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

The promise of SyncML is coming true

A long long time ago when I bought my Ericsson R320 2nd generation GSM phone (with Bluetooth but no GPRS) there was this great standard which I had read about. SyncML was its name and its promise was the ability to sync with almost any type of PIM (personal information management) client and storage. Up to now its been a bit of a yeah yeah some time soon. I know Apple have done some great things with iSync which runs on SyncML but elsewhere we still got crazy sync methods which require propitery software and hardware. For example my PocketPC only talks to Activesync, which in turn talks to Outlook 2003 on my machine. Microsoft were nice enough to allow the PocketPC to sync with another activesync client, so I am able to sync with my machine at work too. This is great if you got only two machines and one mobile device. Well thats no good for me as I got a 3rd generation mobile phone and a TabletPC to sync with too.

I was pretty much out of luck till I saw Sync4j a while ago.

The Sync4j Project is an open source initiative to deliver a complete mobile application platform implementing the SyncML protocol. SyncML defines a standard way to synchronize data and remotely manage devices.

Sync4j consists of:

  • SyncServer: a Java SyncML server, that you can use with any SyncML client (e.g. to synchronize the address book on your phone through a pre-installed SyncML client)
  • SyncClient PIM for Microsoft Outlook, Windows Mobile Pocket PC PDA and BlackBerry: out-of-the-box applications that you can use to synchronize your PIM data (address book and calendar) to a SyncML server
  • SyncClient API in Java (J2SE and J2ME) and C++: SyncML client APIs that you can use to build an application based on a sometimes-connected paradigm (e.g. a sales force automation software on your cell phone or PDA)
  • SyncConnector DB and Microsoft Exchange: connectors to relational databases and Microsoft Exchange that you can use to store and extract data from the SyncServer (and send it to a SyncClient)

Reading this, I'm thinking wow this sounds like Zoe (another server which I keep meaning to deploy fully on my server) for PIM applications. So anyway, I've finally got it working and am trying it out. I'm using the beta version which is using Jboss, I considered using the WAR depoyable version but setting up the Database connectors sounds like a pain, specially with me not actually using any databases at all in my whole setup. Anyhow, the server is running and I can connect to it, my problem seem now seems to be the clients. The pocketpc seems to not see the server and outlook 2003 seems to throw a error when connecting. Unexpected error # 453 occured: can't find DLL entry point TzSpecificLocalTimeToSystemTime in kernal 32.. I'm sure using Outlook 2000/XP would make things better so I may give them a shot if I cant find another way. I'm going to try and connect to with my mobile phone once I setup the firewall settings or get the other clients working correctly. No point in syncing phone if there is little data in the syncserver.
I'm unsure if SyncML supports the ical standard which I like using with Thunderbird/Sunbird. To get those clients working with outlook would make mine and sarahs life so much easier!

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Syndication for a world wide audience

People have slowly caught on to the problems with RSS syndication and languages. If you follow the links back from the blogdigger blog entry
 you will start to notice a pattern, of people not quite being able to put there finger on the problem. And the reason why is because actually its not a single problem, its more a muddle of a problem. Andy puts it well but I may have the killer paragraph which explains it all.

It is a chicken and egg problem. If the content publishers do not provide RSS feeds with correctly structured language meta-data which software engineers can cut there teeth and applications on, then the stalemate will proceed as it does today. Certainly this is one way of looking at it. The other view point is software engineers need to put language features into there software otherwise there is no point in content providers using correctly structured language meta-data and modules to describe language content…

This is taken from my draft Paper which I am currenly finishing on the same subject of RSS and languages. See Blogdigger are right but how many feeds do they get from non-latin languages which have language meta-data they can actually use? This quote comes from Mark Fletcher from Bloglines

But the more important question is, are the majority of feeds accurately labeled in terms of language. And in our experience, the answer is unfortunately a resounding no.

I would echo that fact too, when looking for examples of non-latin RSS feeds, they tended to have little language meta-data (some actually marked english still!) Is this a limitation of the RSS standards or something else? Well in my paper it would seem no one gets away clean. For a quick taste of what I mean look at the complete (you call that complete?) list of language codes which can be used in the RSS 0.91 spec. Yes I know its old but still quite scary for 2000. Try and find Arabic, Hebrew and other non-latin languages.

If your interested in more information in this area, please keep an eye on this blog where I will post my paper sometime in late May or early June. Or even better come and listen to my presentation on the paper at XTECH 2005 in late May.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

del.icio.us and de.lirio.us controversy

Jon Udell has a nice and simple piece explaining the problems between delicious and delirious. From my own point of view I dont really care about the rip off-ness of the new service, end of the day there are many search engines and soical software apps which look simular but no one batters an eyelid. Honestly I would say its more of a compliment or a form of flattery. Anyhow the issue I do have is the open source-ness. I dont like my data not being mine, when I signed up to delicious I knew this but it was the only thing widely available at the time for bookmarking. Now I may change my bookmarks over to delirious because there is an alternative. I want my data to be under a creative commons licence which suits me and even though I dont have plans to build my own social bookmarking service, I'm more happy to know my data will not be locked into a service which could go bust. Yes you can get all your data out of delicious by using the API but thats not everything is it, I'm sure theres tons of linking information which I cant currently get my hands on. There's parellels between this debate and others like the attention.xml debate.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Looking for another java servlet aggregator

I was using Flock for the last few years but moving to a shared servlet environment is making me reconsider using Flock. See this is the problem Flock has been worked on for the last 2 years and still has no ATOM support. It works well when its got a small amount of feeds but the fact you cant even change the duration of the feeds collected is troubling. After trying to install Flock on cubicgarden.com I got a reply from the excellent support from interadvantage.

I was excited to see that Flock runs on Tapestry, because I've never tried to get any Tapestry apps running on our servers. This is what I did:

1. I updated Apache's config to pass all /flock/* requests to Tomcat.
2. I then added security grants so any Webapp can read the net.sf.tapestry.* and flock.* system properties.
3. I then ran into a roadblock…

Flock is going to be problematic because of the ridiculous tendency of open source Java developers to assume their apps will only run on a dedicated Tomcat instance.

The problem is that it tries to write to /username/*. As you know, we put your home directory at /home/username. Further, the only way (I can see) to override this behavior is to set a system property, flock.home. Sure, I can set this, but it'll be set system-wide so if another user wants to run flock, you'll have to share a directory. That's obviously not acceptable. Why can't they just use a flock.properties file in the classpath? I've recommended this on their mailing list. Of course, I could set flock.home to /home/forrei/public_html/flock/WEB-INF/flock or something, thereby limiting the server to a single instance of Flock (yours). But that's not a good solution, so let's see whether the developers are willing to do anything for us on this one before we implement a kludge.

Yeah and I'm honestly he's right. So till some nasty little hack is decided on, I will keep on running it on my local server but I'm on the look out for something else to replace it. Any offers? or even any thoughts around this problem with flocks home directory? I actually remember having a simular problem a while ago when I was first setting up Flock. I didnt want it to stick all its data in the home directory in documents and settings, so I did the classpath trick to fix it. Luckly Blojsom is much better built and this blog is well on its way to moving to its new home under http://www.cubicgarden.com.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Ajax? asynchronous JavaScript and XML better known as Remote Scripting

Well it looks like theres some push behind the AJAX naming now. I believe it stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and translates into this easy to understand list.

  • standards-based presentation using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS);
  • dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
  • data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
  • asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
  • and JavaScript binding everything together.

I couldnt give a crap what its called but certainly the way to do rich interaction in the browser without using Flash or anything non standard. Its all interesting because about 3-5 years ago Standard CSS and XHTML was becoming accepted in the modern browsers, and a standard browser DOM or javascript was along way off. Now it seems were hitting the point of where you can use standard javascript across all modern browsers. Which is indeed a good step forward.

Sam Ruby considers Ajax harmful but seems to have more a problem with bad use of it. Paul vents his frustration with others on the naming of Ajax. Dare covers the whole Ajax issue once and for all

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Fixing my tablet again after a failed solaris install

My tabletPC installing sun solaris 10

I made the mistake of letting SUN install Solaris 10 on my laptop on Tuesday afternoon. The guy did say it would take about 15mins over the network because obviously my TabletPC has no CD Rom. I had to rush off before 6pm and to be fair I didnt turn up till 5pm, so I was always pushing it. And as you'd expect there was problems, solaris wouldnt detect my network card which is essential when your network booting over PXE! By about 5:30pm it was starting to install but the solaris server must have choose to transfer data at 10BaseT instead of 100BaseT. So it was going so slow that I had to switch off half way through the transfer and go. To be fair the Sun guy gave me a DVD of the Solaris 10 with wireless drivers and also instructions and contact details if I get stuck.
I didnt know my TabletPC was screwed till the day after when I switched it on and was given a cryptic message about the Master boot record. Yep, I thought – My tablet is screwed again!

A couple of good things did come out of this mistake. I now know my Sanyo 3G Camera phone supports EXIF metadata unlike a lot of the camera phones on the market which is pretty cool to know. And I also learned how to boot my TabletPC off a compact flash card. Roman swears you can boot the Tablet off a USB key chain but I tried and tried and gave up. But lets step back a second, how on earth do you create a bootable disc in Windows 2000 anyway? I remember in Windows NT and 98 you could click bootable when you format a drive, but theres no option in windows 2000.
In the end I reliased I could fake a PCMCIA CD Rom by using a Compact Flash card and PCMCIA card adapter. I then built a Custom bootable CF card using this nice HP application and this bundle of DOS tools. I then stuck the DOS version of Partition Magic 6 on the same CF card and was able to boot in to DOS by using selecting the PCMCIA CDROM and load up PMagic 6 for DOS. Where it fixed the MBR problem and set the Windows Partition to Active. Then I was sorted! The URL which helped me through all this was this tutorial – Tip: Boot from USB Key Addendum. But the key for TabletPC's is using the CF as the booter not a USB key.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

This blog is moving to interadvantage

More of a warning than a comment, I'm moving to real Java Servlet hosting by interadvantage this month. So expect a lot of down time and redirections from URL's your use to using. The first one to go will be cubicgarden.com which is currently being transfered from UK2.net to interadvantage.com. After that I should install the new Blojsom 2.4 with new features like pingback. The direct URL of http://adrenalin-online.demon.co.uk/blojsom/blog/cubicgarden/ will still exist up the point of when I'm happy with the clone on cubicgarden.com. After which I will use temporary redirects to cubicgarden.com. My pictures and cocoon will stay on my own server till I can be sure they work fine with the shared permissions at cubicgarden.com. I'm also thinking of running Flock on cubicgarden.com and maybe Zoe on my own server once cocoon is moved across.

So generally, try and use the domain http://adrenalin-online.demon.co.uk/ for accessing the blog and other applications like my pictures and wait for the green light to when cubicgarden.com is up and going.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Cloned card

I found out a couple of days ago that my current account has been used by some theifing bastard(s)! Seems they wasted no time and took out 3 days of my maximum amount of cash you can take out in one day (grand total of 600 pounds) . I hardly use my card and am very careful of keeping a eye on it at resturants and cashpoints. Some people have commented that I maybe too paranoid about it in the past, well rightly so I would add now. It would seem I made the mistake of using a Natwest cashpoint in Leicester Square on ST Patricks day, which was used to collect sensitive banking information. How am I sure its the that cashpoint and no where else? Put it this way I'm 98 percent certain and the only other places I used my card that month was at my local train station to buy my travel card and a resturant where I had the card pretty much most of the time plus my friends cards are ok. Oh also add to the fact that the cash was taken out in Piccadilly which is a stone throw away from Leicester Square and I can be certain the machine was tampered with in a form which I never noticed. The werid thing is, Its not like I never got my card or cash back from the machine and I remember holding my hands over the pin code as I usually do so there was no way someone could see what I typed. Hey maybe I could be wrong about the cash machine but I'll tell you what – this has come just before the easter bank holidays and at a time when I'm feeling very ill. I would do unspeakable things to the person who did this to my account if I found them!

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

The Scene? a new form of soap entertainment?

So its all about the scene. No were not talking about the dating scene which tickled a few slashdotters. And were not talking about the clubbing and music scene which I would usually consider as the scene. No its a site which was picked up by a few people a while but I kinda of skipped over till recently. So basicly its a Television show about the underground network scene of suppliers, rippers and coders who bring the latest films to the public networks of the internets. Yes that means you can easily and freely download each ep via torrent, gnutella, etc etc… Its not a new way of thinking but it seems the whole thing is being funded by Sony, which is quite interesting.

The.Scene.Episode.1.TV.XviD-SCENE was released December 2, 2004 This video was created by Sony (www.sony.com) towards the end of the Video there is a name that appears Rebecca Brandt if you google Rebecca Brandt you get http://www.sonyplaza.com/ny/reporters_5.html [sonyplaza.com] apperently she is some sort of reporter for Sony if you continue to look at the page you can see who else she works with Seth Hochman http://www.sonyplaza.com/ny/reporters_4.html [sonyplaza.com] Look at his picture. Its the guy from the video with a haircut.

From there it drops into the usual slashdot bashing but I'm not so quick to bash it. I have only seen the first ep which I watched on my ipaq on the way home but its not badly done and the product placement and advertising is not terriable, plus add the factor that you can easily skip it because the video is a plain xvid file not a DRM junky file. Which assures everything will be able to play it, which strikes me as good move on Jun Group's part. The advertising site has reported that it has recieved more attention that it could actual handle which has to be a advertiser's wet dream come true? Executives at show sponsor Freebord phoned Jun Group two hours after the premiere to report that their website was “being swamped with traffic.”

What makes the show most unique is the fact that it is being distributed solely through the P2P community. “File sharers have made it very clear that this is their preferred method of consuming content,” Mitchell said. “We are the first ones who have found a way to truly meet that demand.” He added that the file-sharing audience is a highly desirable demographic of affluent and largely male young adults. Businesses pay for placement based on the number of people who are inspired by the show to visit a sponsor, which is both quantifiable and verifiable. “Our sponsors will only be paying for the people who download the show or the people we drive to their websites,” he noted. “They won't have to rely on outdated ratings systems.” There's no reason to copy-protect the shows, Mitchell said, because the whole idea is for people to copy and share them so that advertisers reach the highest possible number of consumers.

And this is the thing, if you dont like the scene which is really a soap for file sharers, then dont watch it! But honestly, it still beats watching Eastenders and Hollyoaks for myself. I would almost start to say that this season of 24 up till recently (ep 13) has not been great and its been too generalising for my liking and I welcome something a little more technical and tech savy. The scene is light soap entertainment and its popularity has spawned a copy already and proves that even developers, filesharers, hackers, etc still want or maybe even need a little light entertainment now and then. The question is, do you want it from the mainstream or narrowstream? I know which one I perfer.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Blogmatrix shifts focus and grows a 360 business model?

I was just browsing around and noticed Blogmatrix have redone there website. But thats only the start, yep Sparks! is out of beta and is now on version 2.0 for Mac and PC it would seem. Theres a new pricing and business model too… Now not only do you get this great client for RSS, recording and podcasts but you can upload and record your own podcasts and store them on blogmatrix's 150 meg per user storage server as long as you only do 4 unique uploads a day. Which is ideal for podcasting really. Theres also a option to upgrade space and the customise the client for businesses and large scale operations. This is a serious shift because now you can listen to a podcast and reply with your own right there and then. Blogmatrix are even planning on turning files into torrents for you which would save so much hassle! With all the talk about 360 degrees recently, I would say this is pretty close to a complete 360 degree product and service – and I welcome the change of focus and sharp business move. Only one thing seems to be missing in my mind, if you read a RSS entry the only was to reply is via comments. For consistency wouldnt it be good to have some simple XML-RPC client built into Sparks! which would pingback or trackback to the article, entry, post you were just reading? I would dump w.bloggar like a shot if it did.

Just thinking about Jaeger's position now, I would like to see it have all the features of Sparks! but without the creation and recording internet radio features. So just improve on whats currently in it and take some features like del.icio.us posting and podcast/attachment download queue from Sparks! It would be a real shame if Jager just got forgotten behind this great service and application of Sparks! By the way, Doc Searls has a interesting piece to say about Blogmatrix, while Ross Rader doesnt really say anything but is all the way behind Sparks!

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]