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

Allergy Cards are a good idea…

Ian Forrester's Allergy Card

Via Kid666's blogI found a link to Allergy Card.com. Which is a site where you can create little cards to give to new resturants. Yes its sounds a little over the top, but you know what it would have saved me quite a few nights of terriable projectale vomiting. Like the time when I was in Amsterdam and decided to eat in a Thai Resturant with Kevin Hinde and Joel Chippendale the day before my talk at Xtech 2005. Trust me, if you think its all in mind then you really needed to see the state of the wetroom that night. It was so bad, I dare not call anyone for help till Sarah on the phone in England convinced me otherwise. And that was just Coconut sauce in the meat and prawns in the rice (which I got replaced). No trust me the ride to the hotel was hellish and I thought I wasn't going to make it.

I would have liked to have used the HTML which Allergycard.com creates, but it was so messy I couldn't do it without breaking a load of XHTML rules.

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Playing with Twitter, but I’m not all that happy yet

Twitter screenshot

After hearing Ryan Freitas talk about Twitter among other things, I've been trying out it out. If you don't know what Twitter is, check out Derek Powazek's description.

Twitter lets me SMS to a group all at once and creates a handy 'what I'm up to right now' insert for my site. A kind of in-situ, realtime, status message blogging. Fun!

So yeah its a good way to send short timely messages to a pool/group of friends. Those messages can be text messages (sms) or even im using jabber. It sounds really good but it has problems. Tantek posted up shots of ways to improve the pretty poor signup process. But I've been having problems registering my work mobile phone which is on O2 with Twitter. What also bugs me is the fact you can only register one mobile number. Yes I know its rare people have more that one mobile, but those who would use Twitter are much more likely to have 2 phones or 2 lines. My other issue is around adding your friends. Please please, allow me to add either my flickr network, upcoming network (why flickr and upcoming don't interop, is still beyond me), Plaxo contacts or even a Foaf file. I just can't be bothered to setup another network of friends in Twitter.

I do see the use of Twitter, specially for setting up adhoc geekdinners and getting people organised. But I would prefer to see Twitter used as an output point for messages. So I could send messages to it from almost any application or service and it would amplfy it to a certain group. Maybe it can do this already, it has an API so its certainly possible.

My username on Twitter is cubicgarden under the name of ian forrester, as you'd expect.

David Czarnecki has wrote a Twitter Plugin for Blojsom 3.0. Its currently in CVS but it will update twitter when there is an update or new entry to a blojsom blog. Damm I need upgrade to blojsom 3.0.

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Petition to Ban within government-funded schools, the promotion of any faith or religion

Ship of fools

I'm not keen on Bans but, this certainly sounds like a worthy cause.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ban within government-funded schools the promotion or practice of any particular faith or religion.
Submitted by Quentin Brodie Cooper of UK Brights

Faith-based or sect schools encourage and propagate divisions within our society.

Schools should be places where our children are taught to think about the world around them and come to their own conclusions. In short, they should be taught, not only about the profusion of religions and faiths but also about how moral and socially responsible lives can be led without them; rather than, at a time before they have sufficiently developed critical faculties, being indoctrinated.

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Yes I did go to an Arsenal Football Match this weekend

Arsenal vs Newcastle Utd

My good friend and Best man Ross won some tickets to Arsenal vs Newcastle United recently, so the plan was for him and his wife to go to the match. And we would Babysit our god daughter. But it didn't quite work out that way and so I ended up going with him.

After we found a nice parking space just 5mins walk from one of the entrances we on the march along one of the stadium bridges, found our gate in the Orange Quadrant and before long we were in our seats. The Emirates Stadium is new and Arsenal are unbeaten at home this year. The stadium is very comfitable and actually very clean and tidy. Not what I was expecting for a football ground. The match wasn't so great, Newcastle Utd scored against the run of play and after half time Arsenal scored with a great freekick by Thierry Henry to make it a draw at 1-1. 60,058 people attended the match and actually I'll admit it was a good day but I would only ever do it for a big World Cup game. I've got tons of pictures of the stadium and game on my flickr stream.

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Phones on a plane and Free Wifi on GNER Train

ishida's seat from London to Edinburgh

Our good friend Rachel Clarke who now lives in New York (the movie piracy capital says the MPAA) asks Phones on Planes?

No. Please no. At least put them in a booth or something so the rest of us don’t have to hear them say ‘guess where i am, on a plane’.

I have to say, I don't quite think this is such a bad thing. Ideally there would be a restriction on high volume talking not mobile phones. Yes they seem to induce high volume chatter but if your using your mobile for Data then thats a whole different story right? I just look forward to the day when I can finally text my friends to say I'll be arriving at Chicago O'hare in 30mins rather than waiting till I'm through customs. Although, like most people I also turn on my phone the moment I get off the plane. Another reason for mobiles on a plane is the fact that airplane phones already exist. They hardly used because once you swip your card, you can feel the timer eating through your money. The cost aspect as applies to in the air wireless which has stupid prices attached. I think having the ability to use your own dataplan/phone will finally break those stupid in the air monoploies.

Talking about Wireless. I thought I'd give a big thumbs up to GNER's Free Wireless onboard the train between Leeds and London Kings Cross. This is how I'm currently replying to all my emails and blogging. Its also pretty damm fast, the upload speed is bad (ping times of 1000 to my network) but general browsing and IM are good. From what I'm reading the Wifi shouldn't be free but trust me it is and there's no blocked ports or anything. I was able to VPN into my network using Hamachi and VPN into the BBC. Oh I also forget to mention there is power on some of the carriages in GNER and it also seems First Trains in the North of England. So from now, when traveling up to Northern England, I'll be traveling by train! This is great because I've been meaning to cut down on my air travel and I end up feeling terriable after flying. It may take longer on the train but its comfitable and you can actually relax with a reasonable amount of leg room.

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OS X Atmosphere Concept done with Flickr and clever scripting

OSX Atmosphere Concept

I wish I had a XML desktop. Why? Well I really want to do some of things which can be easily done online, with my desktop machine too. Kind of application development using web technologies. Yes it would be slower that writing in C++ or something like that, but it would mean more people could write stuff for there machines. So whats prompted this observation? Well I'm already thinking about this for my Xtech Proposal (which I should be working on instead of blogging) plus I saw the OSX atmosphere concept on electro plankton just recently.

So what I'm thinking is this is kind of possible using a weather feed or api and Flickr pictures. Obviously I've not seen the application running but the general idea of what the wather is like outside on your desktop is very achiveable. RSS Screensavers currently are pretty lame, for example my current favorate displays the headlines and a random picture from the local machine. But it will also display markup as actual non escaped markup, yeah sucks when you get a feed with pictures. You would have thought it would be clever enough to display that picture or something. I mean imagine subscribing to a feed like engadget or gizmodo which are heavy with high quality images. The experience would be a lot different.

But back to the XML desktop idea, yes Vista with XAML looks/sounds like what I'm after but knowing Microsoft its not going to live up to the promises. Geez this is certainly geting close to my proposal but wouldn't it be great to have read only (at the moment) XML feeds for commonly used APIs on your own machine? Its kind of like a widget engine and how they make common desktop api's available for use. Well extend that out so you don't have to build just widgets. I know for a fact this has security and privicy implications but say we could find a way through those very serious concerns? Wouldn't that be fantastic?

Update: It looks Adobe'e Apollo could be the solution to this? Thanks Gareth for the heads up on this. I started think about Apollo a lot more while reading the PDF and thought of the parallels between it, Xulrunner and a widget engine. And came up with this matrix.

Internet Application matrix

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RSS as the vaseline that’s greasing the wheels of Web 2.0

Jeremy Keith writes about how everything he uses outputs RSS of some kind which can easily be mashed up. Yes this is pretty straight forward and I hope commonly known now but what prompted me to blog was this bit.

At the recent Take Back The Web event here in Brighton, Rob Purdie talked about RSS being the vaseline that’s greasing the wheels of Web 2.0. He makes a good point.

Over the course of any particular day, I could be updating five or six RSS feeds, depending on how much I’m blogging, how many links I’m posting, or how much music I’m listening to. I’d like to take those individual feeds and mush ‘em all up together.

I think were finally at the stage where its accepted that RSS and ATOM can be like RESTful API's. I remember having a email exchange with Jeff Barr about this and he disagreed. Well I'm sorry but it looks I was right.

What Jeremy also talks about is why I love XSL so much. As long as its valid XML and web accessable I can do something with it. I've been asked to be involved in a special project for Christmas to do with XSL, so look out for that soon.

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Web 2.0 Summit coverage

Quick heads up on where to get really iindepth information on the O'reilly Web 2.0 Summit which just finished recently. Richard MacManus from the Read/Write Web has tons of posts which seem to cover pretty much everything. His wrap up post links to everything he's written in notes.

I also have to point to Ben Metcalfe's post about his ignoyance about the people attending the web 2.0 summit. Richard also picks up on this.

Some folks, like Ben Metcalfe, think the conference has lost its edge. Maybe it has, but the Web 2.0 Summit is a different beast now than it was last year – and that's a sign of the times.

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Enterprising Britian : the debate?

Raising the currency of ideas

Well first up, it wasn't a debate, it was a very long series of lectures. And to be fair lectures which were pretty much saying the same thing but not offering any real ways forward. There were some highlights to the day. Talking to Doug Richard was interesting and he had some thoughts about what backstage could be doing with Library House. Kevin Steele chief executive of Enterprise Insight, also put out a call to all community groups around London to get in touch with them, as they have money to fund your community. This event kicks off Enterprise week which has been running for about 4 years now, and there are many events happening around the country this week.

Anyway like the mashup day, I pretty much filmed every I could and have uploaded the results on to Blip.tv.

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End of the road for the Gillmor Gang?

Tom Morris writes

There are rumours flying around about the Gillmor Gang – the whole thing may be wrapping up, or that the show might leave PodShow. Who knows? In Steveland, nothing is constant. Truth is dead! The Gang is dead! Links are dead! Ding dong!

I loved the Gillmor Gang when the likes of Jon Udell were on it. But in the last year its been a mess of ego busting natter. Steve Gillmor seems to be trolling people, while Jason Calacanis seems to suck it all in and blow it back again. Dan Farber and Dana Gardner tend to be very monotone while Mike Arrington and specially Doc Searls sometimes say something of interest. But generally its not enough and its gotten worst recently.

The last straw for me is the crazyness which is going on with the RSS feed. I looked this morning and it had downloaded 600 meg of old Gillmor gang podcasts. I gave up on Gillmor daily ages ago. When I get online again, I'm removing them both from my subscriptions.

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