Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Author: Ianforrester
Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser.
Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io
I’ve been thinking about the mix for the mix competition and decided to do a more upbeat tech electro mix instead of trance. I’ll post it on soundcloudvery soon, just need to edit it a little because the pacemaker didn’t record the first mix correctly (again!).
So its about time to start looking into the future again and making those resolutions… Looking at the previous ones for 2009 things have not gone exactly to plan.
Go skiing on real snow Didn’t happen, will have to carry this one over…
Work and execute a Alternative Reality Game Also didn’t happen, but I may have to sub this one for writing a book
Build up a better routine Its starting to happen but not quite yet, but give it a little more time and things will be better. I’m going start getting up earlier and go to bed earlier that currently.
Work smarter, with less pace and less stress This is happening, but there is still smarter ways I could be working. I’ll try and document some of this too of course.
Go out more and be live more heathly Yep, I think I’ve drunk more beer and wine this year that ever before. So I’m certainly going out a lot more but living more heathly, not quite. This year that will change.
Be more daring with matters of the heart Yeah I’m not doing so bad there… Between OKCupid, Speed Dating, etc I’ve done a reasonable job enjoying myself and not holding back.
Start organising Werewolf and Werewolf+ nights in the North Started well but dropped the ball a bit half way through the year when barcamp, tedx, etc kicked in. I should certainly get this going again, as I do enjoy a good game of Werewolf.
Build a web application So I got a couple of kick ass ideas which I do want to build and with my new thoughts about using Xquery instead of Python, means I’m a lot more likely to build what I’m thinking in my spare time.
Blog every film I watch So I started doing this via twitter using the hashtags film and movie but due to twitters archiving system, they got sucked away before I noticed. Someone pointed me towards 140 film review. So who knows maybe I might use that or come up with some simple Xquery to pull my reviews into a storage container using Twitter/Indenti.ca
Read more This has happened a lot, since I bought my ebook reader I’ve read about 15 books in about 4x the speed I usually would. I can see this increasing in the future.
More Trance music I’ve not done may trance mixes recently but once I get this competition mix out the way I’ll be uploading them regularly again. I’m also making a habit of listening to Armin Van Buuren and other dj shows at work and making a note of top tunes. I also noticed I spent about 150 pounds last year on tunes from AudioJelly and Juno.
Lots more graphics Yep this is happening, I’m also getting faster at drawing in inkscape and explaining the after graphics. I’m hoping next year to be able to do complete presentations based on the graphs alone. I’m also going to start using some of the techniques Dan Roam uses in the back of the napkin
Not perfect but I like the general idea. Been trying to get HR involved in using Linked-In.com for quite a while. Not so good to think the cluetrain has been watered down to this however…
After buying the Sony PRS 600, it made sense to sell the old one on Ebay. The new ereader is a better machine in everyway except contrast. As you can see in the photo above the one on the right (old one – PRS 505) is much better in its range of greyscale. The black is black and white very white. While the new one (PRS-600) isn’t so black and white. This means while reading the words are not as sharp. It would be picking up a nice modern hardback and comparing it to a used paperback. Both are perfectly readable but you can see the difference when put together. Obviously I’m not the only one to see this issue.
For me all the other features out way this issue, I’m still looking forward to writing the XSL to convert Tomboy Notes into Sony Notes and back. But if your interested in picking up my old one for cheap, head over to ebay soon.
Matt showed me this earlier in the week but I had to blog it. This is a excellent example of remix culture… Imagine if Amen had claimed copyright over the break? Or if they had licensed it only to the top producers in the music industry.
This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the “Amen Break,” a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music — a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison’s 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.
I’m still in the process of doing all the redirects and general cleaning up but its coming together quite nicely. Once its all stable I’m hoping to spend some time sorting out the styles and themes.
Getting the entries out of Blojsom was easy as pie but then converting them into a format which WordPress wouldn’t barf on was a big problem. In the end I wrote a throw away XSL to do it, because it WordPress didn’t like namespaced elements or generally anything over the standard RSS 2.0 elements. I did manage to push over the Categories and Tags but had to split them apart in WordPress later.
My whole thing is hosted with GoDaddy on their new European Servers and will be quite slow while it caches all requests.
I love Blojsom but I never upgraded to version 3.x which required a database to work. With the need for a database, it meant the ground between WordPress and blojsom was a less so. Then add cheap hosting, amazing plugins, themes and community. And its pretty much a no brainer. I also found that less and less blog editors are supporting Blojsom (some kind of metaweblog xmlrpc category issue). So now I’m able to use Bilbo which is a KDE editor with support for pretty much everything WordPress allows. I’m also able to use Google Gears which is useful when offline.
This was also a chance to get a little more serious about my blogging and footprint online. Hence I’m really hoping to stretch what storytlr can do for me and some of the projects I have for it.
In the meantime, let me know if you see anything very weird which I may have missed….
As promised a while ago, we are open sourcing our platform. A first version is now available at http://storytlr.googlecode.com with a detailed set of instructions on how to install.
With this code, you can host your own storytlr on your own server (or on a shared hosting environment). By default, it is setup as a single user mode, but you can easily change it to a multi user host and therefore reproduce the exact service we are hosting on the current storytlr.com.
If you remember they announced they were shutting down the service a while back, they want to move on to bigger and better things. Funny enough in that period Sweetcron also went open source and the creator moved on to something else. Sweetcron is GNU GPL 3.0 licensed and seems a lot harder to install that Storytlr.
Right now I'm still using Soup.io for ianforrester.org but I am going to install Storytlr and switch it over when I get the chance. I'd also like to do some changes to the code to support APML for one of my projects, I had also considered using storytlr lightly to dynamically pull together BBC backstage media and something very special which I won't reveal yet.
Been quite quiet about Project Canvas for a while. But since its gotten approval from the BBC Trust, I'm sure I can talk about it openly like most things on my blog. Although its fair to say I do work for the BBC and my views do not ever represent my employer (blah blah). I know people working on project canvas and they already know my views.
So first for those catching up what is it?
Project Canvas is the current working name given to a proposed endeavour concerned with internet-connected television – also know as internet protocol television (IPTV) – for the United Kingdom market. It is intended to combine broadcast content (including that currently available via Freeview and FreeSat, and digital radio) with broadband content, delivering both through the television (as distinct from the computer).
The endeavour's core principle is around developing a set of standards – including both technical and content standards – that, once confirmed, will be open to the industry as a whole. These standards will be used to create the necessary hardware (such as set top boxes) and programming content to allow for content typically accessed via the computer on the internet to be delivered to the television, combined with existing digital terrestrial television.
An analogy used often is that Project Canvas is aiming to be the equivalent of Freeview (in the UK) for IPTV and internet video. Like Freeview, Canvas is proposed to have a joint venture structure, the standards will be implemented by way of certification of the set top box devices[2 – S.2.3.3], and the BBC Executive has also stated that the Project Canvas venture itself will not manufacture, sell or support the hardware, and will not create, aggregate or retail any content, or act in any way like an ISP.
Theres a video floating around which Paidcontent captured just before Christmas of Erik talking and showing what Canvas could look like and act like.
Nice stuff but hardly anything to rivial the likes of XBMC, Plex, Boxee or other things creaping in like Roku. Heck I'd even say Sky's Xbox 360 option isn't bad but after playing with it on a friends Xbox over Christmas, its obvious that there still thinking very much about video on demand and a little dusting of social on a new platform. Boring, specially when you got one of the most powerful interactive devices on the market your using as the platform. Anyway back to Canvas. So its a marriage of the broadband with broadcast? Not really unless they were getting married in the early 1900's where men could legally do unspeakable things to there partners. Without stereotyping or being disrespectful, but this marriage is unevern and borked, aka broadband is the beotch. All the partners on board maybe excluding TalkTalk are somewhat broadcasters in someway (even BT have BT Vision). There's not a single Internet company involved and can you blame them? Whats in it for them? Canvas is what a broadcaster would build if they were trying to marry the internet with there own medium.
Saying all that, I'm actually a big supporter of Canvas and actually the BBC should be doing this. Why? Well Peter Evers sums up what I think in a comment to his post.
What I’m basically saying is that while other initiatives like Xbox’s, Plexx, Boxee or NetTV focus on one device (a console, a Macm a Philips tv set), Canvas is possible on every tv with a set top box, which literally is every tv in the UK. The BBC are a party that will have the scope to make this really succesful. It’s not just about the technology, a lot of the success of new technologies depends on the party introducing it and its motives.
The BBC as an initiator makes it available for all of UK, not just people with fancy Macs or Philips TV sets or teenagers with an Xbox. For the 35% of the UK population without internet but WITH a set top box this could just be the thing that gets them online.
Right on the money, canvas should be the default option like Freeview for everyone in the UK. If you want a better experience of how broadband and broadcast can work together, you might have to look elsewhere for now at least. But for now Canvas is the next Red button, it will look old hat in a few years but more and more people will use it and get use to it. It will be a way of life like how Teletext is for alot of people still. This is a good thing, this is what a public broadcaster should do. Peter Evers does ask the million dollar question, how open will canvas be?
Besides, BBC wants to make this platform completely open, which I’m sure Philips, Plexx and Microsoft won’t do. In their case it will always have some sort of link with a certain hardware product.
I'm not in total agreement Boxee is already pretty open, so oepn you can build apps and heck run your own apps store on there platform. Can't see Microsoft, Philips, Virgin, Apple or others doing the same. Like Dlink, I wouldn't be suprised if more hardware makers take on projects like XBMC in the future. But thats fine, those might do well in other markets but for my parents I look forward to seeing them on Canvas soon.
As we count down to end of 2009, the emerging star of this year's holiday shopping season is shaping up to be the electronic book reader (or e-reader). From Amazon'sKindle to Barnes and Noble's forthcoming Nook, e-readers are starting to transform how we buy and read books in the same way mp3s changed how we buy and listen to music.
Unfortunately, e-reader technology also presents significant new threats to reader privacy. E-readers possess the ability to report back substantial information about their users' reading habits and locations to the corporations that sell them. And yet none of the major e-reader manufacturers have explained to consumers in clear unequivocal language what data is being collected about them and why.
As a first step towards addressing these problems, EFF has created a first draft of our Buyer's Guide to E-Book Privacy.
Like I was saying not all ereaders are the same and for me the Sony is the logical way to go.
I just upgraded from the Sony PRS 505 to the Sony PRS 600 which is better known as the Sony Touch Reader, due to its touch screen. My only regret is the screen on the touch isn't as nice and shiny as the 505, in actually fact when put side by side its quite bad, as this video show. But on the plus side, the refresh rate is 3x as fast, I can now search and make notes alongside my ebooks. Also I'm glad to say the Sony Touch reader keeps all the open features of the 505, aka no spying on what books I'm reading or even the need for software to transfer books. What really impressed me however, was the format of the notes and annotations. Yep thats right all in XML and easy to get at because the device mounts like a USB drive. So I'll be writing some TomboyNotes converter/transformer via Conduit soon I expect. And if that wasn't enough, the freehand sketch notes on the touch reader are also in XML/SVG. Which means with a bit of work, it should be easy to convert/transform a rough sketch in a meeting into something which I could use in Inkscape later. Very impressed that Sony kept things simple, open and transparent.
I love reading about social engineering type stuff, and this paper (PDF) by Paul Wilson and Frank Stajano is ideal Christmas after turkey reading. Schneier has the low down as usual.
This is a very interesting paper: “Understanding scam victims: seven principles for systems security,” by Frank Stajano and Paul Wilson. Paul Wilson produces and stars in the British television show The Real Hustle, which does hidden camera demonstrations of con games. Frank Stajano is at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge.
The paper describes a dozen different con scenarios — entertaining in itself — and then lists and explains six general psychological principles that con artists use:
The distraction principle. While you are distracted by what retains your interest, hustlers can do anything to you and you won't notice.
The social compliance principle. Society trains people not to question authority. Hustlers exploit this “suspension of suspiciousness” to make you do what they want.
The herd principle. Even suspicious marks will let their guard down when everyone next to them appears to share the same risks. Safety in numbers? Not if they're all conspiring against you.
The dishonesty principle. Anything illegal you do will be used against you by the fraudster, making it harder for you to seek help once you realize you've been had.
The deception principle. Things and people are not what they seem. Hustlers know how to manipulate you to make you believe that they are.
The need and greed principle. Your needs and desires make you vulnerable. Once hustlers know what you really want, they can easily manipulate you.
It all makes for very good reading. Two previousposts on the psychology of conning and being conned.
Talking of Schneier, he was talking in London on the 11th December and although I was in town I couldn't make the event. Luckily someones recorded the lot and put it up online.
Bruce Schneier did a benefit gig for Open Rights Group last Friday and here's the video of his 'Future of Privacy' talk and the 45-minute Q&A.
