Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Quick note to all who contacted me after reading about the last Geek Dinner
. There is only 24 places left for the next one which is planned for 7th June in the Texas Embassy Cantina, near Leicester Square and the Mall. So if I was you I would seriously make up your minds and get your name down on the wiki sharpish. It should be a good night, lots of bloggers, geeks and interesting people (not to say bloggers and geeks are not of course).
Channel4 have launched a competition titled The play's the thing
. Its an opportunity to write a play which may be performed in London's West end if its good enough. Now I like theatre but love cinema because I find theatre quite stuffy and out of touch (my thoughts). But I do like the idea of live theatre. So this strikes me as a chance to do something about my thoughts.
Me and Sarah have come up with a cracker of idea for a play which brings it right up to date and sends a message out about the society were in today and tomorrow. Yep you bet your bottom dollar its got something for the net generation but its also got something for people who just read about the internet in papers. Obviously once me and Sarah thrash through ideas and develop something concerete which we will submit. I'll open up the idea and development on my blog. Maybe if its a little too riskque for Channel4 someone else may be interested in the idea. Submission has to be done by 1st July 2005 which is the same deadline for the Microsoft IP video thing, hence I only got time to do one or the other.
So many things happen when you go away on Holiday for one week. Yep this is kinda of late news, but that secret project which I was not really able to talk about on my blog has gone live now.
backstage.bbc.co.uk is the BBC's new developer network, providing content feeds for anyone to build with. Alternatively, share your ideas on new ways to use BBC content. This is your BBC. We want to help you play.
Taken from the about page.
Backstage is part of the BBC’s wider remit to “build public value” by sharing our content for others to use creatively. How do you “build public value”? One of the ways is through supporting innovation as the BBC Governors response to the Graf report of BBC online makes clear:
“The BBC will support social innovation by encouraging users’ efforts to build sites and projects that meet their needs and those of their communities … The BBC will also be committed to using open standards that will enable users to find and repurpose BBC content in more flexible ways”.
backstage.bbc.co.uk aims to promote innovation amongst the design and developer community: if people are able to do interesting, productive things with the content then we’d like to support them. Finally and as a useful by-product of the above, backstage.bbc.co.uk is an opportunity to identify talent in the online community.
I have been aware of backstage bbc.co.uk for quite some time, but didnt take part in the closed beta due to work load. I urge everyone else to check it out and join the email discussion list which should be a friendly place for developers and designers to suggest ideas and team up with like minded people. I certainly will be on there with my designer/developer hats on.
I have to give a lot of credit to the backstage team. WELL DONE! Ben Metcalfe, James Boardwell and Tom Loosemore. Who all worked really hard to make this happen and without the concerns and conditions which could have been plagued the whole project and idea. I know lots more people were involved but these guys lived and died by this project.
Looking around so far, backstage got metioned on Channel9, Guardian Unlimited online Blog, The Oreilly Radar (cool!), Boingboing (double cool!), P2Pweblog (odd?) and even BBC News. The question still remains if they are ready for a slashdotting? Too late they already were via Stefan Magdalinski of course.
It time to crank out my Cocoon book and get working with the tons of open APIs and RSS feeds which now cover the web 2.0 landscape.
So yes, I come back from a nice holiday away expecting all my TV programmes to be downloaded ready to watch through-out the rest of the week but oh no, the bloody MPAA have targeted TV torrent sites. Damm you! I use to use ShunTV and BTefnet for all my American Television fixes now I'm going to gave to look elsewhere. Some good news is that PQRT has changed to http://www.rokanova.com and http://www.seedler.org has just launched. Shame there trying to be jack of all suprnova trades, and seedler does not have rss feeds. Oh well, as Sarah says, there will be others and there are other ways to get TV shows that just these sites. It also seems BTefnet was sued according to the IRC channel. Someone left a comment, saying BT Website is currently down. Releases are on hold until we have a better understanding of the current situation. We have NOT been sued or been contacted by the MPAA!
More information about the closures can be found here at Slyck or the P2P website. It looks like either http://www.demonoid.com, http://www.torrentspy.com or http://www.zonatracker.com are the places to go for TV torrents now.
Thought Thieves is about people stealing and profiting from your creation or innovation. Think about it: how would you feel if you saw your hard work being passed off as the property of someone else? What would you do?
As I said to Dave and Miles over email a while ago, I swear, I am so tempted to enter this competition just so I can make a film which expresses the advantages of the opening your ideas to the world. IP is not a black and white issue, I very much douht many of the videos will speak in favour of opening thoughts. I could be wrong though… Honestly if I won, I would get myself a decent DV camera and then give away the rest to my previous college.
Were not the only one who noticed the thought thieves competition, NTK.net are running there own competition off the back off thought police, umm I mean thieves.
The 1400-word terms and conditions for MSN.CO.UK's strong-IP “Thought Thieves” film competition are quite the read, even if you're not the 14-17 year-old they're intended to be read and understood by and complied with in their therein bywhich entirety. Entries must be the “sole work and creation of the person submitting the film” (no sharing your precious intellectual property fluids with your cameraman, Mr Auteur); must not “use third party intellectual property rights” (no furniture, no architecture, only clouds as background); the entry form additionally specifies “Should I be selected as a finalist […] I will formally licence on terms acceptable to Microsoft, all intellectual property rights in my film and agree to waive all moral rights in relation to my film if requested to do so”. But what we made us wonder was: where exactly did Microsoft get this “Thought Thieves” idea from?
The idea that people can “steal your thoughts” is surely not original. We're hoping for a class-action by paranoid schizophrenics, who we think came up with the idea that others are stealing the very THOUGHTS FROM YOUR MIND a good few years before Microsoft started losing theirs.http://www.msn.co.uk/thoughtthieves/
– send us a copy of your entry. We'll do prizes.
http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/excerpts/index.shtm
– Lessig's book starts at the exact point the T&C gets ridiculous
Are you shitting me?
Indeed, I love the category Copyfight put the competition under, yep IP Abuse. P2P weblog suggests the winner will end up on Bit torrent, which would be poetic justice in some odd way. There was or is some discussion on Channel 9 but its not exactly saying much we didnt know. It also seems it was slashdotted along with boingboing'ed (is that the right name for it?) at some point in the past according to Loren.
I'm sure this will not be the end of the thought police thievies.
Being away on holiday without a decent connection had its disadvantages. I knew and saw the MTV preview trailer for xbox 360 online a few days before I left london and knew sometime friday all would be reveled. But it wasn't till I got back on the road and enter Devon again that i could get a decent 3g connection and get my email again. Tony sent me a email titled xbox 360 baby!
Xbox 360,
Boy oh boy!, Roll on November…………
Xenon 3.2Ghz with 3 Cores WHAT!!!!! and 512 Ram this will surely piss on the PS3 or PS4 or PS9999.
I can't wait to pre-order one.
Cheers Tony
Well well, triple core 3.2ghz cpu and 512 meg of system memory for the next xbox which is going to launch late this year. What is triple core? Well I guess its 3 xeon (my mistake from when the details were still a little short in cornwall) IBM G5 type processors sharing the same level 1, 2 and 3 cache across the whole processor board. Certainty in any case the cpu sounds quite amazing. After some time I was able to get online and check out Full coverage of everything xbox 360 at team xbox
Some under played news around the xbox 360 launch. Neon the light synthesiser by Llamasoft will be built directly in the rom of the xbox 360. Wicked stuff which I'll look forward to playing with. I actually bought some earlier light synthesisers (Trip a Tron and Colourspace) for my Atari ST all that time ago, the Atari Jaguar was the last console to see a decent light synthesiser.
Sony Reaction to Xbox360 Unveiling could mean Playstation 3 or Playstation Cell will be released sooner that later.
Ok so I rushed home to vote today, then disappeared down to a location between bank and moorgate stations for a geek dinner. Nice but difficult to find thai restaurant. Anyhow, turned up fashionable late in my brazil football shirt. Can hardly blame me, it was nice and warm in london today, even while I write this on my ipaq on the way home at 2300 its still warm enough not to wear a coat. Anyhow everyone else seemed quite dressed up in shirts, so I guess I was weirdly dressed. But it didn't matter everyone was very friendly. Anyhow it seemed about 66% of the people there were from Microsoft! I believe there were about 12-15 people eating in total. After dinner which was paid for by Microsoft, there was a free prize draw and everyone non-microsoft won something. Prizes ranged from One Note 2003 to a Samsung Personal media player. Yep guess what I won? Yep as you can see in my pictures, Official Windows XP Professional with sp2 included. Wow, I dont believe I have ever held a boxed version of XP Professional. And I certainly have never owned a copy.
After the dinner people started make there way home which was strange because usually people in London tend to stick around and have drinks or something. But it was good because I'm off on holiday tomorrow and needed to pack (but instead I'm blogging – whoops). I had some interesting chats with some people and swapped some business cards. I was assured that Internet Explorer 7 will have RSS support and that Longhorn may do (best I could do). There was lots of general talk about Languages and RSS at one point but we got stuck into the media centre version of xp before that. One of the guys working on Media Centre edition seemed a little surprised when I asked about the threat of the xbox media centre and hacked xboxes, he replyed with a usual Microsoft answer but admitted to that fact (it being a official answer, not being a threat) then moved the subject on to the media centre abilities which may be in Xbox 360 (yep he used that word not myself). I also had a very interesting talk with a lady from Microsoft about me thinking of swapping my tabletPC for a Apple Power book. She was shocked I would consider doing such a thing, and said I should consider getting a newer one which is lighter and without the keyboard.
Generally it was good night out and thanks to Microsoft for paying the dinner tab. Although most of this can be seen as suspect, I have to say all companies do this. I mean you only have to look at the way Apple went over the top on the tiger launch. You can also listen here. And honestly its good to see Microsoft trying to get down from its ivory towers and listening to the developers of the world (ok London at least). I'm looking forward to making this a regular monthly meal and I look forward to the next one.
Konfabulator is one of those things which I have been meaning to check out for quite sometime. Since seeing the Dashboard idea in OSX 10.4, I have thought it was a pretty good idea. For example, the amount of times I'm sitting at my laptop and I want to quickly do a complex sum with the built in calculator. Well I have to click start menu, find accesssorys, find calculator. Yes I know I could assign a keyboard short cut but come on. So using widgets in Konfabulator, I am able to click a hot key and get my calculator in without doing any navigating or finding. But thats only the start of things… Theres this really nice widget (UK Train Timetable) which grabs the latest train times from the official Train timetable website and displays any delay's or cancellations.
So from own understanding, Konfabulator is using the Mozilla javascript engine on top of the operating system which allows widgets to be built in the same way as you create applications on the web. This is very interesting when you consider the real push behind dynamic web applications like google maps. Ajax or as I prefer remote scripting creates a inituative user interface to underlined webservices. With widgets in konfabulator its easy to imagine taking applications right into the operating system. I understand this is exactly what the Avalon/XAML idea in Longhorn is meant to do. But you know what, its available now and being built on Standard Javascript/DOM is good idea. I have been meaning to improve my Javascript/DOM skills for quite some time now, this is the perfect reason why. I wonder how easy it is to connect to the web and the file system? Does it use xmlhttp or something else? There are a;ready plans in my head to talk to cocoon and other web applications. How hard would it be to read a xvid file on my filesystem and search for the informaton for it on IMDB.com? I'm sure the interaction with the user interface and filesystem is limited but not that limited surely? I mean for example there is a nice wireless strength indicator which can be downloaded. For it work, it must plug into the operating system and read that information in some way? There are also many system monitors which to me indicates that access to operating system information must be easy or at least flexable.
There are performance issue with layering a Javascript engine over an operating system, sure. On my 1.3ghz Tablet PC Konfabulator realisticly takes about 2 secs to switch on my button switch. I have about 8-10 widgets running. While on my desktop 1.8ghz Athlon box it takes nothing more than half a second at very most. Bar Avalon and somewhat Dashboard, what else could be used instead of the javascript engine? Java? Python? what else? See this is the thing, Javascript drops the entry level down real low, you do not need to learn a while programming language to create widgets. This is good! Yes performance is one of the trade-offs but come on a widget is meant to be small and simple. For example there is a nice little search box which I have as a widget, it simply converts my string entry and passes it on to the locally installed web browser. Makes sense. It wouldnt be too difficult to send the request to google search webservice and get results back in the widget as a small list. Cool, but why bother? Unless your building a browser as a widget, just pass the query to the browser at the start.
Not trying to do a lazy web, but heres some thoughts for future widgets.
Del.icio.us adder – What ever webpage you happen to be on can be added to del.icio.us through a widget instead of the browser. There is already a firefox extention which I use which does the same but it would be cool to see a widget too.
Upload to Flickr – Uploading to flickr is simple and there are 2 ways to do so right now. Download a application or do it via a webform. What about a widget which allows you to drag folders of files to be uploaded. Once its finished it opens a webpage where you add the metadata. Or you could do it from the same application too I guess (I prefer not to).
Blogging it – I like wbloggar and other blogging clients but come on, its all heavy weight for posting to a blog. My blog software already has a javascript bookmarket for posting, so why not a widget too? Actually it would work quite well because maybe it can accept drag and dropping urls and files too?
Tell me a route – I use transport for London's Journal planner all the time. It would be so cool if I could just put where I am and where I'm going and it could send the request to TFL. Then chart a route or send the response to the locally installed browser. This would also work with Google maps.
Following on from my last post about RSS and Azureus, I'm thinking once I finally get XML or something structured out of Azureus and its completed or in progress queue. I should build a widget which shows me the latest TV shows downloaded or in progress. Yeah I know Azureus has a little download bar but its too abstract and through cocoon I could get updates for in the same way even when I'm not on my local network but at work or even roaming. Pretty powerful, you have to agree? Yes all I'm doing is reformatting what comes out of cocoon but hey, it can be alot more with a lot more time and coding. Instead of just a list of whats downloading and whats done with percentages. How about a tv lookup so you get a image and nice small percentage instead? Simple and effective.
So generally, yeah I do not think Konfabulator is the best thing since sliced bread, but I do rate it. I will have a better feel for how I rate it once I get into writing widgets of my own. I may be so wrong and widgets could be based on a twisted version of javascript and requires super human knowledge to write. Maybe connecting to the web is difficult and reading machine or operating system information almost impossible. But on first judgement its good and effective. I'm happy with it for now. There was another program which I downloaded but didnt end up testing called Samurize. Its open source which is good because konfabulator is payware but quite cheap at only 30 dollars.
So finally I have fully setup Azureus to automaticly download almost all the media me and sarah watch weekly. This includes the Daily show, Twenty four (only set it for the rest of this season), etc. I was testing TV RSS a while ago but after seeing Jon's RSS+Torrent entry, I switched to using a RSS feed plugin for Azureus on my windows workstation. I have to say its pretty damm good and the only difficult thing is getting your Regular Expression query tuned so you dont collect reposts, same media from different rss feeds, etc. I'm using a program called Regex Coach to test stuff out before applying them to Azureus. I highly suggest using a system like this as its automation is really quite good now. I'm hoping to get a RSS feed out of Azureus sometime soon, so I can keep an eye of whats going on without being at the actual machine.
