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

The logical conclusion of FB alibi case?

Freeze Frame cover

I over hear someone suggest that the guy who used Facebook as an Alibi was very clever and that more of us should record our lives to prove where and what we had done. My instant thought was to the film Freeze Frame.

Sean Veil is an ultra paranoid murder suspect who takes to filming himself round the clock to provide an alibi, just in case he's ever accused of another crime. Problems arise however when the police do come calling and the one tape that can prove his innocence has mysteriously disappeared.

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Revolver: Your mind will not accept a game this big

Everyone seemed to hate Revolver, and honestly I can understand why. On the surface its nothing like any of the other films Guy Ritchie has done. It also takes its self far too seriously. But what people missed is the sharp plot and cool one liners. The person to look out for is André Benjamin as Avi, he brings a certain element of smoothness to the whole plot, which I have to agree is complex and not easy to explain.

After spending seven years in solitary confinement and having his sister-in-law murdered, confidence trickster Jake Green (Jason Statham) is out to get revenge on Dorothy Macha (Ray Liotta).

Jake Green is a hotshot con artist who has acquired a specific strategy (referred to as “the Formula”), that is supposed to lead its user to win every game, during his seven-year stint imprisoned in solitary confinement. The Formula itself was discovered by two unnamed men in adjacent cells either side of Jake’s own. During the first five years of his seven-year sentence, the three men communicated their thoughts on confidence tricks and chess moves via messages hidden inside provisional books, such as ‘The Mathematics of Quantum Mechanics’. They plan to leave their cells simultaneously, but end up leaving Jake behind, who ends up serving the remaining two years. He finds that all of his possessions and money have been taken by the two men with whom he had shared everything but, having the two men’s Formula, he went about making a lot of money at various casinos. Two years later, Jake has garnered a reputation that leads many casinos to fear his freakishly good ‘luck’. The Formula is seen to apply to any game, and is often exemplified by his apparent mastery of chess. The story revolves around Jake’s epiphanic awakening, as he learns how to apply the Formula to the ‘game’ of life.

I think the reception says it all about the film…

The film was generally panned by critics: for example, it has been criticised on grounds of pretension and having an over-complicated plot by critics such as Mark Kermode. Reviews were so poor in the UK that The Guardian ran a story on how the distributor was able to attribute a quote to The Sun saying that the director was “back to his best”. The quotation came from a section of the Sun Online website created by a PR agency on behalf of the film’s distributors.

There were, however, some positive reviews as well. Mark R. Leeper conceded that it was “a film for a narrow audience”, but said that he personally rather “liked it” and gave it a score of 7/10. According to Brian Orndorf, Revolver “is the perfect movie for those who like to crack things open and dig around the innards”, saying that it “reminded [him] quite a bit of Richard Kelly’s film, Donnie Darko”. He goes on to explain that “both films have a taste for the deliberately confusing, sharing scripts that take the viewer on a ride that requires much more than one simple viewing.”

So there you go a film for a niche audience who like there films with complex story arcs and twisted concepts. What more do I need to say?

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Wake up to light in the mornings

Philips Wake up light

I heard about these light alarms which wake you up using daylight from a large bulb instead of a nasty buzzing noise like traditional alarms. So in an aid to improve my wake up routine I invested in a Philips Wake-up Light HF3463. Of course I never paid 100 pounds for it, actually I picked it up for 20 pounds because I knocked the retailer down again and again due to the bad state of the box, paint on the power lead and that it was a return product.

So far I got to say its working pretty well, I do feel better waking up to the bright light and I tend to wake up about a minute or two before the set time or the noise of blips (which I have mine set to). It all sounds like marketing crap but there is something about the bright light which does work even in my room with lots of glowing leds from machines and mobiles.

Will this be a path to a more healthy lifestyle of waking up early and feeling full of energy? I doubt it, I still feel very rough in the mornings and feel so much more alive at night but anything which gets me up without that jolt has got to be pretty good.

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Tesco: All that technology but no ethnic food?

Tesco's online store for home delivery is great, I've been using it for something coming up to a decade I'm sure. But what I don't understand is with all the choice, options and clever ways to drill through the database of items, you still can not buy or order ethnic food or drink.

I'm sure I've highlighted this problem before and Tesco said it depends on which store your close to. Aka they only reflect whats in the store around the corner. Well I'm sorry but its almost 2010 and thats not a acceptable excuse as far as I'm concerned. Imagine if Amazon said that?

What kills me is I'm only after Popcorn Kernals to go in my new popcorn machine. I had no idea that Popcorn Kernals are ethnic goods, wow because they are so exotic of course. So now on top of my full tesco order, I now need to head down to ASDA in Hulme to buy Popcorn Kernals and a loaf of hard dough bread. Tesco if your listening, everything should be available, if it requires extra time or effort to get the item, warn the customer and in extreme cases, suggest a very small service charge. I would have paid at 50p extra to have it delivered instead of having to scoot down to hulme just to pick up two items.

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Is the Relational Database Doomed?

databases

Of course not, but finally thankfully people are starting to take serious stock of other types of Databases. I'm no Database expert but for ages I never understand why I was serialising XML into a relational database to pull it out a bit later in XML. So I started doing some digging and found out about XML databases and object stores. This was way back in 2001. Later in 2004, the suggestion of a XML database or any other database except MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle was a no go. How things have changed.

In BarCampLondon7 Simon Wilison gave a talk where he listed a range of different types of databases or datastores. There all listed on this Etherpad titled #bcl7 non-relational database BoF. A very impressive list indeed and there's much more. So will we finally see people moving away from the LAMP stacks? Maybe but I its going to take a while.

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Novell Pulse catches the Wave

You got to hand it to Novell, they are quick off the mark. Rather that trying to fight Wave they have embraced it (something I suggested big collaboration corps should do). Novell have a nice clean enterprise product/service called Pulse, which looks and feels like a very cleaned up Wave system. But here's the kicker, it interoperates with the Wave protocol. smooth move Novell and I'll certainly keep an eye on Pulse for our future plans.

Novell Pulse Demo from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.

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Software ahead of the curve: Gwibber 2.0

Gwibber 2.0 Screenshot

Gwibber is an open source microblogging client for GNOME that supports Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Pownce, Identi.ca and other popular social web services.

Yes I know its not Tweetdeck but hey hello, it supports more account types than just Twitter and Facebook. Its also got interesting support non microblogging services for Flickr, Brightkite, Digg and a few others. I've been pretty vocal about knocking Gwibber's stability in the past but now its rock solid. Currently I have 7 different accounts running through it and it doesn't even blink. So solid, that I have dumped the Air app Twhirl. The only thing which I have seen which is close to Gwibber is Eventbox/Socialite which is mac only. There's already talk about making a QT version of Gwibber which could work on the Windows and Mac platform too. I expect most people will look at it and say, yuk. But to be fair its using my own custom style from ubuntu, and it will get better. The concept of Gwibber and how it works puts it a few steps in front of a crowded microblogging market.

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The yin and yang of Ubuntu 9.10

So I upgrade my dell XPS laptop to Ubuntu 9.10 pretty soon after the launch of 9.10, and to be honest its been pretty good to me. However I have had a couple of problems. The first major problem which still needs to be solved is shutting the lid doesn't send the machine to suspend. I had this problem way back in the 7 series and Glyn fixed it for me by creating some custom script. I got a feeling that script might be causing problems now, so hopefully it won't be too much of a hassle to fix. I just have to remember to set it to suspend beforehand till then. I have no idea if hibernate works but I don't really use it anyway.

I have reinstalled Ubuntu 9.10 twice already, once because the display got really messed up (no idea why and all my messing with xandr made no difference) and the first time because there was some major problem with finding partitions in fstab, from my previous 9.04 install. Each time, a reinstall has been pretty easy, pop the disc in give it 20mins and we're back to scratch again. Nothing lost except the applications. All preferences and personal files stay untouched which is ideal.

There's not a lot of new stuff in 9.10 from what I can tell, instead I'm getting a real feel that things are getting very stable, ready for 10.4 which is rumoured to be a LTS (long term support) version. I've been using Firefox with between 20-30 tabs over the last few days and its been pretty flawless. During that time I've been using Youtube like a fiend for reasons which I may blog about later. In the past going page to page with so much flash would cause all type of chaos and slowdowns. But its not only Firefox which seems fine, everything seems super tuned. Memory usage is way down on previous versions, even with 30tabs open, evolution, gwibber, skype, pidgin, banshee, rhythmbox, tomboynotes, specto, keepass, etc all open at once, my memory usage just hit 1.1 gig of physical memory.

Compiz feels solid as a rock now, don't get me wrong its been good and worked well but now it feels impossible to crash. Pidgin, Gwibber, Evolution and Gnome-Do all seem very stable too. Not only that but Gwibber 2.0 is cleaned up and and I have now dropped using Twirl and Tweetdeck because of Gwibber 2 (I might do a blog post about just that alone). Specto and Conduit have added new social features which makes it extra useful with tracking things like RSS feeds. Generally everythings good and the day in day out applications are solid.

Heck even the battery monitor reports the time better that ever before, not only does it know my battery is screwed and only shows theres a maximum of 25% capacity counts down correctly from that point in minutes. Theres a few new things I've noticed which I've not really had time to play with yet. Pulseaudio has been tighten up and now includes support for Apple airtunes and DLNA/UPnP devices. I had a quick try to see if XBMC would pick it up but it didn't although I can see its working on other machines and the UPnP discovery tool. The general style of Ubuntu and user experience has also gone up in the latest version. Software centre bugs me a bit but its much more usable that add/remove apps. I still have my own custom themes (sandy box and jade garden) but I've left the default boot and login screen alone as there very attractive. Oh yeah and boy does Ubuntu boot up fast.

The last sting in the tail is the external display. For some reason external displays have changed since 9.04. There seems to be some kind of autosensing which picks up anything plugged in and tries to sync with it. Hence 2mins before starting the BarCamp welcome talk, everything went very wrong with my laptop. I have since installed the Grandr which is a gui for RandR, I hope to have this issue under control.

So all in all, a good upgrade but be careful, its not all blue skies

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Google specs worth checking out

Its been ages since I've written in my blog, so I'm hoping to try and make up for that with a series of blog posts over the weekend.

While at BarCampLondon7, I attended a couple of sessions about some very cool technologies which Google are behind. Like most of you I'm skeptical of anything any large company does, specially specs but its hard to pick any hole in any of these I would say. Adewale also did a excellent job of explaining them and there context for use.

oEmbed – oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly. Its already being used on Youtube and many others. You request a resource and it gives you back xml or json for the resource instead of returning a nasty piece of html or javascript. Very neat.

Salmon Protocal – Salmon aims to define a standard protocol for comments and annotations to swim upstream to original update sources — and spawn more commentary in a virtuous cycle So from what I understand, its an attempt to standardise all these commenting systems like cocomment and disqus (which I use on this blog even). They shouldn't really feel threaten because they could support Salmon and add value to the basic concept.

Wave federation protocal – Well this goes without saying but I learned that its now very easy to setup a wave server. So I expect I'll be playing with that soon. There's also a lovely guide to Wave by Gina Trapani which will grow into something much more complete in time.

pubsubhubbub
 – A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS. Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks) when a topic (feed URL) they're interested in is updated. This is a difficult one to explain but generally its a clever way to poll for updates without polling the server. Instead you submit a request and a status server alerts you to when the change has happened. It sounds complex but its actually not and its quite neat. Like most google things, its worth flicking through the presentations on the site.

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