I was trying to explain to a friend of mine why I'm switching to Linux or GNU when ever possible. Tried to explain some of the trusted computer outcomes. But theres nothing like pointing someone to a bias website to make up there own mind.
Month: January 2004
Xcal : Progress on Calendar
Started doing more work on the Calendar part of my website. Finally got cocoon to read inside of a Xcal. So now its more a matter of how do I actually put the xcals in the webdav directory. Once there in there I can write a classy transformer so you can read most of the information online, but also add the xcal to your calendar. I do believe xcals are accepted by all ical compatable applications? The rdf version was also a option but I can easily enable that if more accept that…
Found some useful links too.
Mozilla Calendar Notes and Queries
iCalendar DTD Document (xCal)
Pronom a new service for 2004
Was flying through Openoffice.org today looking for enough information to contribute to the National Archives Pronom application. And came across this nice openoffice ebook which is free to download and read online.
What is Pronom? Well let them tell you…
PRONOM is a database of information about the technical dependencies upon which access to electronic records may rely. It contains information about the file formats in which electronic records may be stored, the software products required to create, render and migrate these formats, and the vendors who develop these products. It includes product support life cycle information, to facilitate technology watch within digital archives. The PRONOM database can be searched online, and reports produced in a variety of formats. The system currently holds details of, 550 file formats, 250 software products, and 100 vendors, and records are being added on a regular basis. We also actively encourage the submission of new information for inclusion on PRONOM, and an online submission form is provided for this purpose. The website also includes details of our plans for significant future developments to both the content and the functionality of the system.
PRONOM was developed by The National Archives' Digital Preservation Department, as a tool to support TNA's own digital archive. However, we hope and anticipate that PRONOM will also provide a valuable resource for the wider digital preservation community. As such, we very much welcome feedback on both the current version of PRONOM and our future plans. All feedback should be sent to: pronom@nationalarchives.gov.uk
More information can be found under the menu on the left side of PRONOM Go check it out and contribute more information.
Atari ST Emulator
Andy pointed me to a crazy website which does odd things on the first page. Actually its so bad on Opera that you have to pretend to be IE for it to load a page. But it turns out to be a great resource for emulators. I'm dying to try out some of the ST emulators. If I can emulate a Atari Falcon which was 32bit and had 24bit colour on my pc I will be extremly happy…
Content Management is for losers
Rushkoff stirs the content management pot at the feature.
Content Management is for losers. Young people may have discovered the dark truth about digital media: the person who wins the right to store a piece of data has actually won the booby prize.
Well done Rushkoff, I tend to agree with alot of the sense he talks… Been also keeping an eye on Theoretical PerspectivesRushkoff's online classroom. With that and danny boy you can get some really good ideas about interaction design…
Xhtml friends network
I briefly saw this in my offline reader while reading my news in the car on the way to the Twin cities but was obviously offline so couldnt check it out futher. However in the back of my head i've been meaning to catch up on XFN. It actually looks very good and so so simple compared to FOAF even though there not really compareable… Will start using XFN soon i think…
XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a 'rel' attribute to their a tags…
My first XFN link to Dave, just need to add profile to my blog pages and i'm ready to go… might do that in a bit before i sleep.Oh just to note I also added a GeoURL to all the pages too, while i was at it.
Smoothie
Finally got a machine setup for Smoothwall 2.0. The Machine is a Pentium 2 233mmx with all of 64meg of 100mhz memory and a 3 gig hard drive. Unfortually I've run out of video cards so I'm using a FireGL 1000 pro which orginally thought was a powerful 32meg FireGL 1 card. But it seems it wont be so wasted as its only a 8 meg card and wouldnt be a good idea to swap with my 64meg ATI Radion card. Specially seeing how the Smoothwall server has no display, keyboard or mouse now. I however did put in two 3Com network cards and my ADSL PCI modem card in the hope smoothwall would pick it up, it seems it didnt and I'm now stick using the Green frog usb modem till I sort it out.
So tomorrow when i get up, I will take down the current server and change my network setup till i get it all working behind smoothwall. Better hope google caches this before it goes down later today…
If you can see this post, then i'm now sitting behind a linux firewall and everything is working well… love it when a plan comes together.
Catching the big one
In my post a couple days back, I emailed alot of leading heads of the internet about talking at the college. Well I'm pleased to say Richard Stallman has agreed to come talk in May.
I should be in the UK in May, so I could give a speech.
So simple and yet so amazing… This is going to be a huge event and I think there will not be enough space to house all the people who would like to hear him speak.
Presence and Location management?
One of the things which bugs me about mobile phones is the location trianglation which is possible to find where I am at the time. And I always thought the profiles on mobile phones were powerful but not natural enough for widespread use.
Bell Labs claim to have solved the first one at least…
Bell Labs sets its sight on location privacy and
Hiding your Location Information.
Inviting the internet to the college
I've been writing emails and back and forth to some of the leading lights of the internet. Hoping to get them into college to do talks to students and staff.
Some of the people in my hit list include, Howard Rhiengold, Lawrence Lessig, Linus Torvalds, Jon Johansen, Richard Stallman, etc, etc… Hoping to add to the list when I actually recieve replies…
Ok I've recieved lots of auto-replies and a Authorize from mailblocks but the only person to really reply is Howard Rhiengold so far…
Ian —
Why don't you consider joining Brainstorms? That way, you'd have contect with others who share your interest — and you'd know when I might be in the UK. (No plans at present, but I usually make it to London every two or three years).
Here's info. Let me know if you are interested: http://www.rheingold.com/community.html
Urban Infomatics Breakout
If you want to understand cities today and especially in the future, keep mobile communications in mind. Ten years from now, understanding the way people use mobile media will be as fundamental to urban planning as understanding the buildings they inhabit and vehicles they use. by Howard Rhiengold
Thoughts soon…
Following on from twincities post
Birch sent me a link which basicly said all what I had said about the twin cities. In Birch's own words I coined it, that article is everything you already iterated
.
Birch (19:29:05): Did you ever call it or what? Cars are the biggest problem. Whether driven or parked, they require enormous amounts of space. Unless auto dependence is reduced, the classic neighborhoods that Minneapolis plans for cannot happen. More transit and more walking are the only answers.
At the same time I was talking to Miles about the whole Twin cities thing and he pointed me towards Jane Jacobs which I'm sure I've either read or heard of before. I know we had talked about her thoughts along time ago but I'm sure i've read her books. She thought all this through 40 years ago and no one took her serioulsy till 25 years ago. How many times do we hear the same story? McLuhan, Chomskey, etc etc… Its a shame because we could be in such a better state if we did.
Miles asked a important question regarding the twin cities.
italicdj (20:00:51): Is through planners – or is it social change? that things are happeing in twin cites?
Birch replies
Birch (20:27:26):
I believe we are all products of our environment. Regions of climate extremes tend to embrace femenine qualities. Not at the individual level, but at a cultural level. Social structures are of course evolutionary abdaptation that ensure survival. Public transporation, health care, public schools, etc are all natural aspirations now that colder cultures as able to satify Maslow's hierachy need
Birch (20:29:57):
urban planning is logical social step on the cultural latter. social change is a bi-product of the history/climate. we are what we are. nothing nobel about it.
Birch (20:33:26):
Geert Hofestede is a Dutch author who developed this theory by make cross cultural comparisons. It is Hofestede's 'Masculinity-Femininity' theory to which i am referring. It shreds perspective on why Sweden exists in one frame of mind while Texas exists in another.
Birch (20:36:17):
The theory would suggest why northern U.S./Canadian cities tend to fall on the far more socialistic end of the spectrum. Why they might adopt social change more quickly then cities of the south
jxCAL – I want it now…
The jxCAL project aims at providing a calendar publishing framework based on Cocoon/XML/XSLT. It can aggregate multiple sources of events and display them using nice SVG views.
AIGA experience is back
You are invited to the thirty-ninth AIGA Experience Design London meeting.
Your computer is broken!
We have been using the same graphical users interfaces for 20 years, since the Apple Macintosh (launched on 24 January 1984) killed the command line. Our tools today would have been easily recognisable by maverick genius Doug Engelbart in the 1960s, and the Xerox PARC fraternity of the 70s. Yet in the meantime we have applied computers to many more, and more complex, tasks including communication, information retrieval, collaboration and planning, and entertainment.
How does the design of GUIs need to evolve, where is this happening, and what can we learn from it? Where do we go beyond the desktop metaphor? And application-centric computing? How do we manage 1000s of files, message, and other data elements? What new input devices are appropriate?
Web design has learned from GUIs, and now GUIs are drawing on (and are often based on) Web technologies. (And although everyone has a view on Web design most people ignore the more important interface that they use every day.) Eventually Web design and GUI design will merge and we will need to absorb the deeper lessons GUI designers have learned over three decades.
We will look at the past, present and future of GUIs to lay the ground for an informed debate.
THE EVENT
– – – –
Presentation: The past of user interfaces
— Event chair Nico Macdonald will discuss the history of GUIs.
Presentation: The present of user interfaces
— Nikki Barton, Creative Director of Nykris Digital Design, will present her company's work on the Aqua and MacOS X versions of some of Microsoft's MacOS products. (Presenter biographies can be found on the group Web site.)
Presentation: The future of user interfaces
— Here we invite you to give a 3-4 minute presentation on a key user interface challenge or solution. If you would like to take part please say so in your RSVP (see below) and we will forward you presentation information.
DETAILS
– – – –
When:
Thursday 29 January, 6:30 for 7PM (until 9:00 PM)
Where:
The Design Council, 34 Bow Street, London WC2E 7DL
(opposite the Royal Opera House)
http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/howtofindus/
RSVP:
mailto:RSVP@design-agenda.org.uk?Subject=AIGAExpDesLondon%20Jan%202004
There is no payment to attend. Attendance will be limited to 80 people.
Please only RSVP if you are likely to be able to attend.
Please email all enquiries to this address, not the Design Council.
NEXT EVENT
– – – –
Our February event is likely to focus on gaming and interaction design.
Electronic programming guide for radios
Yes you heard it first, i'm not paienting it, i'm not going to keep it to myself and i'm certainly not going s ll the idea. This has GPL written all over it.
So what’s it all about? Well when I was in america last christmas we drove the distance from peura in illinois to the twin cities in minnesota via chicago, milwaukee, madison, eau claire, rochester and la crosse. And back… During that time, we listened to a lot of public radio. Some good some poor. But I was thinking on the way back from la crosse to madison. Why can’t I listen to this in england? (By the way england only has 2 national talk stations.) As some of the talk is relative to anywhere in the world. Oh by the way the BBC is great and is included to my list of good stations. Then I thought, but I can there online, surely? So what was stopping me from tuning in? Then it hit me.
Theres no programming guide for radio as far as I know. What the heck? And if there is, its not wide reaching enough to count for internet radio stations. So i'm proposing a xmltv style schema for radio listings. Surely it would be easy, and once the data is in xml, I don’t see why not it can’t be syndicated and aggregated just like rss and xmltv?
The next stage would be to create a pvr-ish thing in software or even hardware). It would then allow you to capture multiple internet radio streams and maybe (tivo like) suggest others. Xmlnetradio is what i'll call it for now. On the hardware front you could imagine something like radioyourway supporting xmlnetradio, but I like the idea of mobile devices with java or something simular decoding the xml and supporting internet radio even though it would be stupidly expensive over a gprs connection. However wireless would be great for this. Saying all that I would prefer to do the whole capturing on my pc with the software client then transfer the result with xml content to my mobile device. You know if worst came to worst writing out the mpeg3 file with converted xml data in id3 would work well enough?
So the stages for xmlnetradio would be,
1. create the schema based on xmltv but modifed for internet radio.
2. Write software to transform xmlnetradio into something meaningful and allow it jump station to station easily
3. Add pvr type functionality so the listener can record one or more streams in real time.
4. Add support for mobile devices, be it just mpeg3 transfer or full on mobile client.
5. Hope someone adopts it…