Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Guys in the BBC saw a arcticle in the latest Wired about the OQO. Havent checked it out for a while, interesting to see there now using a built in keyboard with a 5 inch screen, use to be 4 inch and no keyboard. Shame there still using USB 2 and no 802.11g. Che found more upto date info on TechTV. And of course theres lots of photos on the OQO site.
Read on my feeds a while back, there are some more RSS readers for PocketPC, Smartphone and even the palm.
Just read on infosync, Skype is coming the PocketPC. And now I'm interested… Just wish Skype used standards like H323 or even SIP.
Skype Technologies, the company behind the increasingly popular Skype P2P Voice over IP (VoIP) application for Windows desktops, today launched a beta version of PocketSkype for the Windows Mobile 2003 platform. Owners of Wi-Fi enabled Pocket PCs with 400 MHz or higher processors can now make free, unlimited and unmetered calls to friends, family and colleagues using Skype on the desktop or similar devices.
PocketSkype retains the same core features of regular Skype software including free Skype to Skype worldwide calling to any Skype user, ability to participate in free Skype conference calling, instant messaging, access to the Global Decentralised Directory, online presence and contact lists. Skype Technologies recommended that a headset be used with the software to achieve the best quality.
This is the way forward, sitting in a seminar with tons of wireless around me. Looking at my scanner, theres actually 5 just in this area. There was 20 hubs on the way from the registeration part to the seminar. Anyway I some interesting things i heard…
UltraWideBand isnt the same as Wimax, duhh me! Ultrawideband can support 1.2 gigabits download and 480 megbits upload per node. Its 802.15.3 and is currently made up of 3 different types. UWB Wireless Lan, UWB Electric and UWB Cable. The Wireless Lan is obviously your usual Wireless for home and office use. The Electric, is a rival to the Home plug standard. And the Cable is used for home to home and metro area networks. Almost cable rival to 802.16 – WiMAX. On the UWB Electric front, you can get up to 100megabits a second if all the items communicating are using the same electric point. If it goes through the house electric system, it drops down to 20megabits per second.
The talks then went into Wireless Mesh technology from locust. Which is interesting, but I'm more interested in how to do it with free or opensource software, hardware. Some of the Applications of Mesh technology are vast networks, tempory networks and self healing meshes.
The public sector, commercial ISP's and Coop community's are very interested in using them more. Some places which have already done this…
Hayfiled derbyshire, North Norfolk, University of putra,
Fastline internet in louisiana, Vivian Louisiana, British Army Base in germany, Lauris provence in france and Drymen in scotland.
The only other thing of real interest was the white hat wireless hacking was kinda of lame, but the actual guy did know a lot and was well worth talking too.
Need to keep an eye on this for my debian box, because this will make my life so much easier when trying to work out where things are in Debian.
This is one of those things which dont translate well to europe. In Apples grand plan to be different, they made the design of the ipod mainly white. Unfortually this is a dead giveaway that your sporting one of the hottest gear of this year. Pefect victim, some would say…
Anyway I've been going on about it for ages, but would anyone listen? No… till now.
In america the fashion seems to be more about showing off your goods, while in europe you do that and your not going to have it much longer. Perfect point to Dave in regards to our talk about where you put your mobile phone. Note the Ericsson P900 is also hot pickings for thieves, luckly they have normal-ish headphones.
During one of my wonders around the internet, i came across a video which claimed to be a Playstation One emulator for PocketPCs. I kind of dismissed it because I was busy. But I just check out the video and I'm amazed. It doesnt store the Rom on a large CF or SD card, it doesnt even involve remove bits from the orginal rom. No you use Wireless to transfer the rom bits needed. Wow!
Not tried it out yet, but going to try it someday soon…
WTF Event I attended yesterday, very good. Heres a load of links… Will write stuff around them over the course of the day.
Networked PVRs
Walked directly into the event with dave and started listening to a guy talking about the same idea as this Electronic programming guide for radios. His idea the Frequency clock seems pretty good and stood up to general questioning. I did ask about metadata which the whole system seemed to rely on alot. And yes he had thought quite hard about the issue, not sure he'd though too much about how producers would actual input the data. Some guy mentioned karmadownload which he runs. A lady from the BBC mentioned wrn.
The future of music, its digital because its remixable…
http://www.guerrillanews.com and
http://www.indymedia.org.uk
http://www.europeancreativeforum.org/
One Voice
At this point the whole event moved next door to the vertigo lounge. The choices of dicussions i cant exactly remember, but one was WTF's the future of wiki's. People talked about changing the world through wikis but its not happening. What can be done about it? And I was kind of keeping my mouth quite till Oliver Bradley outlined his idea. His idea takes the best parts of wikis and blogs. Then arranges them using lots of almost semantic technology to create a ground-up emergance aware system.
The semantic nature of well structured blogs or even better semantic blogs, could be systemanticly put closer together. So in Oliver's example he wanted to be able to see blogs which were physically and topic closer to his. I had to jump in and say at long last a idea which is possible and wouldnt require huge resources. I did show quite a few people the geourl stuff and wish I'd showed the London transport blog map too.
But these were only a step in the long path towards semantic blogs. The more metadata and semantic meaning you add to the blog, the easier it is for pools of blogs to be aggergated together for a long or short of period of time. And the author doesnt have to be involved in that at all. Oliver pointed out when he googles for a topic he usually gets about handful of related blogs, wouldnt it be nice if all those blogs got aggergated into one for the very short period of the search? Yes indeed, all google would need to do is know what rss is, and understand what a topic is made up of. Not impossible I would say, actually pretty trivial to do by google, and would give them even power than other search engines. Not to say all the web and others couldnt do the same, but the method they all use to decide whats a topic would become secret and the one which does that the best will be king of this area. I can just imagine google doing a good job because they own blogger and have already started using the AtomAPI.
But back to the event, unfortually it seemed the comments got taken as an attack on wiki's. So there was lots of talk about wikis vs blogs or collaboration vs personal publishing. And I felt the point was missed that these aggeragted blogs could be turned into a wiki. So all the subjects or topics were pulled from elsewhere and then edited and commented on using a wiki type interface. To me it makes no difference Blojsom as always had a wiki plugin built in, just not sure anyones done anything with it and/or if its survived the multiple user version of blojsom2?
More to come….
http://www.kendra.org.uk/ and http://jena.hpl.hp.com:3030/blojsom-hp/blog/ and http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2003/04/15/semanticblog.html and http://www.google.com/search?q=semantic+blogging&sourceid=opera&num=50&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 and http://rdfweb.org/
Lots of crossover with my own ideas…
What is the difference between the Smartphone and a PocketPC? Then you could ask whats the difference between a PocketPC and a TabletPC?
But seriously back to the first question, whats the difference between a smartphone and pocketpc? I only ask because Microsoft have just released there second edition of Windows Mobile 2003, Released Pocket streets for the Smartphone platform and have disclosed details about a new software development platform which allows you to write for the Xbox, PocketPC, Smartphone and Windows. The lines are getting very blury… This maybe not the best time to own all 3 of them.
The major feature in Mobile 2003 is the VGA screen resolution for PocketPCs and QVGA for Smartphones. So this means the next lot of phones will have the same resolution as my current PocketPC. The WPA support, if i'm thinking correctly will be good if it finally supports 802.1x TTLS natively, rather than through another crappy client. But I'm not sure I'm thinking along the same lines. Would like to see the same Internet Explorer for Smartphones used in PocketPCs. If your site uses frames, then it wont show – excellent, that will teach those old style web designers. Which reminds me I still havent done my CSS media = phone/palmtop test yet. Still a real pain that explorer shows all css, which isnt made for small screens.
Voice dialing including voice tags would be great for the Smartphone AS IS PROMISED in the Orange Manual. Still cant work out if its a fcuk-up or just feature which was promised and not delivered on.
About 2 months after the Dutch and 2 weeks after the French. UK finally get an update for the SPV E200. Finally I will beable to use my SPV as a bluetooth modem. Whoo, a reason to use bluetooth again. Downloading update as posting.
You can improve the performance of your SPV E200 by downloading a new ROM Code Upgrade. This will give you the following benefits:
* Longer battery life which significantly improves standby time so that you can use your E200 much longer.
* Improved sound quality from the loudspeaker, earphones, and microphone so that you can hear and be heard more clearly.
* Improved Bluetooth support so that many more Bluetooth devices now work.
Upgraded, took me ages and thought my SPV was dead a couple of time… More about it after I get to sleep.
After pocketpcnow found the developer blogs for the PocketPC team. He's found out Microsoft are now hosting live chat sessions to talk about the PocketPC platform. Interesting Microsoft are using Ical for there events now. And looking at the information, its not only pocketpcs but smartphones too…
Birch dropped me this small article from a local newspaper near him in Minneapolis. Its basicly about Munich's problems with opensourve software and how Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is enjoying the fact there having problems. He makes the point that governments who change for political reasons are free to do so. While those who choose the software for business reasons stick with Microsoft. I'm not quite buying it, but we shall see as more and more governments make these critial decisions.
Been enjoying the register's wifi in the real world series.
Wi-Fi in the real world – pt. 1 and Wi-Fi in the real world – pt. 2
I keep meaning to try out the cloud in Beckenham, grab a pub lunch and wireless…
The guys at the broken have a new release of there popular hacking cross jackass online show.
We kick it off with Windows password hash extraction and cracking. Also learn the basics of modding the Xbox, PS2 and GameCube. Plus, Ramzi’s back with a mission: impossible self-destructing laptop. And we sit down with Kevin Mitnick to find out what life is like for a hacker in prison.
Nice, cant beat that for 30mins.
Went today to the videoforum 2004. Wasnt as varied as last years, but there were some highlights.
Oplayo.com, the first company to do streaming video over 2.5g. The interesting thing is that it will work with almost any colour Java or Symbian phone. Which there are about 10 million in the UK now, I believe? Note funding for Oplayo is from Siemans and Nokia. Hummm… Anyway it works and works quite well with about 12secs to download a 1-2min clip they claim? Flix is a company which make a living off the Oplayo technology, they usually charge around 2 pounds per stream. Which works out to be 50 percent to Flix, 20 – 6 percent for the content creator or owner and then 17.5 percent for the operater. They also say the user GRPS charge should only cost 5 – 10 pence and the 2 pounds will be charged to the users phone bill. Oh they use MVQ video codec for there streams. And there is a kind of directory wml page interface available for use too.
In the sound section I found a nice GNU/Linux audio project called Augnula. Its made for Redhat and Debian but will work on most Linux boxes. It just a matter of getting the hardware to support the software.
Talking about Linux, I passed by the AMD stand and got a spookly but nice light up green AMD pen. But finally got my hands on a AMD 64 Laptop and saw a 4 CPU Operton server running. Wow it was pumping out hot air, plus it needed 3 PSU's to keep it stable! Not for desktop use I'm sure. Interesting thing is that all the laptops out there at the moment are standard desktop AMD 64 chips not the AMD 64 Mobile chip, so they dont last as long on battery, even though the chips have a neat power saving feature. Also the AMD 64 regular chips will change to 939 pin and the Operton to 940 pin in the near future. At the moment the regular chips are using 736 pin or something like that. So who knows what will happen to the FX range?
On the hardware front I finally got to play with a Korg Kaoss Pad. If you've never had a play its well worth having a go. Too expensive for me, but one funky tool. Specially now it does audio and video effects… Thing also worth mentioing is the Alesis Fx's. The Air Fx and Air synths allow you to control them without touching them, you basicly wave your hand over the top of it to control it. And it works really well. Almost as good as the Kaoss pad. While the ModFX's are very cheap FX tools which can be chained together to make a complete setup. Considered buying one if I was that much into making music just to play with while out and about. There very cute too… Didnt see the Pioneer DVJ-x1 though…