Ianforrester

The end of screensavers?

Something I picked up somewhere today. The concept of a screensaver is quite simple.

A screensaver is a computer program originally designed to conserve the image quality of computer displays by blanking the screen or filling them with moving images or patterns when the computers are not in use. Today, screensavers are primarily used for entertainment or security purposes.

So with all the best screensavers now being RSS or internet connected and widget engines being common on desktops now. Doesn't it make sense to do away with screensavers and go for a special widget mode. For example it would be really cool if instead of going to a screensaver, the computer simply moved all the windows and applications back and showed the desktop and an array of widgets. Like most widget engines, it could dull the background so you avoid the burn-in effect. I'm also thinking the widgets in that mode would be either be locked or ones which are informational only. So you can't bypass security through a widget. Anyway it was just a thought….

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Flicker music podcast

My friend Paul Crowley has created a flipping awesome podcast for his and Gareth Cole's exclusively online music lablel Flicker Tracks.Yes Flicker with an E not without the E. Anyway his just launched a new EP called Minimus and decided the 30secs preview you get from the Apple iTunes store wasn't enough for slow building arrangements which you find in a lot of house and trance music. And he's very right, there's tracks which sound nothing like the first 2 mins because thats your build up period (or mix period) then the track comes alive with something amazing which suprises the listener. Paul says it much better that myself

We decided that it is important that anyone interested in our material can hear significantly more than the 30 seconds currently afforded by iTunes. This is particularly important with club focussed music, where lengthy intros facilitate equally lengthy and seamless DJ mixes. Slow-build arrangements don’t necessarily reveal the true nature of the track in the opening bars, or in fact, in any given 30 second sample.

It’s always been true that the medium has dictated the format and length of mass produced music (from wax cylinders through to compact discs) but in this instance, the promotional method is creating an artificial limitation – the medium is not at fault. It is as if when writing material, you should now produce the musical equivilent of the elevator pitch to have the greatest chance of commercial success.

Were we to write and arrange our material so that the first 30 seconds gives the casual listener a more representative sample of what’s to come, we would then risk rendering the material less appropriate for the intended context – a club (which of course is creating another restriction on form, but one that we choose intentionally). Anyway, all this technology is supposed to be about creativity and freedom of expression, right?

Your damm right Paul. I've added the podcast to this entry which I hope will give it even more visability and I don't think Paul will mind. It would be easier for others to do the same if there was a creative commons licence like Attribution-NoDerivs License attached to the podcast. Then people could play it, copy it and even play it on a commercial radio station. I would also add – it would be great to have included a little tracklist (maybe linked to the direct track on itunes) in the blog post. But it was great to hear louise's voice over the music, very professional sounding.

So about the actual tracks.

1st track minimus – is damm fat and heavy, I like it and might have to get it for net Saturday's Bash.

2nd track bring you too – is a nice rich leader track. Something I would use to bring the crowd to a new place. This is certainly what I think of when thinking progressive or tech house.

3rd and 4th tracks are not quite my style but sound like something I would dance to in a house club.

5th track skidmark – is another fatty track perfect for playing in a bar, warm and smooth, perfect for a slightly upbeat lounge club. Saturday is calling its name.

So Paul it worked, your elevator pitch of a podcast has made me considered buying some of your tracks. Now if it wasn't in itunes encrypted mpeg4 audio (AAC) I could use it in a DJ set next weekend. Oh well…

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The Corporation available for free, but is it remixable?

From Torrent freak, which I've been meaning to blog for a while…

The award winning Canadian documentary The Corporation has been released on BitTorrent for free. Filmmaker Mark Achbar just released an updated official torrent of it. Everyone is free to download, watch, discuss, and share it. Although the torrent download is free, the filmmakers encourage people to donate a small fee if they like what they see. We asked Mark Achbar how the first round of donations went. He said, since my initial torrent launch of The Corporation at the end of August, there have been $635.00 in contributions. They ranged from $2 to three very generous gifts of $100 each. All are very much appreciated. He added, my only regret is that I didnt put up my own torrent sooner.

Although this is great stuff, I couldn't find the licence anywhere. So I'm assuming its downloadable, sharable but not remixable? Shame because its a great documentary but I would like to see a slightly shorter version which I could lend to some friends without them falling a sleep. You could easily do a 1hour version which gets the core message across and then the 3hour version full of examples and more depth.

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Pipelines posts can now be found at Flow *

After my huge mind dump for Pipelines, I've now decided to start a new blog called Flow *. It will be about everything to do with pipelines. I'll sometimes cross post some gems here but generally the flow blog will form part of my research and development into pipelines.

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Pipelines and the flow of automation

I've been sitting on this blog post for bloody ages. But Tom's post has tipped me over.

Want to see something cool that's coming soon? Take a gander at XProc – the XML Pipeline Language. It's a way of defining a series of processes that operate on an XML file – for instance, running it through XInclude, schema validation, XSLT and making choices etc. It is great in as much as it's abstracting yet another layer out of the processing systems (SAX, DOM etc.) and their implementations (Java, PHP etc.) – obviously there are problems with that. Norman Walsh says that it's quite likely to be finished early next year. Kurt Cagle of XML.com thinks this is a good thing, and should fit in to the XML+REST ecosystem nicely.

So I've been thinking about some presentations and talks I'm planning on giving next year. I can't quite put my finger on the exact term but I know through blogging it and being very open about my thoughts I might reach a set of conclusions or at least points worthy of talking about with others..In my usual style a lot of the stuff is scattered around all over the place, so I'm going to try and use a wiki or something else to tie things togther.

My abstract for Etech 2007, which didn't get accepted.

API's are a great way of developers being able to access data and content from one provider. But with the trend of the mash-up has come the ability to join two or more providers together to the benefit of the user. This level of interoperability means people can start offering automation and new business opportunities by chaining services together. As many of us look towards the social benefits of a somewhat centralised Web 2.0, I can see how our single provider habits will be broken by the user generated pipelines.

Like Unix Pipelines, a user generated pipeline can be used to send content through a series of pipes. But unlike UNIX pipelines these pipes can be a series of remote or local webservices, services, applications, transformers, etc. A simple example could be, uploading a photo from your mobile phone to Flickr, then that same photo magically appears on your friends doorstep processed, nicely cropped with a related personal message with no more time or effort required from yourself. Thats the magic of pipelines.

This is not a new concept but how we manage this has existed in the domain of Apple-scripters, Perl and Python hackers. Automator by Apple is an example of this, but fails due to its proprietary nature.

I'm proposing that a series of pipelines will be ultimately definable, non-proprietary and shareable by anyone who can install and run a browser. A whole eco-system will grow out of this decentralised user driven behaviour, which I call Web 2.5.

The Flickr example I gave works on an application being authorised to access a certain picture on Flickr. Flickr already has this feature in its API and many other services use this to provide services to there users. So in this example Preloadr.com are instructed to receive the picture and do the default image enhancement which there famous for. After the preloadr is finished the picture is passed on to delivr.net which can create postcards and send them to a person on request.

This is all possible now with simple AppleScript or some other scripting language like Perl but requires a intimate knowledge of the scripting language. A user generated pipeline would be the higher level language to describe the Flickr example

Addy Santo of Santomania once wrote this quite fantastic application called Blogwave which he has not been updated for at least 3 years now. Its a multi purpose .net application which can consume RSS feeds (generator), transform them with some parameters like sort. It would then send them somewhere else, for example FTP, Email, SMB, etc in a RSS or Text form. What I found interesting about it was actually, it would create timed batch tasks in the standard Windows scheduler (something not many people use on there desktop). So in actual fact, it was a GUI for the command line in Windows. The application was a head of its time and unfortually not open source, so its kind of died but can still be used if you find the right link. But the concept is key, a GUI creates scripts or manages the complex pipeline process. The different pipes are already defined so you don't need some low level code to manage it. It seems Touchstone will take over from where Blogwave went, but I'm not on the alpha programme so I can't actually play with it.

Touchstone

I have tons of other examples but I'm now saving them up for the wiki and for my talk at Xtech 2007 which I'm currently rewriting my failed Etech proposal for right now.

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Digital Wellbeing, into the woods…

Digital Well being have changed there range to match the change of the season. They had a instore bash recently to celebrate the change. It was a good night and I managed to grab a chat with the guy behind USB cell and a guy whos created a maginify table. All good stuff and a great evening had by all. I've added a load of pictures here on flickr.

I went back to the Digital well being shop on Sunday. I have got even more pictures and caught a few more videos. This time Sheila playing with the maginfy table, Alex trying out the wood sound remixer and Alex also explains how the Nabaztag works and why its more that just a toy.

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Ambient information

I'm trying out this Ambient Clock prototype. Its part of a range of Ambient devices which are meant to be glanceable. Aka you look and get a general idea of what's happening. Its an interesting idea and I look forward to the actual physical device.

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Skype offers free calls to the UK for next 6 months

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To qualify for the offer, Skype Credit must be paid for via PayPal or with a UK-issued credit card with a UK billing address. You'll also need to be signed into the Skype software while buying credit. Broadband internet connection required.

I was using JaJah for a while but using skype on my mobile phone to call landline numbers for free is going to be great. Now if only Orange would offer a decent all you can eat plan like 3 just did. Rumours are that it will be more like 30 pounds a month rather than Orange's 75 pounds a month. My last bill on GPRS was 59 pounds because I forgot to turn off automatic hourly downloading of my 391 rss subscriptions!

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Allergy Cards are a good idea…

Via Kid666's blogI found a link to Allergy Card.com. Which is a site where you can create little cards to give to new resturants. Yes its sounds a little over the top, but you know what it would have saved me quite a few nights of terriable projectale vomiting. Like the time when I was in Amsterdam and decided to eat in a Thai Resturant with Kevin Hinde and Joel Chippendale the day before my talk at Xtech 2005. Trust me, if you think its all in mind then you really needed to see the state of the wetroom that night. It was so bad, I dare not call anyone for help till Sarah on the phone in England convinced me otherwise. And that was just Coconut sauce in the meat and prawns in the rice (which I got replaced). No trust me the ride to the hotel was hellish and I thought I wasn't going to make it.

I would have liked to have used the HTML which Allergycard.com creates, but it was so messy I couldn't do it without breaking a load of XHTML rules.

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Playing with Twitter, but I’m not all that happy yet

After hearing Ryan Freitas talk about Twitter among other things, I've been trying out it out. If you don't know what Twitter is, check out Derek Powazek's description.

Twitter lets me SMS to a group all at once and creates a handy 'what I'm up to right now' insert for my site. A kind of in-situ, realtime, status message blogging. Fun!

So yeah its a good way to send short timely messages to a pool/group of friends. Those messages can be text messages (sms) or even im using jabber. It sounds really good but it has problems. Tantek posted up shots of ways to improve the pretty poor signup process. But I've been having problems registering my work mobile phone which is on O2 with Twitter. What also bugs me is the fact you can only register one mobile number. Yes I know its rare people have more that one mobile, but those who would use Twitter are much more likely to have 2 phones or 2 lines. My other issue is around adding your friends. Please please, allow me to add either my flickr network, upcoming network (why flickr and upcoming don't interop, is still beyond me), Plaxo contacts or even a Foaf file. I just can't be bothered to setup another network of friends in Twitter.

I do see the use of Twitter, specially for setting up adhoc geekdinners and getting people organised. But I would prefer to see Twitter used as an output point for messages. So I could send messages to it from almost any application or service and it would amplfy it to a certain group. Maybe it can do this already, it has an API so its certainly possible.

My username on Twitter is cubicgarden under the name of ian forrester, as you'd expect.

David Czarnecki has wrote a Twitter Plugin for Blojsom 3.0. Its currently in CVS but it will update twitter when there is an update or new entry to a blojsom blog. Damm I need upgrade to blojsom 3.0.

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Petition to Ban within government-funded schools, the promotion of any faith or religion

I'm not keen on Bans but, this certainly sounds like a worthy cause.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ban within government-funded schools the promotion or practice of any particular faith or religion.
Submitted by Quentin Brodie Cooper of UK Brights

Faith-based or sect schools encourage and propagate divisions within our society.

Schools should be places where our children are taught to think about the world around them and come to their own conclusions. In short, they should be taught, not only about the profusion of religions and faiths but also about how moral and socially responsible lives can be led without them; rather than, at a time before they have sufficiently developed critical faculties, being indoctrinated.

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Yes I did go to an Arsenal Football Match this weekend

My good friend and Best man Ross won some tickets to Arsenal vs Newcastle United recently, so the plan was for him and his wife to go to the match. And we would Babysit our god daughter. But it didn't quite work out that way and so I ended up going with him.

After we found a nice parking space just 5mins walk from one of the entrances we on the march along one of the stadium bridges, found our gate in the Orange Quadrant and before long we were in our seats. The Emirates Stadium is new and Arsenal are unbeaten at home this year. The stadium is very comfitable and actually very clean and tidy. Not what I was expecting for a football ground. The match wasn't so great, Newcastle Utd scored against the run of play and after half time Arsenal scored with a great freekick by Thierry Henry to make it a draw at 1-1. 60,058 people attended the match and actually I'll admit it was a good day but I would only ever do it for a big World Cup game. I've got tons of pictures of the stadium and game on my flickr stream.

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