anyway they always have the fresh news of exploits and hacks, all rounded up in a humourous not too serious container. Its spot on, trust me.
Anyway, they have put all there archives and all new issues online in grabble txt files within logical folders. Even though everything is in txt i should beable to do simple aggeration like pulling all the txt files together into one large one. Perfect for reading on my ipaq.
NTK is a odd one, I like it but I dont. There content is great and so fresh, but there style and presentation is enough to put me off from reading it regularly. Anyway Dave usually tells me all I _need to know_ from NTK. Hehe.
But anyway, yes I like your content and I want to represent it in something less html and more xml based so the presentation is very seperate from the content.
Now one of the things I could do is grab there main pages and tidy it then turn it into rss. But have you seen the mess which is there pages? Yuk, span elements everywhere. Oh well at least its not like there menus which are full of dont tags.
Anyway, if I get time I may write the xsl to do the transformations, sure others would be interested.
So where did it all start?
Well we needed a blogger app for staff and students to blog from anywhere in the college. And our college has the additional problems of using mac as well as pcs and laptops not only desktops.
So how would we do this? Well I evaluated many blogger apps but they were either too complex or not cross platform. But yes there was one which was simple and cross platform. Chronicle lite
Anyway theres major problems with the graphics display on mac osx, so much of a problem I sent Paul a screenshot of the problem.
Paul replied that he had no mac to test on and that he wouldnt support the mac because of that. Oh, were a little stuck then?
Not if we send him a mac complete with osx! Yes thats right, we are going to send Paul a mac so he can fix the problem and maybe do some of the things we want to include into clite. Obviously because clite is opensource, everything we suggest for development will be open to everyone. Its a odd sitution because everyone wins. Paul gets a new mac, we get unlimited licences of software which does what we want and everyone else can use the same software with or without modifications. Yep the only people loosing out are those who charge for software. It really does pay to go opensource…
And in the spirit of opensource, I will now be plugging clite and its development when ever i can. lol.
Oh and here's Pauls wishlist if anyone else feels the need to help him out.