I am seriously considering doing this, I'm going to do it without changing the html much unless its not xhtml. Anyway I need to download the pack and give it a shot.
Author:
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
Mark Thomas
Mark Thomas has been in the news again, and I found a good site to keep track of what he's been up to. Next time he does his tour, I will have to drag my wife along. I explained to her that he is the british equalivent to Micheal Moore.
The forums are very lively, found this one. David Blaine – Fool, fraud, and full of sh*t.
Interesting comment from Pixelchick – what about derren brown wanting somweone to load the gun so he can play russian roulette? it seems strange that these adverts coincide with blaines – are they trying to outdo each other maybe? if so perhaps we should just put them in a carpark and leave them to it…
Dr Divx vs Xmpeg5
I just found out DrDivx supports encoding of unencrypted vobs. What does this really mean? Well that means I dont need to use xmpeg anymore to encode my films. Version 5 looks and sounds great but its only in french, which could be a problem. But I'm still stuck on another problem.
I need to start encoding all my good films in ac3. In the old days getting ac3 sound out of my computer was awarked but now I usually watch movies on the xbox using xbox media player which supports ac3 without the hassle.
So yes, I need a encoder app which supports vobs but allows me to encode to divx or xvid with ac3 sound. At the moment I have to encode to the video in xmpeg 4.2 and output the raw ac3 sound to the hard drive then go to virtual dub and muliplex them together. Trust me its a pain and should be that way now.
Blojsom2 installed and ready to go
Ok Blojsom2 is installed and ready to go, except one thing. I cant for the life of me get xmlrpc working from any blogging app I use. Combine this with the problems I'm having with Clite and suddenly blogging has become a lot more difficult.
Anyway got some nice snippits I found around the net which I'll drop into posts soon as I can. I cant believe its been 5 days since I last posted. Whats going on!
AIGA Experience Design
Just got back from Designing for e-government, and it was good. Not sure if it was better or worst than the last one, but this time I stuck around afterwards when everyone went to the globe pub. Meet some interesting people including Louise ferguson. She was talking about the events calender she had drawn up on her website. I explained I also tried to do a simular thing but using the ical standard, which would allow anyone with a username and password to add events to it. And anyone could sync up with it.
So its good to see shes done this, I can see myself using it alot.
Just had a look for ical again. I remember my ical idea didnt work because you need a ical server and I was trying to use webdav instead. BUT i just found this, and i'm now thinking once I do the blojsom2 upgrade. I should try this out using resin's webdav support.
Yes please note regular readers of my blog, it will be down tomorrow while I change to blojsom 2. And unfortually all permalinks will change. Really sorry its just the way it is. It shouldnt take long to do the upgrade and my feeds will be available still. There maybe slight issues during the first few weeks.
Thanks for your patiences during this time
Interesting ebooks
I was reckonmmending a student In the Beginning was the Command Line. And came across this directory of nice interesting ebooks. Will have to read some while I'm away on jury service for sure.
Oh i also spied this a while back, good faq for ebooks
XML tools by category
Found this
caught in my news feeds.
Looks quite big and as useful as searching freshmeat and sourcforge. I also notied they provide the site contents as a topicmap. Which is useful not only for viewing but also for seeing how to write one correctly. I still want to get into topic maps for mapping alot of things.
Eigenradio = Statistically Optimal Music
Ok so Miles dropped this in my inbox the other day, but I was following the convo on alter slash but like most things on slash dot it was lost before you know and replaced with something just as interesting.
This is from slashdot –
ShinyPlasticBag writes “'Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. Since we listen to so much music all the time, Eigenradio is always on and always live. What you hear on Eigenradio is the best of the New Music, distilled and de-correlated. One song on Eigenradio is worth at least twenty songs on old radio.
Anyway so yeah this eigenradio sounds like a intersting project but is somewhat not when you actually listen. Maybe its the slash dot effect, but tell you what it sounds pretty poor at the moment.
The slashdotters have gone crazy about the issue, and its all a good read. Heres some of the best.
bobtheheadless (467304)
I wonder if you can do the same thing with video… hm.
Sanity (1431)
I wish they had spent as much time documenting what this actually did as they spent making the website pretty, the one remotely technical diagram on the website has no explanation whatsoever as to what it is about.
IMHO this is yet another example of how academic projects are judged by the amount of attention they attract, rather than on whether they advance the state of the art. This is the reason why people like Kevin Warrick [sundayherald.com] can stick a dog tag in their arm and go around claiming they are the world's first cyborg – all while being lavished with attention by the mainstream media.
All of this leads to an academic system that increasingly rewards self pubicity at the expense of real reasearch.
Oh, BTW – I listened to the radio station, it sounds like a garbled mess – I certainly couldn't determine the point of this from listening to it, but then I could say the same thing about rap.
JohnGrahamCumming (684871) comments about the website,
1. Horizontal scrolling required
2. Tiny
3. Virtually no links to anything
4. Very small amount of information
I personally think its all good fun but the genres are too wide for any good experience. Also I expected it to generate tones for human listening? Some of it was hardly that. I would like to see it take only a single genre and use the same engine then hear the results.
No matter what the slashdotters say, the author page sounds like he has lots of interesting projects going on, but not much to show at this moment. Some of the papers I will have to read through when I got the time.
Pocket Internet explorer
Why do Microsoft do it? why? oh why oh why?
Pocket IE 2003 renders CSS stylesheets and if that wasnt bad enough it seems to support limited javascript? I think. I visited a site a while back on the ipaq and it left a big dialogue box on the screen. What on earth is going on with this browser?
I am pleading with Opera to realease there amazing micro browser for pocketpc. There seems to be no real altenative browsers on the pocketpc unless you look at using wap
Saw this on code monkey
So, if you have a PDA running PocketPC 2002 or earler, could you do us all a favor and upgrade? And for those of you who don't, could you see what you can do to get whoever it is who makes your mobile browser to upgrade theirs to some modern web standards? It would make everyone's life much, much easier.
Ok why should people upgrade so you can now design using css on a palmtop device?
Theres no solution to this, I just wish I could turn off css on the ipaq. I also think the new palms support css too. Enough said for now!
Slashdotters meetup updated
Ok, I cant count this meetup, the unexpected happened. I left to go to the slashdotters meetup and got to east croydon by 1800. Great I thought, what I'll do is go via New cross gate and pop up to brick lane via the east london line. Got to New cross gate, boarded the tube and the train suddely stopped. Why? The tube driver said it was down to a signal failure. Nothing new. But no it was more serious than we all thought, and while i sat there between new cross gate and surrey queys. The choas unfolded.
I only found out later when I finally got out of the tube and got a text message from my wife. Did you get to the meetup with the power cuts? What power cut, I was thinking? Everything seemed fine, only realised now I was sitting on a tube while most of the national grid in London had gone down.
The funny thing is I was having a go at my wife about americas power outage last week. Well at least it was only 30mins here not days!
The interesting thing I found thinking about Zeldman's blog, was that the mobile phone transmitters never went down once as I was able to get a gprs connection while sitting there on the tube. I never looked at my 3g phone, but I'm sure it was all fine too.
Anyway back to the meetup as such, I was lucky because the east london line power was quickly restored and I was away, while the other lines were all down. But it was pointless because no one else made it I dont think, plus the fact I got there 1 hour late. What kinda of host am I? But come on the there was bloddy power failure! in London!
