The guy behind What's up with Xbox media center has done a great piece about the python script interface for xbox media centre. Anyway I thought I'd point out the post, as this guy does a great job reporting on xbmc. Keep it up and it reminds me again I need to do some serious screen shots of the latest cvs build of xbmc. Project Mayhem II's new skin is so beautiful running on my widescreen TV. Would love to see it at 720p.
social networking and data mining
Audioscrobbler sent me a email today to notify me that Tim had selected myself as a friend of his for audioscrobbling. Yes this is correct information but I had not really looked into the friends option of audioscrobbler. And it made me think about the whole friend of a friend dynamic and why should I fill out foaf information for each silo webservice like flickr, audioscobbler, amazon and del.icio.us?
Someone once say asking for someone to be your friend was not a good way of doing things in the social networking space. It doesnt lend its self to the offline world either. I would kinda of agree but no one has really come up with an alternative. I know FOAF allows you to just add people without asking them first which can be kinda of cheeky but seems more reasonable to me. I mean I could say someone is just a contact, friend or family member if I like, that someone may say I'm there worst enemy or good friend in return. I dont really care if you see what I mean. In my scope there a contact while in there scope i'm a good friend. Where things get complex is when you try to build meaning out of these abstracts. A machine could come along and say well no human's going to add enemy's to there FOAF profile so it must be a friend? Or it could do some serious analysis on the terms used between us and decide to not link us because its not sure what the relationship is. And honestly that wouldnt be such a bad thing.
In Microsoft Wallop, I have a link to a couple of people who simply commented on my blog posts, nothing more. But Wallop adds those people as friends? Now I understand the reason for this, as these people have contacted me so they must be friends of somekind right? But what if they simply wrote comments to wind me up or slag me off? Then I would be pissed off to know there now friends! However this is hard work for the machine to work out whats positive and whats negative, so I guess it relys on me to manually delete or remove them? Which I guess is fair…
But lets move out of the usual social networking
applications like wallop, friendster, etc. And think about all those other social applications. And when I say that I mean from email to instant messenger to blogs to flickr. Thunderbird which I use for my email at home, has a nice feature called collected addresses
. The idea is that anything I reply to will be added to the collected addresses and never end up in the junk box. Makes sense I would say but not flawless, for example if I reply to a automated email when I join a forum or something, its added to collected addresses. But say I remove myself from the list 2 days later, well the address is still in my collected addresses. Once again i could remove it myself, but I'm human and I forget to do such things. I think there is some projects going on in the closed and opensource worlds regarding machine intellengance which keeps a record of what you do and what you reply to etc but across your whole desktop. Even though it fills me with a little terror, i'm sure there will be secure and privicy assured versions which you can control. I'm envisioning something like zonealarm which tracks what I do with people on my instant messeger list. For example during work time I will ignore most people because I'm working. Wouldnt it be nice if this application could block certain people from sending me links during this time? Then unblock them when i'm less busy. And thats only the start…
When I usually reply to peoples blogs aka leave a comment, its because I think I have something which could move the entry along or general yep totally agreement and alternativly i disagree comment. If this application could tell the difference (hey it could simply ask me, like Zone alarm does) It could track the name of the owner of the blog and effect the way I deal with instant messeges, emails and other requests. For example writing a positive comment on scott's blog should automaticly add his email to the collected addresses in thunderbird, put his blog into a browser zone which allows for popups and flash useage (I'm using Flashblock which I adore), automaticly allow his skype and im addresses to contact me without authorisation. Obviously these should be manually overrideable and you should beable to change levels of trust as such. Another example where this would work. I use Tesco.com for my food shopping. They have this bizarre system where popups are used to display goods with all the label information which is useful. They also send confirmation emails when there going to send the food and what there going to send. Now I think its not crazy to say if I trust the email from tesco.com then I trust the popups too. And if you move this into the mobile world for a minute. Then it wouldnt be too much to say I also trust tesco.com to send text messages to me and call me. Yep text/sms spam is becoming a problem in europe.
Back to the first thought, Tesco may not be my friend but theres a certain level of trust I allow for when dealing with them. I know Tesco mine my foods list every month and they then profile me and send certain discounts and offers to tempt me to buy more. Fine, but I dont want Asda (Wallmart) to do the same! In the same way you can block people on im and disallow cookies on certain sites I want to see the same happening across my interfaces I use. If I'm ignoring someones emails, it might right to say I would like to ignore there calls and texts. This may mean there not a foaf and that I dont want anything to do with them ever? who knows, were only human and I certainly change my mind all the time. But if I do, I should not have to unblock im's, unblock text's and phone calls on all my phones and change the email filter.
So back to Tim a second. When Tim adds me to his del.icio.us, his flickr, his email, his im. I honeslty dont want to keep authorising him. He's a good guy and likewise he shouldnt need to authorise myself when he's already added me as a friend in audioscobbler. Does Flickr trust audioscobbler enough to allow friends on that to be friends on flickr without the usual authorise this person? No, or not at the moment. Maybe that will change in the future? (Because I added a picture from Pmtorrone to the top of this post mean he's trusted or not? And exactly how much trustworthness will he have? Now thats a question not worth thinking about at this stage)
I swear to you theres a serious link with Attention.xml, FOAF and all of what I'm talking about – but alas its late and I cant think of it right now. There are too many questions and not enough answers in this post!
Google Maps supports XML output
Well well, after only a couple of days at the most? Google maps has been found to give off simple XML when you add ?output=xml
to the query string. So for example – http://maps.google.com/maps?q=minneapolis&output=xml will give you the centre and span geo's of Minneapolis in North America. Its not alot of information I grant you that but its not bad at all. Here's Sarah's home town – http://maps.google.com/maps?q=racine&output=xml. I honestly think this is what Web 2.0 is all about, a data only/machine readable view of a servie. So where from here? Well first some more data would be great, not to say you couldnt just query another service for information but its google and its free for use – not even a api key in view. A public schema, no matter how simple it may be. It would be useful in the case of a error like this – http://maps.google.com/maps?q=15%20Kings%20close&output=xml. Jon Udell goes into more depth and builds a simple XSL to demostrate whats possible. I am tempted to do something with it myself but it supports nothing outside of North America, which is little use to me. Till a european service is open, here is some interest queries…
Pharmacies in Chicago
Walgreen's pharmacies in Chicago
Sex shops in Minneapolis
Churches in Racine, wi
Racine to Minneapolis and the interesting XML version
There's lots more comments on google maps at slashdot as usual.
Seems SVG is only mentioned once, while its being used in backend map building all around the world. Damm I wish I had the time to build prototype using SVG and the google xml.
Google Maps XML output has now been disabled. Oh well it certainly was fun while it lasted.
Into the Dragons’ Den
The Dragons' Den was a six part series where entrepreneurs pitched their ideas to secure investment finance from the Dragons… elite business experts.
I missed most of this series and only caught bits here and there on TV. It also seems very few people were interested in seeding a torrent of the Dragons' Den, but I'm slowly getting them down. Anyhow I have to say its one of those programmes that the BBC do so well. Yes its reality TV but actually its got all the elements of ideas and thoughts which I expect from the BBC. Great programming, well shot, well thought-out… I may even considering checking out the Apprentice which starts next week on BBC2.
Some of the ideas for businesses are sometimes laughable like in the pitch when a couple of guys suggested turning old tyres into wheelchair ramps. But there have been some gems like Paul Thomas' Truffles – plantation system. The pitches can make one hell of a difference (as we all know too well) and honestly the winning entrepreneurs tend to have a good pitch and the business figures to back themselves up. Best example has to be Huw Gwyther who pitched for a high quality magazine called Wonderland (shame about the nasty flash website, hardly says quality or good taste in anyway!). I know just the person Huw should speak to about this…
The Tivo Home Media Engine SDK with Jon Udell
I had to blog something about the Tivo Home Media Engine SDK which allows developers to write applications which run on version 2's of the TIVO software. Its a very good move by TIVO but as Jon Udell points out, its not as open as it will/could be. Anyhow, highlights of the blog post and podcast by Jon Udell
.
Tivo uses MDNS to find applications on the local network, All the applications are written in Java using the SDK, the applications dont actually run on the TIVO box – the TIVO just plays it or displays it (as such), It always runs from a networked machine. I have to say its quite something, and would allow for some serious applications like shopping, home entertainment and home automation. The limitations include not being able to access the metadata from the recorded shows or the recorded shows themselves. I under legally why they cant do this but there has to be some kind of legal loop whole which could be exploited? I'm wondering if Xbox media center could make use of the SDK to provide cross platform fuctionality? Hoff touches on IP delivery of Content which is an obvious move for TIVO and could be a killer when you think about the problems people have with managing/storing content on there local machine. For example, Itunes allows you to add playlists and the like but TIVO would go one step beyond by suggesting content you may like based on your previous content.
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
Xbox media centre in the washington post
I hate it when newspapers make you signup to read content, so I'm going to post most of the piece up. If you want to read the whole thing this is the URL you need. I logged in with washingtonpost@dodgeit.com password nHWLDb8J. It may have changed when you read this so check the dodgeit mail account here. I think its quite good to see a quite balanced view on a open source project like XBMC from the large newspapers. Even if its in there Technews section. Yes I know Firefox and others have been covered to death, but XBMC is something very different. Officially there are not even any compiled binaries so you have to build it yourself from the sourcecode or of course wait till someone builds it and releases it on the net.
The most successful such effort may be XboxMediaCenter, or XBMC. This free program (www.xboxmediacenter.com) lets an Xbox connect to a wired or wireless home network and perform many more media-sharing tricks than Microsoft's Extender add-on allows.
Those kinds of capabilities normally require spending $250 or more for a separate wireless media receiver from such firms as D-Link Systems Inc., SlimDevices Inc. and Roku LLC.
For software created by hobbyists in their spare time, XBMC is surprisingly capable. As a music box, it plays a wide variety of music, including Web radio broadcasts as well as MP3, Windows Media, AAC, RealAudio and many other file types — excluding the copy-restricted files sold at such stores as iTunes, Wal-Mart and Napster. Pop a CD into your Xbox, and XBMC can even copy its tracks to the Xbox's hard drive in the format of your choice.
If you use Apple's iTunes, XBMC ties into that program's own sharing feature, providing access to all of your custom playlists.
Switching to video, XBMC supports an equally broad range of computer formats, including MPEG-4, DivX, QuickTime and RealVideo. If you have a ReplayTV digital video recorder on your home network, this software can even stream recorded shows from it for watching on the TV plugged into the Xbox. But although XBMC can play DVD movies, it can't display their menu screens. If you have a computer monitor or high-definition TV connected to the Xbox with the right cables, this software will also upgrade the Xbox's video output to high-definition resolutions.
Last, you can plug a standard computer keyboard and mouse into an XBMC-endowed Xbox (after you plug a $10 adapter into the Xbox's controller port) and browse a limited menu of Web content — not much more than weather forecasts and Internet Movie Database lookups — on your TV.
This program isn't for the technologically faint of heart, though. You can't load XBMC on a standard Xbox — you must modify one to accept this new program, either by soldering or plugging in a new chip inside the case or patching its software through arcane routines.
Such an Xbox “mod,” if you don't perform it yourself, will cost from $50 to $100 when done by a firm such as FriendTech Computer Ltd. (www.friendtech.com) or the private individuals who market the service on local forums such as Craigslist (www.craigslist.org).
More to the point, it will void the Xbox's warranty. Subscribers to Microsoft's Xbox Live service may also find themselves banned from it if their modified machines are detected by Microsoft's servers.
The company has frowned on these adaptations in part because they are often used to play pirated copies of games. “Microsoft investigates and makes case-by-case determinations as to whether specific mod chips enable piracy,” said Molly O'Donnell, a Microsoft spokeswoman.
That risk, however, hasn't discouraged Xbox tinkerers from experimenting. Among other odd achievements, they've managed to craft multiple Xbox versions of the Linux operating system that turn an Xbox into a full Internet PC. And for those who just want to play video games on an Xbox, another add-on lets it play titles for older game consoles such as the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo.
I would say its pretty fair wouldnt you say? Shame there were no pictures because its a thing of beautiful. This also reminds me that I should take some more pictures of the latest builds of XBMC…
Bluetooth vs FM Radio headphones
I was talking to Dave today and was mentioning Apple's new powerbooks which now come with Bluetooth 2.0. The idea is to make streaming audio to bluetooth headphones much higher quality, which makes sense but why they jumped from 1.2 to 2.0 who knows. I think its just going to add a whole load of confusion to the market. Anyhow, Dave was not convinced bluetooth headphones were the way to go. He offer the alternative of FM headphones. At first I kinda of dismissed it but now I'm thinking there pretty damm cheap and last a long time in battery life when compared to bluetooth headphones. Also using a FM Transmiter (which is still not sold in the UK!) its really easy to use the same pair of headphones anywhere. For example at work it would be easy to plug in my FM transmiter and use a small pair of FM headphones or headphones attached to one of those cheap FM radios to listen to my music wirefree and anywhere within 50meters. Its even better if you have one of the phones with a FM radio built in. Maybe Dave is right about this, for now while Bluetooth evolves in this area at least.
Trackback Spam, easily solved?
Seems cubicgarden is actually getting its first hit of trackback spam. People never ever believe me when I say cubicgarden actually gets a reasonable amount of readers (mainly through the rss) but this proves its easy to find and also a target for spam bots. its really easily solved, but I'm going to hold off for a bit to see how this trackback spamming progresses. I could use the open proxy moderation plugin which is pretty harsh or the Trackback moderation plugin. Someone once mentioned somewhere that most spam bots dont leave any referer, so maybe someone will build a plugin for blojsom which ignores trackbacks without a referer, if thats actually possible?
CSS 2 XML idea
At work recently, we've been thinking about managing CSS. It may sound quite a simple task but actually we have 43+ stylesheets and there all slightly different. They've been managed and edited by different people and we've been keeping it all logged in some kind of spreadsheet. Not great, but it will do. Well anyway i'm doing some tidying up and doing some comparisons between different styles. And I started to think about how to go about this when I thought wouldn't this be so much easier if it was all structured content? (Well yes CSS is structured but not in a form where I can consume it with XML tools)
After a couple mins of conversation with work friends, Tom mentioned a Perl Lib which could read CSS. Which lead to the conclusion that once in Perl, it would be easily serialized into XML where I could do all manner of analysis, charting and what ever else we choose to do with it. But wait it doesn't stop there, it not only allows us to manage CSS but also generate CSS using XSL. Pretty useful I would say. Anyway, I've convinced everyone involved we should open source the Perl code, XML schema and idea for anyone to use. So I'll drop some links in once we got something going… I'm highly suprised no one had already done this and opened into on to the web, I would love to see a Cocoon reader for CSS.
And at long last everything you need to get started… Thanks Tom for the great work, comments to the usual place
Ravensbourne’s Copyright vs Community videos on Archive.org
I have finally put the copyright vs community videos from May 2004 on Archive.org under a creative commons licence. These go with the audio versions I added a while. I have to say a big sorry to Fravia because our 2nd DV Cam kept auto switching off because we were recording over firewire not on to DV Tape. The rest of the Videos are not effected because we were able to change the camera placements after Fravia's talk. I'm hoping to upload his first lecture in 2003 to make up for this mistake. Anyway, apologies over here are the videos which as of 0120 GMT are not available but
Verification and derivations have been completed. Now waiting for a curator to approve the recordings.
Copyright vs Community: with Fravia
Copyright vs Community: in the age of computer networks by Richard M Stallman
Copyright vs Community: with Cory Doctorow
While searching around, I also found Tom's notes on the same lectures. The certainly complete, corydoctorow and richardstallman in plain text.
This also serves as a very good time to remind myself to change the cubicgarden.com/copyright site.
Update about Cory Doctorow's lecture video. I sent a email to Cory a while ago when I first posted the videos up, and just had a look at the video and saw the batting average is at 34.11% with 411 downloads since 4 days ago. So I had a look around the blogosphere and saw who was talking about it. Results from blogdigger by link, Technorati by links to the BoingBoing post. Some highlights of what I've found. Corante's Donna Wentworth picked up on it for Copyfight, which I read all the time but somehow missed. Weird how people are just copying the text directly, keep seeing thanks Ian! which freaks me out a little… shame its not linking directly to this post…
iTunes to ipaq
I'm still not very happy with using iTunes but with the DAAP support and Winamp coming to a slow end I'm forced to use it. I thought it was pretty cool that the xbox media centre supported DAAP, but hot on the heals of that comes WiFiTunes which is still in alpha but is GPL'ed. Yes it doesnt support AAC but I would never encode my stuff as AAC, but I can understand why this would put some people off who have whole playlists of AAC's. Its a real shame I cant use it at work because the Wifi is locked down. Oh link came from pocketpcthoughts. I did some experimenting in the office today with Toms Mac laptop, and it works quite well. Theres little controls, so once its playing its playing and so you cant jump around the music file yet! But it will play all the playlists no problem (even recently played and top rated) and the delay in connecting is small, like 5secs maximum over 802.11b. One thing we did discover, is the wifitunes doesnt seem to register as a user, so if you shutdown itunes you dont get the usual prompt asking if you want to boot other users off. Still very usable for a alpha.
It certainly beats using a streaming server setup to listen to music or podcasts in the bathroom without copying the file to SD first. Talking of which, My house is fully FM tuned using the iTrip style FM Transmiters which I believe are still not available in the UK. My main problem is the signal doesnt reach past the kitchen which is a bit of a pain. Anyway, I hooked it all up so I can now listen to something on the FM signal and choose another thing in the living room. Real multiple room audio, so Sarah can listen to the hits of the 80's in the bedroom or/and kitchen while I enjoy the sounds of Armin Van Buuren. 88.5 if you ever go past my house and are interested in what we may be liistening to…
High Definition and Ultra Definition
I went to the Video Forum 2005 exhibition yesterday, it was pretty boring but I did catch the BBC HD presentation which gave me a little to think about.
The first point which hit was the thought of using digital still cameras to create HDTV clips. Let me explain, my digital camera creates pictures of 4.33 megapixels which is about 2272 x 1704. Other resolutions bellow that are 2048 x 1536, 1600 x 1200, 1280 x 960, 1024 x 768 and of course 640 x 480. The first two (2272 x 1704 and 2048 x 1536) could easily beat the highest resolution of HDTV which is 1920 x 1200 progressive. So all you need to do is take 25 pictures or even 50 pictures of the scene at these resolutions and crop or reszie them to 1920 x 1200 then join them together at 25/50 frames a second to create the clip. Only 2 major problems, most digital cameras dont have native support for the 16:9 widescreen format we enjoy in the UK and also the biggest problem. Its going to be hell taking 25 or even 50 shots a second to create a short clip. At these resolutions a attached CF card would quickly fill up and you would need some way to get the information off quickly. Anyway this method is ideal for things that dont move much aka skies and landscapes (timelapse clips). Obviously this is not new to others
, who already do HDTV quality versions. The other thing I was thinking was that you could easily achive the lower quality HDTV resolutions (480p/i and 720p/i) on a digital camera and even on a good mobile phone! My Sanyo's 1.33mpx camera is able to do 1280 x 960. Yes the CCD and lens is bad but its possible with enough time and lots of editing.
By the way Andy King also stressed the need for real digital surround sound in HDTV recordings, which doesnt seem to bother alot of the boradcasters at the moment.
And I was also alerted to the successor to HDTV which is called UHDV. Here is the camera shot I took after the presentation by Andy King from BBC HD. Let me highlight the specs, if you dont want to look at the picture.
7680 x 4320 resolution, it will be 16 times higher than HDTV and creates a 32 mega pixel image for each frame! Its also meant to run at 60 frames a second! They also havent forgotten the surround sound. Shifting to a 22.2 Surround Sound setup. Which is 10 at ear level (suspect this will be the new rumoured Dolby 10.1 or 12.1 standard), 9 above and 3 below ear level plus 2 subs.
If you do the maths, all those sound channels and image pixels add up to a massive amount of data.
In test, an 18-minute UHDV video consumed 3.5TBs of storage (equivalent to about 750 DVD’s). The data was transmitted over 16 channels at a total rate of 24 Gb/s per second, thousands of times faster than a typical DSL connection.
By the way its been talked about on slashdot twice now.
Ravensbourne’s Copyright vs Community videos on Archive.org
I have finally put the copyright vs community videos from May 2004 on Archive.org under a creative commons licence. These go with the audio versions I added a while. I have to say a big sorry to Fravia because our 2nd DV Cam kept auto switching off because we were recording over firewire not on to DV Tape. The rest of the Videos are not effected because we were able to change the camera placements after Fravia's talk. I'm hoping to upload his first lecture in 2003 to make up for this mistake. Anyway, apologies over here are the videos which as of 0120 GMT are not available but
Verification and derivations have been completed. Now waiting for a curator to approve the recordings.
Copyright vs Community: with Fravia
Copyright vs Community: in the age of computer networks by Richard M Stallman
Copyright vs Community: with Cory Doctorow
While searching around, I also found Tom's notes on the same lectures. The certainly complete, corydoctorow and richardstallman in plain text.
This also serves as a very good time to remind myself to change the cubicgarden.com/copyright site.
RSS 1.1 draft available now
As mentioned in few places including Sam Ruby, Miscoranda and Cafe con Leche. There is a draft version of RSS 1.1 available on a creative commons licence. The official specification is a bugfix rather than a real change. My own feelings are the same as Elliotte except of course the very end…
As if RSS 0.9, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, and 2.0 weren't enough to deal with, now there's RSS 1.1. I think the authors are missing the forest for the trees here. While there are some small improvements in RSS 1.1 relative to RSS 1.0 (which is a completely different beast than RSS 0.9x and RSS 2.0), they are simply not outweighed by the cost of expanding market confusion and incompatibility. Oh well, maybe if we're lucky, this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and convinces the world to just move forwad to ATOM leaving RSS in the dustbin of history where it belongs.
Oh thers already a RSS Feed validator and RSS 1.0 to 1.1 converter.