Ianforrester

London in choas after early morning blasts

Just one day after London winning the Olympic bid for 2012, London is in choas from power surges and explosives on buses and its still only 1030. The underground has been shutdown and there are reports of more explosions on other buses.

The aftermath of a bus bomb

Its now 1112 and another bus bomb has been confirmed. Almost everyone is saying this is a terriost attack of some kind. Blair is going to make a live announcement at noon from the gleneagle, Scotland. No one quite knows whats happening but its certain people are quite calm and walking around trying to call friends and family on a well congested mobile network. Theres also talk that some mobile phone operators shuting down normal calls. The police reckon there have been in total 6 blasts and there may be more to come. Theres also now talk about Train stations in Swindon, Bristol, Brighton being closed and cleared just in case. All bus in central London have been stopped and doubled checked.

map of blasts in London

Ok at 1129, a BBC security journalist (Frank Gardner?) is claiming they have evidance to say Al Qaida are to blame for these attacks on London. I believe just around this time Cobra came into effect.
Its 1202, and a shocked Tony Blair is on. Blair will be making his way to London within 2 hours. Talks about it being a terroist attack to go with the G8 summit, and how we will be defeating terroism. Back in London, all major buildings are in lock down.
1241 and its lots of talk and nothing much else – thank goodness! Flickr is doing a good job of displaying images of the media coverage. Tag bomb and Bigdaddymerk. Google news is also doing quite well when the BBC news site was over flooded with traffic.

Its now late in the night and the nightmare day is almost over for now. For a complete review its best to look at the BBC's great coverage of all the attacks. I had a look around the web and the screen shot of technorati says it all. 9 out of 10 searches have been on the same terriable event. Interestingly enough BBC tried to cover a bit of what was going on online here.
I really hope someone is saving the screenshots of the indexes on some of the major news websites. MSNBC and CNN have gone so far over the top till I saw Fox news. Compare these indexes to the guardian, nytimes, washingtonpost and of the bbc. I'm glad to see Wikinews is actually creating a very good page about the London blasts.

Well all I personally can say is, tomorrow I will be returning to work and will happily ride the train, tube or a bus. This terriable event points to the fact we helped America in the unjust war were still involved in, although a majority of people here were against it. I do worry that there maybe more attacks like this, but I wont let the fear take over my life in this wonderful multicultural city. The people who planed and excuted the bombs are nut jobs and can claim to be of what ever religious background they want. But the fact remains that people who were killed and injured were of all faiths, religions, colour and background. Tomorrow we shall see both sides using the London blasts for there own means but also tomorrow we shall also see a city going back to work with its head up high. Yes I do sometimes love London.

Tomorrow has come and its already started. From a Fox news reporter, talking about yesterdays blasts.

…these people are, If necessary, prepared to spill Arab blood in addition to the blood of regular — of nonarab people living in London

This is not creepy, its truly wrong, twisted and sick! via Boingboing

Boing Boing pal Danny O Brien says, “Fox News doesn't think some Londoners are real Londoners. Here, an overexcited Fox News reporter catches himself dividing beleaguered Londoners into 'Arab' and 'regular' people. Creepy.” Link to video.

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PocketRSS v2.1.5 faster than ever…

Just recently I upgraded my PocketRSS software. Wow the speed difference is amazing! Honestly my 235 RSS feeds are a pain in the ass to load in the old version and it would sometimes take up to 2mins to load. Now it takes seconds and navigating around is quick and easy. If your using PocketRSS, honestly upgrade you will thank the guys at Happyjackroad for the move to opensource SQLlite.
Even I when first read that, I thought no way is it going to be that much faster? But honestly it feels like 10-15x faster is an under-estimate on there behalf. Good work guys! I've actually run out of features and bugs for them to consider.

About the Database: Previously, PocketRSS was using Microsoft Pocket Access and ADOCE as its database solution. However, it was not an ideal solution for all devices and is not support with the new WM 5.0 OS. As a result we have switched to the open source sqlite database format. Our low-level testing has shown this to be 10x-15x faster than Pocket Access and is working so much better on storage cards than Pocket Access does.

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Julie Howell recognise for her great work

This is great to see, Julie Howell who is well known for her accessability work at the RNIB. Was awarded a NMA award just recently. I was suprised because usually awards like this dont go to people like Julie. I think she deserves this award and whole lot more. No one works harder than Julie in this area…

Howell, who has been in the job since 2003, is a tireless campaigner for Web site accessibility. She's keen to point out the business benefits of accessibility, as well as the legal requirements, but she's intolerant of companies that want to do the bare minimum to keep their Web sites on the right side of the law.

Julie honestly works so hard in the area of accessability. A while ago I convinced her to give a lecture to Ravensbourne College, and I really got a chance to talk to this amazing woman. Good on you Julie and this is great news for web accessability.

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Doug Kaye’s next venture, world dommination?

I was reading Blogarithms just today and came across Dougs new venture. Generally this explains most of it.

My new project is to capture (record) all of these presentations, post-produce them, and make them available worldwide for free.

To record tens of thousands of events each year, we will appeal to the social conscience of the worldwide army of podcasters 10,000 today, and 25,000-50,000 within a year who I believe will be enthusiastic about the opportunity to give back to their communities and to the world. As a side benefit, these podcaster stringers will hone and extend their skills and build their reputations in ways that could benefit them financially and otherwise.

We will build an online “dating service” that will match podcasters with events in their communities. Likewise, we will recruit volunteer writers and producers to create and edit the metadata and descriptions that accompany the recordings. Content will be managed, and quality will be maintained, by a Wikipedia-like system and community. High-volume content will be delivered by a combination of BitTorrent and partners such as the Internet Archive.

We will cover not just IT or even technology, but literally every topic about which someone speaks and another person finds it valuable enough to capture.

Wow! Now I have no idea of how he's going to drive this forward but it sounds like something well worth following and backing, specially if Doug is seriously considering the vital elements of cooperation, community and emergence.

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Talking to Microsoft

I dont believe theres anything wrong with mentioning the recent conversations I had today. One with Mike Munn from Apple and the other with Sean Lyndersay from Microsoft. I didnt plan it that way, it just turned out that way. Anyhow I wanted say the phone conversation with Sean was very interesting in regards to Microsoft's love of RSS. So I had to blog a couple of things.

Simple List Extensions.may not be the only module from Microsoft and although writen with RSS 2.0 its not exclusively for RSS 2.0. Sean's fully aware of rdf:Bag and rdf:Seq and all the beautiful fuctionality of RDF but suggests that the marketplace has spoken when it comes to RSS 1.0. However there parser will support all the extensions/modules which are practical and bring some benefit to the end user including the well known syndication, dublincore, etc modules. I asked about commercial type modules like Yahoo's and now Apple's iTunes Media module and Amazon's Opensource modules. Sean was clear that the same benefits need to be met as with all modules but they need to be very careful about the licences with commercial modules, Microsoft putting out there module under a creative commons licence was mindblowing and Sean suggests thats only the start of things – but also hopes it pushes other commercial modules makers to consider how they licence the modules much more. He actually hopes Microsoft have set the standard and all modules will be very clear about there licencing from now on. xml:lang at the item level was discussed and may make it into the microsoft rss parser as a way to tell language and somewhat directionality. We talked about the smaller language bases which tend to be ignored or at least missed by the mainstream media outlets and how we could foster RSS usage and subscription within these languages with IE7 and World Service content. Interestingly IE7 is coming out in to public beta quicker than I first imagined. However network/bamdwidth usage was discussed and Sean was serious about the huge number of undisclosed users IE7's release could send to
our or anyone else website. Its certain, this is the year when RSS grows up and hits the mainstream

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Cass Creatives: Read All About It, but where exactly?

I forgot to mention the Cass Creatives event I went to last week. Paul at work gave me the heads up on this series of events/talks which are also free and full of interesting creative people just like the AIGA London ones. Anyway, after finally finding the place in the city near London wall, there were a small selection of drinks to wet your mouth before heading into the nicely cooled (it was about 27 degrees outside) lecture theatre. I wont go into much detail about what people said as its much better covered here at interactive knowhow. My own thoughts on the discussion was first why didnt they show the Epic 2005 version which is much better and realistic. I was quite amazed when a huge percentage of the audience said they had never seen Epic 2004. Anyhow if you seen these pieces and look at the Panel, you will know roughtly how the night went. Nico Macdonald wrote a very good piece in net imperative titled Media replies to the bloggers while on the other side Sunday's Observer has a piece. Yes generally the Death of the Journalist was debated but no conclusion was ever met, as expected. Interestingly enough Jemima Kiss from journlism.co.uk wrote a piece titled Yahoo! editor slams mainstream news. I would quite call it that but it would have been really nice to have had someone from google or even digg there to back up some of the points Yahoo's Simon Hinde made.

The talks went on for about 90mins and seemed to fly by. There was about the right amount of discussion and questions from the floor as well talking from the panel. And although we went around the forrest a bit in the discussions it was enjoyable and well worth it. After the talks, there was nibbles and drinks to further discuss the death of journalism with the panel and others. So generally the night was very enjoyable and I look forward to the next one in November sometime.

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iTunes 4.9 with podcast support

So I downloaded the 21meg iTunes and Quicktime bundle from Apple last night. and honestly I'm not very impressed with the new podcasting support. But then again was ever going to be that impressed?
Generally it works quite well, except you need to actually copy and paste the url into iTunes or register your podcasts in the iTunes music store. With later testing I found you could drag and drop but it will accept any url, which it doesnt seem to check for a RSS feed. The big question for me now is if it will run without crashing every few minutes on my Dual Pentium 3 Xeon setup. Anyhow, ipodlounge has a complete guide to iTunes 4.9 with podcasts which is worth reading for much more information. Enhanced Podcasts sounds quite interesting and I imagined my full house of rss extensions was going to come true. I had imagined Apple have either added a module/namespace to RSS or are using some RSS elements for different purposes but it seems all the enhanced features are all in the aac file not the RSS file. Oh well, but I bet there will be further discussion about this move by Apple elsewhere soon.
So generally iTunes 4.9 does not do away with the need for a decent podcasting client/reciever but it certainly does do away with the older generations of ipodder 1.x.

Update, I was wrong about the RSS extension from Apple. There is one and Edd Dumbill has a great review of all the elements and there usage. He sums it up nicely by saying.

What could have been a useful and reusable addition to the world of RSS is really rendered only fit for the single use of adding content into Apple's own iTunes store. Apple prove they know how to be cool, but they've got no idea about making friends on the web.

From the point of view of XML and the web, iTunes RSS extensions are somewhat disappointing. From a professional point of view, I'd say this looks rather embarrassing: Apple clearly don't have enough people who really understand XML.

I agree its a bit of a shame and honestly in the light of the other (as such) commercial extensions its the worst yet. Theres also further evidance to suggest Apple are a little out of there depth here. Why would you add a bit torrent feed to a client which doesnt support it? What a great way to advertise your product eh? And i'm sorry the unintentional denial of service attacks is unforgiveable if its true and it certainly looks like every podcaster was hit really hard because of iTunes.

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A bad day for Grokster, worst day for creativity and innovation

If you've not heard already, the case Grokster vs MGM was yesterday won by MGM. Yep you heard right MGM won and Grokster lost. I was stunned when I first heard about it yesterday, this case has been going on for so long I almost forgot about the case when Ben from Work came over and told me, I asked which case? But yeah soon after my smile turned down on its self as I realised what this mean. Its best explained by others, so heres some of the best comments about the future of innovation. Boy am I glad not to live in states, its just a shame this will now spread like wildfire to other western markets such as europe.

MGM – Grokster: The Calm Before the Storm
MGM versus Grokster – Geeks are going to win
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=838
Grokster loses, trouble in digital land
Not a Good Day for Innovation, Customer Rights and Free Speech
Major ruling in digital copyright: Supreme Court weighs in on intent
Grokster Loss Sucks for Tech
StreamCast CEO talks to p2pnet about Supreme Court ruling
Will Google survive Grokster?

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While Microsoft gets RSS, others ponder the future of the web

So while Microsoft shows its RSS hand at Gnomdex 5.0 just recently, Miles was posing the question about the future of the web (and I mean the web not the internet).

How often do you look at the web?

It was posed after talking with him about an idea floating around recently and getting side tracked into a talk about Jabber and XHTML 2.0. Some of the justification came from the lack of interest in moving forward the XHTML standard and the move of internet content and services on to the desktop and beyond. Miles showed some of the clients he's been using including netnewswire and a experimental one ~~which has only 4 letters (which I cant find or remember right now)~~ Flow. And explained how access the web was not so much needed as it use to be. I had to agree, I can even do google, yahoo, etc searches directly from Blogmatrix Jaeger along side with RSS search. Then if you add watchlists, marking and categories to the mix you got a lot of the features which make browsing the web not hardly needed anymore. I mean generally you got everything except services and commerce.

But there is nothing to stop even the services and commerce sites from also serving the RSS marketplace. For example my online bank could supply less sensitive information over a secure http connection to my RSS reader, they already supply updates and bank statements over SMS, so RSS isnt that far off realisticly. But then hey why not skip the reader and go striaght to the application? A secure RSS feed which goes straight into Microsoft Money or Quicken can not be far off. I'm sure Microsoft are well aware of the possibilities within this idea and may provide a bridge between your service and there application.

I'm not a fan of huge applications but check out Flow's interface.

I can imagine there being anything this advanced on the pc platform, actual Blogwave is an attept at taking RSS beyond the pure reading point of view but relys on a hacker/development mindset and applications around it (which is not a bad thing).

I actually quite like Blogwave because like cocoon it can serve as a great pipeline arcitecture for directing structured content around without human interaction. Say for example it would be great to not only have my watchlists in Blogmatrix Jaeger but redirected to my email or instant messenger. I know its possible but would take some time to do, Flow seems to be working towards making this happen without development effort.

Anyhow the point I think Miles was making is the internet is evolving and RSS is a huge part of this. With RSS being structured content, its easy to take advantage of different feeds to do different things. Why not a Meetup feed going straight into my calendar? Flickr feeds into a screensaver or wallpaper/background changer? Local Government debates appearing in my email ? Software updates via RSS? etc etc. Some people disagree such as RSS the next plague?. But you only have to look at Apple's RSS Screensaver to get a feel for how great timely and relveant information can be in the correct context. With Widgets, RSS at the OS level and Applications which are RSS aware all coming or almost here, will we all be using the web less and less?

There is something else very interesting about the Microsoft announcement and reflects with the use of the web. Microsoft releases under Simple list extentsions for RSS under a dare we say it ShareAlike, Copyleft type Licence. Prof Lessig can't help but be perfectly balanced about the move while I cant help but say were all communist now Bill Gates. But yeah this quite mind blowing and could actually be the start of a Microsoft which can share, contribute back and play fair while still making a profit? Only time will tell. Its also interesting that between, Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft there has been propsed extentions to RSS while in the HTML world, things have come to a stand still. Yes XHTML 2.0 is around the corner but how many developers of browsers are using it? I bet there are lots of developers keen to intergrate opensearch, rssmedia and Simple List Extensions. The only worry now is if people start pushing RSS into a place to compete with X/HTML, adding forms, css, etc. Its going to happen because all the innovation is happening in RSS not in XHTML at this moment, even with all the remote scripting (Ajax) stuff. So the question remains, how often do you look at the web?

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Finally my bluetooth keyboard is in sight

So at long last I'm finally going to get one of the Think Outside Bluetooth Keyboards. According to Nizam its going to be Dell branded but I couldnt give a crap as long as it works well and looks somewhat like the normal version. I was saying to Tom today that I use to be quite quick with the ipaq on screen keyboard but since getting my laptop all that time ago I have become much quicker with a normal sized keyboard although I prefer the ergonomical keyboards for work and long typed documents like my paper which I still need to rewrite soon. I'm also finding that now I'm using OPML for all my note taking having a outliner on my ipaq and laptop means I can choose which device I use. But recently the battery life on my laptop has pushed me into using the ipaq more while the lack of speedy input on the ipaq makes it not as perfect for note taking. A Bluetooth keyboard should make the ipaq the prefered choice now.

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