Category: technology-and-computing

Some nice cool things happening on a ubuntu box near you now

This is the new look Ubuntu or rather the new default theme in Ubuntu 10.04. I’m not totally convinced, I prefer my own sand and jade themes but its good to see the brown theme will go away.

Ubuntu seems to be one step closer to a semantic desktop with the use of Gnome Zeitgeist is Gnome Activity Journal, zeitgeist-filesystem and other bits…

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users’s activities and events (files opened, websites visites, conversations hold with other people, etc.) and makes relevant information available to other applications. It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

Nice (check out this great video) but can I get the thing working? Well I got the engine running but I can’t get the activity journal working. Luckily it looks like it will make its way into Gnome 3.0 (which we will have to wait for 10.10). If your a KDE user don’t worry there’s also a Semantic desktop strand coming your way.

Me menu is like a idea I had a long time ago. I always wondered why you couldn’t set your status in one application and for the others to also pick that up. So from memory the picture I mocked up was me editing my status in Gwibber and it automatically updated my Skype and Pidgin statuses too. Well now Me menu pretty much does that. Oh and did you see the next generation of Gwibber? Kind of looks like Tweetdeck but not.

Phone7, What the ipad needed

An ipad using the Windows phone 7 interface

One of the things I never quite understood about Apple’s idea of a massive ipod touch as a ipad, is the interface. Steve Jobs may point the finger at Adobe for being lazy with Flash, but to be honest the ipad interface isn’t exactly cleverly thought out or exciting in anyway. I have already said lovely things about Microsoft’s Phone 7 and even with all the other things it doesn’t do I’m still very impressed. So take the form factor of the ipad (although I prefer the 6 inch screen of my ebook reader) dump out all the Apple crap and load it up with Windows phone7 and you got something much more interesting and the dawn of slate computing. I’m not saying its a perfect match but if it was to happen, I’d much more likely to buy a ipad. Dell and HTC get on it….

Hakiu the open operating system with a bright future

Hakiu

When I was young, when I was deciding what type of system I should use next after my ST. I had the choice of either the PC running Windows, Apple Macintosh running System 7 or a Sun Spark with some Unix system. I choose the PC with Windows in the end mainly due to cost and the ability to build my own. Linux at the time seemed too complex but there was another which I got very interested in at the time. BeOS.

Well BeOS has had quite a rollercoaster time and has been rebuilt from the ground up by developers applying the same ethics as Linux and BSD to BeOS. Now called Haiku, the alpha looks and feels usable enough to try in a virtual machine or play with on a spare machine. There’s also a live cd for that true test it and see experience.

I’ll be keeping an eye on Haiku because I think it could be come something worth using in the future, not that I’m saying anything bad about Linux. But options are always good and having another open source operating system is certainly good for the world.

Before Apple launch what ever…

I wanted to quickly get my thoughts down before the Apple announcement later today.

I can’t see myself buying what ever Apple launches. But we all know that was the case anyway.

If Apple do launch a Tablet device, I will only be interested if it has a colour e-ink screen and costs less that 400 pounds. If its LCD screen then the battery life is going to be a killer, unless it holds 3x more charge per hour that your laptop. Why carry around a tablet which holds the same battery life as you laptop? If its not cheap, it will be eaten up by the small netbook industry or the whole host of smartphones coming on to the market. If its OLED then cool but its not going to be anywhere near cheap. And thats another problem. If its 500 pounds plus, why not just get a laptop? Or even add a nice top of the range netbook like the Nokia netbook or Dell Mini10’s? So could Apple do a crunchpad and get a LCD tablet down to the price of a Netbook? Maybe but the appeal is low. Would it have 3/4g? unlikely, specially after the AT&T burning Apple’s received.

Ok lets say its a Ebook device with E-ink. Well that market is becoming flooded and I can’t really see what more Apple could do in the space. I’m also sure E-ink would frustrate Steve Jobs. So were back at LCD/OLED again.

I had another thought that Apple could do something like a slate which is pretty underpowered when in its default state but when you plug in your ipod touch/iphone it binds the two together for something more powerful. So yeah all your games from the apps store can be played at its full rez instead of the iphone screen rez.  I was thinking they  could do the same using a bluetooth pan (personal area network) but we know Steve doesn’t like Bluetooth. So we’re left with either Wifi or some other new radio technology. Having the ipod/iphone part of the sum seems to cut the costs down quite a bit, plus when your at home it could piggy back off your laptop or other apple hardware.

I do also wonder if this big announcement be the next AppleTV, Apple Stereo or even Lisa? If so, we’d wasted so much time for a piece of crap. The chances are that its not because Apple have been working on this for years and it might be Steve Jobs last major product launch. So it could be something very different like a Apple branded LCD TV, a larger screen movie player or even finally the Apple Pippen (the games console which never came out). There is a thought that Steve Jobs must be surprised by the amount of casual games created on the appstore that the idea of a mobile gaming slate or device. Knowing Steve Jobs, he’ll be using that new standard for wireless digital hdmi system to interface with larger screens.

I guess we’ll find out soon…

Interested in buying my Sony Ereader?

Sony PRS505 vs Sony PRS600

After buying the Sony PRS 600, it made sense to sell the old one on Ebay. The new ereader is a better machine in everyway except contrast. As you can see in the photo above the one on the right (old one – PRS 505) is much better in its range of greyscale. The black is black and white very white. While the new one (PRS-600) isn’t so black and white. This means while reading the words are not as sharp. It would be picking up a nice modern hardback and comparing it to a used paperback. Both are perfectly readable but you can see the difference when put together. Obviously I’m not the only one to see this issue.

For me all the other features out way this issue, I’m still looking forward to writing the XSL to convert Tomboy Notes into Sony Notes and back. But if your interested in picking up my old one for cheap, head over to ebay soon.

Experimental Compiz Fusion Plugins

Ubuntu has build in support for Compiz fusion now called just compiz since version 8.04 I believe. But the plugins included haven't really been increased in a while. So most of us are missing out on some of the creativity and downright oddness coming out of experiemental corners of the internet. Theres a whole page of how to get the plugins from GIT if you want to take a walk on the wild side.

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HP doesn’t care about black people

Amusing little video about the new HP webcams which don't track black faces, but will happily follow a white face. Racist no but Black Dezy did have me chuckling, specially since he bought one. Recognition software isn't always what it should be, for example some of those voice recongnition systems can't deal with the deepness in my voice and never catch any of the numbers or words I use. Very frustrating when you know your not the problem in the chain. I expect the camera just can't cope wit the lighting of the store/office and if you shine a light from the front it will work.

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Learning XQuery

I'm convinced that Xquery is somewhat the non-elegent child of the xml family of technologies. Every single technology from XSL to Xpointer, Schema to XMLencryption seem to pick part of the puzzle and do that bit very well. So you can forgive me for thinking Xquery would only be useful for querying data from a xml database, somewhat the SQL of the XML world right? Nope, in actual fact its not only SQL but also PHP and the XML doesn't even have to be in a database at all. The crossovers with XSL is quite shocking for such a elegent family. Fear not, Xpath forms a large part of Xquery meaning us XSL lovers can jump straight in and feel a little at home with its strangely non-xml syntax, I actually quite like writing xml to create/transform xml. And if things get a little too weird in Xquery land, you can run for the beach by telling Xquery to do a XSL transformation on a tree of data instead.

Although it doesn't quite fit, its actually darn powerful and beats messing with XSP or other templating languages. For example, in about 6 easy to understand lines of Xquery, I was able to pull down a XHTML document, rip off its head element and append the body inside a ATOM feed. I could do the same with XSL but it would be much more lines and the way Xquery is setup, it seems to make more sense. One of the big issues people have with XSL is that it doesn't know anything about its environment. So for example calling the present time would require looking up a webservice or some other external logic like PHP, XSP, JSP, etc. Well with Xquery, you get all that type of logic which you could even pump into a XSL transform.

I'm learning Xquery right now mainly through Exist DB and this nice wikibook, which I converted to PDF using the wikibook system for offline reading and reference on my Ebook reader.

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Essential software for modern working

I saw this on Ben Metcalfe's blog recently…

It’s my first time working with RoR and I’m really enjoying the experience. Pivotal Tracker continues to be an amazing productivity tool for development, and I’m beginning to wonder how I ever worked before DropBox, EtherPad and BaseCamp.

Got me thinking what tools do I use which I just can't work without.

Dropbox is high on my list. First thing I do when installing a new machine is install dropbox, because has my desktop backgrounds, application settings and all types of good personal stuff which I use day in day out. I've also considered there pro upgrade for the purposes of work. Its like the promise of Webdav without the stress. I like the way I can work on a file on any of my ubuntu machines and then flip to my work windows machine and carry on where I'd left off. Save and Sync, then i'm back to my laptop. I use symbolic links to do drop torrents from anywhere, sync bookmarks and exchange configs. I want dropbox on my Sony Ereader and on my phone (Windows Mobile 6).

Basecamp I do use at work a lot. But to be honest in recent times its starting to look and feel the poor cousin of Googlewave, Etherpad, etc. Basecamp is great because its project management done to the level which I'm confidential I'm not spending time filling in crap like project but acting too loose like on a wiki. The problem is basecamp is a web only system and not only does that restrict what kind of projects I put on it but also makes it a pain to pay for it out of my own budget. What I really want is Basecamp inside of Wave as a robot and series of widgets or Basecamp with the ability to install on your own domain/server and federation support.

TomboyNotes is where I store all my notes which I can't remember. Its great and simple but I do wish it would work on my phone or at least as a webservice (Snowy will solve this problem). On the gnome desktop tomboynotes is quite well supported (plus it runs on all 3 main platforms), so theres plugins for a lot of things you may want but its not really as smart as Evernote which I started using but got fed up of due to their attitude to gnu/Linux users. Using, I'm also meant to be able to turn Tomboynotes into a lot of other things like a basecamp backpack (although this doesn't work for me anymore). I do use dropbox with tomboynotes, so I can sync notes between machines without a problem.

Hamachi is my personal VPN network I have on most of my own machines. It runs pretty smoothly on most of machines even old Pentium 3's. I keep wanting to go the either the OpenVPN (which I just don't get), Ntop N2N which I struggled to get going too) Wippien which has recently come to my attention as a Hamachi but with open decentralised lookup server. But I find myself using Hamachi for its pure ease and clever things it can do. For example because every node on the VPN act like local ethernet, you can use mnds/zeroconf, run pulseaudio from any home machine or use ssh/samba/webmin/vnc over VPN into any machine attached to the vpn.

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