My lecture notes from todays lecture at Ravensbourne College are now online for all to view and take apart. Enjoy!
Month: February 2006
Geek and Geekhag podcast number three – Dark side of the mobile
Me and Sarah's third podcast is now available online. Enjoy and please leave a comment if you've enjoyed it or simply hate it. This time we slide from topic to topic and get interupted by a few people at 1am in the morning. If I need to tie this podcast down to something, I would say its about the dark side of the mobile phone. Bluetooth, Toothing, Happy Slapping and now Happy Shagging. Luckly we never got into this which is terriable to even think about.
Moving cubicgarden.com again
For quite sometime I've been having issues with running Blojsom on a shared Java host. See its possible but not ideal. It would seem Blojsom is best placed in a dedcated servlet container where it can have room to move. So for quite some time I've been holding on to my very cheap shared hosting by Interadvantage. The System Admistrator has been helping me out for quite some time but it just seems Cubicgarden.com is just generally growing in popularity and outgrowing its small plot of internet land. For the last 2 months I've been trying to cut down on system hit by using OSCache and Log4j to solve the errors I might be getting. But it came to a head just recently… here's a slightly edited email I recieved.
I've noticed that whenever your site gets hit hard, our server's load goes way up and other sites become unresponsive. This is particularly a problem in the mornings, from about 8 – 12 AM our time. I assume all the geeks over here who are addicted to your blog get their RSS feed (because you get a lot of RSS traffic then), and then go hit your blog if they see something of interest.
I also took a look at your stats, and about 25% of your page loads come from crawler.bloglines.com.
At any rate, your site is successful, and active, and it depends on Blojsom. When it's getting hit, your site dominates a loaded Dual Xeon server, so I think it's unlikely we can reduce the load to an adequate level just by tweaking Blojsom. Sadly, I again need to encourage you to look for another host. I don't think it's fair for you to try and host your blog in a shared environment; I really think you should put it on a VPS or dedicated server so that Blojsom can't hog CPU and memory that is being shared by other sites.
This came to a head this morning because our company president was trying to do something on your server at 10:00 AM, and he was very upset by the performance. He wants resolution to this situation, and suggested we give you 30 days to find a different host.
It has been fun working with you, and I'm sorry to write this note. I do wish you the best in your future endeavors.
Gratefully,
interAdvantage Administrator
So once again I'm on the look out for a good java hoster which provide virtual private servers for people on tight budgets. So far the cheapest I've found is 4Java.ca's private tomcat at 14.95 candian dollars a month for Tomcat 5 with 600meg of space and 10gig of data transfer. But Daily Razor's RazorBLAZE package attracts me because they also supporting Cocoon cost 19.95 american dollars a month for 5gig of space and 80gig of data transfer which is fantastic in comparision. VPS land seems ok too at 3gig of space and 40gig of bandwidth. One of the things I loved about Interadvantage which seems hard to to come by is, the friendly and knowledgable system administrator. The System admin has been working with me for quite some time and I know for a fact that this email was something he didn't want to write. We tried to get Cocoon working in a shared environment but came to the conclusion that it was not possible with serious security overrides. So please don't blame the ISP for this letter, its my fault for trying to slot a popular blog and amazing blog software in a shared environment. I'm sorry to the other people on the same server and I'll be moving soon.
So if you have any other hosts which do Java servlets, allow for at last 5gig of transfer data a month and cost as little as 10 pounds a month do please recommend them to me in the comments.
The future of everything conference
I may have messed up the dates but for some reason I thought the Carson Workshops Future of webapps was on the same day as the BBC's digital futures conference. It looks like a early email mistake by someone might have been at fault. Either way I ended up going to the BBC's digital futures and not the future of webapps, but Licence to Roam's Racheal Clarke has written up quite a few of her notes which have been really useful. Thanks for that Racheal. Paul Hammond told me I need to check out Tom Coates presentation.
I'm tempted to upload my notes from digital future but one I don't/didn't write many notes and two my dyslexic mind means my notes make a lot of sense to me but not to anyone else. I usually have to tiidy stuff up afterwards if I'm going to give my notes to someone else. By the way I tried using Gobby which is the opensource and cross platform version of subedit on the mac. But not many people were using laptops and of those who were, they were all mac users. Anyhow I believe although it was a BBC staff event I'm sure I can talk about it publicly without a problem.
So who were the guests?
- Ron Pompei
- Matt Webb
- Dan Hon and Adrian Hon
- Natalie Jeremijenko
- Jeffrey Veen
Honestly I actually enjoyed every single presentation and they were really varied. Natalie Jeremijenko was great but I quickly realised I had heard her before on IT Conversations. The only thing new I saw was the excellent idea of Howstuffismade.org But it was great to see her live and see the videos of the OOZ robotics and the feral robotics dogs project. It was great to see the Dan and Adrian Hon doing a presentation about Perplex City which is the first major ARG in the UK. And one I was involved in from day one. I was quite suprised by the openness of there presentation, as it seems they have lower the curtain and made the game a… game? Something which the American ARG's are very strict about. For those who have never checked out ARGs check out these links.. The curtain issue is like a line in the sand between the players and the game creators. In some previous ARGs the line has been over stepped and it was not uncommon for puppetmasters (general term used as they pull the strings of the game, I prefer game creators) to go into hiding during a game because people will and have followed them around as part of the game. I talked with Dan and Adrian a lot afterwards about there openness and previous mistakes by other games. I wanted to ask the questions in public at the event but didn't get a chance. But moving on, as I got a feeling I will end up back at ARGs again at some point soon.
Matt Webb was good but owning his book Mind Hacks meant I had heard and seen quite a lot of the presentation already. I think Matt gave a good presentation on a very difficult subject to present. He may have lost a few people on the way but made everything easily understandable by the end. I didn't get much time to talk to him afterwards but I'm sure our paths will cross at somepoint again. Talking of which. Matt Blackbelt Jones was the event afterwards and said he was subscriber to my blog and to keep up the good work. I was kind of blown away, like when I heard Doc Searls also reads this blog at one point. I wanted to ask Matt why he reads and how he deals with all the rants and grammer mistakes but he was on his way out, so maybe next time. Ron Pompei started ok and got much better towards the end. He talked about the different sides of people and our own ideniity. I think my notes on this one presentation will make more sense than any other. One thing to note was the progression graph which struck me as very cluetrainish.
Co author instead of consumer. dialogue instead of message, journey instead of the desitination, cooperation over corporation and status activities instead of status objects.
Jeffery Veen was fantastic and really rattled through his presentation which was about the buzz of Web 2.0 and why he felt it could be Bubble 2.0. After looking at what others thought of Web 2.0 including the audience and Tim O'reilly. He went on to prove that although Web 2.0 may be buzz word it does have some elements which do show a certain progression forward. Even out of the boom and bust cycle which has been going on for decades The whole presentation is here and worth looking at.
Do you EVDO? No not on this side of the world
If I hear someone say EVDO again, I'm going to scream. I don't know any other country in the world which uses this 2.5g mobile data connetion? Except maybe Canada? Oh and Latin America? don't think so, but maybe someone could confirm this. I'm very sure its not used anywhere else including Russia, Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Eastern Asia or the Asia Pacific area. it seems to have been made by American mobile carrier to allow them to offer mobile internet type solutions without paying the stupid prices of 3G licences. Ok, Fair enough but now theres a split between the smartphones coming out (IMHO).
Theres a whole range which support GPRS, EDGE and UMTS (3G) which all seem to work together nicely. You can even go from one country to another with these phones and it works. Believe it or not I was able to get GPRS out of my SPV E200 when I last went to the midwest of America in 2004 thanks to Tmobile and AT&T. Then you got the rouge phones which only support EVDO. This would be fine but the rouge ones tend to be the Microsoft PocketPC or Windows Mobile 2005 devices. The type of device I've been looking forward to having one day soon. Thanks EVDO carriers for this split. Thank you very much. I can't really blame Microsoft because America is a bigger market when it comes to Mobile Data it would seem. I'm not only pointing the finger at American Carriers like Cingular but also much closer to home like my own which is Orange. If Orange would provide a more American like data tariff of 20 pounds for 100meg of Mobile data a month we may start to see more mobile data use and that would in turn attract Microsoft and others.
It must be killing Orange and other mobile operators over here that they paid such stupid prices for 3G and its actually better and quicker technology that EVDO but the customers are not using it much. They quote huge take ups of 3G phones but how many of those people actually regularly use 3G and how much data do they transfer? I bet the percentage of data per person is very low. And you can't be suprised when most operators are charging about 1 pound per meg if you don't buy in advance with a bundle. (This post could/should simply be about this really.) I do care that I can't get a 3G phone which runs Windows mobile 2005 in a smaller size than my ipaq. But also mobile data costs in the UK and Europe is stupidly priced and I would have thought in 2006 we would be moving away from these crazy prices. I mean can you blame me for waiting for a phone which supports Wifi? Roll on the Nokia N80 soon please Nokia.
Google loads in high resoultion satellite imaging of London
I just noticed Google have loaded in super high resoultion satellite pictures of London. Wow the quality is amazing. Check out Woolwich Arsenal where I moved to.
Tagging which way? How about my way?
Looking though my to read at somepoint in the future tagged catagory in Great News I found this useful summary of the problem with tagging online at the moment. Tag formats: Can’t we all just get along? covers the main tagging applications online and shows the confusion between spaced keywords and the comma seperated method.
So where do I fall on this issue? Well although I use Flickr and Del.icio.us almost everyday, I think they could both do benefit from using commas to seperate tags. All the latest services which I've used which support tagging have used commas because they make a lot more sense. As Victor says in the comments,
commas are faster than quotes.
as i see it (in my own experience) tags can be annoying if you don’t really care about them when you have to enter them. Usually you care about them later on, when you cannot find what you’re looking for. but they’re still a(nother) time-consuming task.
i’d use fast, thus i’d use commas.
The only thing which puts me off commas is the language issue, which is that some languages use commas for other things. There was a suggestion to use semicolon but I feel that would go down like a listening to your ipod in a church service. Other solutions which I've seen around the web include autosensing spaces or commas and the Amazon box model type thing. Which I personally think sucks because it takes too long to fill them in. I wonder why no ones written a greasemonkey script to allow people to pick a method which will be translated across all tagging services. So I can type commas into Flickr and it just translates it into spaces for me. Yeah its very lazyweb stuff. But as FataL points out, this can't be that hard.
Computer now smart enough to parse them all:
south asia, africa = [south asia] [africa]
“south asia” africa = [south asia] [africa]
‘south asia’ africa = [south asia] [africa]
(south asia) africa = [south asia] [africa]
south asia – africa = [south asia] [africa]
It’s not so hard to program all this I believe.
WikiWednesday in London
Wikiwednesday in London was a interesting affair. Its the first time I've ever been and I honestly can't remember how I found out about it. But about 12 people turned up and talked about everything web based. I know the theme for the evening was wikis but I don't think I spent much time talking about them past the intitial conversation with Shelia and a guy whos name which escapes me right now. Anyway before long more people turned up and we hooked up with the rest of the group which were already somewhere else in the bar. Like most events in London there was quite a bit of drinking, some snacks and a lot of good conversations. Before long people were leaving (about 9:30pm) which seemed a little early, but we all got work tomorrow.
Time for some name dropping I guess. Kathy and Nina for there fun and funky atitudes to geek culture. These women make any event so much more fun. I also learned that Kathy is actually from Bristol too, but sadly moved to the rivial city Bath (a very boring place for the young).I know the next geekdinner with Paul Boag is at a difficult time for quite a few people but Nina tried to convince me that I should change the date just for her alone. Nice try Nina, but you will be missed. A couple of stayed till the very end even after Ross Mayfield had left. Lars is one of those guys I've seen on wikis and blogs around the web but never met in person. Me and geez I'm bad with names talked about blogs, rss, aggregation and social networks for a while on the last lot of drinks. I can't remember this guy's name either but he works for Skype localisation and travels back and forth between Italy and England every 3 weeks. Although it sounds great, he admitted that its quite tiring and he never really gets to go out that much.
Inkscape is simply great software
I would just love to say, I upgraded my inkscape the other day because I needed to do something using vectors. In my younger days I would instantly use Adobe Illustrator but I really don't feel the need to any more. Inkscape 4.3 is as stable as a brick house (honestly never crashed ever, like previous versions) and although not quite working quite like illustrator. I'm really getting into the way it works now. I also felt so happy about Inkscape, that I decided to add my core but simple illustration to the openclipart project. You can see the whole thing here, till they move it. I provided the object under a public domain licence, so anyone can do what they like to it. I was tempted to do a whole range for XML, XSD, CSS, etc. But thought I'd leave it for now. But maybe one day soon I'll do it. It feel so good to beable to do this with opensource software.
You can't help but feel the tables are turning and there will be enough openclipart and applications like Inkscape to do everything in a opensource environment. Oh whoops, of course there already is. But these new crop like Inkscape, Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, Koffice, Scribus, Openoffice, Gimp, etc really are getting the basics right and win market and mindshare. The google code thing has got me thinking that actually its time I started working with SVG a lot more like I use to. I mean there are people who can see it now and its growing as more browsers come out supporting SVG. Expect to see more inline SVG on this blog as time goes on. I dropped a SVG in this page just for testing purposes. Hey and what a great name for software? Inkscape. What more can I say, oh did I say how great the connector tool is? OMNIGrapple? Don't need it, I got Inkscape thank you very much.
The new Connector tool was used for a preliminary design of these flowcharts, when it was critical to keep items connected all the time while looking for the best layout. The flowchart lines were then edited with the Node tool.Diagrammers everywhere will find this tool invaluable. Connectors stay attached and automatically route to avoid marked objects as the drawing is updated. After the layout work is finished, connectors can be adjusted with the node tool.