Month: March 2007

So busy and tired recently…

I have not blogged for quite a while. This is down to a few things.

  1. Ecto is simply doing my head in, as it keeps loosing draft entries and screwing up on the spellchecker. I paid for the software and I'm back to using W.blogger again.
  2. I have been out and about across the England and Scotland recently. I have actually been to more places up north that ever before. My Flickr account is full of pictures from different places. I also need to find the time to sort out all my pictures.
  3. Wireless has been patchy in some places and after a day of working and night of socialising, I actually do need to grab some sleep.
  4. When I'm at home, i've been preparing to go somewhere else the next day or so and the broadband has simply been a nightmare due to Demon's restrictions (more about this later).
  5. Last of all, when I do find the time to blog, the blog is down because Resin has shut its self down on the server. I then spend a little bit of time trying to work out what the problem is instead of blogging. This has been a real pain and I know your as pissed off as myself about this. I'm totally lost why after months of perfect service, why this has just started happening.

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Giving F.A.C.T the finger

Priacy joke poster

There’s nothing I hate more than sitting down for a film at a cinema only to have that horrendous F.A.C.T. screen come up to threaten me about what could happen to me if I take a photograph or record the film. Thank you for threatening me right after I’ve bought a ticket and sat down to watch a film and RE-FUCKIN’-LAX for goodness’ sake!

I'm just loving the post Aral post about F.A.C.T and Pete's comment in the same blog post. Here's some quotes.

FACT do a hugely important job in fighting the perpetrators of IP and copyright theft crimes, and these ads are a necessary evil. There are people out there – many of them on this blog apparently that seem to think that its ok to download or purchase DVD’s from unofficial sources. The plain fact is IT’S ILLEGAL. Ok so you know that … but amazingly enough there are people out there who dont know this. Its is these people that the ads are aimed at. Come on it’s only a couple of minutes and hardly worth loosinganysleep over. Just ignore it for f**ks sake … concentrate on your bag of pop-corn or something if t bothers you that much. It really isn’t that bigger deal.

How different is it realy from the speed signs by the side of the motorway – we all KNOW what the limit is… but people need reminding from time to time

– Pete from F.A.C.T

How would you like it if you had to sit through “just a couple of minutes” of video telling you that stealing food is illegal (hey, IT’S ILLEGAL) every time to opened your fridge? How about a message about how stealing music is illegal (hey, IT’S ILLEGAL) every time you started up iTunes. Come on man, it’s just a few minutes, don’t be so anal about it! Oh yeah, and you’d probably love sitting through two minutes of a message telling you that copying other people’s work is illegal every time you start up MicrosoftWord(hey, IT’S ILLEGAL). In fact, if you actually believe what you’re saying you shouldn’t mind sitting through two minutes of legal lecture whenever you start *any* software application that deals with data or IP (which is, pretty much, any software application.) Would even you — a “paid up member of FACT” stand for this? If not, how hypocritical of you.

– Aral

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Practical attention thoughts

I was reading Tom Morris thoughts about attention. First up I thought damm I missed another Beers and Innovations (I actually need to pay attention to the upcoming events calendar in Outlook more often). But more deeply Tom's thoughts about some attention bundler.

I've just installed the Attention Trust tracker in Firefox, which is churning out (not particularly well-formed) XML of everything I browse (there is a button to toggle if I don't want it to record my clickstream).

It would be trivially easy to write an attention tracker which would turn this XML file in to RSS, OPML, RDF etc. I'm excited by the new features in XSLT 2.0 that allow grouping (xsl:for-each-group).

An application I'm thinking of building would be called my “attention bundler”. What it would do is take everything I've been browsing, pull other data that I've been producing (last.fm, del.icio.us, Flickr, my blog etc.), mix it all up, produce some interesting results and upload them. It'd be a desktop application – perhaps just a button on my Dock which I could hit from time to time and all sorts of magic would happen.

Is this too geeky? Of course. But that's one way in which we can research how others can use it. We piece together geeky stuff, then test it out, and if we like it, make user-friendly versions of it.

I've been tempted to install the attention tracker too but I use Touchstone which doesn't exactly do the same thing (small picture attention) but kind of does (larger picture attention). One of the biggest things I like about Touchstone is the APML file which gets created. Its an aggregate of your attention instead of a log of your attention which isn't so useful. It also creates a RSS which is uploaded every hour or so to the internet(known as the pebble output adapter). I don't know how the relevencey and attention engine is working but its finding some good stuff and highlighting it to me.

However I wouldn't mind if Touchstone or something else could read my user generated feeds (couldn't think of a better name) as Implicit Concepts. Using a attention bundler it would be trivial to pull in all my user generated feeds and then do some transforming so they were put into the APML file which Touchstone uses. So simple if I got time I might have to set it up as a local cocoon pipeline. I would prefer to do this remotelyonmy server but getting the server to effectively pick up my local APML file and write it back is not trivial. If Touchstone could remotely read and update a APML file it would be much easier. (any thoughts Chris Saad?) Ether way, it would be cool to just build a prototype to get a feel how hard it would be to write, I could certainly do some local syncing to Jungledisk and Jungledisk will sync it to Amazon S3 a bit later.

Time to crank open Synctoy then.

One last word of caution about Attention. This time from the backstage presentation. The attention engines around me are so good at filtering out stuff I'm not interested in, that I didn't know about a major train crash till someone told me about it a couple of days afterwards as I was getting on a train. Epic is here? Funny enough, I found out more about the football and world events by my taxi rides recently that anything else. Is that a good thing or bad,hummm don't know.

meta-technorati-tags=epic, attention2.0, attention, apml, attentiontrust, touchstone, epic2015, xml

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Out of nowhere comes the Orange SPV M700

Orange SPV M700

Been considering my next phone again. My current SPV M600 is great but there are a couple of things which I would like to change.

  • The lack of 3G is a killer now I have applications like Google Maps on my phone
  • The TI 200mhz processor is good for most things but running something like Skype is a real killer and tends to lock up the phone while making a call
  • The camera is reasonable but nothing special, also the lack of flash is a pain at night
  • Java isn't great

So I started hearing some rumours about the natrual upgrade path, the Orange SPV M700. The major difference is 3G (UMTS) support and GPS. It also has a new Samsung Chip which runs at 400mhz which means Skype will run smoothly. They have moved over to MiniSD instead of SD which is acceptable but a small pain. It also comes with Windows Mobile 5 instead of 6 which is interesting.

The thing which puts me off is the colour. There is a black version but I hear the paint job is not great and can chip off overtime. The White one doesn't have the chip problem but its shiny white! Geez, maybe I should get it and spray it myself?

meta-technorati-tags=orangespv, mobile, phone, orange, m700, 3g

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The full stack and it works

I was reading Antoine Quint about his speaking engagements and saw he will be talking at Xtech 2007 too. Putting SVG and CDF to Use in an Internet Desktop Application sounds interesting enough, but then he goes into detail.

The goal of this talk is to present how client-side XML technologies (SVG, (X)HTML, XUL, CSS, RDF, DOM and ECMAScript) were put to use to create a killer, multi-platform desktop application built around the Internet allowing television-watching via peer-to-peer networks: The Venice Project. The main points of this presentation will be to illustrate how the various XML grammars were put to use for different tasks, all within a unified XML presentation layer:

  • SVG, DOM and ECMAScript for finely tuned, animated and highly interactive user interfaces that scale gracefully to any resolution and screen aspect ratio
  • HTML, XUL and CSS for flexible control of the display of text content coming from remote data sources
  • RDF, SPARQL and remote requests for data retrieval

The common thread within this talk will be to show as well that this technology mix is directly applicable within browser-based Web 2.0 applications as well.

Holly crap, Joost not only uses XUL but also SVG (only learned that 5 days ago) and RDF technologies. All I can say is Wow! Now I'm very impressed. This is a real good example of how standard technologies not only work together but interop with each other, nicely.

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