social-hardware – Page 28 – Cubicgarden.com…

First night in Amsterdam

I'm telling you I love this city, yes its full of shadey people at night and theres the hard drug pushers walking around offering tourist all types of anything but you cant beat the vibe in this city. Anyway I have to report that the Lloydhotel maybe quite a bit from Central Station (about 25mins walking, 5mins by taxi) but its certainly worth it. I'm using there very fast and free broadband connection which is plugged into every single guest room. Yep on the wall there is a nice network connection just waiting for you to plug in. I can pick up the 4 different Wireless nodes which are placed downstairs in public places like the bar and lounge areas. But being on the 3rd floor makes the signal a bit weak. Anyhow for some reason my ipaq seems to do a better job picking it while walking around the hotel. It seriously takes some getting use to. Being surrounded by free wireless while away from home does not quite compute in my own mind. But dont worry, I'll be taking full advantage. I already have noticed someones elses iTunes playlist is available via the local lloyd network. But I can not for the life of me connect to Jabber, skype is fine but not jabber. Its almost like the ports have been blocked… Email is also fine, so email me on my hotpop or rave address if you want to tell me something urgently.

The actual room and hotel are pretty good and this wireless aside has to be the best hotel I've been in. its not the biggest (vegas hotel room at Lady Luck was huge). But this hotel is smooth, simple, clever and stylish. Theres little touches like the lights which can be moved around the wall using strong magenets and a set of spare enthernet cables just in case you forget to bring or buy one. Sarah asked me to explain the room and hotel and I answered simple, sensible and clever. You can tell the designers had a great time.

I have to spare a thought for Matt biddulph, whos hotel did not have wireless and needed to go down the RAI centre to get some. I now have my stuff together and should be ready for tomorrow's talk. Just like Dodds, I also extended the week into the weekend so I wont need to rush home after the conference. Sarah is coming over so we can spend the weekend together in Amsterdam.

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Geek dinner with microsoft

Ok so I rushed home to vote today, then disappeared down to a location between bank and moorgate stations for a geek dinner. Nice but difficult to find thai restaurant. Anyhow, turned up fashionable late in my brazil football shirt. Can hardly blame me, it was nice and warm in london today, even while I write this on my ipaq on the way home at 2300 its still warm enough not to wear a coat. Anyhow everyone else seemed quite dressed up in shirts, so I guess I was weirdly dressed. But it didn't matter everyone was very friendly. Anyhow it seemed about 66% of the people there were from Microsoft! I believe there were about 12-15 people eating in total. After dinner which was paid for by Microsoft, there was a free prize draw and everyone non-microsoft won something. Prizes ranged from One Note 2003 to a Samsung Personal media player. Yep guess what I won? Yep as you can see in my pictures, Official Windows XP Professional with sp2 included. Wow, I dont believe I have ever held a boxed version of XP Professional. And I certainly have never owned a copy.

After the dinner people started make there way home which was strange because usually people in London tend to stick around and have drinks or something. But it was good because I'm off on holiday tomorrow and needed to pack (but instead I'm blogging – whoops). I had some interesting chats with some people and swapped some business cards. I was assured that Internet Explorer 7 will have RSS support and that Longhorn may do (best I could do). There was lots of general talk about Languages and RSS at one point but we got stuck into the media centre version of xp before that. One of the guys working on Media Centre edition seemed a little surprised when I asked about the threat of the xbox media centre and hacked xboxes, he replyed with a usual Microsoft answer but admitted to that fact (it being a official answer, not being a threat) then moved the subject on to the media centre abilities which may be in Xbox 360 (yep he used that word not myself). I also had a very interesting talk with a lady from Microsoft about me thinking of swapping my tabletPC for a Apple Power book. She was shocked I would consider doing such a thing, and said I should consider getting a newer one which is lighter and without the keyboard.

Generally it was good night out and thanks to Microsoft for paying the dinner tab. Although most of this can be seen as suspect, I have to say all companies do this. I mean you only have to look at the way Apple went over the top on the tiger launch. You can also listen here. And honestly its good to see Microsoft trying to get down from its ivory towers and listening to the developers of the world (ok London at least). I'm looking forward to making this a regular monthly meal and I look forward to the next one.

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Google Maps comes to the UK at long last

Sorry being sitting on the information that Google maps has finally made its way across the ocean to the UK. Go check it out under http://maps.google.co.uk. All the features are there except the Satellite imaging.

Its quite interesting that the Train stations near me do not actually sit on the actual train tracks?

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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RSS Software bugfixes and feature requests

Ok first lesson in blogging, get your facts sorted. I started writing this entry with a long list of bugfixes and feature requests for my common RSS readers. But then I went to the sites for PocketRSS and Blogmatrix Sparks! and realised that they both have upgraded there versions and I just was not keeping up to date. But on the PocketRSS front its not my fault because they dont have RSS feeds on the site. Oh dear oh dear! Anyhow, here's my list of features…

In PocketRSS, theres seems to be no way to import linked OPML files. For example my IanForresterfeeds link to my other OPML files. luckily Sparks! does which is great
In PocketRSS, there seems to be no way to automatically reload opml subscriptions without doing it yourself. It would be great for it to happen every X days or everytime you start PocketRSS.
In Sparks, is it only me or is help needed in Sparks! I still dont quite know the differences between “Add this OPML directory to Sparks!” and “Import every weblog in this OPML directory”?
In PocketRSS, there seems to be no way marking a whole RSS feed read. And on top of that theres no way to do this to multiple RSS feeds. At the moment you need to go into the RSS feed and mark each entry as read.
In Sparks, what is the difference between the blue sphere global things and the podcast and weblog sections? When I import a OPML file shouldnt it automaticly work out what a podcasting feed is and what a normal feed is? Jager already does this, why not sparks?
In Sparks, how on earth do you actually delete a ton of feeds in one go? I right click on the containing folder and the Remove category is always greyed out. And following on from that, hitting delete key should do the same as right clicking and selecting delete right? Wrong!
In Sparks, is there anyway to stop Sparks using IE as the default browser for displaying blogs? On top of that, is there way to force it to use a external browser like Jager does?
Generally about PocketRSS, why does searching under google for PocketRSS still take me the old site? And the old site still points to PocketRSS 1.42 rather than the nice new PocketRSS 2.x. A simple redirect should do the trick AtomicDB guys
With Sparks and Jager, why is the licence attached to a indivdual machine? I have jager installed on 4 machines I use every week. Couldnt the licence be attached to myself rather than the client?
With Sparks/jager and somewhat PocketRSS, as mentioned above I have Jager running on 4 different machines. There needs to be some kind of attention data between them soon, otherwise its going to be unmanageable. I read a feed on one of them and then switch to another client. I then have to manually tell the 2nd client I already read that entry or feed. This is nuts when your using 4 clients and then add in the fact I'm using 2 other RSS readers, PocketRSS and Sage. Yes this is CRAZY! Please can some one start using Attention.xml please! Theres a GAP IN THE MARKET here for someone to setup a nice webdav service which could sync attention.xml across multiple RSS clients. Blogmatrix this would be ideal for you guys!

Of course I'm not knocking any of these pieces of software, I actually bought PocketRSS a while ago and am considering buying Jager (Sparks! still doesnt fit with my style of rss reading).

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perplexcity

Recieved a email this morning from the ARG perplex city, which I actually thought ended sometime last year.

My name is Sente, and I am the Master of the Perplex City Academy.

On January 16th 2004, an object of immeasurable value was stolen from
our city. You kindly answered my plea to assist in its recovery. Over
many, many months, we at the Academy have been assembling information
to help you in this task.

Today, we break our silence. There is still so much to share with you,
but for now this fragment must suffice.

http://www.perplexcity.com/video.html

I will be in contact again soon.

Stay alert.

Sente

Of course it would be wrong of me to not link to the Project Syzygy aka Perplex City forum on unfiction. Which is the place to go for information on Alternative Reality gaming generally.

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At long last I can drop Opera for Firefox?

At long last the one thing which I really missed when moving from Opera 7.5 to Firefox 1.0, has been developed as a extension. Opera had this great way of remembering sessions even when your machine had crashed or you had closed the browser by mistake. Now SessionSaver does the same for Firefox. I'm the first to rate it and I had to rate it 5 stars. I believe theres enough extensions to make up for almost every feature in Opera. I just need Firefox to be as quick and slick as Opera now.

A while ago I highlighted a load of extensions I used in Firefox, well this my current selection used across the 5 different machines I use day in day out.
SessionSaver – SessionSaver will auto-track and restore your browser -exactly- as you left it
lget – Allows you to initiate a direct download of a file given a url
Flashblock – Replaces Flash objects with a button you can click to view them
Sage – A lightweight RSS and ATOM feed aggregator.
Tabbrowser Preferences – Enables enhanced control for tabbed browsing
Disable Targets For Downloads – Prevents sites spawning blank windows when clicking binary downloads
FoxyTunes – controls your favorite media player without ever leaving the browser
Web Developer – Adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools
Mouse Gestures – Allows you to execute common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by mouse gestures drawn over the current webpage
User Agent Switcher – Adds a menu to switch the user agent of the browser
Nuke Anything – Adds a “Remove this object” entry to the right-click context menu, which will remove an object from a webpage temporarily
mozcc – Provides an interface for viewing embedded Creative Commons licenses
Gcache – Allows you to check the page you are browsing in the google cache

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Social software silos

Tim Idenifies the major problem with social software silos.

One thing that interests me in terms of socialsoftware is the fact that there are many sites offering social applications (different services rather than duplication) and it struck me that it would be really cool to have a sort of 'meta-social'software' service, that would aggregate all your social presence on the web into one place. That way you could take your blog, del.icio.us bookmarks, IM accounts, flickr photos, friendster profile, url and email (along with any other personal data) and make it accessible all in one place, meaning you only have to give out one userID to people, which would allow access to all these things.
Microsoft's solution is a great effort in that it tries to integrate all these services, but the fact that you have to buy in to using the same product for everything concerns me slightly; – it would be nice if integration was possible over multiple services. This should be possible with something like RSS, but to my knowledge has not yet been done. (Presulably a level of cooperation between teh providers of social web services would be needed, and since not all of these services are open source, this is probably fairly unlikely.)

Some thoughts on the issue myself, first I saw some information about LID – lightweight identity and I've been thinking about the whole issue myself. Recently I adopted the use of Keepass which is a open source light weight password manager. To have pretty much all my internet and computer passwords in an advanced 256bit encrypted, twofish algorithm database, makes you think twice about personal information. I mean for example I'm playing with Microsoft Wallop, using flickr for my public domain photos, relaying music taste to audioscobbler and busy weaving bookmarks and metadata for del.icio.us. But each one bar audioscrobbler I would say are pretty much deadend when it comes to getting personal information out. Not only that but what about all the other information which is generated from mass aggregation? Would be good to share that information with the people actually creating it wouldnt it? By the way I have not heard Doug Kay talk about Attention XML for ages now and digital identity was discussed by the gillmor gang a while ago. The reality of digital identity raises its head when thinking about social software, shame none of them will even take my foaf profile? Not to say that is the ultimate aim of digital identity and interopable social software.

Miles dropped me and Tim a email pointing towards the new Technorati Tags. And honestly I'm pretty impressed with the tag feature, I just wish there was a meta standard for blogging which would beat using the rel attribute in a link. The better default option of using the categories of blog entries is actually quite a good idea because it requires no extra effort from the blogger and its retro active, which gives technorati lots of data to analyse, if they have not done so already. Anyway to celebrate the technorati's step up in the aggregation market here's a couple of good examples.

Technorati ipaq tag | Bill Gates | Socialsoftware | Hacking | Xbox | Silicon | Flickr | xbmc. Now if only we could get this in xml?

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Future conference choices

Which one would you go to? and of course, how would you justify it?

Doors of perception 8 in New Delhi, India – 19-26 March 2005
O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, America – 14-17 March 2005
SVG Open 2005 in Enschede, Netherlands – 15-19 August 2005
The World Wide Web conference 2005 in Chiba, Japan – 10-14 May 2005
XTech 2005 (use to be XML Europe) in Amsterdam, Netherlands – 25-27 May 2005

Well if I can finally find time to write my SVG paper before the looming deadline of Feb 1st 2005, I would get a huge discount into SVG open 2005. (By the way, my new Sanyo S750 plays SVG). I was planning on a presentation on the Art and Design, Data Connection or Evangelism & Specs tracks. Even if I miss out on the paper call, I'm still going to create some kind of promotional animation showing off SVG at its best and hopefully projected on to the white walls of the university. Back to the subject, if worst comes to worst I'm going to pay for the conference because its so close, flights and sleeping arrangements will be cheap and its an excuse to go back to the netherlands again.

Update, thanks to Joel. I'm going to submit a paper to XTECH 2005 on behalf of BBC World Service about RSS. My main push will be about publishing RSS in 35 different languages and then how were publishing extra metadata to help build a better picture of the content. I'll also touch on how were able to service 3 different types of end points with the same content. Should make an interesting but challenging talk for those involved in the xml world. I wish BBC News lots of success with there paper, and honestly think if both papers are accepted this would be great for the BBC. You only have to look at the line up for Emerging technology to see how diverse and forward looking the BBC is.

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When its set to busy, i am honestly busy…

Ok so first up Tom Coats talks about the weird context shift of IM on mobile devices. and then Ben Hammersley replys with this. And I see what there saying, actually worst than that. I've actually been trying to deal with mobile IM for the last few months. See GPRS charges are getting low enough to be online in between work and home, so I am. However theres things which just dont work, for example.

Usually when I'm iming, I usually have to tell people i'm on my smartphone or ipaq otherwise they wonder why i'm taking so long to reply. Theres also a tendancy to write large chunks rather than tap tap bang tap tap bang, as im conversations up the screen tend to be a pain to scroll when trying to type at the same time. So I end up coming across really busy and distracted, when i'm actually just sitting on a train listening to podcasts. Saying all that, the opposite is also true. Specially when I'm on IM using my ipaq. I tend to turn off the screen and leave the ipaq on to walk, which means I'm on online but actually very busy or not able to talk right now. And just before I consider ways to solve this problem, one of the tricky problems is leaving im on while at a resturant or cafe. Its not as discreet as sms and a real pain in the ass for the other person trying to get hold of you, thinking your at your desk. At least with sms people expect you may not reply instantly. Its a social convention, for me at least…

Ok I'm sure i've been through this before, I use to think it was about presence management. But its not possible to do so without somekind of technological assistance. For example my smartphone has a nice profile called Automatic which automaticly sliences when your synced calendar says you have a busy meeting. Its simple and works. However i dont sync my phone nearly as much as I use to now I've switched to linux. Which leads me to wonder why my ipaq (which I do sync everyday) doesnt have a option like this?

Off the back of the last question, is it possible for the ipaq to send out a bluetooth message to all bonded devices to say Ian is now busy in a meeting? I know it wouldnt work for everyone because not everyone keeps there calendar up to date. But I bet you would if your mobile devices did something like that. I mean it cant be that hard to write something which switches profiles based on a bluetooth message? Saying that, with all the bluesnarfing attacks and closed api's on the windows mobile platform. It isnt going to work is it? Ok so lets forget bluetooth for a moment then. To get on im you need to be online, so why not some service which defaults your im client into a certain presence depending on your ical calendar? Hummm maybe… nahh…

Ben talks about the fact he's not usually online because people dont respect his presence. Well I'm using PSI which doesnt automaticly pop up a window, thank goodness. And I tend to have the same view of IM as I do for sms. Aka leave it till i'm ready to deal with it. I've been thinking how great it would be to tell if someone is really idle by the client following movement on the screen or something, but thats even more scary that anything else I've suggested. I've also been thinking about somekind of in-between solution. For example, I've got a bot called WeatherBot which tells me all the information I need without actually iming it. Maybe theres something in this? I've looked on the other networks and jabber seems to be the only one which does this, however theres lots of news about msn messeger 7 which is meant to copy yahoo's attention Buzz thing. Personally this is still too much, but shows theres grounds inbetween which can be explored. Oh by the way interesing blog about Jabber and Bots. I think maybe a jabber bot which is a conversation summariser would be difficult but damm useful. Thanks for the idea Miles (we were talking about something on top of aggregation for news).

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