Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
My and Sarah's five podcasts now available online. Enjoy and please leave a comment if you've enjoyed it or simply hate it.
This time we talk about joint/partner websites, Sarah says sorry to Blojsom creator and how Tesco is becoming Walmart in the UK and it would seem trying to beat Walmart at its only game in America with Tesco Metro's (starbucks style?).
A friend of mine Birch, sent me a email.
I think this gizmo has a future because of its price point, wireless capability and mobility. i might even be sold on one. what do you think?
And my reply as I've only covered it not really put any of my thoughts down yet.
Honestly I think its too expensive. If they got it down to about 400-500 pounds it might start selling. Having a TabletPC already I know there good but not worth a extra 250 on top of a reasonable Laptop. If they did get the price down I would dump my HP Ipaq which runs PocketPC 2003. I would still keep my 12 inch Toshiba TabletPC because you can't beat a decent keyboard although my Bluetooth Keyboard isn't bad once its paired and running. But even 12 inches is too big for holding on a packed London train in the mornings. The 2.5 inch Ipaq is good but a little too small for playing video back. And don't even get me started on playing back H.264 content on a PocketPC! I'm sure its simply not possible. With a 7 inch Origami or other like device (ben), its going to be possible to playback h.264 with VLC without having to transcode the video first. Hey and its not just about watching and consuming. The Origami is going to be a great device for taking notes, recording audio and maybe even recording video has it has a Camera and USB2
Its generally a interesting device but I wouldn't give up my Laptop of it. But we can certainly say this could be the end of the road for PocketPC and PDA devices now. I mean the next phone I'm really interested in has everything my Ipaq has, so whats the point of having both I guess.
It was odd, I usually find my views are usually much closer aligned with Doc Searls than Steve Gillmor. But during a short time period while this weeks Gillmor Gang, Dan Farber, Doc Searls, Mike Arrington and Dana Gardner start chatting about the Apple Minimac announcment earlier in the week. Well Doc and others were saying it was no good as a home entertainment box because it had no Tuner input, while Steve was saying screw that its got a network port what more do you need?
And you know what Steve is right on this one. IP delivery is where its at. Yes it nice to have a digital TV tuner card but that whole PVR time shifting thing is over rated in my view. (Saying that, if Bit torrent was to go away tomorrow I would run out and buy a Twin Tuner Freeview PVR straight away). I keep hearing about the huge leap from scheduled programming to time shifted, and it is. But its also equally a huge jump from time shifted to on demand. This is not new ground, many people are exploring the world of on demand already. For example I was out at Wiki Wednesday today and missed the UK Apprentice, but it does not matter because by the time I wake up tomorrow, it will be downloading without using any of my attention. And even if i wait a week or even a month I could still get that same episode somehow without too much searching. Thats on demand. No actually that's the 3rd era of so called broadcasting.
Anyhow back to the Mac, Front row's new features are no match for Xbox media centre but I'm sure they will get better over time. If not there always other options like the Xbox 360 (if you can get your hands one), Playstation 3 (if it comes out before 2007) or even a nice shuttle PC.
Lets have deeper look at what makes the Macmini a nice machine for my living room. Well first its now got a Intel Core Duo which means it should handle 1080i HDTV with AC3 surround sound without too much problem. Like I said although Front row is no Xbox Media Centre and a long way off Windows Media Centre. Its looks pretty good for that living room remote control domain. I really need to go into a Apple store and try it out sometime soon as its kind of hard to tell just from pictures. Optical out should mean 5.1 surround sound isn't that far off. Its got a DVI output and does not seem to contain that DRM standard HCDP which means we won't get that scary Windows Vista thing where it will switch off the video unless you have the licence. I don't believe the Xbox 360 has this, but its hard to tell till its been hacked.
However there are lots of disadvantages to using a Mac. The DVD drives tend to be region locked which will make my old DVD's from America a pain to play on this machine. The remote is simple but thats the problem, its too simplic. I'm use to doing things like queuing up a selection of podcasts and videos then let it run through-out the day, it doesn't seem like you can do that from that remote? On the sound front, the Mac does not have a dolby digital chip like the xboxes, so I'll have to say goodbye to the upscaling of Dolby Surround to Dolby Digital.
Before I've even had the chance to play with Microsoft's Simple Sharing Extensions, Ray Ozzie just shared a prototype they have been playing with internally. Its called Live Clipboard and basiclly is a clipboard for the semantic web.
Its a JavaScript-based solution which works in most browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox. It stores data on the page as actual xml data trees which can be copied and pasted without having to select the text content. Its a difficult concept to explain but luckly Ray's got tons of screencasts to show how it works. The interesting thing is that not only does Live clipboard work in the browser domain but also in the desktop domain. Thanks to 25hours a day for the Etech trip report, which alerted me to Live clipboard in my RSS reader today.
Honestly when I first read the post, I did think this would be perfect as a Firefox Extension or even Greasemonkey script but you would miss out on the desktop side of things. I'll be interested to know how flexable Live clipboard is. For example will it read all types of Microformats? How about FOAF and XFN? Humm, I wonder if you could do something between a Firefox extension and a Yahoo Widget?
One of the best features of Bit Torrent and UK nova is when it pulls up gems from TV's past. Someone posted up the first season of Desmonds which is a classic Channel4 TV programme from the late 80's. Its amazing to watch now and I can't believe I had all but forgot about it till last weekend. Sarah's having a hard time understanding the mixture of accents on the show but finds it funny watching me crack up. The poster wrote this about the posting.
It was as late as 1989 that a British sitcom which focussed on the life of a black British family finally became mainstream viewing. It was worth the wait. Desmond's was not tokenism: this was a funny and warm show, with a strong cast and all the traditional sitcom ingredients, but with a solid anchor in the lives of those it portrayed.
Unlike The Cosby Show (to which Desmond's is often compared), St Lucia-born writer Trix Worrell set the series in a working class area of South London's Peckham. Desmond and wife Shirley are first generation migrants from Guyana who have set up their own barber's shop. They live upstairs, along with two of their teenaged children, Sean and Gloria and spend their days serving customers and enjoying the company of the regulars, including Ram John Holder as Porkpie, Christopher Asante as eternal student Matthew and their BUPPY son, Michael.
Watch for a young Domonic Keating, who is introduced later in the first series, now famous for his role as Malcolm Reed in Star Trek – Enterprise. He wasn't particularly natural in Desmond's (and isn't in Enterprise either), but he does possess a lovely pair of cheekbones.
The show ended after the sixth series, with the untimely death of Norman Beaton. With quality writing and lovingly observed characters, you'll enjoy the warm, fuzzy glow that the show imparts.
What ever your view of Bit torrent, this has got to be seen a really good example of that long tail. So far its been downloaded almost 170 times and there are currently 44 seeders and about 3 leechers. Sharing Desmonds with a community of people means it will never be lost or locked up in a valut somewhere. Showing Sarah Desmonds was a interesting experience.But its also certainly something I would love to share with my kids when there old enough. And if CD/DVD doesn't pack up I should be able to still play back un-drm'ed media from 2006. If worst comes to worst and CD/DVD does pack up, I'm sure the 170+ people who have nabbed it will be happy to share it in the future.
So I've just changed the DNS records which means your reading this blog post from my new servers in Panama (don't ask!). I'm also currently in the middle of moving the domain cubicgarden.com to Godaddy.com. So i'm expecting there will be some issues during the next week or so while I get things sorted out. Please bear with me during this difficult time, and I expect to be blogging as usual soon.
Realisticily nothing should change for anyone subscribing out there. The feeds will stay the same but now you shouldn't get that weird RSS thing when I do a update and it throws up some old entries. I'm also aware the access to the new server isn't as fast because its hosted in Panama instead of America but it will mean I can take advantage of services like feedtree and feedburner. Hey and I've learned some of the sharper end of unix administration which is a big bonus. As they say, google is your friend. Althought recently the opposite would be true.
Thanks to Che for sending this link around the office today. Its the video for the new Microsoft device which is set to be launched tomorrow (March 2nd 2006). I've heard Scobe and others talking about it on blogs and podcasts but had no idea it was a OQO killer. Hey another reason not to buy a PSP or Ipod maybe? By the way, what is up with this site?
It certainly looks like it has Wireless and Bluetooth. Maybe running a special version of Vista instead of Windows Mobile 5? The big question is if its a real product or just a concept or prototype? I guess we will find out tomorrow.
And at long last its official.
…Is what Miles said about me setting up my own virtual private server on the weekend. Yep I finally took bull by the horns and slapped down my credit card and decided to go with Hub.org for Cubicgarden.com's new resting place. To be fair I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. See I kind of thought Tomcat and Apache would be installed and ready to go. But nope I finally logged into my FreeBSD box and quickly found out that it was a barebones box and I would need to do the configuration of applications, permissions and users. Well trust me, this is no easy thing. I mean there something very different about running unix on the desktop and running it as a server. In a server environment permissions and applications running all need to be kept under tight wraps. I would agree this should be the case for a Desktop environment too, but you can be a little more flexable with the configuration of a desktop machine. Put it this way, being a admin with root access to your own server is certainly compareable to building your first F1 car then racing it along the streets of Monte Carlo. Or as Miles puts it a baby with a loaded gun.
Either way, with thanks to Miles and tons of resources online like this one, I'm almost up, running and hopefully pretty secure. Rather than the usual Apache 2.x and Tomcat 5.5.x type configuration with mod_jk, I've gone for Tomcat 5.5.x with Pen in front for a reverse proxy and load balancer. Miles suggested Pound and Balance but I couldn't get Pound to compile without seriously messing with OpenSSL and Balance didn't seem to forward HTTP traffic without stripping away the header information. Pen is just like Pound it would seem, but also runs on Windows which is good to remember for other projects I may have in mind with my old Windows 2000 box. So yeah its a pretty sweet setup so far and means I loose the overhead of running Apache when all I really want is Tomcat. By the way, I was very close to installing Resin 3.x but decided against it for now.
Compiling Cocoon only took 2 mins once I finally untared and gunzipped the source. Can I just say how much of a nightmare Compression is? This guide was very useful for not only uncompressing files (tar -xvvzf cocoon2.1.8.tar.gz) but also compressing them. It took me a while to work out the correct parameters to compress a directory of files and its contains but keep the permissions and modified dates (which is extreamly useful for moving blojsom blog entries) . tar -cRvzf archive.tar foldertocompress/. Anyway, Cocoon is running happily in Tomcat now and Blojsom is also running fine with everything this blog has up till Feb 26th. So I'll have to do another update just before I swap over to the new server. This will also mean there will be a period of maybe 2 days when the blog and RSS feeds may time out or seem out of date. Don't worry I'll warn you in advance of the exact day.
So what next on the horizon? Well I need to do some more securing and enable Log4J on Tomcat and Cocoon. I've also still got to sort out basic Unix type things. For example while I was setting up the server, the only text editor I had was vi and the only shells were tsch and some other weird ones. Yep thats right no Nano or Bash. I don't know how I managed, but trust me I'll be avoiding vi when ever possible. I've already chpass all the users and made Bash the default shell. Beyond this, I'm considering Hamachi for Linux which would mean I could securely login to Blojsom, Tomcat and anything else from anywhere without setting up that crazy port forwarding in Putty. This sounds over kill but I'm tempted to at least run Hamachi on my Smoothwall Firewall server at home.
In regards to Cocoon, well my next step which I had planned to do if I was not writing this long blog post, would be to install Saxon 8.7 (good to see a .net version btw) in Cocoon using this guide (I know it works, i already installed Saxon 8.4 on the development machine at work). While with Blojsom, I will start trimming down some of the outstanding issues I had.
Oh before I finish, did I say how great Wget and Sudo are? Loaded gun indeed.