Month: June 2004

Aggregation overload

Very recently i've noticed a serious drop in performance on my feeds (aggregation). And I know exactly what it is, i've too many rss feeds! I need to sort it out this weekend, as its not good in its current state. I'm going to go through all my feeds and make sure they all still exist and put them into thought out categories, rather than the adhoc method i've been doing up till now. I'm also hoping I will sort out about 40 rss feeds which do full text syndication for my personal pocketpc news reader. The ones i've currently got are a mixed bag of crap.

Flock is my aggregator and seriously nothings happened to the project for ages. It still doesn't support rss2 feeds let alone atom. So tempted to knock up my own in cocoon sometime soon, but then again Blojsom 2.7 will also have a aggregation plugin to go with the import plugin.

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RSS to Jabber

Smartphone with Agile messager running

Last night just before bed, I dropped past the jabber site because I wanted to get a new jabber client for my pocketpc. Saw that myjabber guys had released there own pocketpc version. But I couldnt find it so thought I'd see what else is out there.

Anyway I saw a news story about getting realtime rss feeds in jabber. And it pointed to the jabber.at site. Basicly in the vein of smthingme and other bots like smarterchild and myownbuddy, you can talk to it via set commands and tell it to subscribe you to different rss feeds. Which it will deliver to you every 30 or so minutes.

And I must not forget to mention I'm now using the excellent Agile on my pocketpc and smartphone. I actually think its better than imov, topicim and myjabber. Plus its free, and supports almost every single mobile platform out there.
Interesting links to check out later – http://edgar.netflint.net | http://www.pmbrowser.info/thinkbot.htm | http://www.niemueller.de/software/eggdrop/jabberbot/ | http://www.google.com/search?q=jabber+bots&sourceid=opera&num=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

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Blojsom and Jabber make it into OSX 10.4 Server

So I woke up this morning and looked at my email before rushing off to work, and Miles had sent me a email pointing out that Blojsom and Jabber will come as standard in OSX 10.4 server, which is going to ship end of 2004 or start of 2005. Article here then during mytrain journey to the BBC via Cannon street, I see a link to Blojsom in a slashdot arcticle.

I'm so loving all this, but I'm sure David and Mark are laughing there arse's off. Good one guys looking forward to the Jabber version of Somethingme very soon?

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testing somethingme im to blog service


Somethingme logo?


So I can finally let out the big secret of the blojsom team. They've been working on a IM to blog service and this is my first blog using the service.
They've been working hard on this service since the days of Blojsim which only worked with blojsom 1.x. Mark always promised to get it working for all blogs not just blojsom, now they've done the job. Excellent work. I'm looking forward to using this on my ipaq to drop down quick thoughts into my bookmarks. And I'm rubbing my hands with glee about SMS and even MMS to blog. Allowing me to blog from my SPV as well as a GPRS connection. Tell the truth that will really open blogging up to a whole new generation of bloggers. Very cool, very cool.

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ebooks prices like these make you want to steal them

A work friend recommended Neal stephenson to me yesterday evening. The book he was recommending was Cryptonomicon and the Snow crash. Now I was quite willing to buy the ebooks because I highly prefer reading on screen to reading a book. But have you seen the prices! Oh my, check out this one…

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson costs 8 dollars and you can get some second hand versions for half that. However, if you want the digital acrobat version that will be 10 dollars! Even the microsoft reader which by the way is crap and i hate alot to read from, is 10 dollars. And I'm willing to forget that digital distrubution is cheaper and easier than the book. And I was almost willing to pay the money for the ebook because 10 dollars is about 5 pounds here. But then I read this.

Format: Adobe Reader
File Size: 5776K
Printable: Most publishers do not allow Adobe e-books to be printed.
Mac OS Compatible: This title requires Adobe Reader 6.x, which requires Mac OS 10.2 and above.
Windows Compatible: Yes
Handheld Compatible: Adobe Reader supports transfer of e-books to PalmOS devices, but not to Pocket PC or Symbian devices.

Format not a problem could tag it later too I guess. File size sounds large but its got drm so i guess its got space for that. No printing, who cares not bothered. Requires Acrobat 6? why? But this did it for me! Adobe Reader supports transfer of e-books to PalmOS devices, but not to Pocket PC or Symbian devices. What the hell! So if I bought this ebook I wouldnt beable to transfer it to my ipaq for reading on the train?!
And to make things worsts, the microsoft reader version only works on pocketpcs and tabletpcs, which i do have but why cant i look at it on my windows xp pro machine?!

Its no wonder why people are so pissed off about ebooks. I for one will wait till it hits the newsgroups now, on pure principle. Because this takes the living piss… I'm going to scream!

I'm thinking of buying the audio version which is cheaper and then converting it to text later on for reference. Sometimes I wonder about the world we live in today.

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Xlink results – two thumbs up

Xlink Kai: EVO 7 - global network gaming - teamxlink.co.uk

In a follow up to my earlier post about the xlink experiement. I finally got a copy of Topspin for the xbox. I mainly used the KAI client to connect and then just loaded up topspin on the xbox. First time I connected to xbox live and it moaned because it couldnt access it. Then I tried system link in the multiplayer mode, bang it worked. I was able to see someone ready with a game to play. So I joined and I was playing within a couple of minutes. General impression was it was a little slow and the game quitted when I tried to change the camera angle. But the second and so on games afterwards I had were awesome. I'm so tempted to try out the Wimbledom 2004 tournament – shame its now closed now.

I basicly now use Xbox media centre to see if anyone on my contact list is around, then I switch to a KAI if I need to play a game. If there was a way to type in xbmc i would use that instead. Rememeber if you do sort it out, my user name is cubicgarden.

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Zeroconf’ed up

At the bottom of that page from the Register was a link about the BluePod file swapping. Now I had heard about it but always dismissed it as rubbish talk. Till I sat down and read it today. I had the idea about bluetooth swapping along time ago, but i'm sure many did. But using ZeroConf Lan aka Rendezvous sounds like a excellent idea. I'm actually quite amazed some of the things Simeda are doing in Bucharest, and cant wait to try out there beta webserver. I have to admit I wasnt the biggest fan of Apple for taking ZeroConf Lan and rebranding it as Rendezvous but actually now maybe they might have kept the standard ticking over, as few others are. I might even go as far as installing it on my machines at home now. Also found a client for PocketPC by Apple of all people. And a Hydra type of application which allows you to share media and clippings over Zeroconf/Rendezvous for PC and Mac called Spike. I'm wondering if I can share media to it from other Zeroconf devices not running spike, from example my pocketpc? Will need to try them out tonight for sure.

I have to say Intel got this right. Its all about servers and clients within the Personal area network, a portable webdav server would be ideal, the best I have is my laptop running IIS in webdav mode or using Davenport.


I installed all the above on my ipaq and machines at home, all is well and I'm enjoying zeroconf now. Just need some more apps to take advantage of it.

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Bluetooth finally hits the underground

P900 with the bluetooth keyboard

People use to call me bluetooth boy, because everything I bought had a bluetooth chip inside of it. My tablet, my ipaq, my phones going back to 1999 with the Ericsson R520m. But I've been a little frustrated by the lame cable replacement type of solutions over the last few years. That was till I saw a couple of things recently.

The first one I heard about a long time ago but its only just come out. And that was in the states and Canada. But it seems Stowaway have sorted out there European resellars. Basicly its a Bluetooth keyboard and it works with everything I have, aka one consistent interface for all my notes, editing, blogs, etc. I could even use it at home if I wanted to. But I douht I will give up my Microsoft Erogonomic keyboard yet. But yes finally I can outline as fast as my laptop on my ipaq. I'm seriously going to buy from the states unless I hear about others soon

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Semantic Behavior

Found this interesting idea in my feeds today. I think the crux of the idea can be explained through this quote.

Behavior obviously contains clues about the intent that stitches actions into meaningful streams, although the clues can be awfully misleading: If you see that I move from a web page to a word processing document, there's a chance the first inspired me to write something in the document, although it's also possible that I got bored reading the Web page and decided to get back to work. If I copy from the Web page and paste into the document, you have a stronger clue.

I've already wrote a comment so I hope the trackback works. I sent a email to David, because I think the log of data from such a client application would be perfect for his OS david application. What ever happened to that?

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Progression and Java

Sorry for the odd errors and general slowness of cubicgarden.com. I have updated Resin java server, been messing with some wiki's and tearing my hair out trying to get blojsom to output xhtml 1.0 strict code. The last one is a issue with the url's which dont have escaped ampersounds in it. Instead there just simply & which drives any validator crazy. The server upgrade should mean better performance generally but the testing wiki's mean i'm running many things at once and might counter balance the positive effect of the upgrade.

I also tried to run the Java SDK in server mode using this tweak Miles sent through a few days ago.

Someone has done some research about JVM performance: http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=45250

In a nutshell, you are recommended to run your JVM as the “Server” JVM not the “Client” JVM. The downside is the server JVM takes longer to start, and uses more memory, but in the performance benchmarks, the Java code is faster the C++ code!

I opted for option 2 which means you need to edit java.cfg sp server comes up before client.

   -client KNOWN
   -server KNOWN

You should change them to:
   -server KNOWN
   -client KNOWN

So I did and guess what nothing worked at all. It broke the whole of the server which is scary. I may try again this weekend to be sure…

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What is EBS?

Mark calls it impromptu while David calls it EBS? What ever it is, it seems to allow blogging via xmlrpc and a instant messager client. I'm left wondering if its blojsim sorted out for blojsom 2.x or something alot more. Oh my I never saw your last post Mark, yes would love to do any experiements possible with cocoon and smack if you like. Anyway I hope to know more soon, now I've made my interests public. – by the way how the hell do trackbacks work?

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Xlink experiement

I've tried to get Xlink working, but bigbrother 5 uk overruled my experiments. Will try again tomorrow. Nice guide on xbmp.org.

Also of use – Xlink Kai Instructions, HOW TO GET UP AND RUNNING and Xbmc + Online Gaming Tutorial, in's and outs of KAI3 support in xbmc!

I also had to cut my streampack experiement short. I now at least know how to setup a stream file. Simply a *.strm file with the url on the first line. MMS and HTTP are fully supported, will try ICY and RTSP later.

Ok its the next day, and I've got it all sorted now. Xlink was not working because my account was not registered, so I registered again and bang were in. So heres how I did it.

Register your XTAG username and password at http://www.teamxlink.co.uk. Then download Xlink Kai: Evo VII. Make sure you've added your username and password to the xbmc config file.

< xlink >
 < username >cubicgarden< /username >
 < password >password< /password >
 < /xlink >

(remove spaces around elements!)
Setup Xlink Kai Evo VII with settings like this. Profile = Engine only, Network adapter = Auto detect and lock, Username = your Xtag, Password = your password, Accept UI connections from = Any IP Address, Dont mess with the ports and finally click launch engine (launch UI on the first go try is a good idea too). Then click OK.

Now launch KAI and login. Thats it… You should be good to go. Enjoy and remember to look for the user cubicgarden.

By the way stream pack is working fine, I was watching French TV today at 56kps. I'm going to try adding tons of links myself to uk radio stations and the television streams. Then submit them to stream pack forum

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The State of Wireless London

Harry sent me a link to this study on wirless in greater London. Not read it all the way though but it seems very interesting. More wireless than I actually thought there was. I mean if you look at central London its basicly covered. Its hard to believe that BT openzone has 173 different hotspots while surf n sip the next biggest rival has 91, the cloud has 78 at the moment.

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