Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
What was waiting for me in my inbox today…
To: Ian Forrester
We are pleased to accept the following proposal for XTech 2007.
- Pipelines: Plumbing for the next web
It has been scheduled for 16:45 on 16 May 2007.
Please confirm that you have received this acceptance and can deliver the presentation.
Thank you,
Edd Dumbill
So my presentation at BarCampLondon2 will be a very early draft for whats to come in May.
The lasers are calling me or something… As part of my 2007 resolutions, I said I would go clubbing once a month. Well I'm itching to go clubbing again at Turnmills (damm flash site). The person I would love to hear is M.I.K.E, his tunes are right on the line between Trance and Progressive (perfect for listening to at work). But he's on when I'm up in Scotland (Friday 2nd March) and I'm meant to be in Bristol that weekend
too. So my other option would be to go next weekend (23rd Feb) which has a good line up too with the likes of Tall Paul, Above & Beyond and Rank1.
This will also mean another Dj mix before going out.
So if your interested in joining me on my quest into dance music, drop me a line… (yes Ryan that includes you). But be warned I tend to spend most of my time on the dance floor and I only do caffinated beverages.
The first ever BBC Backstage podcast kicked off in fine style on Wednesday 7th February.
We invited some of the most vocal backstagers in the long running debate over DRM, to come and join us at the BBC to discuss face to face what they felt about DRM and the BBC. The hour long discussion around DRM and the BBC included,
You can listen with the built in player below, or you can download and remix the MPeg3 file or the Ogg Vorbis file. Both are licensed under creative commons attribution. So as long as you credit backstage.bbc.co.uk, your good to go. Don't forget to check out some great action shots from the debate…
Found on Engadget. Seagate D.A.V.E 
igital Audio Video Experience ) is simply a mobile hard drive with USB2, Bluetooth and Wireless. Its got a server built in so you can connect over wifi or bluetooth with almost any device. Currently it comes with 10-20gig of space, but there expecting much more in the near future. Oh and it launches in May.
My thoughts, on this very nice device which I can certainly see myself buying one. Does anyone remember the Toshiba Hopbit? Yes it didn't support Wireless and USB2 but the principle was the same. To be fair I wanted one of those a back in 2002 too.
Yes I've seen it too.
Now I can shout and rave about how crazy it is having 4 london events on the same night (i did this before), but I'm also one of the guilty event organizers. So I should try and set the record a little straight, because people do seem to think we don't talk to each other.
Me and Sarah Blow from the girl geekdinner's did speak to see if we could avoid clashing on the same day. Now to be fair Sarah had the day first and I was planning the geekdinner for Monday 19th March (I have emails to citizen agency to prove it) but due to the Future of Webapps conference I needed to change the day.
Conferences like Fowa and @Media do have a odd relationship with the smaller events in London. On one hand small events like Geekdinners could be seen as nicking the best speakers from the conference holders, who to be fair have paid for the speakers to be in town that week. It could also be seen as taking people away from the main conference. This is something a lot more real, when you run a BarCamp next to a large conference. On the other hand (the hand I prefer) the smaller events can increase the amount of
people from out of town who come who go to a conference. For example I just booked flights to San Diego for Etech 2007 and left a good 2 days around the start and end to make way for smaller events. I see Etech as the main reason for going but the smaller events where I can actually talk with people and share ideas. If your a conference organizer, this is a bonus because you can keep both eyes on the conference and rely on a trusted small event organizer to do the social event for you. Even better is when the
conference and small event have some kind of cross linking. This was true of the @media social and now the fowa conference. So the point I'm getting at is, I respect the work which goes into fowa and they are happy to recommend geekdinner for the social event. You could say they are sponsoring the event, but I see more like supporting the event.
So with that support, it makes a lot of sense to have the social event on the last day of the conference (21st Feb).
Some would say, hey why don't you merge or partner for the 21st? Well this is difficult because of a number of reasons
So we're all in agreement that clashes like this will happen (much that I wanted to go to both Girl Geekdinners and WikiWed).
So the question is how do we try and stop this happening in the future?
Well last time I did propose a Google Calendar. Sarah Blow has been great using the calendar, I've not been so good. Others who I've invited have been simply rubbish. But I'm starting to wonder if a google calendar is the right way to deal with this problem? See the one place everyone uses now is Upcoming.org. I preferred Eventful.com but Upcoming is what everyone uses in London. So your at least guaranteed that event organizers will place there events up there. Maybe my biggest problem with upcoming is the lack
of a actually calendar. It was always hard to see what was on a certain day and if it was relevant enough to worry about.
Now I'm using Outlook 2007, this isn't such a problem but I'm only subscribed to the my events and my friends events. This keeps most of the crap out of my calendar but its not perfect. I'm still relying on one of my friends adding a event which I'm not aware of. Lucky I have a lot of friends on Upcoming so I can get a real idea of whats going on. But others are not so lucky,
Groups on Upcoming.org are reasonable and maybe one way forward. Although right now there not very used. But back to the main point, the fact upcoming is event driven not date driven (you can't click on a calendar anywhere and you can't navigate by dates) is a big problem when trying to pick dates for a small or large event.
So I'm now done.
Does anyone have something I've forgotten or is simply a unsolvable problem?
It looks like Windows Mobile 6 will go live on Feb 14th. I have to say, it doesn't look much different from Windows Mobile 5. Some of new things include Windows Update, the ability to encrypt storage cards and more input methods. I hope this will be a Flash memory upgrade because it hardly worth adding a version number to it. Also I'm not keen with the Windows Live and Update stuff (although, I do like the idea of my phone being upto date with security patches). Microsoft please remember this is still a phone
and data might be cheap over in the states, there certainly not cheap over here. Mobile review has it covered better that anyone else.
I can't believe I missed Yahoo's Pipeline beta. Chris from Touchstone actually dropped me a email and asked if I've seen it. But all I get now is…
Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!
Well in the meantime a lot of people are talking about it (Techmeme). Tim O'Reilly has a long piece about it on his Radar blog. He starts with,
Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” that allows you to “create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in
turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.
In agreement, but I'm worried Yahoo might be focusing too much on aggregation that general purpose pipelining of any data source online. Tim then talks about why he's excited and points at some of my also favorite posts in this area. Jon Udell's keynote at the 8th Python conference and the JavaOne keynote which really gelled with my thoughts about
Pipelines at the time. This is also another reason why I got fed up of the Gillmor Gang without Jon Udell. Anyway back to Tim's post, here's a couple of other things I found interesting.
But perhaps more significantly, to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer. Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone.
This is certainly very true, coming from a design background I just couldn't understand why pipelines were not used more in application development. I actually thought the move towards objects in programming would be the start of this, but I guess not.
Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the “ue” this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops.
RSS and XML are easy targets for a beta service. But whats really needed is more input adapters. Microformats, FOAF, S5, WebAPIs, XMPP, etc. The transformers are predictable bar the user-defined filters (which I would assume would be XSL?). There's other services like RSS Mix and Feed Rinse which do the same thing. Chris is right filters are old hat.
Talking of Chris, in his post he seems quite down on his own pipeline: Touchstone. Personally I think their further down the line because the interesting part of the pipeline is being able to mix local and remote content not just remote. Also the widget style UI is very powerful. You could use Yahoo Pipes and I guess Yahoo Widget Engine to create something like Touchstone but your missing the Relevancy engine (APML) which did a great job of finding me screenshots of Windows
Mobile 6.
I'm a little worried about the focus on the GUI used for Yahoo Pipes. It sounds good but there needs to be thoughts about interopability. I don't want to create a great Pipeline and then be locked into Yahoo Pipes forever more.
Anyway, I can't talk much more about it till I get a chance to play with it first hand. Good work Yahoo.
I've been involved in a few podcasts recently.
The first one is a round table discussion with Paul Boag, Gary Marshall and Jeremy Keith for the .net magazine podcast. I've not heard this one yet, but I was calling with skype over a wireless network at work, so I cut out a bit.The topics for the show were,
You can listen to the mp3 file here or subscribe to the show with this RSS feed.
I'm also on the Boagworld podcast this week as the expert on video formats online.
Ian Forrester from BBC backstage and the Geek Dinners joins us to talk about online video. He talks through the different formats available (quicktime, real player, windows media and flash) as well as the different delivery mechanisms (steaming, download and progressive download).
I'm on about 28mins from the end and the audio level is scary. You can listen to the mp3 directly here or subscribe to the show here. Please note, I did record one copy about using Mp3 and Ogg streaming using shoutcast and icecast but it got too long and decided to keep it very simple and quick (if you can call 6mins quick). I also made
a joke about tubes and the straw dripping but deleted that one too.
I've attached the .net magazine podcast, so enjoy!
