Category: technology

Opie (Open Palmtop Integrated Environment)

The question of what I do with my old compaq 3630 ipaq still bothers me. I cant just sell it as I wont get much for it and I would rather make sure it makes a difference to someones life than sell it. As such…

Anyway I found something to do with it. Thanks Infosync. Install Opie Linux on it.

So I did.

Its alot of hassle to put opie on the ipaq, but if you follow the instructions to the T it works fine. The scarey part was when you first boot up the ipaq from cold and it sits there booting up opie without much feedback. Anyway it all looks good now.

When you start up opie the screen is a little low res and it flickers a bit, but my old ipaq screen wasnt the best anyway. Looked at the updated packages and downloaded a few bits and bobs like web server, samba server, etc. To note it doesnt support 3com wireless cards, but it liked the oroncio and compaq cards. Never had a chance to read the opie user manual till now.

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Phrack is back

Man I feel so lame sometimes, there is so much to read online and I dont ever have the time to sit and read it. I thought having a personal aggerator would be a good way of filtering the noise. And it is but I'm finding so much I cant run through it because there not rss feeds.

Now my solution to this problem is using cocoon's aggerator generator, I can grab a html page, tidy it into xhtml and extract the bits needed for a valid rss feed. And I can see it working, but its alot of hardwork for a simple job.
_life is ment to be hard_ says me.

Anyway the sites I would start off with, phrack and ntk.

If you dont know phrack, then your've never heard of 2600 or anything like that, its time to learn. It describes its self as 'a Hacker magazine by the community, for the community' and yep they've been there since the mid 80's believe it or not. I still remember getting there txt files from bbs's and ftps on my old st. Anyway they always have the fresh news of exploits and hacks, all rounded up in a humourous not too serious container. Its spot on, trust me.

Anyway, they have put all there archives and all new issues online in grabble txt files within logical folders. Even though everything is in txt i should beable to do simple aggeration like pulling all the txt files together into one large one. Perfect for reading on my ipaq.

NTK is a odd one, I like it but I dont. There content is great and so fresh, but there style and presentation is enough to put me off from reading it regularly. Anyway Dave usually tells me all I _need to know_ from NTK. Hehe.

But anyway, yes I like your content and I want to represent it in something less html and more xml based so the presentation is very seperate from the content.

Now one of the things I could do is grab there main pages and tidy it then turn it into rss. But have you seen the mess which is there pages? Yuk, span elements everywhere. Oh well at least its not like there menus which are full of dont tags.

Anyway, if I get time I may write the xsl to do the transformations, sure others would be interested.

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Flash mobbing

Heard about flash mobbing a while back but knew of it as flocking smart.What ever the hell you call it, its finally come to the UK. Hurahhh.

Heres a story, Cities on 'flash mob' hitlist from the BBC
And they provides some good links in related section.
London Mob,
Warren Ellis' weblog ,
Cheese Bikini,
Flashmob.info

Its kinda of like meetup
 with no reason. Cant see it lasting too long once you get thousands of people going to one place, then the police get called and people get arrested. Blah blah blah… Of course it will go underground again, like most things.

Its already happening actually.

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Give it to the children

I went to this thing yesterday with Dave and SarahK. It was better than I expected and hosted at the design council, Convert Garden. The title was – Understanding the future of mobile devices, which instantly rings alarm bells in my head.

It was my first time to this event, so I was a little uneasy about the format of the meeting (as such), not enough questions from the floor for my liking and no real debate. But I was attracted to the event my friend dmarks and by the listings of previous meetings, also on the website.

The key points for me were Joe Odukoya's talk, which was a round up of different technologies and when were expecting to see them become common place. I did question the lack of discovery in his chart but mainly to start a debate, which didnt work. But yeah over all good simple and entertaining presentation. Just the kinda person I would invite to talk in college. Maybe just maybe?
One of the suprising things for me was the fact eastern markets prefer cables, hence why bluetooth, wifi and even infra red were not common place. Scarey! Also he pointed out the America market is run by the corps while the european market is run by consumers, hence why wireless instant messaging will be more popular here than wireless email or push to talk.

Ok till then I was ok with everything, then this guy Dr Simon Roberts does his presentation.
He presented the idea of bottom up content rather than top down – yes because we havent heard that before. But then he went off on how the early adopters are to blame for a lot the issues with mobile technology. I was like what the fcuk! Anyway, it didnt take long for people to challenge him and a guy from IDEO said the most sensible thing of the night. Give the technology to the kids and they will do something different. The point he was putting across was the fact technology when it first comes out is expensive, yes of course the early adopters will be a certain group. Make it cheap and afforable and give it away and you will see a new group of early adopters doing different things.
Early adoption isnt bad, just in its current state only a few can be the adopters.
However Simon did bring up some good points and a subject I've never heard of before. Kinship? – I tapped down, The study of linkage, Relationship of people and content.
And i was wondering how sematics and otologies fits into this?
Also he had some good quotes including this one. We use people to find content, we use conent to find people
and this European have a fear of falling. Eastern Asians have a playful nature.

Remind myself to get there early next time and get a seat in the crowd rather than the edge. Will be going to the next event for sure…

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Ink Markup Language

So the W3c have a working draft of InkML and looking at the authors there is no sign of Microsoft at all. Interesting enough HP, Corel, Apple and IBM as well as others are there.
I can see why Apple and Corel would be very interested.

But whats this xml spec do?
This document describes the syntax and semantics for the Ink Markup Language for use in the W3C Multimodal Interaction Framework as proposed by the W3C Multimodal Interaction Activity. The Ink Markup Language serves as the data format for representing ink entered with an electronic pen or stylus. The markup allows for the input and processing of handwriting, gestures, sketches, music and other notational languages in Web-based applications. It provides a common format for the exchange of ink data between components such as handwriting and gesture recognizers, signature verifiers, and other ink-aware modules.

Which you must agree with me, is highly amazing and I cant wait to see how this blends with other standards such as rdf, svg, etc. Theres already talk of SMIL.

A photo taken with a digital camera can be annotated with a pen; the digital ink can be coordinated with a spoken commentary. The ink annotation could be used for indexing the photo (for example, one could assign different handwritten glyphs to different categories of pictures).

Once again a dual category post = Tabletpc and XML

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