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

Zeroconf’ed up

At the bottom of that page from the Register was a link about the BluePod file swapping. Now I had heard about it but always dismissed it as rubbish talk. Till I sat down and read it today. I had the idea about bluetooth swapping along time ago, but i'm sure many did. But using ZeroConf Lan aka Rendezvous sounds like a excellent idea. I'm actually quite amazed some of the things Simeda are doing in Bucharest, and cant wait to try out there beta webserver. I have to admit I wasnt the biggest fan of Apple for taking ZeroConf Lan and rebranding it as Rendezvous but actually now maybe they might have kept the standard ticking over, as few others are. I might even go as far as installing it on my machines at home now. Also found a client for PocketPC by Apple of all people. And a Hydra type of application which allows you to share media and clippings over Zeroconf/Rendezvous for PC and Mac called Spike. I'm wondering if I can share media to it from other Zeroconf devices not running spike, from example my pocketpc? Will need to try them out tonight for sure.

I have to say Intel got this right. Its all about servers and clients within the Personal area network, a portable webdav server would be ideal, the best I have is my laptop running IIS in webdav mode or using Davenport.


I installed all the above on my ipaq and machines at home, all is well and I'm enjoying zeroconf now. Just need some more apps to take advantage of it.

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Bluetooth finally hits the underground

P900 with the bluetooth keyboard

People use to call me bluetooth boy, because everything I bought had a bluetooth chip inside of it. My tablet, my ipaq, my phones going back to 1999 with the Ericsson R520m. But I've been a little frustrated by the lame cable replacement type of solutions over the last few years. That was till I saw a couple of things recently.

The first one I heard about a long time ago but its only just come out. And that was in the states and Canada. But it seems Stowaway have sorted out there European resellars. Basicly its a Bluetooth keyboard and it works with everything I have, aka one consistent interface for all my notes, editing, blogs, etc. I could even use it at home if I wanted to. But I douht I will give up my Microsoft Erogonomic keyboard yet. But yes finally I can outline as fast as my laptop on my ipaq. I'm seriously going to buy from the states unless I hear about others soon

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Semantic Behavior

Found this interesting idea in my feeds today. I think the crux of the idea can be explained through this quote.

Behavior obviously contains clues about the intent that stitches actions into meaningful streams, although the clues can be awfully misleading: If you see that I move from a web page to a word processing document, there's a chance the first inspired me to write something in the document, although it's also possible that I got bored reading the Web page and decided to get back to work. If I copy from the Web page and paste into the document, you have a stronger clue.

I've already wrote a comment so I hope the trackback works. I sent a email to David, because I think the log of data from such a client application would be perfect for his OS david application. What ever happened to that?

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Progression and Java

Sorry for the odd errors and general slowness of cubicgarden.com. I have updated Resin java server, been messing with some wiki's and tearing my hair out trying to get blojsom to output xhtml 1.0 strict code. The last one is a issue with the url's which dont have escaped ampersounds in it. Instead there just simply & which drives any validator crazy. The server upgrade should mean better performance generally but the testing wiki's mean i'm running many things at once and might counter balance the positive effect of the upgrade.

I also tried to run the Java SDK in server mode using this tweak Miles sent through a few days ago.

Someone has done some research about JVM performance: http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=45250

In a nutshell, you are recommended to run your JVM as the “Server” JVM not the “Client” JVM. The downside is the server JVM takes longer to start, and uses more memory, but in the performance benchmarks, the Java code is faster the C++ code!

I opted for option 2 which means you need to edit java.cfg sp server comes up before client.

   -client KNOWN
   -server KNOWN

You should change them to:
   -server KNOWN
   -client KNOWN

So I did and guess what nothing worked at all. It broke the whole of the server which is scary. I may try again this weekend to be sure…

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What is EBS?

Mark calls it impromptu while David calls it EBS? What ever it is, it seems to allow blogging via xmlrpc and a instant messager client. I'm left wondering if its blojsim sorted out for blojsom 2.x or something alot more. Oh my I never saw your last post Mark, yes would love to do any experiements possible with cocoon and smack if you like. Anyway I hope to know more soon, now I've made my interests public. – by the way how the hell do trackbacks work?

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Xlink experiement

I've tried to get Xlink working, but bigbrother 5 uk overruled my experiments. Will try again tomorrow. Nice guide on xbmp.org.

Also of use – Xlink Kai Instructions, HOW TO GET UP AND RUNNING and Xbmc + Online Gaming Tutorial, in's and outs of KAI3 support in xbmc!

I also had to cut my streampack experiement short. I now at least know how to setup a stream file. Simply a *.strm file with the url on the first line. MMS and HTTP are fully supported, will try ICY and RTSP later.

Ok its the next day, and I've got it all sorted now. Xlink was not working because my account was not registered, so I registered again and bang were in. So heres how I did it.

Register your XTAG username and password at http://www.teamxlink.co.uk. Then download Xlink Kai: Evo VII. Make sure you've added your username and password to the xbmc config file.

< xlink >
 < username >cubicgarden< /username >
 < password >password< /password >
 < /xlink >

(remove spaces around elements!)
Setup Xlink Kai Evo VII with settings like this. Profile = Engine only, Network adapter = Auto detect and lock, Username = your Xtag, Password = your password, Accept UI connections from = Any IP Address, Dont mess with the ports and finally click launch engine (launch UI on the first go try is a good idea too). Then click OK.

Now launch KAI and login. Thats it… You should be good to go. Enjoy and remember to look for the user cubicgarden.

By the way stream pack is working fine, I was watching French TV today at 56kps. I'm going to try adding tons of links myself to uk radio stations and the television streams. Then submit them to stream pack forum

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The State of Wireless London

Harry sent me a link to this study on wirless in greater London. Not read it all the way though but it seems very interesting. More wireless than I actually thought there was. I mean if you look at central London its basicly covered. Its hard to believe that BT openzone has 173 different hotspots while surf n sip the next biggest rival has 91, the cloud has 78 at the moment.

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Forget iTunes music store

Yep forget Apple's itunes release, allofmp3 is where its at.

yes all of mp3 is russian and may not be totally legal in other counties besides russia – but boy oh boy, the ability to pay for how much you actual download rather than per song sounds like a great idea. Specially when you consider downloading music for mobile phones, palmtops and other devices. They support the ipod with AAC Mpeg4 and tons of other formats including WMA, MP3, OGG, Flac and MPC. Check out the online encoding for even more flexability by the way there selection of music isnt bad. I found lots of trance on there but I cant test it against itunes music store because I refuse to download itunes.

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GPL Shareaza

shareaza logo

Shareaza version 2.0 is now available, the biggest and most important change is that it’s now offered under the GPL license. Slashdot covered it a while ago with comments – but I'm only just downloading it now. Will tell you how it goes over time.

Ok first up, the interface with the default skin is a little heavy but attractive and neat. Its very comparable to Winamp 5's default interface. A nicer skin is needed soon. Anyway how does it work? Well it picks up my Bit torrents nicely, read them from clipboards or when i click the file in windows. Opera should be able to send the torrent if i set it up correctly. Thank someone, because the bit torrent downloader is actually good and comparable with Torrent storm which I use to use. Downloaded something quite big very quickly last night. Not really logged on to G2 yet, but might do tonight see how it compares to the plain gnutella network.

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Changes to the cubicgarden

I'm making some long awaited changes to the garden this week. You should start to notice more images creaping into my design at long last. If you reading this now, you should see the sky or grass backdrop on the cubicgarden banner. I'm getting rid of all the tables except the one which makes up the calendar for now, so the blog will be run using pure css. Going to sort out the VM templates so they churn out XHTML 1.1 or at least XHTML 1.0 strict.

I have hopefully fixed the comment feeds. RSS 0.92 Comments and RSS 2.0 Comments. Some of the changes to structure may take a little longer, as I'm going to use blojsom alot more and maybe use some kind of Wiki for other sections of my garden. The first to change will be the mixes, which will have a simular blojsom style interface and this my main blog will pull in parts from my bookmarks (already a blog) and the mixes. My feeds is also up for a change and sort out but maybe in about 2 or 3 weeks.

So if you notice something odd, dont worry it could be me just messing with stuff. But be warned, I'm working to the W3c standards, if your browser does not support XHTML + CSS2 then it might be time to change it… I recommend Opera 7.5, Mozilla or Firefox.

I'm also on the search for a good quality wiki which has these features.
Editing with preview (live preview would be a bonus)
Editing input options (the topcat type buttons)
Real categories
Hierarchy view
GPL or BSD licence (opensource)
XHTML and CSS support
Multiuser
Search (jakarta lucene would be cool)
Recently changed
CSS themes
Metadata and Diff support
Bookmarking
Calendar
Snipsnap support (Textism would be ideal too)
Rss output (input would be awesome)
XMLRPC or Soap interface
Blog support
Comments

Choices so far.
XWiki – http://www.xwiki.org | Forrest – http://forrest.apache.org | JSPWiki – http://www.jspwiki.org | SnipSnap – http://snipsnap.org | Confluence – http://www.atlassian.com. Confluence is the best wiki i've ever seen shame its not open source. Snipsnap is cool but the blog and wiki combined together makes things confusing, dumping Blojsom is simply not a option. I find JSPWiki too plain and too simplex for what I want. I'm really warming to Xwiki as the author is pretty honest about it and where it sits in the sea of wikis. Shame its only alpha and I think it requires a SQL database. Useful page highlighting alot of the Java Wikis also very useful and upto date.

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Television will eat its self?

All the television corps are running around trying to build solutions for the future.

New Service by TiVo Will Build Bridges From Internet to the TV
TiVo, the maker of a popular digital video recorder, plans to announce a new set of Internet-based services today that will further blur the line between programming delivered over traditional cable and satellite channels and content from the Internet.

Interesting specially in the light of… BSkyB launches rival to Freeview
For a one-off payment of £150, it will include the BBC's digital services and Sky News as well as other free stations. But unlike Freeview, a satellite dish will be needed to pick up the service.

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Good luck with the Broadcast Treaty at the World Intellectual Property Organization

Wipo globe icon

On Sunday I passed Cory sitting on the grass at notcon04. And wished him good luck at the WIPO, I think the EFF and others are going to need it for all our sakes… If you honestly dont know what I'm talking about please – i beg of you to read this now.

As usual there has been little about an important issue in the mainstream news. Cory Doctorow and others have been raising awareness but few have picked up on it so far. Slashdot also had a posting yesterday which started the usual slashdotting discussion.

The best way I've found to keep intouch with whats going on is through the union for public domains blog on broadcasting. The EFF page is good for a understanding of whats at sake but not whats going on at this moment. No respect to Cory, his post was a little lost in the boingboing information ocean. But it did provide almost the same if not better links than what I got here.

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A common archive

So I had my meeting with paula today a little latter that expected due to some world service work. But we went off to the non-smoking starbucks and ordered frappachinos before talking shop.

Paula explained the project fully and pointed out the several strands of the project. And all I can say is seriously Paula is awesome and the creative archive couldnt be in better hands…

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Airtunes popped

Airpot Express…
Get a grip people. Its once again Apple coming in late with a slighly more polished product and once again people will buy it and stroke it wildly till they realise theres a terriable fault or downside.
For those interested Linksys did this ages ago. Not exactly stylish but hey it does the job and does video too. Dlink's more stylish version, hey lets not forget Philips Streamium. Yeah yeah Apple got the link with itunes but seriously who cares when you got a xbms streaming?

I'm also serioulsy douhting the range on the express? If its anything like the Extreme, it will throw PC's off the network every minute. Great news if your streaming music I would say… The other interesting for me is once again Apple have held off on Video? Why?
Could it be because they want to bring out video related products together in one batch, once they made as much money off audio as possible? Not sure. Could it be because they dont know how to? Hummm, dont think so. Or could Apple have something in the wings which few others have thought about? Sound about right. But lets not forget the standard complient iChatAV, the simple only Mpeg4 in quicktime or the nasty battery life on the ipods…

How AirTunes works.

For those wondering if AirPort Express supports MP3, AAC, or any other specific file formats, the answer is no. AirPort Express supports Apple's Lossless Compression technology — and everything that your iTunes streams across the network to Airport Express is compressed using that technology.

Did anyone else think propitery in that quote?

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