April 2011 – Cubicgarden.com…

Ubuntu is broken

It hurts me to say it but Ubuntu is broken for me.

I upgraded 2 machines to Ubuntu 11.04 on Saturday night and left them downloading/upgrading over night. One of the machines, my Pentium 4 desktop machine. Upgraded and after a reboot looks and feels pretty much the same as it did before hand. There was a message to say it wasn’t able to run Unity because the graphics card was too low spec and after a click ok, its pretty much the same as it was before, nothing really changed. All seems good.

However my laptop (Dell M1210 XPS) also got upgraded after the pop up came up. After a reboot, I logged into Ubuntu which I assumed had unity installed and I’m left with my usual desktop picture some icons but no menus at all. What makes things worst is the location where I assume there should have been a menu is now black. So down the left hand side is black and along the top is black. Nothing… I would show a screen shot but as I discovered my keyboard mappings have also been lost in the upgrade. Yes even Fn+Print Scrn no longer works. Luckily Gnome-Do still kind of works, so I’m able to open applications, including screenshots with some hassle.

I finally logged out and tried running Ubuntu in classic mode (I assume using Gnome instead of Unity). Things are better but still not correct. My keyboard shorts are still somewhat broken and its a nightmare not having Compiz cube switching which I didn’t know I was so use to now. After a little googling I got cube switching back but only using a keyboard short cut. It seems the automatic switching when the mouse touches the side of the screen is no longer available?

Right now I seem to have three choices…

Live without Compiz and run Ubuntu totally plain
Run Ubuntu with Compiz using classic mode and work on the annoying things like (you may have noticed) no chrome/window boarders. (at one point I had no menus! Try saving something with no save menu…) Compiz seems to accept some changes but do random things to some of my settings. Like currently I can’t move windows or even change there sizes.
Reinstall the whole thing from fresh and attempt to get Unity working

Its frustrating and I don’t really know what happened but for me right now Ubuntu 11.04 is simply broken… Expect screenshots as when I can consistently take them and upload them.

Manchester’s first Northern Quarter street party (a R&D viewpoint)

Manchester’s Northern Quarter was transformed into a massive street party for the northern quarter hipster crowd yesterday. Billed as an alternative to the royal wedding It was all over the press which was great [men][guardian][cubicgarden].

With the help and support of Madlab, the BBC North ran a gaming wonderland during the street party.

The gaming wonderland included 2 wii’s running wii sports and a early glimpse of BBC R&D project called Virtual Maestro or Kinect Orchestra.

On the wii’s we had bowling running and the scores of everyone who played was put on the board just like they do on top gear with lap times. We had a total of 40 players put up there scores over the hours of play. Ages ranging from 8 to 55, but the winner of the day was Rachel Norris with a high score of 188 over 10 rounds. We will be contacting Rachel with her prize. There was some controversy with some of the players as they claimed a score of 210 but as it wasn’t seen by any of the team, we had no choice but to question it. So maybe Helena Rice will also receive a slightly lesser prize too.

Virtual Maestro, an installation we’re developing with the BBC Philharmonic. Using a Microsoft Kinect and some custom code, a person is able to ‘conduct’ the BBC Philharmonic in glorious HD video and 3D surround sound using nothing but their arms to control the tempo and dynamics of the piece…

The Virtual Maestro or Kinect Orchestra will be back soon for the Manchester International Festival in July. But at the street party it went down very well with lots of people trying it out. Lots of photos can be found on Flickr. On the version we removed the HD video and 3D surround sound but it didn’t stop the public interest in the system.

As Max said in the r&d blog post,

As well as being brilliant fun for the public to play with, demos like these are a great way to illustrate some the technical work that happens here at the beeb.

Not only did we have lost of interest in the bowling tournament and the virtual maestro, but we also had people asking about BBC R&D, Madlab and BBC jobs.

Although it was a bit of a solo effort (no disrespect to Andy, Nicole, Hwayoung and Dave as there help was great and very much needed) it was worth it. We had maybe about 150 people come through our ground floor madlab space, which isn’t bad for a bank holiday.

Super 8 interactive trailer in Portal 2

Its nice to see a film trailer (JJ Abrams’ Super8) as a interactive game sequence… I’m sure its been done before but its a interesting concept. I wonder if it will automaticlly update to provide more once the film is released on June 10th?

Switching over to Tweetdeck

I switched over to Tweetdeck a while ago… I use to use Gwibber on my laptop/desktop machines and Peep on my Android phone but recently switched…

HTC Peep was ok but honestly it use to wind me up when it wouldn’t update when the storage was quite low. No warning either. Gwibber was great but I found it slow when adding lots of columns. I tend to have a column for all the people I’m following (home) one for replies (@replies) and finally one for Private messages (d msgs). On top of that I have searches for events and the such things. Tweetdeck handles these pretty much in its stride, but Gwibber use to do odd things.

I think it might have something to do with being connected to Twitter x2, Identi.ca, Facebook and other services.

The one thing I do miss from Tweetdeck is the ability to connect to a identica and status.net server. Instead there’s accounts for Facebook (which actually works very well) and Google Buzz. Honestly I’d switch out Buzz for status.net anyday.

I don’t know how the news Twitter might buy Tweetdeck will effect everything but it looks like status.net and even the open microblogging standard isn’t coming any time soon. I may switch back one day, specially if Gwibber 3.0 is as good as it could be.

The internet operating system for real

I switched to Ubuntu over 4 years ago, and its been pretty smooth.

But its recently got even smoother thanks to Google’s Chrome browser.

Why? A lot of people don’t even know Chrome supports extensions like Firefox…

Evernote winds me up no end… I started using Nevernote. Its a java client which mainly works with evernote but to be fair its quite bulky and a little slow. However Google launched there web store and a whole bunch of html5 apps have made it into the web store. A few of the apps include Evernote clients which not only connect to Evernote but also keep a local store of the notes. Making Evernote finally fully usable and reliable on a Ubuntu laptop.

As you can also see, its not only Evernote, its also Tweetdeck without installing Adobe Air (because when I last checked the 64bit version was bad, and who wants it on there machine?). I actually stopped using Gwibber because of Tweetdeck in Chrome (sorry to say…) Readitlater, Dropbox, etc are more like Firefox extensions than full applications. I guess Mozilla’s Prism is more like the chrome applications. I did try a while ago to run Evernote in Prism but it really wasn’t built for it, maybe things have changed now but I’m using Chrome more and more, although I also use Firefox 3.6 still for most of my general stuff.

There’s a lot of low level chatter about the internet operating system but google are doing a great job actually making it happen… you can see why the concept of chrome os is fascinating

A collection of good talks from the BBC

I got to point to a few good presentations I seen recently from my managers.

BBC ‘would not kill off the internet even if it could’ (presentation) – By Ralph Rivera (Head of BBC Future Media)
Being the BBC in the Information Age – Towards the New Broadcasting System (presentation) – By Matthew Postgate (Controller of BBC Research & Development)

The quality of the presentations have certainly got much better in recent times. Its also worth pointing out that Matthew Postgate will be giving a talk at Thinking Digital this year. And of course Matthew is well known to many from his presentation at TedXManchester.

Its all about the Top10?

Been meaning to blog about Harry Jones’s next venture for a while…

I was shown a beta of it a while ago and I got to say upfront I’m a close friend of Harry’s and yes I did teach him in university (Ravensbourne college of design and communication). At the time he was doing lots of Flash stuff and singing from the Adobe/Macromedia song book but I slowly broke that down and I kind of remember one day he turned to me and said he gets it (referring to XHTML) not the actual technology (Harry was very smart and picked it up instantly) but the concept of the web being readable to not just humans but to machines and devices.

Anyway a while he launched Top10.co which is a place for all those crazy top 10’s. Top 10 makes it super easy to create your own list but the magic comes when you remix someone elses. What it does is create an instance of the top 10 someone else did and allows you complete control over the list. So in the video above you can see some artificial but funny disagreement over cheesy 80’s action film between Harry and the other co-founder (don’t give up your day jobs to be actors guys….). But as its a instance, its still linked to the original, so you can see an aggregated view of everyones top10.

For example I setup a top 10 after my blog post about the films you should have seen in 2010.

Here’s the aggregated view (master list) of everyone who has contributed to the top films in 2010, and of course my top 10.

So interestingly they have catered for both the popular stuff in the actual list but also the long tail in the variety of weird and wonderful lists you can make.

Its all public, so thats great. However there are problems… The first one is the non-ability to embed the top 10 list. I know it supports Facebook and Twitter (in actual fact you sign up using one of them, wheres the openid guys?) but I just want to embed or even copy the information to somewhere which is mine. May seem slightly old fashioned (can’t believe I just said that) but its important. I’d also like to see better use of there blog… When I first saw it I first thought it could be like Okcupid’s OKtrends… You know, “we have 100000 users who picked films of 2010, and we aggregated all the lists together to show the top film choice across all lists is Inception…” type stuff. Right now its just fluff about the company which is a yawn to be frank. Heck even this is the types of films which make it to the top of most film related lists, and here’s the ones which tend to be in the middle ground… Come Harry… Data is the new source code (think I just coined a new saying)

So as a whole I think the concept is good, but it really needs someone to think about uses of the top 10’s. I’d also like to see a format which makes it easily transferable. Like a opml file with top10 extensions… but thats further down the line and I expect most won’t be interested in such a thing. Although when I explain what you can do with such a thing, it gets very interesting… Maybe I harry should pop up one day soon for a chat but he’s one busy son of a gun…

Anyway good luck and good to hear he’s moved on from all that Apple crap which he had to deal with a few years ago. Oh and congrats on getting engaged to the lovely Tiffany…

Geeks talk sexy part4: The dynamics of relationships

Ed and Alice live together and will soon marry. She decides she’d like more sexual experiences before settling down with the man she loves, so she convinces Ed they should “see other people” (as in, sex with strangers), even as they continue to live together and plan the wedding. They discuss it. Each knows someone who thinks this idea is cool; each has a friend who thinks they’re nuts. Things start reasonably well, but soon their relationship goes awry. Can the genie get back in the bottle and Ed and Alice return to companionship – or does seeing other people put an end to how Alice and Ed used to be?

Geeks talk sexy part 4, kicked off with a edited version of the film, seeing other people. This time it was a slightly lower key affair with a total of about 12 people showing up to find out what the dynamics of relationships meant.

The dynamics of relationships started without the wonderful Samantha Bail (Sam has a university course she needed to spend far more time on, shes ignored it for too long really). We (me and Simon, who has helped out with geeks talk sexy from near the start) weren’t sure if she was the reason for the large turn outs earlier but it was a quieter more intimate event this time, which actually worked out nicely.

Right from the start we asked some very challenging questions about previous relationships and there thoughts about monogamy. We always planned to discuss in the first half about relationships including hacking them. Then in the second half about non-monogamy.

So in the first half, we de-constructed what it means to be in a relationship… At one point we started to project manage a relationship using planner (which is like Microsoft project). Assigning time information to tasks, we were able to see if Agile methodology could be applied to relationships? The idea seems to work quite well but applying the time information was challenging to say the least. For example, there was a question: At what stage do you change your facebook status to say your in a relationship? And do you say in a relationship with person x? On top of that, we explored hacks people use in relationships. Someone suggested sending flowers to the other person, and this was followed up with a discussion of applying this to a cron. Now thats hacking a relationship…!

Up to that point we talked about relationships in a monogamous way. Now we were asking people to think out side the box. In the break we played the 4thought with Clair Lewis.

Clair Lewis from Manchester has two partners, Phoebe and Gordon, and cannot understand why anyone would have a problem with her loving two people at once

After the break and a cocktail later, we were deep in discussion about the map of non-monogamy. There was plenty to be said… too.

Before long we were on to the special guests (Chris & Simon) who explained how they went from a everyday married couple to become poly. A very interesting tale of love, trust, commitment, compromise and understanding. Simon said it right when he explained you can love more that one person… You love your parents, your sister/brother, your children, your partner. A relationship isn’t just sex, love takes many different forms.

People later added there own experiences to the mix and before you knew it, we were all questioning our own thoughts about monogamy and would we be able to manage having a non-monogamous long term relationship, and if so which type? I certainly think the Unicorn Polyamory would be high on a lot of men’s lists, but as Louise said… Its called that because its not reality…

Lots to discuss and simply not enough time to discuss it in… It was over the road to Common to continue the conversations till the late hours of Saturday night… The event was a great success, its just a shame we had so few people this time around.

Another great Geeks talk sexy… and maybe the end of our regular scheduled sessions this season. However there’s at least one more, this time a flirt & walk workshop with Nicole from Flirtology and the art of the pickup with our budding pickup artists Simon & Andy. Places are very limited, but expect a grand end to season one…

Continue reading “Geeks talk sexy part4: The dynamics of relationships“

An appetite for disruption mix

Its been a long time since I have done a mix and recorded it mainly because my pacemaker no longer reliably records mixes any more. However I can record mixes the old way using my laptop and the analogue interface.

I also switched from soundcloud to mixcloud, which unforgivable doesn’t have the option to download the actual mix like soundcloud use to. But I expect I’ll upload it somewhere else in the near future for those who want it on there portable music player.

So here’s the first effort… I bring you my appetite for disruption mix.

An Appetite For Distruption Mix by Cubicgarden on Mixcloud

Retweet error or something more sinister?

Dave mee from Madlab Manchester tried to retweet a message about geeks talks sexy the other day but couldn’t because his iphone4 wouldn’t let him. No idea why, does anyone else know?

The picture was from the official iPhone twitter app – ironically (as Dave puts it), the only two accounts who have thrown this error up have been myself and Loz Kaye’s. Two people pushing for open platforms and transparency… Both accounts are listed as unretweetable?

Hiding in plain sight: Social Steganography

I know its quite old (all of a year) but I’m really intriguing…

Privacy in a public age

Carmen is engaging in social steganography. She’s hiding information in plain sight, creating a message that can be read in one way by those who aren’t in the know and read differently by those who are. She’s communicating to different audiences simultaneously, relying on specific cultural awareness to provide the right interpretive lens. While she’s focused primarily on separating her mother from her friends, her message is also meaningless to broader audiences who have no idea that she had just broken up with her boyfriend. As far as they’re concerned, Carmen just posted an interesting lyric.

Social steganography is one privacy tactic teens take when engaging in semi-public forums like Facebook. While adults have worked diligently to exclude people through privacy settings, many teenagers have been unable to exclude certain classes of adults – namely their parents – for quite some time. For this reason, they’ve had to develop new techniques to speak to their friends fully aware that their parents are overhearing. Social steganography is one of the most common techniques that teens employ. They do this because they care about privacy, they care about misinterpretation, they care about segmented communications strategies. And they know that technical tools for restricting access don’t trump parental demands to gain access. So they find new ways of getting around limitations. And, in doing so, reconstruct age-old practices.

I would also add the suggestion that deep down they also know that technical methods are seriously no good for privacy. So they deploy there own privacy by adding steganography to there imprint on the web. Its also not just teenagers…

Think and a Drink with Frank Rose

Having been invited to join a panel about new forms of storytelling in Gateshead, with Frank Rose in Newcastle. I was looking forward to meeting him and hearing what he had to say.

Frank ran through a bunch of examples of how storytelling and narrative structures have hardly changed over the years. Most I assume is in his book which he was quietly promoting (I bought a copy, even through I admitted to Frank I would end up buying the ebook version and the book would be lent out to friends who are interested).

The event went pretty flawlessly but there was no real disagreement, so hence no conflict. I did find issue with the lady I was sitting next to (Agnes Wilki). Her comment about quality of content I hear a lot from people within the BBC. So I had to point out that quality can be two things (actual pixel quality and the more subjective idea of quality of the overall concept) some audiences care about one over the other and some don’t care at all.

The overall talk was good but really needed more time for the discussion which started but never really got going unfortunately.

Straight after the talk, was food and the food choice was pretty excellent. The only shame was the lack of flat surfaces to really eat and chat. Frank signing his books the art of immersion and I got talking to a bunch of people including Frank’s wife about the differences and similarity’s of the UK north and south with the American north and south. As she asked me about the BBC’s move to the north of england.

Overall the event was good and well worth visiting if your in the North east. Glad to be part of it and I look forward to coming to more of them in the future. Its also worth mentioning Franks blog on the same subject is full of gems.

Look out for me in the Guardian next week

Me and the BBC

Yes I just about survived the embarrassment of being the face of BBC North’s recruitment event earlier this week. BBC North have stepped it up and are about to launch a series of adverts in the Guardian next week. So I’m preparing myself for people twittering and pinging me saying, hey I saw Ian in the Guardian today…

Oh and Happy Birthday to me… This weekend is my 30th Birthday Redux.

Me in the Guardian today (11/4/2011), look for the Media Guardian pull out section.

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