October 2005 – Page 2 – Cubicgarden.com…

Why I dont want a Ipod or PSP

This post to slashdot by Zonk sums up my thoughts too,

As the owner of a PocketPC PDA I am a very happy camper, with wifi internet access, Skype Voip, video playback, and of course the ubiquitous mp3 playback. In an era were everyone seems to talk about the Video iPod, and the next generation of mobile devices, it leaves me wondering – I already have all those abilities in a PDA that costs about as much as an iPod. My question for Slashdot: Given that modern PDAs have almost all the functionality of these separate devices, how has Palm and Microsoft/PocketPC developers failed in making PDAs a force in this new era of portable media devices? It is the poor marketing, bad media apps, public perception, or do people simply not want an all-in-one for mobile media?

And as I expect, its horse's for course's as my dad says.

Gumber says

Because more functionality isn’t aways better, especially in a smaller device.

You might as well be asking why people buy screwdrivers and pliers instead of a single Leathermen.

Some more comments for thought,

From ciroknight

PDAs might be cool toys, they do a lot that a PC can do, and you can carry it in your pocket. Pretty cool eh? But when it comes down to it, what does the device actually do? Hard to define; it can do calendars, it can do media playback, it can do telephony, it can do internet-related tasks. But on the overall, it's a very obscure device.

– Indeed, its one of the things which makes it difficult to explain to people. One moment I'm using it as a mp3 player then a video player next moment a skype or im device and at the end of the day I'm using it to take notes at a meeting. It works for me but its a hard concept to sell and it requires installing many pieces of software and some configuration.

There was lots of talk about storage too.

Unless you sprung for extra storage, the space on your PDA is measured in tens of megabytes. On an iPod, it's measured in tens of gigabytes.

I dont think that's the main issue, because the psp has equal storage levels to a modern PocketPC (1/2gig maximum). Yes its nothing compared to the 100gigs which are now possible. But I expect Flash Drive pocketpc will be arriving soon, as hard drives are still very power hungrey.

The impact of Crackberries (backberries) has also had an effect on the image of pocketpc in the business world just like how most pocketpc have moved into the mobile world. Hence the change of operating system name, WindowsCE to PocketPC to Windows Mobile.

As someone said,
People who make generic statements such as “PDAs have failed” are just simply wrong.

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Flock finally revealed to the public

So at long last Flock is out in a form that the general internet public can download and play with. And honestly after all the hype and secret squirrel secrecy, its a bit of a let down. Let me outline what it is and what it does differently.

He's my screenshots of the Flock and everyone's Tagged Flock pictures.

It looks to be a Deer Park alpha build of Firefox (might be wrong but its at least a beta) with additional features. What are the extra features? Well…

Add a blogging tool,
Add del.icio.us bookmarking but remove regular bookmarks,
Add a Safari RSS type aggregator and remove livebookmarks,
Add a nice, well designed skin and little tricks here and there.

And you pretty much got Flock.

I think if Greasemonkey was not available I would be very much more impressed. But lets be clear, its a early alpha and can be steered in different directions. I like that fact they have put del.icio.us bookmarking deeply inside and its certainly better than the firefox plugins you can get which do simlar things. But the flickr intergration feel more like a poor after thought in comparison. Its nice to have a blog app right there, but right click and blog is a little sucky and I couldnt get it working for Blojsom under the Atom, moveabletype or even metaweblog API's at all. Which is strange because I thought at least metaweblog would work. I checked the blojsom logs after David's comment, nothing is coming through from Flock or any other besides my own wblogger client. Oh yeah heres the nasty html error I get. Try and make some sense of that…

So at the end of the day version 0.4 alpha is not bad, I won't replace firefox because Flock is certainly not amzingly stable. People have already took pictures with boxes being cut off and the like. Here's a few of my grumbles. It could be that I'm running Flock on my tabletpc computer but I dont think so. Greasemonkey can do a lot of the little tricks Flock has, but there not as smooth or well thought out. Flock is worth keeping an eye on for later.

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Should you use social software at work?

Where’s the line start and end with social software?

Currently I'm using these and more social software services.

Flickr
Audioscrobbler
Eventful
Bloglines
Del.icio.us
Reader2
Myprogs
Ideabank
Listal

But just recently I've been testing out basecamp. Now basecamp is a product by 37signals camp and I was impressed by the talk which was given. But theres something different between the other social apps I'm using and basecamp. See the rest I use in my personal life and projects not at work. But Basecamp is a project management tool, fitting somewhere between a adhoc wiki and full on microsoft project ummm project? Where do I have to manage the most projects? Work of course.

So is it correct of me to use a online tool to project manage internal BBC projects which I maybe working on? Its a tricky question and I'm not certain of the answer. Some would actually suggest that I shouldn’t be discussing this in public on my own blog. But I'm not revelaling anything which is secret or private to the BBC, so I'm sure I'm on good grounds with this entry.

So back to the question. The only time I've come across this type of dielmma is when using del.icio.us. There are a lot of urls which I would like to store in my bookmarks and del.icio.us means I can access and store them anywhere but should I store internal urls in the public del.icio.us? Yes I know del.icio.us like flickr and a few other services have a private tag which means it will not appear in the public. But is that a good idea? Anyhow the question of bookmarking was solved for me when someone setup del.irio.us inside the BBC firewall. So all my internal urls are now stored there and external one's on del.icio.us.

But back to basecamp, this certainly quite a step up from storing bookmarks. Storing project metadata externally is a risk too far. The logical solution would be to download a opensource version of basecamp and run it inside the firewall but then you lose some of the flexibility of social software. I don’t believe basecamp is even available to download and the other project management tools in this area tend to be too structured (alas Microsoft Project) or too unstructured (alas a fancy wiki). If someone can suggest somthing they have seen which is dead in the middle please do add a comment.

The next step for me is look at the public and private aspects of Basecamp and of course the End user licence. I already noticed you can export all the data as one large xml file but it didn’t quite work for me. I got a lot of structure and no data except the actual project title. I'm sure its a bug or something. Theres also RSS and iCal data which can be subscribed and used as a restful api if the export is not up to the task.

I'm sure many other businesses use basecamp small and maybe large. But they may use the paid version which has more features and maybe a slightly different end user agreement? no its the same one. I'll check this out later but I'm actually writing this from my hospital bed and believe it or not there is no wireless and i'm not allowed to use my mobile to dial up on 3g (hint of cheekyness of course).

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Pop! Tech 2005 streamed live via IT Conversations

This is so unheard of, a super conference streaming live to the world. Only Doug Kaye at IT Conversations could have pulled this off. If your not already listening, I highly recomend you do. Currently its 19:45 in the London and there on the Mind and Body sessions so its about 14:45 in Maine. Pop!Tech is a real mix bag of inspirational speakers and real world challenges. Can I also just say the QuickCast option which bundles up all the Pop!Tech presentations in one large zip file well before they get podcasted again on IT Conversations is a pretty neat deal at 100 dollars for the whole lot.

If your like me listening on there xbox you simply need to create a *.strm file and stick http://www.itconversations.com/livestream.asx
in the first line. Then point the xbox to the *.strm (poptech 2005.strm is mine) file and your away. I've told my xbox to cache about 8megs worth at a time so I dont get any breaks at all. I thought about recording it with xbox media centre but it seems to be greyed out for some reason.

Its kinda of weird listening to Pop!Tech live, you cant just pause and go back if you missed something. So use to time shifting now, its hard going back I guess.

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Syncing podcasts and videos between machines

Slowly I've been adopting the use of FireANT for my podcasts and vlogs (video blogs?) downloads. I'm still mainly using Azereus with the RSS plugin for its TV RSS method which has saved me a lot of time and effort downloading TV shows and the like. It was very good today, finding Lost ep5 seeding without any human interaction on my behalf.

Anyhow, I have FireANT running on both my laptop and main workstation. They both use the same OPML file from Bloglines which means they both download the same media! This is not ideal and bandwidth killing as you can imagine, specially when you get some of the larger Channel9 videos downloading. So I was looking around and found Microsoft's synctoy.

Now although this Sync toy isnt as powerful as Rsync on the unix platforms its actually quite neat and has all the modes needed for full syncing.

Synchronize: New and updated files are copied both ways. Renames and deletes on either side are repeated on the other.
Echo: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames and deletes on the left are repeated on the right.
Subscribe: Updated files on the right are copied to the left if the file name already exists on the left.
Contribute: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames on the left are repeated on the right. No deletions.
Combine: New and updated files are copied both ways. Nothing happens to renamed and deleted files

You can also Schedule it using the standards Windows Scheduler, Preview a sync, use UNC paths, sync deep folders (perfect for backup) and tell it to move files to the recycle bin instead of deleting them.

So with all this in mind, I've setup Fireant to download and for Synctoy to sync across to my laptop before it downloads on my laptop. This seems to work, because the stupid file names are at least unique across all Fireants. I've been trying to convince the people behind Fireant that the human readable podcast download names are unique enough to do the same thing, but its still a on going debate. If the human readable filenames were in place, I could then sync files to my storage card, pocketpc, mobile phone and laptop without human interaction. Using filetype filtering in synctoy, its possible to sync audio files to the phone while videos files go to the pocketpc. Hey and if Fireant used human readable filenames and Synctoy regular expressions the limits would be endless.

So in summary,

Microsoft's Synctoy should be renamed Synctool and should add regular expressions to the filetype filering. I'm also hoping syncing to the PocketPC's storage card will be a option soon and there certainly should be a option to divert sync if the removeable storage card is not in place.

Fireant can keep its sync option but should give people the option to automaticly save as human readable filenames.

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Loosing the talented to others

When I looked around for somewhere to work while still working for Ravensbourne college, one of the things which really attracted me to the BBC was one cutting edge projects they were working on and two the creative people it employed. Tom Coates was one of the those people whos name would popup at many events I attended and I became a reader of his blog well before I joined the BBC. So with all this in mind its a real shame to say he's now leaving for a job at Yahoo! Tom was monumental in pushing the BBC creatively, technically and with his stance on blogging, politically. He will be missed by the BBC, just like Matt Biddulph who only left a month ago too. You have to wonder what Yahoo! has or offered which the BBC doesnt. I could guess, but then I would need to kill you.

For those who dont know Tom, I wanted to quote a comment which was left for him in his next entry about the daily show on more 4.

I'm sorry. Was this supposed to be even remotely interesting? I don't mean to be rude but like what the **** are you writing about? Don't you have anything more interesting to say? Jesus Christ Almighty, aren't blogs supposed to be of even remote interest? Obviously not.

FA

– Posted by: Faustino Asprilla at October 18, 2005 12:07 AM

And Tom's reply

Wow. Well, you may not have wanted to be rude, but I think you kind of were anyway.

Let me make something clear. I write my site because I enjoy writing it, and because it gives me a platform to engage in conversation with my peers. I do not set out to entertain people, and I have no obligation to you whatsoever to make my site appealing to you. I'm not writing for a mass audience. I don't want my weblog to make me famous. I'm not making any money out of it – there's no advertising anywhere. I write for the same reasons I speak, to express my opinions, engage in discussion and respond to things going on in the world.

If you don't like what I write, or you find it boring, then that's fine. There are an enormous amount of other sites out there on the internet that you could explore – on every subject imaginable. I'm sure there's something there that you'll find exciting. In the meantime, you may find what I wrote dull, but at least I didn't set out to be rude to anyone, I didn't try and piss anyone off or ridicule anyone else's creative work. I have only one example of your writing to examine, and it looks like the same could not be said of you.

– Posted by: Tom Coates at October 18, 2005 01:00 AM

How could we have let Tom go?

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Messy haxoring with metasploit caught on iptv

Its not quite as cool as it may sound from the title. I just watched epioside 13 of my lame-ass iptv soap, The scene. yes everyones got there weakness but if you put this against other soaps like Hollyoaks then it comes out quite well. Anyhow, I got a real kick out of main character trying to get root on windows box hosting a FTP server. They used the well established metasploit to find a flaw and exploit it. To be fair its one step up from the hack in the matrix reloaded and they did do a little homework to use the nice opensource framework metasploit. Its certainly a fine line between security tester and exploiter but the best tools always are.

Talking of which if you didnt catch the Security now podcast number 9 about rootkits, please do as it will give you a good old wake up call. I've been personally aware of rootkits for quite a long time but I didnt know spyware, adware applications were starting to use them just so they cant be removed from a computer. Its crazy, but its true. Honestly I wouldnt wish a rootkit on my worst enemy, I just cant imagine anything worst. Anyhow, Steve and Leo do a great job explaining how rootkits work. It is however really good to know Microsoft and Sysinternals are working on the problem. I did try out SysInternal's Rootkit Revealer on all my machines and I'm clean as expected but its good to be sure. I suggest everyone should give it a try, at least till Microsoft add rootkit scanning to there malicious software removal tool. No one likes to be rooted…

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I kind of wish the Orange RSS buttons would die

If you have not seen the huge debate about the RSS Orange buttons for Windows Vista and IE7, go check it out.

I do agree with Jane in this statement.

The choice of what icon to use is challenging because it should be universally symbolic, but today there is no single icon for that represents feed. Instead there’s a variety of mostly orange rectangles with the words “XML”, “RSS”, “ATOM”, “FEED”, or “Subscribe.”

and it sounds like the Microsoft RSS team really is starting to get the i18n (internationalisation) message loud and clear.

Our goal is to make sure that the icon is something that is understandable by all of our users: novice, advanced, developer, business, international, etc. These are the principles that we are using when selecting an icon:

3. It avoids the use of text. Icons that have text do not generally work well for a global audience. For example, an icon with the text “FEED” may be cryptic to users whose primary language is non-Latin based. Text is very important to support an icon (in tool-tips or accompanying text). In English, we will be using the verb “subscribe” fairly widely whenever text is appropriate.

But I dont think there quite there with the 5 orange icons jane is presenting on the same entry. We have opted for the Orange RSS button on all our language sites across the BBC Worldservice now. There was lots of talk about changing this, for example BBC persian has the orange button which might be better written in Persian like the rest of the navigation side bar? But if you look out on to the web, you rarely find such examples to follow. I'll be interested to see what else Jane and the Microsoft RSS team come up with in the future, but I do wish the orange aspect would die away. I see RSS as more a red thing than Orange now.

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Hosting Tim O’Reilly’s Geek Dinner

So first rule of hosting anything, dont turn up late. I broke that rule by about 15mins, but I have a good reason or a good way to shift the blame. Tim O'Reilly had talked in White City only a few hours before the Geek Dinner and spent sometime talking to people afterwards. So by the time I had left White City it was already 18:40 and I still had to ride into Central London with the crazy one way systems and find somewhere to park the scooter. Luckly Hanover square is full of parking and it was after 6 so finding a space wasnt so bad.

When I finally arrived at the Hogs Head (venue for the geekdinner) I was kinda of suprised by how people had already turned up. I would say at 20 people were already sitting around drinking and chatting. After a little talk with the bar man and some pre-printed signs up here and there, we were off. I actually believe Tim and Josette walked in and sat down around about this time, which was perfect timing. Before you knew it a few people had hovered around Tim and pinned him into a corner. I dont believe Tim really got a chance to walk around till the Questions and Answers point later.

I was doing my best to keep the room cool (air con was a little tempermental) and collect the one pound for the buffet later. Honestly going around the room was a joy and although my voice was starting to go, I kept going because everyone I met was interesting and a joy to talk to. Everyone was happy and remarked on how great it was that I was doing this geek dinner. I did many times say that I was helping Lee out while he was away, but people kept asking me if I was running the Scoble one too. More on that later.

The venue was quite warm if a little too hot sometimes due to the packed up Air con and at first it seemed a little small for 60 people but people were quite tightly grouped and there was more room by the toilets and staircase. The bar man, was a young guy and was actually really interested in what geek dinner was and why it existed. He did comment that although there were a high percentage of males in room, they didnt seem very geeky, just normal guys out drinking. I wasnt sure what to say to that, but it came across as a compliment not a insult. I had asked everyone to tell me what they felt about the venue and on a whole most people were quite happy with it, remarking it was so central and easy to get to from the tube. But the noise from upstairs was a little too much and made things a little difficult when Tim did the Questions and Answers session. I guess it didnt help having another party just up on the landing and the quite busy pub above us. The Buffet was actually not bad at all. It did all disappear by the end of the evening but honestly there was more than enough to go around plus there was something for everyone. I feel it was well worth the 1 pound per head cover charge, and I didnt find anyone who disagreed.

Tim's Question and Answer session came a little late in the evening and was difficult to hear with the noise I mentioned earlier. I dont believe anyone got it recorded correctly, the recording Nokia which I was holding for Improbulus didnt record anything and a guy with the video camera was not close enough to get the audio clearly. (Kosso where were you?) Which I'm sure Tim will be happy with because he revealled a new service from O'Reilly which there still working on. The question which sparked the disclosure was "what web 2.0 services does O'reilly have?"
Tim did talk about the good stuff they were doing with O'reilly Safari but then talked about this other project, which I cant remember right now.

47 (not including me) people attended this geek dinner. This is a exact figure because I collected the money from everyone.

I'm not the biggest fan of name dropping, but I have to say thanks and hi to everyone and here's some of the people I remember who were there and I talked to quite a bit or not enough. Suw Charman and Kevin Anderson (geez you guys are cute together, good one Kevin), Alan Wood, Improbulus, Dave from NTK, Richard Sanbrook, Euan, Lianite, Ryan Carson, Jeremy from HP and of course some work mates Sherwin, Henrik and Dharmesh.

Big thanks to everyone who helped and turned up…

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Video ipod is official, but is this it?

I'm following the coverage from Engadget, Gizmodo and believe it or not Stuffmag

The new iPod, as speculated, features video capabilities and the wider display, but it�s still a music-first device.

The device will feature a 2.5-inch display, QVGA resolution (320 x 240), and will MPEG-4 h.264 (natch), and presumably Quicktime.

The new iPod will be 30% thinner than the current 20GB iPod (making it 0.44-inches thick�say wha?), and will feature a 60GB version and editions of both in black. The 20GB should go for $299, and the 60GB for $399. They�ll be shipping next week.

I'm not sure this is the actual video ipod, more a inbetween ipod.

New news just coming in…

You'll be able to buy TV shows from the iTunes Music Store – Desperate Housewives, Lost and more shows from ABC and Disney. Five shows will be available to watch on iPod or computer: Lost, Desperate Housewives, Nightstalker, The Suite Life and some other Disney thang. $1.99 an episode.

So its over, the apple index page has been updated and world now has a Video ipod to play with, we already knew about iTunes 6 before.

Here's the complete list

iMac: faster, larger disk, built in iSight. Includes FrontRow (app)
iPod: 30GB/60GB with Video – realtime decoding of MPEG4 and H.264. 260,000 colors. Video out, perfect for the car?
FrontRow and PhotoBooth Apps.
30GB iPod: $299 – 31% thinner than current 20GB; – 60GB iPod: $399.
New video iPods avail next week.
New TV adverts for video ipods
iMac: $1299 for 17″ model with 1.5GHz, $1799 for 20″ model with 2.1GHz
iTunes 6 to be released with video support, You will be able to buy TV shows from iTunes Music Store. $1.99 per episode. ABC on board esperate Housewives, Lost)
Front Row – comes with new iMacs. Lets you enjoy video/music/pictures from sofa. Everything still displayed on iMac screen. iPod-like remote. 6 button remote.
Photobooth – appears to be slide show application.
Music Videos. 2000 available to buy. $1.99 each.
Can “gift” music to other people. Peer reviews and recommendation service.
Videos have Digital Rights Management built in. Can play on up to 5 computers.

Ok wheres the HD laptops and Video enabled airport express? (airport express video anyone?). Engadget has the first lot of real screen shots of the new vido ipod including the black version. Also wheres the UK video store? I'm sure the BBC could have a role to play in that, its fits with our licencing and its a little more flexable than the imp right now.

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online RSS reading just turned 100 degrees

The Google, just put its foot down in the personal RSS aggreagtion space. Look out Bloglines…

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Serenity, a cracking example of the long tail?

So I went and watched Serenity the movie yesterday with a friend and Sarah. And honestly I was very suprised at how entertaining and enjoyable the movie was. A few weeks before I was reading about the movie and how it actually comes from a TV show called Firefly which was cancelled before the 1st season ended. But the upset fans and got together and planned many ways to express there views on the cancelling, including a advert in Variety magazine. Theres a better overview in this wired article titled Serenity Now!.

What I find not so much amazing, but impressive is the coordination of the 1000's of fans. Its so impressive that I was driven to watch the movie and maybe even buy the DVD in the near future. Fox were really not paying attention to the conversation happening in the long tail. And credit to Universal because they must have been, why else would you screen sneak previews of Serenity in 35 cities. Except to thank the loyal fans for a money spinning series and a movie tie in?

I didnt know till I got online again, that all the actors and actresses are the same as in the TV series. And can I just say one of the actresses, Kaylee played by Jewel Staite is one of the cutest women I have seen (next to my wife of course). Dont get me wrong Zoe, Inara and River are also beautiful.

Anyhow, back on topic. We are already seeing a hell of lot more of this grassroots driven influence, like the cluetrain says #57 – Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner. Fox just learned #60 This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.. Let the revolution continue, and dont forget to check out the pictures of the UK premiere online and the personal email from Joss Whedon (the director of both Firefly and Serenity).

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BBC accidentally reveals video iPod?

Photoshopped made up version of the video ipod

Steve Jobs is not going to be happy with us at the BBC. See there's a big date of the 12th October crossed in Apples diary and there were rumours of some Apple run BBC broadcast at TVC (BBC Telelvision centre) on the same day. Then there was other clues.

http://www.apple.com/movies – Forbidden, usually Apple has a nice redirect like this http://www.apple.com/geekdinner. The hidden video buttons in iTunes. Plus you've got the Nano disappointment (yes you heard me correctly) and the PSP's mass takeup and adoption across the world.
The evidance is growing everyday
Google Cache of iTunes + ipod video page

So we were all scratching our heads till BBC 6 accidentally let slip yesterday.

Apple is set to unveil a new video iPod at the BBC Television Centre in London on October the 12th

Ahh ha, so its a dead set now then. The specs may still be up for debate but I'm wondering if the iMP trial will extend to the video ipod and give the worldwide audience the ability to pay for BBC programming? Its all very fitting when you listen to Paula Le Dieu's talk at Emerging Massive media.

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Would you give up your Browser or your Applications?

A Interesting thought around the web as a platform, via jeremy zawodny. Jonathon Schwartz from Sun recently wrote this…

Or finally, as I did last week at a keynote, ask the audience which they'd rather give up – their browser, or all the rest of their desktop apps. (Unanimously, they'd all give up the latter without a blink.)

Like Jeremy and Johathon, I too would easily pick the browser over the rest of the applications. I pose the same question to a few people at work and Tom disagreed and came up with the clever answer of the rest of the applications because he would build his own browser. Deborah alerted me to the fact that Sun are very much in the thin-client space and that this entry may have something to do with that (I believe shes right). But its still a interesting question.

I think with a decent browser such as Firefox with mediaplayer plugins and the ability to install extensions there a much smaller need for the rest of my applications. Realisticly if you include Greasemonkey your able to program any rich applications like how widgets work now.

This whole discussion can be taken a step deeper, but I'll revisit it when I have the time.

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