Month: September 2003

The london designer events calender

Its bizarre how these things happen or better still how they start happening.
I while ago I wanted to create some kind of ical service which would allow a small community of designers to share calender dates. And it kind of work except for one thing. You need more than just a webdav server to allow multiple people to change one ical file. Damm I thought, oh well move on.
But its been bugging me still, and when I met Louise Fergonson at this AIGA event. The memories started coming back.

See Louise actually manually keeps a kind of blog of upcoming events in London which designers would be interested in going to. I personally found it great and attended the Spiked gone to the blogs event because of her.

So whats the problem then? Well the problems are these.

I can not sydicate the events, which may sound pretty pettie but it means I have to return to her events page everytime I want to check.

I still have to manually copy and paste events into outlook or any other calender program I'm using.

So yes these may sound pettie, and I dont want to put down the seriously hard work Louise has put into the events page. But with a bit of xml magic, it shouldnt be a problem to create a rss feed and a icalendar.

How is this possible? Well this is in theory and quickly,
Louise's Html seems pretty messed up, it doesnt validate as xhtml as there is no doctype or things like that. So I will run it thought Cocoon's html tidy pipeline then start using xsl to filter out all the navigation and stuff, at which I should be left with only the content. Another xsl pipeline (or the same?) will turn the content into structured xml (may use ical or invent my own for now). Once its in that format I can turn it into anything I like. I am going to create rss feed to start off with then go about creating icals.
Will expalin better later, if that made no sense.

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TvBrick home server

Was flicking through Digital home magazine the other day and came across TVbrick.

Its basicly a TV recorder capble of broadcasting over the internet. The TV brick is able to stream programmes stored on its hard drive to other pc's or another tv brick reciever which plugs into a TV. The idea is that streams will be password protected . But theres nothing stopping people from giving out the password to anyone out there, including publishing it on the internet.
It requires a broadband connection of at least 256kps to stream, making it perfect for uk adsl subscribers.

At this moment it seems TVbrick is sold as to international families, who want to send streams from japan to europe. But it wont take long to reverse engineer this device. Saying that too, the whole system is built on open source software so its not even needed to reverse. Openbrick.org details everything needed to build a tvbrick compatable device. Depending on pricing and availablity this could be a decent option for those of limited technical ability. The BeOS of streaming?

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Revisiting Be OS

Its been a long time since I looked at BeOS. But reading in the beginning there was a command line and my lack of knowledge about linux, I thought I'll have a look and see what BeOS are up to.

Well to keep things really short, I installed BeOS XP Max edition, as it supports the amd athlon XP processor. Also it seemed fine about most of my other odd hardware. Unlike Linux, correct me if I'm wrong.

But theres a problem!
I've installed it and had no problems, but can someone please tell me how to start it! I swear theres no straight forward way to start it. I would ideally like to add a menu option to the boot menu, so I can decide to drop into beOS rather than Windows XP.

Anyway I'm sure I'll work it out soon. Till then heres a few good links which I picked up.

Creator of the first BeOS/OpenBeOS Distribution
Community of BeOs supporters
My all the web simple search

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Java vs .Net

Miles dropped this into my inbox a while back, good read.

Is Java Finished?

The battle for the hearts and minds of developers is heating up, with .NET starting to compete fiercely with Java. The war is being waged mostly inside corporations — department by department, and project by project. True, many companies will use both technologies. But because Java traditionally is considered more complex and difficult to use, .NET will have the edge in some head-to-head comparisons.

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Your move : 3g update

Its been a while since I've done a update on a few things, one of those updates should be my 3g phone. I was sparked into doing this because Three finally sent me a letter asking me to make a choice by October 2nd.

Also been meaning to share this with my blogger too,
Gsmbox.com tests my 3g phone

I still cant not work out if three have deployed a walled garden or not. Everytime I type a url in manually (when i got 3g signal of course). The phone says not all content is viewable, then it tries and fails, every single time. I even tried wap sites to make sure it wasnt because the browser didnt fully support xhtml.

But then yeah its odd because its says it should work. Then dont even get me started on the java aspect! I still to this day have not got a single java applet working on the phone.

So what am I going to do, well it seems I can keep the phone if I stay on 3toGo pay as you go. If I goto the video price plans they will give me 100 pounds in credit, but would i use it? No chance! My 3rd option is to leave three, and return the handset to them. And sometimes I do consider it to be the best option.

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Mark Thomas

Mark Thomas has been in the news again, and I found a good site to keep track of what he's been up to. Next time he does his tour, I will have to drag my wife along. I explained to her that he is the british equalivent to Micheal Moore.

The forums are very lively, found this one. David Blaine – Fool, fraud, and full of sh*t.
Interesting comment from Pixelchick – what about derren brown wanting somweone to load the gun so he can play russian roulette? it seems strange that these adverts coincide with blaines – are they trying to outdo each other maybe? if so perhaps we should just put them in a carpark and leave them to it…

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Dr Divx vs Xmpeg5

I just found out DrDivx supports encoding of unencrypted vobs. What does this really mean? Well that means I dont need to use xmpeg anymore to encode my films. Version 5 looks and sounds great but its only in french, which could be a problem. But I'm still stuck on another problem.

I need to start encoding all my good films in ac3. In the old days getting ac3 sound out of my computer was awarked but now I usually watch movies on the xbox using xbox media player which supports ac3 without the hassle.

So yes, I need a encoder app which supports vobs but allows me to encode to divx or xvid with ac3 sound. At the moment I have to encode to the video in xmpeg 4.2 and output the raw ac3 sound to the hard drive then go to virtual dub and muliplex them together. Trust me its a pain and should be that way now.

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Blojsom2 installed and ready to go

Ok Blojsom2 is installed and ready to go, except one thing. I cant for the life of me get xmlrpc working from any blogging app I use. Combine this with the problems I'm having with Clite and suddenly blogging has become a lot more difficult.

Anyway got some nice snippits I found around the net which I'll drop into posts soon as I can. I cant believe its been 5 days since I last posted. Whats going on!

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AIGA Experience Design

Just got back from Designing for e-government, and it was good. Not sure if it was better or worst than the last one, but this time I stuck around afterwards when everyone went to the globe pub. Meet some interesting people including Louise ferguson. She was talking about the events calender she had drawn up on her website. I explained I also tried to do a simular thing but using the ical standard, which would allow anyone with a username and password to add events to it. And anyone could sync up with it.
So its good to see shes done this, I can see myself using it alot.

Just had a look for ical again. I remember my ical idea didnt work because you need a ical server and I was trying to use webdav instead. BUT i just found this, and i'm now thinking once I do the blojsom2 upgrade. I should try this out using resin's webdav support.

Yes please note regular readers of my blog, it will be down tomorrow while I change to blojsom 2. And unfortually all permalinks will change. Really sorry its just the way it is. It shouldnt take long to do the upgrade and my feeds will be available still. There maybe slight issues during the first few weeks.

Thanks for your patiences during this time

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Eigenradio = Statistically Optimal Music

Ok so Miles dropped this in my inbox the other day, but I was following the convo on alter slash but like most things on slash dot it was lost before you know and replaced with something just as interesting.
This is from slashdot –
ShinyPlasticBag writes “'Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. Since we listen to so much music all the time, Eigenradio is always on and always live. What you hear on Eigenradio is the best of the New Music, distilled and de-correlated. One song on Eigenradio is worth at least twenty songs on old radio.

Anyway so yeah this eigenradio sounds like a intersting project but is somewhat not when you actually listen. Maybe its the slash dot effect, but tell you what it sounds pretty poor at the moment.

The slashdotters have gone crazy about the issue, and its all a good read. Heres some of the best.

bobtheheadless (467304)
I wonder if you can do the same thing with video… hm.

Sanity (1431)
I wish they had spent as much time documenting what this actually did as they spent making the website pretty, the one remotely technical diagram on the website has no explanation whatsoever as to what it is about.

IMHO this is yet another example of how academic projects are judged by the amount of attention they attract, rather than on whether they advance the state of the art. This is the reason why people like Kevin Warrick [sundayherald.com] can stick a dog tag in their arm and go around claiming they are the world's first cyborg – all while being lavished with attention by the mainstream media.

All of this leads to an academic system that increasingly rewards self pubicity at the expense of real reasearch.

Oh, BTW – I listened to the radio station, it sounds like a garbled mess – I certainly couldn't determine the point of this from listening to it, but then I could say the same thing about rap.

JohnGrahamCumming (684871) comments about the website,
1. Horizontal scrolling required
2. Tiny
3. Virtually no links to anything
4. Very small amount of information

I personally think its all good fun but the genres are too wide for any good experience. Also I expected it to generate tones for human listening? Some of it was hardly that. I would like to see it take only a single genre and use the same engine then hear the results.

No matter what the slashdotters say, the author page sounds like he has lots of interesting projects going on, but not much to show at this moment. Some of the papers I will have to read through when I got the time.

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