Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
So after my hard geeky weekend, I have a nice holiday in Germany to look forward to. Dont expect any blog entries for about a week now. I should have lots of pictures to add to flickr when I'm back. Till then dont forget to check out the inspiration blog
So after a couple of days I was finally able to get my notes together and email some of the people I met. Open Tech 2005 was simply great this year. The line up was full of stars including Ted Nelson, Jeremy Zawodny and Danny O'Brien.
Ted was entertaining as usual but his projects including Transliterature have not moved on a whole lot. Generally the philosopher Ted in my mind is right about the problems with operating systems but the way he goes about it tends to be restrictive and confusing to say the least.
Ben Metcalfe was in his element at the official launch of backstage.bbc.co.uk (note the lack of beta now), which kicked off well except bbc news published the story a little too early which spoiled it for people like myself who read there aggregator before they went to opentech 05. Anyhow, Ben did a great job of presenting the competition and answering all the questions and even managed my tricky question around people from around the world using backstage.bbc.co.uk. I did want to get the point over that backstage.bbc.co.uk isnt just a developer network, its also for designers who want to submit ideas, thoughts and even get involved.
Jeremy Zawodny was very interesting and pointed out a couple of things.
I then stuck around for Hacking the TV Stream, where BBC R&D and BBCi staff showed off the biggest PVR (promiscuous video recorder), Dirac codec and how to hack Freeview 
VB) broadcast streams. I didnt know how easy it was to do and it came to my suprise that the BBC is encoraging people to do this under a backstage non-commercial type licence. There was also some reference to UKNova in one of the presentations, which I keep meaning to send to the UK nova members. Yes the BBC are fully aware of Uknova, and the people at Opentech had a good laugh when it was mentioned.
Some of the other highlights included, Tom Reynolds who now seems to be turning into one of those A class british bloggers. Don Young from Amazon services, who talked about all the APIs and services Amazon is opening. Lee Bryant's Collaborative Archives which trigger a whole load of thoughts about how this could/should work across languages. And the Greasemonkey presentations by Simon Willison and Rob McKinnon who I later talked to at a indian resturant about a number of things including Ruby, SVG, Cocoon, Python, American Poltics, Media and many more things. I also have to say Nicola Smyth and her partner were also good company to our quite geeky conversation. Its just so rare to meet some so into SVG as myself.
Talking of which, I finally met Matt Webb, Ben Hammersley, the NTK guys and many more. Its a shame I missed the discussion on where the British EFF was? Cory Doctorow filled me on the main point after the discussion while the afternoon break was on but I cant wait to see the videos of the debate. It also made its way on to slashdot.
I still cant believe the whole event only costs 5 pounds, I would have happily paid 20 plus pounds for such a event. Talking of which, geekdinner prices are getting really silly now. 20 pounds for some cheap nibbles, loud music and no drinks. Yes the company is great, but we could all just meetup somewhere free and talk around a pub table. I'm just thankful Ben came up with the idea of poping down to tesco and getting a ready meal before hand. Geekdinner really needs to slum it for a bit otherwise people will get pissed off and stop going. Its not even like the orginser is making any money. Its all going to the venue owner, and in that case I would rather spend my money else where not give it to some stuck-up Picadilly bar where a cranberry juice costs 2 pounds something.
Overall, it was an enjoyable weekend except the rain which soaked me when riding between opentech and the resturant which I couldnt find for over an hour! Hope to see everyone next year. As usual there are photos on flickr and tons of talk around the blogsphere
Donnie Darko in the Park: Saturday 6th August at the Royal kensington gardens, London
Donnie Darko, one of the best films of 2004 in my own view. Has been given a new lease of life in the form of a one off outdoor cinema complete with the national symphony orchestra and orginal composer (Michael Andrews). It all takes place in the royal kensington gardens and looks to be a fantastic event for donnie darko film lovers, such as myself. You can book tickets onn the Stella Artois website, which is some nasty piece of flash, so you need to search for it a bit – look under screen events. Whole thing only costs 5 pounds and takes place on the 6th August between 6pm and 11:30pm.
Then I got a Jeremy Zawodny double bill, first one for BBC staff in White City then the second one as a special mid month Geek Dinner. Great work to Ben for arrange this one at short notice. Then on Saturday (could be argued, the first day of the weekend) Open Tech 2005 in west London. I expect there will be another meal afterwards and lots of drinking and chatting like last years notcon04.
Sunday will certainly this weekend be a day of rest, or riding the scooter depending on the weather.
PBS Launches NerdTV, the First Downloadable Web-Exclusive Series From a Major Broadcaster.
I'm unsure if the last part is true but its a brave and good move by PBS. Although I have to say its about time a major broadcaster started really taking advantage of downloadable video. There was no mention of using bit torrent for distribution which is a shame when you consider the amount of the NerdTV target users use it and with this recent announcement from Opera about there bit torrent support. Its also used by quite a few podcasters and the new range IPTV programmers (cant think of a better name). From the shadows, Systm by Kevin Rose and of course The Scene by Jun Group entertainment are a few which come to mind.
For a public broadcaster like PBS, NerdTV certainly makes a lot of sense but for the commercal enterprises, IPTV sounds like a nightmare. Those which strike the balance between the audience demands and there own stand a fair chance. I found this quote on the fromtheshadows forums.
There is no competition for air time, no time slots, and no commercials.
I'm seriously douhting if OPML is the right thing for the task. Uche goes one step futher and suggests XML formats for outlining are complete rubbish. Danny Ayers also gets the boot in on OPML. Honestly he has a point but offers up a couple of others which I had not looked into before. OPL in reaction to the ugliness of OPML. Looking at the spec, I'm not sure it goes quite far enough. XBEL on the other hand looks too wildly different but useful for outlining. Uche also did a follow where he reviews. I like the idea of XoXo but prefer the idea of using XHTML or RDF which is easily parsed and integreated into other processes.
Then I found Wikipad… and had high hopes for a pocketpc version like this palm version or even this mobile phone type version. Wikipad doesn't have the name of something like Voodoopad but it certainly does do a good job of notetaking for now…
So at long last I got it and have used it quite a bit. But I really got to try it out at a political blogging lecture I attended just recently. The complains I heard from other users about the keyboard timing out after a minute or even less didnt seem to happen to me. Generally my ipaq would turn off before the keyboard would. It is a bit of a pain having to reconnect when the ipaq has switched off but even that only takes 2secs and only requires you to press a key. None of that bluetooth bonding each time, which was a relief to discover.
I was not able to bond my 3G Phone with the keyboard of course but unexpectly my tablet would not pair with the keyboard. After a browse through the Stowaway forums and Microsofts FAQs, it seems the Toshiba bluetooth drivers are utter crap and they dont support the HID profile along with others like the Audio profiles. So I attempted to remove the toshiba bluetooth drivers and force the service pack 2 ones into action. However its going to take more work as none of them working now.
Generally the Bluetooth keyboard is pretty great and I highly recommend it. I just cant wait to make proper use of the keyboard when at a conference or decent lecture. My thoughts of using the bluetooth keyboard as a interface for most of my machines may have been a little forward thinking on my part. Oh well at least I'm half way there.
