Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Once Blojsom has a xml backend, I should beable to create a very different axis into my blog using dynamic css and xsl. I could almost do it now by taking a internal rss stream with all the entries of the year and transforming that into a xhtml document with a dynamic css file. Even better I could generate a sweet looking SVG. All done via Apache cocoon of course.
Very recently i've noticed a serious drop in performance on my feeds (aggregation). And I know exactly what it is, i've too many rss feeds! I need to sort it out this weekend, as its not good in its current state. I'm going to go through all my feeds and make sure they all still exist and put them into thought out categories, rather than the adhoc method i've been doing up till now. I'm also hoping I will sort out about 40 rss feeds which do full text syndication for my personal pocketpc news reader. The ones i've currently got are a mixed bag of crap.
Flock is my aggregator and seriously nothings happened to the project for ages. It still doesn't support rss2 feeds let alone atom. So tempted to knock up my own in cocoon sometime soon, but then again Blojsom 2.7 will also have a aggregation plugin to go with the import plugin.
Last night just before bed, I dropped past the jabber site because I wanted to get a new jabber client for my pocketpc. Saw that myjabber guys had released there own pocketpc version. But I couldnt find it so thought I'd see what else is out there.
Anyway I saw a news story about getting realtime rss feeds in jabber. And it pointed to the jabber.at site. Basicly in the vein of smthingme and other bots like smarterchild and myownbuddy, you can talk to it via set commands and tell it to subscribe you to different rss feeds. Which it will deliver to you every 30 or so minutes.
And I must not forget to mention I'm now using the excellent Agile on my pocketpc and smartphone. I actually think its better than imov, topicim and myjabber. Plus its free, and supports almost every single mobile platform out there.
Interesting links to check out later – http://edgar.netflint.net | http://www.pmbrowser.info/thinkbot.htm | http://www.niemueller.de/software/eggdrop/jabberbot/ | http://www.google.com/search?q=jabber+bots&sourceid=opera&num=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Nice to see Apple supporting RSS native in there new browser but I feel Opera stole the limelight from Apple on this one.
So I woke up this morning and looked at my email before rushing off to work, and Miles had sent me a email pointing out that Blojsom and Jabber will come as standard in OSX 10.4 server, which is going to ship end of 2004 or start of 2005. Article here then during mytrain journey to the BBC via Cannon street, I see a link to Blojsom in a slashdot arcticle.
I'm so loving all this, but I'm sure David and Mark are laughing there arse's off. Good one guys looking forward to the Jabber version of Somethingme very soon?
A work friend recommended Neal stephenson to me yesterday evening. The book he was recommending was Cryptonomicon and the Snow crash. Now I was quite willing to buy the ebooks because I highly prefer reading on screen to reading a book. But have you seen the prices! Oh my, check out this one…
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson costs 8 dollars and you can get some second hand versions for half that. However, if you want the digital acrobat version that will be 10 dollars! Even the microsoft reader which by the way is crap and i hate alot to read from, is 10 dollars. And I'm willing to forget that digital distrubution is cheaper and easier than the book. And I was almost willing to pay the money for the ebook because 10 dollars is about 5 pounds here. But then I read this.
Format: Adobe Reader
File Size: 5776K
Printable: Most publishers do not allow Adobe e-books to be printed.
Mac OS Compatible: This title requires Adobe Reader 6.x, which requires Mac OS 10.2 and above.
Windows Compatible: Yes
Handheld Compatible: Adobe Reader supports transfer of e-books to PalmOS devices, but not to Pocket PC or Symbian devices.
Format not a problem could tag it later too I guess. File size sounds large but its got drm so i guess its got space for that. No printing, who cares not bothered. Requires Acrobat 6? why? But this did it for me! Adobe Reader supports transfer of e-books to PalmOS devices, but not to Pocket PC or Symbian devices.
What the hell! So if I bought this ebook I wouldnt beable to transfer it to my ipaq for reading on the train?!
And to make things worsts, the microsoft reader version only works on pocketpcs and tabletpcs, which i do have but why cant i look at it on my windows xp pro machine?!
Its no wonder why people are so pissed off about ebooks. I for one will wait till it hits the newsgroups now, on pure principle. Because this takes the living piss… I'm going to scream!
I'm thinking of buying the audio version which is cheaper and then converting it to text later on for reference. Sometimes I wonder about the world we live in today.
In a follow up to my earlier post about the xlink experiement. I finally got a copy of Topspin for the xbox. I mainly used the KAI client to connect and then just loaded up topspin on the xbox. First time I connected to xbox live and it moaned because it couldnt access it. Then I tried system link in the multiplayer mode, bang it worked. I was able to see someone ready with a game to play. So I joined and I was playing within a couple of minutes. General impression was it was a little slow and the game quitted when I tried to change the camera angle. But the second and so on games afterwards I had were awesome. I'm so tempted to try out the Wimbledom 2004 tournament – shame its now closed now.
I basicly now use Xbox media centre to see if anyone on my contact list is around, then I switch to a KAI if I need to play a game. If there was a way to type in xbmc i would use that instead. Rememeber if you do sort it out, my user name is cubicgarden.
At the bottom of that page from the Register was a link about the BluePod file swapping. Now I had heard about it but always dismissed it as rubbish talk. Till I sat down and read it today. I had the idea about bluetooth swapping along time ago, but i'm sure many did. But using ZeroConf Lan aka Rendezvous sounds like a excellent idea. I'm actually quite amazed some of the things Simeda are doing in Bucharest, and cant wait to try out there beta webserver. I have to admit I wasnt the biggest fan of Apple for taking ZeroConf Lan and rebranding it as Rendezvous but actually now maybe they might have kept the standard ticking over, as few others are. I might even go as far as installing it on my machines at home now. Also found a client for PocketPC by Apple of all people. And a Hydra type of application which allows you to share media and clippings over Zeroconf/Rendezvous for PC and Mac called Spike. I'm wondering if I can share media to it from other Zeroconf devices not running spike, from example my pocketpc? Will need to try them out tonight for sure.
I have to say Intel got this right. Its all about servers and clients within the Personal area network, a portable webdav server would be ideal, the best I have is my laptop running IIS in webdav mode or using Davenport.
I installed all the above on my ipaq and machines at home, all is well and I'm enjoying zeroconf now. Just need some more apps to take advantage of it.