Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
David marks has finally sorted out a demo of his beatiful but clever project os david.
Here's the very large quick movie for the project. I expect david will put the project online at some point in the future, if he can find a host which will give him lots of bandwidth and xmldatabse storage.
Semantic navigation
Tree view navigation, with Developer weblog
Almost worked on my new ipaq too!
Seriously these guys at HP, are truly coming up with some very useful applications using simple technologies.
Oh also saw this on my travels,
New updates from the author of Blucene. I have not installed or looked at the docs yet, but it allows you to post and delete using a form i believe?
So yesterday evening my college bought me a HP 5550 ipaq with pocketpc 2003, 128meg update and a 256meg sd card. Which honestly is far more than I expected. Thanks Niz and Miles
Anyway, i'm honestly going to blog it from now on, which will make up my report if I have to do one later on.
First thoughts, the screen is so beautiful and bright specially when compared to my old compaq 3630 ipaq. The colours have jumped to 16bit from 12bit but the contrast is perfect now. I never get enough glare to not see the text, even when reflecting the suns position into my own eyes.
At last I have wireless and bluetooth in the same compact framework and with the 128meg upgrade and sd card, I have enough memory to run anything I want. So now I use wifi when i'm in range and bluetooth with my t68i mobile phone for a slower gprs connection. See this is the reason why I needed my 3g phone to be bluetooth! Then I could dialup with that instead.
Oh and also you can redirect all mic and audio to a bluetooth headset! So if I cant get my old one working again, I'll buy one of 3's branded ones as there only 59 pounds and all i need.
There are some neat little things in pocketpc 2003 besides connectivity. At last theres a built in spell checker! Which makes a massive difference to someone like me.
Everything is so much quicker too, I played my old megadrive emulator on both ipaqs side by side and the new one can be alot faster than the old one but also generates the kinda of framerates i didnt think were possible.
I would also like add the biometric scanner is very good and at last I can secure my ipaq without using some complex unlock sequence. It would be nice though if you have the choice of strong password or biometric scan. At the moment i'm using pin or high security biometic (default). Tried out very strong biometric security but you got to get it perfect each time which isnt possible when performing normal tasks.
Found the new ipaq is compatable with the old jackets so I can still use my compact flash cards too. So imagine 256 + 128 + 60 = 444 meg of available space! And I got a 80 meg cf card spare too.
Anyway this also means I can plug into ethernet using a network pcmcia card, which is useful for friends houses and non wifi areas.
In my portable triangle the weak link is now battery life. Which I have yet to try out. As wireless and bluetooth has to be banging the battery for power. Which is good because the main battery is now removeable. Maybe I should have asked for a spare battery too? Well at least the usb cable charges and syncs as standard now.
I was a little disapointed with the software built in as standard, but have quickly realised that it doesnt matter because I have so much memory unlike the old ipaq where i had to put everything not needed by wireless onto the cf card.
But yeah i did think the remote control software would be there as well as the voice over ip software. Maybe there on cd I forgot to take with me?
My own dilemma is what to do with the old ipaq, as my wife wont use it for more than a couple of days. I dont want to sell it as I will get nothing for it and i dont know if i can keep this new ipaq (i'm pretty sure i can). So for now I'm going to retire the old ipaq and put it back in its box. Once i finish transfering files over bluetooth of course.
Yep its all happening in the svg arena, I kinda of wish I could have gone to svg open 2003 but Vancouver Canada? Would be the envy of the office. Oh and also would never have got my HP 5550 ipaq with pocketpc 2003, if I had gone.
The SVG Working Group has released an updated Working Draft of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.2 outlining potential areas of new work. SVG delivers accessible, dynamic, and reusable vector graphics, text, and images to the Web in XML.
The Working Group explicitly encourages public feedback on this draft. Visit the SVG home page.
I know I will be getting involved in this one for sure.
And also…
The SVG Working Group has released the first public Working Draft of SVG Print. The document assumes the reader is familiar with SVG 1.2, and is a guideline that explains how to use SVG 1.2 features for printing.
Havent yet read this draft, but could be very useful to graphic designs and the print world. Imagine SVG being the format of choice for graphics, illustrations for printed documents.
And why not? This is a area where flash has not gone, and very much douht will go.
Yep a trip to brighton is in order for sure. Sand, sun and wireless access…
Please someone, just add power.
Oh my goodness, I dont believe what I am reading. It started off by reading Steve Cayzer's blog. And before I knew it I had 4 tab open looking at different sections in this area.
I truely can not point out how amazing this really is. I've always thought of wrapping images up in xml, not embedding it in. Actually tell a lie, I didnt think it was possible? think of things as if your in the matrix. its just code, so why not?
Anyway heres the w3c rdf photo site outlining the spec. Seriously it brought tears to my eyes.
The goals of the project are partially personal, partially to promote W3C technology. The personal reasons are that we, the authors, have large numbers of photos but always have difficulty finding the exact ones that we want to show to somebody. Digitizing them and describing them in RDF should make it quicker to find the ones we are looking for at any moment.
So what does this all mean? Well in the case of david mark's project os david. (see david if you used xhtml instead of flash, i could link directly to the project, and if xpointer was working fine I could quote directly from your own text).
David has wrapped up his images and videos with xml and wrote a very beautiful interface to navigate around the data. Now if we applied this, we could query the images themselves rather than xml documents.
However one of davids problems was calculation speed, so he used a xml database. Which makes me wonder if there are any databases which support images but wont destory the rdf? Now that would be a good project for someone.
Also on the same tagent, what would photoshop or something like that do to this rich rdf data? I know it kills camera data.
Rdfpic, a real working application written in java, hoping to experiment with it over the weekend
The other side, jpegrdf, getting the data out.
Now if someone wrote a serializer for cocoon which did this, I would be xstatic. And why not? its written in java, sure some one will work it out soon.
There is also talk of intergration into Adobe's Extensible metadata platform which I havent looked at for over 3 years now. Will have to spend more time looking into this later.
All this also bring me back to thinking about Annotea which is a advanced annotation/note tool.br/>
Anyway yes I would like to experiment with this too, specially now they have a client built into Mozilla – Annozilla
Have a look at how powerful this could be Screenshot from current version
Even though I know there not compareable, opml and topic maps. I will use them in simular situations. Or at least write down notes using a outline tool which supports opml then convert them into topic maps.
I'm finding more than ever the need to keep a track of the actual relations between different things. Not just the things themselves.
Good starting points
Topic map.com
Getting started with Topic maps
Xml.com's Introduction to topic maps
Company selling topic map software and a free topic map viewer, they also have some ok papers on topic maps. Including topic maps, rdf and other semantic languages
Zeldman talks about Art direction and design.
Zeldman talks about the message being less important than the design, the product being 2nd to the design. The fact that most of us decorate instead of communicating.
This all comes on the back of talk I've been having with Miles about titles. The designer / developer paradox is what I refer to it as. I for one want to communicate not decorate and clutter.
My new office desk, dont you love the heat stained look?
Yes i'm in heaven, the sun is out in south London and its hot but breezy. So natrually i dont want to be inside working.
So recently I've been sitting outside on the college benches working in the sunshine. As I talked about in my post sunshine and wireless , things dont get much better than this. The only problem i've mainly had uptill now is screen visability with the sun and battery usage.
But its now solved, with a long extention cable hanging out of the fashion department. Now I can have the screen on full brightness and charge the ipaq without a worry in the world.
The alloy metal of my tabletpc does get quite hot in the noon sun, but isnt so hot it feels uncomfitable to use. Which is actually suprising when you consider i was outside from noon till 2000. 8 hours with a hour break from the sun for a meeting in the hot and sweaty college.
Anyway heres some pictures of the view from my 3g phone.
The view from the front
The view from the left
The view from the right
Weird thing my 3g camera phone does with the lens edges. More reasons to hand it back soon…?
Here are some pictures taken from my digital shoplifting in Borders. I was tempted to reduce them but what the hell, sorry to all 56k users. 172k is kinda of large but check out the quality of the shots.
Heard so much about the 3 above, need to read them really.
Looks ok, but the content is told in a nice way. Perfect for lending to friends.
How ironic.
The book i was trying to decide if I should get. About how realitivity and quantium physics are linked in this superstring theory.
Yep and a few programming books which I'll just link to
Apache – the best apache book I found. I want to get rid of iis now and i'm going to install apache 2.0 for sure. This would be a great start…
RSS by Oreilly, maybe a bit out of date but still good
XML-RPC by Oreilly, enough said once again
XML databases – Just what i need to compare xquery to xpath and it has a really decent look at xbase, xlink and xpointer
Wireless security, end to end. Thinking of setting up a radius server on my wireless access point.
I was thinking to myself while posting these, if I could get pop3 to blog working. I would be able to post directly to my blog from my 3g phone.
Now that would be something, maybe this is the outline of mobblogging, but i've only seen mms to blog and java app to blog. Not email to blog.
This gets me thinking again that the motorola phone is more useful than this nec e808. It also does 640×480 pictures I believe? Unlike this piece of crap. Need to do more research into this and quickly before i cant return the phone to 3.
Ok I've had a pretty good time walking around Cambridge today. Very Pee'd off that the conference wasnt on, yeah g thanks apple. And I was very tempted to jump on the train back to work. But nope I thought well i spent the time going to cambridge I might as well have a wonder around.
Cambridge reminds me of bath alot. Old building built around a central hub and tiny roads no one can go down. Its got element of Amsterdam with the amount of people on bicycles wobbling all over the place. But I'm not here to bore you about this.
I poped into superdrug mainly to check out the 3g stand 3 have now setup throught-out different stores.
Here in england superdrug is a odd place to put a stand about selling 3g. But I've learned that superdrug and 3 share a parent company, so it all makes alot more sense.
Anyways, yeah I was checking out the stand with these two women on it. The phones were in glass cases and it all looked pretty good for a non pernimant stand. The kinda of quality you expect when you go to a exhitbion.
ok, so 3 have now realeased there 4th phone and its basicly the same as mine but it has no flip and the screen is larger too.
But what they were talking to me about was, if i dont like my phone i can return it within 14 days and get another one. Hummm i thought, maybe i dont like this phone as much as i first thought i would.
So I have choices now, the Nec 606 is the one most people are going for, it does video calling, has bluetooth, and 32meg. Its pretty much like mine but with no keyboard and only 32meg. oh and its smaller of course. But the battery dies like nothing you've ever seen before.
The motorola on the other hand does everything i want, but it has no video calling at all. So i'm missing out on the main reason for 3g if i get that one?
Of course i have the nec 808 already and the 808y seems to be pretty much the same as the 808.
So the question really is, is video calling important to me? If so i should stay with the nec, if not i should go to the motorola.
See at this moment, there is only 2 people i can call on video calling plus the fact its free for me to call, so that makes a big difference in terms of using it. If i had to pay 50 pence a minute to use it, i wouldnt use it straight forward as that. Maybe if it as low as 20p I would consider it. one pound for 5mins of video calling, mmmmm maybe.
So to the greater question, i would say i should change it. But another thing worries me. If i change it, will it take 3 a another 5 months to deliver a phone to me? There is no douht in my mind once i get 3g working as a modem (hoping to do this today) for my laptop, i will be laughing.
It will be basicly free isdn to midband speed internet on the go when ever i want and all for free till October.
But i can do that with the motorola plus it will be bluetooth so i can do the same with my ipaq as well as tabletpc. Now that would be joy for sure. And god help me and my ipaq if they increase the bandwidth to 2meg as umts can support.
The power drain on the ipaq and phone will be stupid. Really stupid…
Ok so digital shoplifting, yes i commited the unthinkable. I went into borders in cambridge sat down in there inbuilt starbucks and masterminded my plan while drinking a strong mocha and laughing to myself in little giggles.
I then went from book to book just taking pictures of the book covers i found interesting. So i can then go on the web and find them. Of course on Amazon.co.uk. What did you think i ment?
But seriously i took a picture of the cover and the index page or the page which explains why i'm interested and then wrote a comment on the camera to go with the picture. Now thats a smart feature of the phone. I'll have to check the motorola does that before signing up.
Also need to see if that information is transfered to the pc as is or in another way. would be kinda of cool if it was pushed into the image as metadata or from my point much better if it was a text file with just the same file name.
Anyhow, i did end up buying a book for the grand sum of 20 pounds and not shoplifiting it. so the opposite worked for me. But I did want to do something while i was in the store.
Something which is more like the digital shop lifting you hear about in japan. I wanted to send miles a picture and some text of a book about quantum physics, because i wasnt sure if it was any good or not. Now I could have phoned him, but what a waste of time that would have been for him, specially if he was in the middle of something. Also a long text would have been really long because the front cover said it all. A mms would have been perfect really. Humm maybe theres something good about picture messaging after all.
But back to the shoplifting, the camera dont yet have the storage or the speed yet to do a whole book or even a magazine. Its all about that one thing you need rather than the whole thing.
Found this while browsing around. Thanks MS office 2003 beta notes
So at long last I got my 3g phone talking to my Tabletpc. And it was so my fault, I was going to external connect rather than data transfer. Come on guys you know that was a honest mistake that anyone would have made.
Anyhow my problems are not over yet. I tried transfering some java files while doing my music for the long trip up to cambridge (dont ask). And it would transfer them fine, but i go to the java app to run one and nothing. It doesnt see a single of them.
Nightmare for sure…
So whats the plan of action? well i'm going to try downloading 3's own java apps to see what there named as. Because i think its as simple as that really. If not, i'll have to into the specs to see what it does and doesnt support.
I have to say this phone is driving me bloody nuts. The battery lasts umm, one day at the most. Hence why 3 put two chargers in the pack. If there was a usb sync cable which also supplied power at the same time then yeah i'll be happy. But oh no, this cable they give you only syncs and nothing else.
Which is damm ignoying because for example i was transfering music (will come on to that in a bit) and it was so slow, but i couldnt leave it o ver night because the battery would die. Yes you guessed it the power and the usb connection are the same port.
But i dont get it because ericsson have been doing this for years and there cables are split. So you can charge the ohone while syncing. Why does nec have to be different? Maybe because there eastern.
Ok good and bad news on media.
It does indeed play music and video from external source which is great but only a selected amount.
Mpeg4 and 3gp on the video front, note it captures up to 12secs of mpeg4 too. And on the music front were talking ogg, 3ga and wma. Yeah what a suprise, no mp3 at all. But I have yet to actually upload any mp3s to it just to check it doesnt do it for sure. Ogg is also a suprise specially alongside windows media.
So I have the reasons why blogging should be put into the college for next year, but how am I going to do it? Well here's a few issues and thoughts buzzing around my head at the moment.
First up, how is blojsom going to cope with 1100 students and staff using it?
I know it scales but how far does it scale really? I mean blojsom like most blogging systems seem to be made for single people or groups of trusted people.
What were basicly building is something like moveable type or blogger, the system in which blojsom will exist as such. Here are a few ideas for the system…
1. The simple way = the way i can see it working for now.
We use blojsom on one server under one servlet only. There will be no xmlrpc access, people can only blog by putting the entry files in a certain directory. That directory will be mapped on to there desktops or user area. We will use standard file system authentication to stop people changing other peoples files, etc.
They are welcome to use any kind of text editing tool they like, but we will deploy and have training on one we rate highly. More than likely this tool will support xhtml and be multiplatform for osx and nt support.
2. The email drop
Basicly the same as above but we add email to blog feature for those's who want to blog offsite. I have not yet tried this feature out, but it could be the same authentication problem as xmlrpc, where the person blogging can blog to any part of the system. Which is not what we want.
3. The xmlrpc way = the way were doing it at the moment
This way we use one server and blojsom but allow blogging over xmlrpc only. We deploy a blogging app on peoples desktops and direct people to use that to blog. Now this runs into the major headache of xmlrpc authentication.
First up how do you maintain the list of authenticated users?
And how do you stop people from publishing to areas where they shouldnt?
4. The xmlrpc way 2 = I think the best way at the moment
This is the same as above but we deploy a staff blojsom and a 2nd servelet running the student one. That way students can fight it out and the like but not interfere with the critical newsletter system.
5. The multiple servlets
We deploy multiple servlets and allow different departments or areas of studies to take care of one. But its pretty much the same as the above solution and has the same problems too.
6. The webdavvy
This is based around version 1, but allows offsite access by the webdav protocal. Each persons weblog folder will also be a webdav folder.
Nice idea but it adds another layer of confusion to the system, but this would also allow the uploading of images, audio and video.
So the issues are,
We need to check against our ldap server to make sure the person writing the weblog is writing to the correct folders. And what kinda of configuration are we going to deploy for blojsom?
On top of all this we have to decide on the input for users. We have the oppotunity to deploy a application on the desktops and that also requires great consideration, which I wont go into now…
