Over the bank holiday, I reinstalled tabletpc from a fresh back up I did when I first got it. And to my amazement it actually worked. So I have not got my pen and inking back, its a shame I now have to install office 2003 beta once again, but it was time for that beta2 technical refresh anyway. Now if I can just find who nicked the cds…
Author:
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
Output escaping = bad?
I am so pee'd off, People are saying output escaping is evil, dont use it blah blah. I yes I somewhat agree with the points. But what happens when your recieving a xml stream which unfortually you have no control over? Well? Exactly what can you do? Output escaping is very useful in such a situation. But oh no, its evil man.
The feeling is that like html to xhtml there was a transision, and this also needs to happen in this area too. Until we get finer grain controls in xslt 2.0 and xpath 2.0 then I challenge anyone to solve the issue.
dark art of ping pong
Syndicating learning objects with RSS and Trackback
On the back of my wonder about what exactly is track back. Comes this. Comes in multiple formats including Quicktime for some unknown reason?
abstract reads like this,
Customized collections of learning objects from multiple repositories are achieved with simple, existing RSS protocols, creating access to a wider range of objects than a single source. This provides discipline-specific windows into collections, contextual wrappers via blogging tools, and a system for connecting objects and implementations via TrackBack
Presentation by Alan Levine, Maricopa Community Colleges.
CSS Layout Techniques: for Fun and Profit
Wired magazine this sept 2003
Just reminding myself to check out wired this month.
PowerPoint Is Evil
[Coming August 20]
Infographic guru Edward Tufte wants to kill the messenger.
Sounds worth waiting for…same as this.
MIT Everyware
[Coming August 26]
Every lecture, every handout, every quiz. All online. For free. Meet the global geeks getting an MIT education, open source-style.
Amazon sydicates
Its official now, no dirty work arounds needed. Amazon goes RSS
Amazon now provides RSS feeds embedded inside the HTML pages. To actually subscribe to the RSS you will need to take a look at the source of the page and then find the link to manually add it to your RSS newsreader
Now if only others could do the same…
What the heck is TrackBack?
I'm still to this day unsure of what trackbacks are, and even more confused after reading the moveabletype documatation about it.
I'm not the only one, Bob DuCharme is having issues. And he tries to explain in his post about the same issue.
GeoURL
Extensible 3D
I'm sorry but I was one of the people in love with vrml. It was amazing to think about for me at that time.
I use to write my 3d scenes in pov ray. And yes it was hard going but I learned so much, and loved watching my old machine do pixel by pixel rendering.
But anyway, I always wish I could make my scenes come alive, you know walk around them, explorer the views from many different directions. Hence when I heard of vrml I was blown away and wanted to use it in the same way I wrote my povray scenes.
Fast-forward past the 1st wave of vrml and at long last vrml is also going to be xml-ised. Could we finally start seeing increase use of vrml? I somewhat douht it, but still feel optimistic that like svg this will grow and become ubiquous.
Anyway heres a article on xml.com titled Extensible 3D: XML Meets VRML, which gives a overview of where the new standard sits at the moment in relation to others such as 3dml, xml, mpeg4, etc.
I'm kinda of glad x3d supports binary, vrml and xml. As everyone is supported then, its in the same way svg supports svgz which is gzip compressed svg for super small sizes, perfect for delivering over gsm connections.
Its also good to see theres java and ecmascript bindings, as I was worried java3d would take off and take people down the wrong path.
I had wished there was more intergration with other xml standards such as smil for animation and svg for texturing (specially with its filter effects, could have been a killer). But all that will come, x3d basicly keeps vrml syntaxes but puts them in the xml world, which isnt a bad thing for the first major release.
I had thought about converting stuff to vrml using xsl in cocoon, but the thought of turning well structured data into a C/C+ text syntax, sounded like too much hard work. Now x3d is available, it would be a trival task to convert other content into x3d. I should do it soon as a proof of concept, just to make sure i can do it cleanly. I would really like to join a aggergator to x3d, so all the elements would be live but exist in 3d space. Which would give new possibilities for navigation and viewing.
Meeting up
Ok so this is something I've been meaning to blog for a while now.
I've been going to the meetups in London, and I've got mixed feelings about the whole thing. First up its very american rather than european as we bump into people all the time.
I went to 3 different meetups over last week, graphic designers in vibe bar, wifi in the media club and webdesigners which was in the best venue to date. So, quickly because its getting late…
_Graphic designers_ – no one else turned up and spent all the time asking people if they were part of the graphic designers meetup with friend dave. Left one hour later.
_Wifi_ – meet a interesting guy from india, who runs a business from there where he gets uk businesses coding done over there for a cheap. Specialises in tradional webservices. Needs designers, meeting up at college tuesday to talk about students working for him. Could be good for both parties.
Meetup was crap otherwise, left one hour later. What a silly place to have a public meetup? A private bar! Well done. Spent 10mins outside thinking of ways around the security guard.
Odd police presence afterwards though, wonder what that was all about. Will need to check bbc site later. About 3 police cars 2 bikes and a unmarked police car surrounding the media club block.
_webdesigners_ – Odd location down and around Angel station. Up 2 flights of stairs. Nice venue shame about the guys toilet, very cute bar lady. Anyway, no wireless in the area which was a shame and were going to leave about 1947, when Lucas turns up and sees the laptops on the table and I must have though, "Yep those two must be webdesigners".
Anyway, yeah we had a good old natter about everything web related and swapped email addresses 2 hours later. Cool guy from Argentina just moved over from Miami, sure I'll be seeing more of him soon, which would be good.
Theres a bloggers meetup this wednesday in Waterstones – Picadilly of all the places to have a meetup. Well at least its public and wont shut till 10pm.
I'm undecided if I'm gonna go or not.
Aggregation webservice – Bloglines
Bloglines is a server-based RSS aggregation system. Many blogs and newsfeed services publish RSS feeds, special files containing the content of the site formatted for easy parsing. Bloglines allows people to subscribe to these feeds. Once subscribed, Bloglines periodically checks the feed for changes or additions.
My first thoughts are this is good for those without access to a server of there own or no broadband connection. And its looks very simular to flock, but it says there using a combination of things. On the minus side it doesnt allow you to collect the aggeration outputs like flock does. So no sharing onwards which is a bad idea. I will need to sign up to check it out for sure.
It does however let you use opml to inport and export feeds, which makes me wonder what they would make of my many feeds
I wonder what there revenue model will be? email marketing or feed in advertising into there listed feeds? The easy subscription bookmarklet sounds dodgy as heck.
How Much Does Bloglines Cost?
Bloglines is completely free to use. Text advertising and additional fee-based services will be launched in the near future.
Using mailinator for the first time then it would seem. Using the email address testuser@mailinator.com with the password testuser.
Got my validated email a sec ago
Hello,
Your email address has been validated and your Bloglines membership has
been confirmed.
Now that you have a Bloglines account, you can subscribe to blogs
easily. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs to see a list of the
most popular blogs on Bloglines. Also see http://www.bloglines.com/newblogs
for a list of new blogs, updated daily. If you already have a list of
subscriptions in OPML format, you can import them automatically. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/manage for more information. For an easy way
to subscribe to new blogs that you find, see http://www.bloglines.com/help/easysub
How can we improve Bloglines? We would appreciate your feedback. Go
to http://www.bloglines.com/contact to send us comments.
Thank you for using Bloglines.
The Bloglines Team
Uploaded my opml file from flock and it worked!
So its now, my own flock server vs bloglines. We shall see what happens, you know I'll blog the results.
CSS Designer?s Wishlist
I've always said I want to be more involved with the -standards- sorry reconmenations the w3c.org do. One of the top ones would be CSS3 or the next one.
Anyway mezzoblue's blog about the new standard has been recieving some interest.
My thoughts are simular to mezzo's, about why designers dont get involved. I mean no disrespect to anyone but wasnt xslt ment to be for designers to use? Thats a serious gap between reality and wishful thinking.
Anyway the spec looks good so far but yeah this will keep a few flash heads happy for a while…
Transparency will be available anywhere you can use colour.
Inaccessible Website Demonstration
I was alerted to this Inaccessible Website Demonstration through mezzoblue. Which gets the message of accessability over very quickly. Its not just about the technology its about the way you design the sites. The blury example is one which touch me, as I've always been told my sizes are too small on cubicgarden.com
Opie (Open Palmtop Integrated Environment)
The question of what I do with my old compaq 3630 ipaq still bothers me. I cant just sell it as I wont get much for it and I would rather make sure it makes a difference to someones life than sell it. As such…
Anyway I found something to do with it. Thanks Infosync. Install Opie Linux on it.
So I did.
Its alot of hassle to put opie on the ipaq, but if you follow the instructions to the T it works fine. The scarey part was when you first boot up the ipaq from cold and it sits there booting up opie without much feedback. Anyway it all looks good now.
When you start up opie the screen is a little low res and it flickers a bit, but my old ipaq screen wasnt the best anyway. Looked at the updated packages and downloaded a few bits and bobs like web server, samba server, etc. To note it doesnt support 3com wireless cards, but it liked the oroncio and compaq cards. Never had a chance to read the opie user manual till now.