Month: September 2003

London events lack of progress

Ok I've hit a brick wall it would seem.
The issue is a very simple one, Cocoon wont accept Louise's non-valid html at all. I've defined a pipeline using jtidy which is the java version of html tidy, so the html from this source should be cleaned up before its used in a xsl transformation.
This isnt happening at all, and in the end i'm getting this instead. You can clearly see the title which is valid xhtml, but as soon as it hits anything non valid it throws a 500 servelet exception.

I have two paths forward, manually rewrite louises html into a file I can use or talk to louise about writing things in standard xhtml. The last one is the most difficult, because looking at her site, its all written using the same template. I dont want to add work to louise because this should be do-able with cocoon.
Oh heres the link for the clean one I'm working on.

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New phone needed

My contract is up on my 2.5g phone, I currently own a T68 which has been upgraded to a T68i.

But all that aside, I'm going to pass my T68 on to my wife whos on pay as you go. But I need a phone just like my T68 but with a decent camera. Ideally it would beable to take videos not only pictures.

So whats the choices?
Z600

Sony Ericsson Z600, even though I hate flip phones this is better than the T610 I feel.

T610
The Sony Ericsson T610 is the natrual choice and is currently free with a new contract. I noticed the T610's picture resoultion is half of the T68 with the extra camera

I have considered buying a different brand, but I need a phone with decent bluetooth support. Some of the Siemans are looking decent now. The only Nokia I would consider is the Nokia 3650 because its not quite a smartphone so it wont replace the features of my ipaq. But it has a MMC and can record mpeg4 video. And I bet its smoother than my 3g phone. I was also going to say I could get a smartphone and duplicate some features.

Something like the Sony Ericsson P800 or even the P810 now. Or I could consider the Orange SPV or SPV2 if that had a decent camera.

I think I'm gonna wait a little longer before i make the jump.

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Gone to the Blogs



Some pictures taken with my ericsson communcam.

Gone to the blogs

Noteable points.

Met the guy behind plasticbag.org, Tom Coates

Blogging for the mainstream
What are the barriers for entry? and should there be any? specially in regards to the live journal, blogger and aol users starting to blog. Is the current blogsphere going to welcome all these extra users?

Are blogs a revolution or really a evolution?
Ground up publishing or peoples voices is the name of the game here?

Blogging outside
Are blogs much more interesting when there focusing outside the blogsphere? Is there too much self reference in the blogsphere and emphase on blogging it first?

Infustructure
Do we have the right infustructure to blog? And I dont mean network. I'm of the view blogs need to be more structured than they currently are. But without making the experience of blogging more complex than it currently is at the moment. I think the metablog Atom spec will go along way in solving this problem. Also this is key in the Semantic web vision.

Why do people read blogs?
Interesting question that no one really answered in depth.

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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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