Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
For the love of god, mankind, whatever can someone please attempt to or help port over the almost open source project RSSsaver. Its killing me that there is no decent RSS screensaver for Linux and RSSsaver is getting quite mature now, hell even the owner of the project wants it ported and free software based.
Ok what the hell am I doing up at 3mins to 8am? Yes this is so wrong on so many levels. Someone set a meeting for 10:30am then changed it to 9:00am. Ok I can live with that but setting the meeting all the way down almost near the M25 in a place only accessable by car or only one train is insane. Basiclly it meant I had to get up 6:30am, be out of the house by 7am (yes no time for breakfast, oh I long for those days when it use to take me 10mins to shower and get changed). Anyway the train from Woolwich Arsenal was due to leave at 7:10am and did. Luckly thanks to shouting at the guy who was screwing around with his travelcard ticket I was on it. If I wasn't I would be screwed. Now let me take a moment out to say to those who would say to me, why didn't you get the one before so you can be certain you would be there on or before time. Well let me fill you in, if I was to do that. I would have had to be on the 6:55am train (which to the sounds of it my flatmate used). That would have required me to get up at 6:15am and the train is the slow one which means I would have got there all of 5mins earlier that the other one. So screw that, i'm sorry I'm not getting up 15mins earlier so I can get there 5mins earlier. Sorry I'm being harsh and grumpy but I got other issues.
In the mornings the trains are bloody packed to the max, not even standing room, only squeeze room. But what really put me in a bad mood today was my windows mobile phone. Yesterday I restart my phone and for some reason during booting up it crashed when loading up egress my rss reader. Why it was loading it up so early I don't know but it got upset with some update and bang off it went. After a series of restarts and charges I decided to leave it over night. Wake up to find its still screwed, so I had no option but to do a cold restart and wipe everything off it. Yes this is what Steve f'ing jobs was talking about but screw him, my phone is my phone and its pretty useless without the additional 3rd party applications – even if there is the risk they might kill the phone. And lets be honest phones go wrong anyway. Because today my work phone a Nokia N80 didn't work when making a call. It makes call but I then have to switch it to speaker phone to hear the other person. I haven't put anything on the phone and I've done nothing with it. Its even still got a standard 128meg memory card in it, which is insane because I have 1gig cards hanging around in my bedroom. About 4 months ago it wouldn't full sync with my computer and 2months after that it certain applications such as mail kept freezing up, ultimately requiring a reboot. How does Apple and Steve 'my way or the highway' Jobs think his device is going to survive the test of time? Anyhow I've digressed too much.
Some of you smarter folks are maybe asking what happened to your scooter Ian? Well its in the bike shop being MOT'ed and I was meant to pick it up yesterday. But I called to check at 4pm and they said call back at 5pm when I found out yes its ready but I need to pick it up before 6pm. Now White City to Liverpool Street and a short bus ride or walk should be do able in 30mins. But oh no, it took all of 45mins and by the time I got to Liverpool Street when i could call them, it was after 6pm already and they were not answering there phones at all. So yes I had no bike. This wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't going to Berlin early tomorrow and had not a ton of other things to do today including picking up my bike, repairing my phone, arranging a geekdinner and packing.
Google has announced OpenSocial, a new open API for social networks. The new standard will allow developers to create Facebook-like apps on any social network site that implements it with the same calls.
The open API will have three parts
- People
- Storage
- Activity stream
All of these calls will have a GData counterpart and they will use HTML and Javascript only. Google is considering adding OAuth (Radar post) to the API.
This is huge because finally we're starting to see a common standard being build into different social networks. There are some caveats however like no support for Facebook or Myspace. But good to see Plaxo and Linkedin involved in this API project. I told you Google were up to something…
From the Backstage Blog, a frank discussion about DRM and Cross-platform support. It all started when I asked Ashley a few questions recently about the iplayer strategy. Ashley answered the question with quite a bit of passion and Matthew Cashmore thought hey wouldn't it be a good idea to get some of that passion in a recording. He is the result which you can judge for yourselves…
The iPlayer, no don't do a runner, seriously, it's taken over the mailing list, dominated our discussions and is something that many members of the backstage community care an awful lot about. So do we. We all know the questions. Why don't we stand up to the rights holders? Why do we insist on using DRM? Why did we sign a secret deal in blood with Microsoft?
So we finally decided that these questions needed answers, and the only person to talk to was the boss. We present 26 minutes of questions and answers about iPlayer, DRM and cross platform support with Ashley Highfield, Director Future Media & Technology.
In this frank discussion we cover the DRM issues, explain that iPlayer isn't a Microsoft only party and ask why didn't we use a non propriety solution.
You can get the file directly from Blip.TV under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence in Mpeg3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.
In a follow up to the simply amazing The machine is using us. Professor Michael Wesch has started to tackle the subject of students university experience.
a short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.
Its the start of a larger project which we can all take part in.
Thanks Robin for the link to the one I almost missed
Its been a really busy week and I've still not quite got around to blogging most of it but I did want to say (quickly) that the Videos for the Women in Games Mixer videos (part 1 and part 2) are now up on BlipTV. As usual unedited and under a creative commons licence, so you can edit the best bits if you like. Nothing to stimulating but interesting. Good work Thayer.
You can also find the boagworld 100th Live meetup video at the same place this time in 4 parts. Expect to hear audio from the Will Wright Lecture, some shouting about how Andrew 'amatuers are killing the industry' Keen got a frosty reception at the Arts Council and some writing about other games related events soon. Still I can't believe I missed Toshio demonstrating Electroplankton at ZeroOne, I would have paid to have been there. Anyway, don't forget today is the Geekdinner with the Wii and Thursday a Geekdinner with Stowe Boyd.
Well to be honest it was going so well till I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10. Now I can't put my laptop into standby/suspend or hibernate. This means I need to switch it off everytime I make a trip anywhere longer that a short walk. If I shut the lid, it locks up and I end up having to force the shutdown with the power button. I'm not the only one and there is an official bug been raised. George reckons I have 3 options… Live with it, downgrade or change kernal version. I prefer to keep 7.10 because I actually like some of the new features but hate not being able to suspend.
Another thing broke recently, Hamachi. It was working fine for ages then it broke. Problem is that it will launch as usual but hit the power button and I get a error saying could not log into Hamachi. Yes I have tried different Gui's and from the shell. Whats extra weird is my two other Ubuntu machines are running Hamachi without a problem now.
On the upside, Compiz graphics is seriously tuned now and you can really tweak the settings to your perfect taste now. Tomboy notes has webdav syncing now. I'm already thinking about syncing it with Exist DB (xmldb) which I'm going to run on my workstation in the near future. I have switched my windows home server over to Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS because I wanted something rock solid. And to be honest its a dual Pentium 3 with tons of hard drive space and memory, it doesn't need 7.x.I Put Webmin on it and everythings working including Hamachi, SSH, Cups (printer server) and Samba. I'm trying out Amanda for backup again, so if anyone from Amanda wouldl like to help out, just comment.
Bluetooth support in 7.10 has come along a lot but the Bluetooth support in KDE seems a lot stronger again. George showed me the lock and unlock feature I've always wanted for my laptop. Unfortually it doesn't seem to see my windows mobile phone, I think maybe because its looking just for phones while my spv comes up as a computer on other scans. Also explains why it can see my work Nokia N80 all the time. Virtual Box is setup and running Windows XP SP3. I tried to run Virtual Dj and it does work but if you put it under any pressure it gets very slow and syncronisation of music becomes a joke. So for my digital djing, I'm going to have to switch back to Windows with a reboot. I've not attempted to put Particls on it but it might work virtualised.
I recently asked a friend about why they had joined Facebook as it tends to hate internet applications which collect data and involves some kind of social aspect.
well, to me all these manage-your-friends-online apps only have one purpose: advertising and adress collection. they are one of the reasons people receive f*cking penis enlargement spams and similar trash.
i believe in modern communicaton, face to face and i already hated the expressions facebook and ringo from day one. they describe that the people are incabable of communication although they have all the best means in our modern society. facebook – i collect my friends faces, the exterior apperance gains importance over real personality values, a quick glance instead of a serious conversation, that's what it symbolises.
the people are plain lazy and comfortable, that's all, i hardly receive any proper emails like the real letters i used to get, ususally short sms style messages like abbreviated postcards. hm, i find that sad ;(i still receive and send a lot of snail mail and i love it!
Its weird because I only get snail mail with bills and official documents in it now, the rest is junk or miss-directed mail (I get a lot of this).
So I've been downloading lots of media recently, believe it or not but me and my flatmate are eating through 168 gigabytes of data a month! Before you all point the finger at me, my flatmate is on skype everyday for long periods of the day. Anyway it means nothing because thankfully moving to Free software network means I'm only using half of my allocated bandwidth a month (yes I do pay 30 pounds a month for this connection, but rightly so). Anyway theres some great media to download.
If your not watching Dexter season 2 then what are you doing? Spooks season 7 (i think) on UK TV is certainly better that 24 ever was. Its worth noting Dragon's Den is also back and has a slightly new look. Back to American TV, and I can't help but watch Ugly Betty season 2 and Prison Break season 3
which seems to jump the shark every episode now. On the upside Heroes season 2 is simply amazing and can not be missed. While jumping back to the UK again for the last time Billie Piper in a Secret Diary Of A Call Girl is strangely non-sexy and more funny that anything else. Still worth a watch, but certainly cheap TV. Its a shame the real hustle just finished but I'm sure Hustle season 5 will start up again, soon. Although they will need to get back the female from Dexter first. There's certainly enough to watch till Lost comes back.
