Month: April 2005

Sin City, the most accurate comic book adaptation ever

Elijan wood as Kevin in Sin City

I dont usually post reviews of films on my blog unless I'm in love with the film (matrix series). Anyhow last weekend I watched some of the most stylised violence and cut throat dialogue since Kill Bill the japanese cut, which is in colour through-out the House of Blue Lights fight. Yep Frank Miller's Sin City. Honestly even before seeing the review on the same page, I was thinking there has never been a more accurate comic book adaptation ever! Its so odd because I usually do not like Robert Rodriguez's style of films but he's really took on Sin City and let the film do the talking. Watching the film is almost exactly like reading the comic books from the look to the dialogue, my own critism is the story lines could have done with a liitle more twist but you got to get new people into it. And it certainly does do that well, there's good character development but not too much for those who who know already. I will be watching this film in the Cinema when it finally reaches the shores of the UK, I highly suggest you do the same…

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Who should I vote for?

After looking at my wife's newest entry, I decided to take the quiz. Take from the results what you want. Its very interested the differences between me and Sarah. I would have thought it would be around the other way…

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Labour 0
Conservative -48
Liberal Democrat 66
UK Independence Party -7
Green 29

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

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New video distribution platforms

This April feels like an innovative month. While Google ready there video distribution platform via slashdot. The great people behind Downhill Battle have launched a new open source video platform which is based on there BattleTorrent system. This certainly beats Nullsoft's NSV system and but makes me wonder why there is no join up between ourmedia and participatoryculture. This all fits quite nicely with my past post about the creative archive which got its day on slashdot, plus Hollywood is finally getting it and thinking about Bittorrent for distribution.

For myself almost every single piece of video content I consume is through the net now, and this has opened up an chance to get stuff which relates better to myself that usual TV. For example Kevin Rose from the Screensavers fame creates short videos for a narrow audience of geeks and hackers. Such a market is very badly served by TV and some what Radio. But thebroken.org and his new systm (yet to see any videos) are good to watch form part of my usual video consuming lifestyle. Talking of which, the scene is also forming part of my crowded train time on the pocketpc. Its perfect because its short and theres not a lot of talking to be missed by a delayed train announcement. I treat it like Hollyoaks or someother soap, which is light entertainment and drama. I'm hoping more of these types of narrowcasted shows and documentary's as such will be created by the tools and distribution methods introduced people like Downhill Battle. And of course I'm thinking very hard about creating my own shows which have a narrow audience.

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Firefox 1.1 with support for Native SVG

Hot on the news that Opera 8 will have support for SVG Tiny, the Firefox team have confirmed support for SVG. This is pretty awesome news, I have to say thank you very much to the Mozilla team. SVG will be disabled as default but can be enabled from the preferences now. Beats building a new version just for SVG support.

In an update, SVG will be turned on as default and can be turned off from the preference if the person wants to use a SVG plugin or turn off SVG. Even better! I also wanted to take this chance to explain the difference between Native and Plugin. Plugin's are usually invoked by embedding the media object in the page, as in the case of Flash. However Native SVG means you can write SVG directly into XHTML code and the browser will know what to do with it (aka it does not just hand it off to a plugin). This is another huge advantage SVG has over Flash, however some would disagree and say because Flash is bundled with most of the browsers out there that its pretty much native anyway. Anyway before a Flash vs SVG debate breaks out, heres a list to consider.

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Stop playing silly twat with your newspaper, before I shove it where the sun does not shine…

My wonderful wife wrote a nice long piece about the twats on public transports. The other day I was on the way to Bromley South station and got on at Elephant and Castle, nice fast train going only to Herne Hill on the way. However the last train has no seats left except a couple dotted around. So I picked one of the six seaters (really its 3 seats facing the other 3) which was sandwiched between two people. Big mistake, I was then subjected to number 2 on Sarah's list. Well this woman had her bag there, so I stood at the middle point between all the seats and took my laptop out placed it next to her bag. That would be a clear sign that I'm going to sit there surely? Well no, by the time I had placed my bag on the rack and went back to open my laptop and sit down. Her bag was still there! And she did give me the whole dumbass look of 'oh I didn't realize you wanted to sit down'. In the end I stood there and managed to say the words excuse me without shouting or sounding too aggresive.

I have to add a point 4 to Sarahs list.
4. Public space hogging-twat. This person reads a broadsheet newspaper and chooses not to fold the paper. So even when your sitting there with a small book or pocketpc the newspaper pages obscure your view of the book or screen. This is seriously wrong! The other day, I was going home via Clockhouse and this man decided that blocking my laptop screen was an amusing game worth playing with me. Rather than play his stupid game, I switch the laptop into tablet mode which took him by suprise and wiped that stupid twatty smile off his sad little face. Yes man, get a life, and dont mess with me. Ha!

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The UK Creative Archive launches

After many rumours and articles in the guardian. The Creative Archive has been launched to the world. It claims to be a pilot but I think it will be out stay its 18 month timetable. Good to see Channel4, The British Film Institute (BFI) and the Open University on board. I do however wondering how much media content will actually come from the partners of the Creative Archive Licence Group.

The site is a super styled Moveabletype blog and contains everything anyone would need including FULL TEXT RSS feeds and trackbacks dotted around here and there. I know Ben Metcalfe is behind this and he's done a good job of keeping it away from the Blog style. It would have been nice if it was not set to 800px width. There are nice large pieces around the site suggesting people should Tell us what you think!, which leads to a short form. My first thoughts was, where's the media content?

Theres a thorny issue which I'm sure will not go away, so I'll talk about it frankly…
The difference between the Creative Commons licence and the UK Provisional Creative Archive Licence is the No-Endorsement part. I know the reasons why but this is almost unenforceable (quoted from Miles in a recent chat). They can't possibly endorse fair use and rule out satire, irony, and lampoon. All are legitimate artistic uses. And he's right, some of the best pieces of work these country has made are mixes of satire and irony. The lawyers are going to be very busy on this count.

End of the day, this is a great move forward and I'm really looking forward to media content being introduced soon. Thanks to everyone involved and I look forward to mixing, sharing and ripping sometime real soon.

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The promise of SyncML is coming true

A long long time ago when I bought my Ericsson R320 2nd generation GSM phone (with Bluetooth but no GPRS) there was this great standard which I had read about. SyncML was its name and its promise was the ability to sync with almost any type of PIM (personal information management) client and storage. Up to now its been a bit of a yeah yeah some time soon. I know Apple have done some great things with iSync which runs on SyncML but elsewhere we still got crazy sync methods which require propitery software and hardware. For example my PocketPC only talks to Activesync, which in turn talks to Outlook 2003 on my machine. Microsoft were nice enough to allow the PocketPC to sync with another activesync client, so I am able to sync with my machine at work too. This is great if you got only two machines and one mobile device. Well thats no good for me as I got a 3rd generation mobile phone and a TabletPC to sync with too.

I was pretty much out of luck till I saw Sync4j a while ago.

The Sync4j Project is an open source initiative to deliver a complete mobile application platform implementing the SyncML protocol. SyncML defines a standard way to synchronize data and remotely manage devices.

Sync4j consists of:

  • SyncServer: a Java SyncML server, that you can use with any SyncML client (e.g. to synchronize the address book on your phone through a pre-installed SyncML client)
  • SyncClient PIM for Microsoft Outlook, Windows Mobile Pocket PC PDA and BlackBerry: out-of-the-box applications that you can use to synchronize your PIM data (address book and calendar) to a SyncML server
  • SyncClient API in Java (J2SE and J2ME) and C++: SyncML client APIs that you can use to build an application based on a sometimes-connected paradigm (e.g. a sales force automation software on your cell phone or PDA)
  • SyncConnector DB and Microsoft Exchange: connectors to relational databases and Microsoft Exchange that you can use to store and extract data from the SyncServer (and send it to a SyncClient)

Reading this, I'm thinking wow this sounds like Zoe (another server which I keep meaning to deploy fully on my server) for PIM applications. So anyway, I've finally got it working and am trying it out. I'm using the beta version which is using Jboss, I considered using the WAR depoyable version but setting up the Database connectors sounds like a pain, specially with me not actually using any databases at all in my whole setup. Anyhow, the server is running and I can connect to it, my problem seem now seems to be the clients. The pocketpc seems to not see the server and outlook 2003 seems to throw a error when connecting. Unexpected error # 453 occured: can't find DLL entry point TzSpecificLocalTimeToSystemTime in kernal 32.. I'm sure using Outlook 2000/XP would make things better so I may give them a shot if I cant find another way. I'm going to try and connect to with my mobile phone once I setup the firewall settings or get the other clients working correctly. No point in syncing phone if there is little data in the syncserver.
I'm unsure if SyncML supports the ical standard which I like using with Thunderbird/Sunbird. To get those clients working with outlook would make mine and sarahs life so much easier!

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Syndication for a world wide audience

People have slowly caught on to the problems with RSS syndication and languages. If you follow the links back from the blogdigger blog entry
 you will start to notice a pattern, of people not quite being able to put there finger on the problem. And the reason why is because actually its not a single problem, its more a muddle of a problem. Andy puts it well but I may have the killer paragraph which explains it all.

It is a chicken and egg problem. If the content publishers do not provide RSS feeds with correctly structured language meta-data which software engineers can cut there teeth and applications on, then the stalemate will proceed as it does today. Certainly this is one way of looking at it. The other view point is software engineers need to put language features into there software otherwise there is no point in content providers using correctly structured language meta-data and modules to describe language content…

This is taken from my draft Paper which I am currenly finishing on the same subject of RSS and languages. See Blogdigger are right but how many feeds do they get from non-latin languages which have language meta-data they can actually use? This quote comes from Mark Fletcher from Bloglines

But the more important question is, are the majority of feeds accurately labeled in terms of language. And in our experience, the answer is unfortunately a resounding no.

I would echo that fact too, when looking for examples of non-latin RSS feeds, they tended to have little language meta-data (some actually marked english still!) Is this a limitation of the RSS standards or something else? Well in my paper it would seem no one gets away clean. For a quick taste of what I mean look at the complete (you call that complete?) list of language codes which can be used in the RSS 0.91 spec. Yes I know its old but still quite scary for 2000. Try and find Arabic, Hebrew and other non-latin languages.

If your interested in more information in this area, please keep an eye on this blog where I will post my paper sometime in late May or early June. Or even better come and listen to my presentation on the paper at XTECH 2005 in late May.

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del.icio.us and de.lirio.us controversy

Jon Udell has a nice and simple piece explaining the problems between delicious and delirious. From my own point of view I dont really care about the rip off-ness of the new service, end of the day there are many search engines and soical software apps which look simular but no one batters an eyelid. Honestly I would say its more of a compliment or a form of flattery. Anyhow the issue I do have is the open source-ness. I dont like my data not being mine, when I signed up to delicious I knew this but it was the only thing widely available at the time for bookmarking. Now I may change my bookmarks over to delirious because there is an alternative. I want my data to be under a creative commons licence which suits me and even though I dont have plans to build my own social bookmarking service, I'm more happy to know my data will not be locked into a service which could go bust. Yes you can get all your data out of delicious by using the API but thats not everything is it, I'm sure theres tons of linking information which I cant currently get my hands on. There's parellels between this debate and others like the attention.xml debate.

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