Month: February 2009

The day the cloud rained

Ma.gnolia

In my data portability presentation, I always talk about services going away or changing. But even I hadn't really considered what happens when theres simply data lost. Ma.gnolia was a service I did use briefly between my switch from delicious to evernote and back to delicious. I had a ton of bookmarks on there but only really had 20 or so which were not on delicious or evernote. On top of that, I use a simple cron job to pull down my bookmarks every few weeks. However even this method isn't perfect as I sometimes have my laptop offline when the time comes around for the next backup. I really should move the cron job to my download machine which is always on and connected to the net.

Anyway I was lucky, I was reading stories earlier in the month from people who couldn't trust online services again with there data. I hope over time they will find ways of trusting services but I totally see the need for more services/apps which offer simple backup solutions. For example Conduit could be perfectly placed for this type usage, if there was more providers and generic hooks. The other solution is to simply have your data running through many services. One goes down and looses everything, another can be pulled upon to get the data back. Actually Ma.gonlia is using Friendfeed to recover some of its data, so it may sound slightly crazy but its already happening. Right now my microblogging activities are aggreagated over about 4 different services including twitter, identi.ca, Jaiku and Ping.fm. My RSS reading is still all on Newsgator but I'm planning a cron job for the APML (one of the things i'm missing from ma.gnolia) and OPML. Plus I have Newsgator offline clients on 2 phones, 1 ipod and 2 computers.

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Many thoughts about Google Latitude

Google spy in your pocket headline from the Metro Newspaper

When new technology comes along and disrupts, its hard to grapple with the questions and answers. I've been thinking about Google Latitude for a while since I got it working on Friday night and decided theres quite a lot of complexity to this new distruptive technology. Here's what I've been thinking

  • In Google Latitude you can turn the share my location off but what about those who you want to show your location. There's no fine grain control over what your friends can see it would seem.
  • Even if you could control what each friend saw, it would be a pain in the ass to change each time. Maybe in the future some kind of grouping would make more sense.
  • Following on from that, it would be good to see a more Fireeagle type response, where I can say to a group of friends I'm in this city, while to the public I can say I'm in this country. And of course to the selected group of friends, which street I'm actually on
  • But also following that, will friend get funny about only being able to see which City I'm in instead of the area or street. Maybe they will only share what you share with them?
  • Maybe it even makes sense that you can only share what that other person shares with you? so if I share only which city I'm in with all my friends, I can't see which street there on. Reforce the friends factor?
  • I've decided not to add close work mates to my friends list because I really don't want them to know where I am. And yes I can turn it off but then theres the whole, why did you turn it off? Were you hiding something?
  • Using your mobile with cell trianglation is pretty good but with additional GPS you can track right down to a small range of house addresses.
  • I didn't agree to Google Latitude getting my updates from Jaiku, even if they are public. But hey its not bad little feature
  • Where's the public view of Latitude for some of more darling types? And talking of which, where's the API, ical feeds and georss feeds?

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Video education for confidence tricks

Taken from Cory's BoingBoing post.

Wikipedia's list of confidence tricks is a globe-spanning journey through con-jobs ancient and modern. Required and fascinating reading:

A clip joint or fleshpot is an establishment, usually a strip club or entertainment bar, typically one claiming to offer adult entertainment or bottle service, in which customers are tricked into paying money and receive poor, or no, goods or services in return. Typically, clip joints suggest the possibility of sex, charge excessively high prices for watered-down drinks, then eject customers when they become unwilling or unable to spend more money. The product or service may be illicit, offering the victim no recourse through official or legal channels.

The Melon Drop is a scam in which the scammer will intentionally bump into the mark and drop a package containing (already broken) glass. He will blame the damage on the clumsiness of the mark, and demand money in compensation. This con arose when artists discovered that the Japanese paid large sums of money for watermelons. The scammer would go to a supermarket to buy a cheap watermelon, then bump into a Japanese tourist and set a high price.

List of confidence tricks

As most of you already know I'm a big fan of the public being totally aware of these type of tricks or scams. Its self protection from the elements who will take anything from you if let them.

It would be good to actually link some of these with the Real Hustle episodes which are mainly online now. We also need something like this for the electronic world. I don't just mean how to identify scam email but also more advanced stuff like checking certs, setting up vpns and checking for leaking for information. And of course we need a ton around simply language multiplation (social engineering). Too many people fall for these scams/tricks.

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Get your gLatitude here

I finally got Google Latitude working on my own HTC Kaiser and work's Touch Diamond. Only a couple of my friends are on it right now but its not bad. Its like Fire Eagle but with a pre-build example/application. I do wonder if you can actually get the geodata out like Fire Eagle? Because I might be not be so interested in the application, but I am interested in the where am I part.

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HD envy, is just as boring

YouTube’s Chad Hurley: “We Have The Largest Library of HD Video On The Internet.”

It is early days for HD video on the Web, but already we are starting to see jostling for position in this nascent part of the Web video market. Less than two months after YouTube started streaming high-definition videos in a major way, CEO Chad Hurley is now claiming bragging rights as the biggest HD video site on the Web. At a panel today at Davos, he said:

We feel we have the largest library of HD video on the Internet.

If you look at YouTube’s HD category, five pages with about 100 HD videos come up. Hulu’s HD gallery, in contrast, only has six videos. Vimeo’s HD gallery has 178 712 videos. But CBS has at least 1,000 (and it is not clear how many of those are on YouTube in HD quality).

But those are just the featured videos. Search on YouTube for “HD” and then select only results in HD quality, and you get 150,000 results. That doesn’t necessarily mean there are 150,000 different HD videos on YouTube. But search on Hulu for “HD” and you get, once again, six results. CBS and other sites, obviously have more. But it seems likely that YouTube has the most.

I say, whos gives a flying monkey (I would normally use stronger words). Ok its a techcrunch story, so we're unlikely to get anything that interesting but what I don't get is why it matters so much. Anyone can tell you can have HD which looks great and HD which looks bad. Just because its HD doesn't make it instantly better. Also if they think they have a lot of HD videos, they should check out this site everyones using called The Pirate Bay. Yeah I bet they have more HD videos that all of the others put together. I also wanted to add being serious now. i've been uploading HD video to Blip.TV for years now. I must have uploaded at least 100 HD 720p videos just myself, I remember the first time I did Blip.TV didn't even support Widescreen video lets alone HD but they quickly fixed that. This HD envy is penis envy twice over. ohhhh but your HD is only 720p, mine is true HD 1080p. Wow! Who gives a f***! Its all being compressed down to Flash 10 and displayed in a player which supports something like 800px by 450px. Get a grip!

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Heavy snow in the midnight city mix

Heavy snow in the midnight city mix by cubicgarden

  1. Tin There (edit) – Underworld
  2. The 7th Day (M.I.K.E Remix) – The Gift
  3. Sky Falls Down (Armin van Buuren Remix) – Oceanlab
  4. Bulgarian (Signum Remix) – Travel
  5. Beauty hides in the deep (john o'callaghan remix) – The Doppler effect
  6. The Pride in your eyes (Martin Roth mix) – Tillmann Uhrmacher
  7. Language (Santiago Nino Dub Tech Mix) – Hammer and Bennett
  8. Gamemaster (Matt Darey 2003 Club Remix) – Lost Tribe
  9. Attention (steve birch remix) – John 00 Fleming vs Christopher Lawrence
  10. She wants him – Moussa Clarke & Terrafunka
  11. Into the danger (M.I.K.E remix) – M.I.K.E vs Andrew Bennett
  12. Gouryella (extended version) – Gouryella
  13. Heal – Electrique Boutique
  14. In the dark (tiesto trance mix) – Tiesto

This mix was recorded during the snow storm hit the South East of the UK on Feb 2nd. The slips are where my cold hands would wipe snow or ice off the pacemaker, Enjoy!

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The benefits to sleeping late

Manchester at Night

This one comes from Wired magazine via Imran Ali again. 3 Smart Things About Sleeping Late. I have to agree with every single one of the points. It still kills me getting up early in the morning but whats worst is when i'm in the creative zone at 1:30am and then have to start heading to bed, knowing theres a bunch of things I could get done if I stayed up a little longer.

1 // You may need more sleep than you think.
Research by Henry Ford Hospital Sleep Disorders Center found that people who slept eight hours and then claimed they were “well rested” actually performed better and were more alert if they slept another two hours. That figures. Until the invention of the lightbulb (damn you, Edison!), the average person slumbered 10 hours a night.

2 // Night owls are more creative.
Artists, writers, and coders typically fire on all cylinders by crashing near dawn and awakening at the crack of noon. In one study, “evening people” almost universally slam-dunked a standardized creativity test. Their early-bird brethren struggled for passing scores.

3 // Rising early is stressful.
The stress hormone cortisol peaks in your blood around 7 am. So if you get up then, you may experience tension. Grab some extra Zs! You'll wake up feeling less like Bert, more like Ernie.

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RSS almost completely covered

I have Newsgator on almost every device I own, which is great because the syncing feature means I never end up reading the same news again and again. Except there's one problem, I have no offline version for my laptop. Yep crazy, my work pc (windows) is running FeedDemon, while my ipod touch runs Netwirenews and even my two windows mobile phones are running the newsgator go client. Usually when I'm connected I'll use the web site directly but when offline I have to use my ipod touch which is stupid when I got such a great display right in front of me. Anyway I'm not the only one.

I was thinking about this the other day now that I have an Eee PC. I'm liking it so far, but the keyboard is definitely maddeningly small. Still, I'm getting better at it. Anyway, one thing I'd really like on it is the ability to read feeds offline. I currently use Newsgator products to read feeds–both Feeddemon and Newsgator Mobile. I love the syncing capability.

But unfortunately, Newsgator doesn't have a Linux product. It does, however have an API into their syncing infrastructure. However, without a Linux product in the first place, most of the people I know that are using Newsgator are corporate types. Newsgator Go!, their mobile product, is for Blackberry and Win Mobile.

With no Linux client and no iPhone app, what are the chances that the developer community is going to care enough about their product in the first place to develop on top of their syncing api. Developers tend to build things to solve problems for themselves. Not surprisingly, NO ONE has built a Linux RSS desktop client on top of their API. Even a Thunderbird plugin would be nice, b/c Thunderbird can handle RSS feeds and it works in Linux. So far, nada, zilch.

Luckily Newsgator do have a POP3 service too, so its possible to get some kind of offline usage even if its nothing like the RSS service and I'm still unsure how/if the syncing works with it too.

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Good to know: The Scoville scale

Found via Imran Ali while we were chatting about late night working. I think we went from talking about Energy Drinks and Coffee into scales of measurements into the The Scoville scale.

The Scoville scale is a measure of the hotness or piquancy of a chili pepper, as defined by the amount of capsaicin, (a chemical compound which stimulates nerve endings in the skin) present.

Some hot sauces use their Scoville rating in advertising as a selling point.

The scale is named after its creator, American chemist Wilbur Scoville, who developed a test for rating the pungency of chili peppers. His method, which he devised in 1912,[1] is known as the Scoville Organoleptic Test. An alternative method for quantitative analysis uses high-performance liquid chromatography, making it possible to directly measure capsaicinoid content.

Nice to know.

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