Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
For the love of god, mankind, whatever can someone please attempt to or help port over the almost open source project RSSsaver. Its killing me that there is no decent RSS screensaver for Linux and RSSsaver is getting quite mature now, hell even the owner of the project wants it ported and free software based.
Ok what the hell am I doing up at 3mins to 8am? Yes this is so wrong on so many levels. Someone set a meeting for 10:30am then changed it to 9:00am. Ok I can live with that but setting the meeting all the way down almost near the M25 in a place only accessable by car or only one train is insane. Basiclly it meant I had to get up 6:30am, be out of the house by 7am (yes no time for breakfast, oh I long for those days when it use to take me 10mins to shower and get changed). Anyway the train from Woolwich Arsenal was due to leave at 7:10am and did. Luckly thanks to shouting at the guy who was screwing around with his travelcard ticket I was on it. If I wasn't I would be screwed. Now let me take a moment out to say to those who would say to me, why didn't you get the one before so you can be certain you would be there on or before time. Well let me fill you in, if I was to do that. I would have had to be on the 6:55am train (which to the sounds of it my flatmate used). That would have required me to get up at 6:15am and the train is the slow one which means I would have got there all of 5mins earlier that the other one. So screw that, i'm sorry I'm not getting up 15mins earlier so I can get there 5mins earlier. Sorry I'm being harsh and grumpy but I got other issues.
In the mornings the trains are bloody packed to the max, not even standing room, only squeeze room. But what really put me in a bad mood today was my windows mobile phone. Yesterday I restart my phone and for some reason during booting up it crashed when loading up egress my rss reader. Why it was loading it up so early I don't know but it got upset with some update and bang off it went. After a series of restarts and charges I decided to leave it over night. Wake up to find its still screwed, so I had no option but to do a cold restart and wipe everything off it. Yes this is what Steve f'ing jobs was talking about but screw him, my phone is my phone and its pretty useless without the additional 3rd party applications – even if there is the risk they might kill the phone. And lets be honest phones go wrong anyway. Because today my work phone a Nokia N80 didn't work when making a call. It makes call but I then have to switch it to speaker phone to hear the other person. I haven't put anything on the phone and I've done nothing with it. Its even still got a standard 128meg memory card in it, which is insane because I have 1gig cards hanging around in my bedroom. About 4 months ago it wouldn't full sync with my computer and 2months after that it certain applications such as mail kept freezing up, ultimately requiring a reboot. How does Apple and Steve 'my way or the highway' Jobs think his device is going to survive the test of time? Anyhow I've digressed too much.
Some of you smarter folks are maybe asking what happened to your scooter Ian? Well its in the bike shop being MOT'ed and I was meant to pick it up yesterday. But I called to check at 4pm and they said call back at 5pm when I found out yes its ready but I need to pick it up before 6pm. Now White City to Liverpool Street and a short bus ride or walk should be do able in 30mins. But oh no, it took all of 45mins and by the time I got to Liverpool Street when i could call them, it was after 6pm already and they were not answering there phones at all. So yes I had no bike. This wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't going to Berlin early tomorrow and had not a ton of other things to do today including picking up my bike, repairing my phone, arranging a geekdinner and packing.
Google has announced OpenSocial, a new open API for social networks. The new standard will allow developers to create Facebook-like apps on any social network site that implements it with the same calls.
The open API will have three parts
- People
- Storage
- Activity stream
All of these calls will have a GData counterpart and they will use HTML and Javascript only. Google is considering adding OAuth (Radar post) to the API.
This is huge because finally we're starting to see a common standard being build into different social networks. There are some caveats however like no support for Facebook or Myspace. But good to see Plaxo and Linkedin involved in this API project. I told you Google were up to something…
From the Backstage Blog, a frank discussion about DRM and Cross-platform support. It all started when I asked Ashley a few questions recently about the iplayer strategy. Ashley answered the question with quite a bit of passion and Matthew Cashmore thought hey wouldn't it be a good idea to get some of that passion in a recording. He is the result which you can judge for yourselves…
The iPlayer, no don't do a runner, seriously, it's taken over the mailing list, dominated our discussions and is something that many members of the backstage community care an awful lot about. So do we. We all know the questions. Why don't we stand up to the rights holders? Why do we insist on using DRM? Why did we sign a secret deal in blood with Microsoft?
So we finally decided that these questions needed answers, and the only person to talk to was the boss. We present 26 minutes of questions and answers about iPlayer, DRM and cross platform support with Ashley Highfield, Director Future Media & Technology.
In this frank discussion we cover the DRM issues, explain that iPlayer isn't a Microsoft only party and ask why didn't we use a non propriety solution.
You can get the file directly from Blip.TV under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence in Mpeg3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.
In a follow up to the simply amazing The machine is using us. Professor Michael Wesch has started to tackle the subject of students university experience.
a short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.
Its the start of a larger project which we can all take part in.
Thanks Robin for the link to the one I almost missed
Its been a really busy week and I've still not quite got around to blogging most of it but I did want to say (quickly) that the Videos for the Women in Games Mixer videos (part 1 and part 2) are now up on BlipTV. As usual unedited and under a creative commons licence, so you can edit the best bits if you like. Nothing to stimulating but interesting. Good work Thayer.
You can also find the boagworld 100th Live meetup video at the same place this time in 4 parts. Expect to hear audio from the Will Wright Lecture, some shouting about how Andrew 'amatuers are killing the industry' Keen got a frosty reception at the Arts Council and some writing about other games related events soon. Still I can't believe I missed Toshio demonstrating Electroplankton at ZeroOne, I would have paid to have been there. Anyway, don't forget today is the Geekdinner with the Wii and Thursday a Geekdinner with Stowe Boyd.
Well to be honest it was going so well till I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10. Now I can't put my laptop into standby/suspend or hibernate. This means I need to switch it off everytime I make a trip anywhere longer that a short walk. If I shut the lid, it locks up and I end up having to force the shutdown with the power button. I'm not the only one and there is an official bug been raised. George reckons I have 3 options… Live with it, downgrade or change kernal version. I prefer to keep 7.10 because I actually like some of the new features but hate not being able to suspend.
Another thing broke recently, Hamachi. It was working fine for ages then it broke. Problem is that it will launch as usual but hit the power button and I get a error saying could not log into Hamachi. Yes I have tried different Gui's and from the shell. Whats extra weird is my two other Ubuntu machines are running Hamachi without a problem now.
On the upside, Compiz graphics is seriously tuned now and you can really tweak the settings to your perfect taste now. Tomboy notes has webdav syncing now. I'm already thinking about syncing it with Exist DB (xmldb) which I'm going to run on my workstation in the near future. I have switched my windows home server over to Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS because I wanted something rock solid. And to be honest its a dual Pentium 3 with tons of hard drive space and memory, it doesn't need 7.x.I Put Webmin on it and everythings working including Hamachi, SSH, Cups (printer server) and Samba. I'm trying out Amanda for backup again, so if anyone from Amanda wouldl like to help out, just comment.
Bluetooth support in 7.10 has come along a lot but the Bluetooth support in KDE seems a lot stronger again. George showed me the lock and unlock feature I've always wanted for my laptop. Unfortually it doesn't seem to see my windows mobile phone, I think maybe because its looking just for phones while my spv comes up as a computer on other scans. Also explains why it can see my work Nokia N80 all the time. Virtual Box is setup and running Windows XP SP3. I tried to run Virtual Dj and it does work but if you put it under any pressure it gets very slow and syncronisation of music becomes a joke. So for my digital djing, I'm going to have to switch back to Windows with a reboot. I've not attempted to put Particls on it but it might work virtualised.
I recently asked a friend about why they had joined Facebook as it tends to hate internet applications which collect data and involves some kind of social aspect.
well, to me all these manage-your-friends-online apps only have one purpose: advertising and adress collection. they are one of the reasons people receive f*cking penis enlargement spams and similar trash.
i believe in modern communicaton, face to face and i already hated the expressions facebook and ringo from day one. they describe that the people are incabable of communication although they have all the best means in our modern society. facebook – i collect my friends faces, the exterior apperance gains importance over real personality values, a quick glance instead of a serious conversation, that's what it symbolises.
the people are plain lazy and comfortable, that's all, i hardly receive any proper emails like the real letters i used to get, ususally short sms style messages like abbreviated postcards. hm, i find that sad ;(i still receive and send a lot of snail mail and i love it!
Its weird because I only get snail mail with bills and official documents in it now, the rest is junk or miss-directed mail (I get a lot of this).
So I've been downloading lots of media recently, believe it or not but me and my flatmate are eating through 168 gigabytes of data a month! Before you all point the finger at me, my flatmate is on skype everyday for long periods of the day. Anyway it means nothing because thankfully moving to Free software network means I'm only using half of my allocated bandwidth a month (yes I do pay 30 pounds a month for this connection, but rightly so). Anyway theres some great media to download.
If your not watching Dexter season 2 then what are you doing? Spooks season 7 (i think) on UK TV is certainly better that 24 ever was. Its worth noting Dragon's Den is also back and has a slightly new look. Back to American TV, and I can't help but watch Ugly Betty season 2 and Prison Break season 3
which seems to jump the shark every episode now. On the upside Heroes season 2 is simply amazing and can not be missed. While jumping back to the UK again for the last time Billie Piper in a Secret Diary Of A Call Girl is strangely non-sexy and more funny that anything else. Still worth a watch, but certainly cheap TV. Its a shame the real hustle just finished but I'm sure Hustle season 5 will start up again, soon. Although they will need to get back the female from Dexter first. There's certainly enough to watch till Lost comes back.
If your in London, the next few weeks is blocked solid with events and exhibitions for the London Games Festival. Just a quick scan down the schedule is enough to start marking down your calendar. What I love is the mix of Fringe and official events, there's stuff for everyone. From Parties like the GLAM Academy Party (Games, Life, and Media) to the Women in Games Mixer social. Looking at my own Calendar, there is something of interest every single day for the next 10 days, including next week Monday (29th Oct) a great event involving live large screen wii gaming from Geekdinner.co.uk, certainly one not be missed I would say (but I would say that). I think this video gives people the idea of what fun it can be…
So I stupidly upgraded from Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) to 7.10 (Gusty). Now I can't hibernate or suspend my laptop, so I have to power it off each time I want to go somewhere else. My Beryl effects I love have gone and been replaced with something. Thunderbird seems to fall over when starting up and RSSOWL beta 6 has stopped working now. Can I fix all of these soon? Maybe not, does anyone know how to downgrade back to 7.04?
Pop!Tech is one of those conferences you would love to go to if you could one afford it and two are special enough to be invited. But whats great about Pop!Tech is that they have every year since about 2004 provided a live stream into the conference. With Maine only 5 hours behind London, its not too difficult to catch most of it at home or while working. Tomorrow being Friday, I might have to find a spare machine and have Pop!Tech streaming on it to the whole department. But to be honest the best way to experience Pop!Tech is at home on a Xbox running Xbox Media Centre.
Its very simple to get Pop!Tech streaming on xbmc. Simple create a blank text document with *.strm on the end for an extention. Then stick one of the urls in the file. So for example I have 2 files, one called Poptech-300k.strm with the url – http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1592848 inside of it and Poptech-700k.strm with http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1592849 inside of that. Navigate to the files via the xbox and select them. The Xbox should now start to buffer the content. I've set my buffer to 10meg which is insane but I'm watcing the 700k stream over the 300k version.
What seems to have changed this year is that Pop!Tech has now included archives. This might something to do with the TED talks coming online a while back as podcasts you can download without any DRM. Well Pop!Tech have gone one further by applying a Creative Licence, so you can share, edit and remix under a non-commercial use. Can things get any better?
So its been a while but I'm finally getting my head around the gnu/linux system and environment. There are some great things about the switch which makes me cringe everytime I go back into windows (on my work pc and when I want to read my busted sd card – more on this soon). But there are some bad things too.
First, pieces of pure joy. Since I've lost Outlook I've not really had a way to capture notes quickly. Dave showed me Tomboynotes which is build into Gnome. Tomboynotes is a local wiki but saves everything into a simple set of XML files. So now I have XMLstartlet and CWM installed, so I can apply XML processing and more to the raw xml. Combine this with Cron and Unix Pipes and I'm not even sure where to start because theres so many opptunities. I'm also looking at using one editor for unix because I've tried a couple but I need something serious before I start writing XSL again. Currently I'm using Nano for command line operations and Quanta plus for writing XML. I've downloaded Eclipse now and will try out both eclipse and emacs soon. Dave also alerted me to Conduit which is synchronsation solution for Gnome but looking a little deeper seems to be part of the solution for my pipelines application (which yes I've not talked enough about recently let alone updated for a while). So I'm super excited by this and the ability to pipe and process stuff with XML, including a KDE application called Tellico which also stores it records in XML. So I'm adding my music collection (from Amarok) and movie collection (from Myfilmz). I think Conduit is going to be one of those applications which I use a lot.
Other good stuff which is good is Stereo Bluetooth can be made to work in Linux, I just wish it was simplier. I get Cron now thanks to Kcron and Dave also showed me Anacron which works like Cron but will run tasks if your computer is off when you boot it back up. Glyn also showed me some battery saving technology () which looks like it will make its way into Ubuntu 7.11? On Windows I use to get about 4.5 hours of battery life out of my Dell laptop. I'm getting close to that on Ubuntu now but I reckon there is room for improvement, so this little app could help a lot. Samba is coming along, and I've now setup Hamachi ip addresses to shares in /etc/fstab. This means if I'm on my own network or on a internet connection I can still mount shares and its all secure. On the moan side, I still can't do real authentication with Samba for some weird reason. I still don't have a decent blogging application and if I switch my wireless card off, I have to reboot the whole machine to switch it back on again! Oh and Wireless and Bluetooth are lumped together it would seem and I can't find where to just turn off Bluetooth in Ubuntu. Not great for saving power. RSSowl is good but I'm still missing lots of features which could make it great. For example I now have a cron to grab my OPML (hopefully soon my APML too) from Bloglines. I was hoping that I could automaticlly update RSSowl with new subscriptions by over writing a bookmarks file but I can't find such a thing and the feature from RSSowl 1.x of automatic subscribing folders isn't in the new version. Last but not so important is, I still can't get the Wiimote to connect to the computer. Oh and I still need a decent piece of DJ software for Linux, I have to reboot into Windows to use Virtual DJ right now.
So generally things are better and I'm glad I switched to Linux over Vista or bought a Mac. Maybe you could be better off too?
So I heard Windows Home Server is now ready to ship according to Paul Thurrott. As some of you already know I'm running pretty much every machine on my network on gnu/linux except my home server. Its strange, my laptop, my workstation and even my firewall/router is running Smoothwall. But the server which holds terabytes of storage is actually running a beta copy of Windows Home server. But my reason for sticking with Windows Home server have finally started to come undone. A friend sent me a link to a few projects including the Ubuntu Home Server Project and Linux home server. This all started by George Ou and his discussions about the difference between the two. George has added updates to the main post and people have gone nuts over the comments (260 to date). There's even the poll which has 2600+ votes is 56% towards linux or freebsd over windows home server. So after some more reading I'm thinking now has come the time to either upgrade or switch over.
Now I wish the switch was that easy. First up I will need to unmount all the harddrives from the Windows storage array and make sure my data is ok. Then I need to take the machine down from the loft and remove windows before putting on Linux. Before going back in the loft I need to make sure I can get back into the machine even when there is a power outage or some kind of error (its a dell with boot after suspend, so it should be ok). But it will be all worth it if I only need to go up to the loft to add addional storage.
So what options do I have? Well I was hoping the Ubuntu Home Server Project would have files or a beta to play with, but not yet. So i'm thinking keep it simple. Xubuntu or Ubuntu desktop version with some well thought-out software. Hey if it works out, maybe I could feed into the process of the Ubuntu Home server project? I was considering the server version but I'm thinking although I will run it headless most of the time, it would be good to be able to run Xwindow for VNC/RDP access. For Backup I'm going to try Amanda again or Bacula. If worst comes to worst, I now got the hang of the Cron and Rsync, I could just use that. On the storage front, I have no idea how to setup a distributed file system like windows home server on linux, but I've done little research and I'm sure someone knows. Sharing is not a problem because Samba shares can be installed easily enough, I also don't really need Universal Plug n Play, specially if I can get Daap working in Amarok or Rhythmbox working. Ideally I would love to have some simple web front end, but once again this is going to take some more research.
