A Boxee box is coming soon

From the Boxee Blog some news I've been waiting for.

We launched our public alpha for Mac/Linux in January at CES. During the show we met with several device manufactures interested in embedding Boxee into their existing devices or building a dedicated Boxee device.

I am very happy to announce we have signed our first partnership with a CE company. At this point we can not say more about the partner or the specs of the device, but we can tell you we are working closely with them to make sure we deliver a great Boxee experience on it.

Details will leak out on the 7th December at the launch of the beta in New York. There's a promise that a new user interface is coming too. Which honestly is needed badly, boxee has become xbmc's ugly but gifted little sister as of late. But the news of a move to a CE box is very good news, although I'm worried it won't be all it could have been if they had done the same last year.

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The logical conclusion of FB alibi case?

Freeze Frame cover

I over hear someone suggest that the guy who used Facebook as an Alibi was very clever and that more of us should record our lives to prove where and what we had done. My instant thought was to the film Freeze Frame.

Sean Veil is an ultra paranoid murder suspect who takes to filming himself round the clock to provide an alibi, just in case he's ever accused of another crime. Problems arise however when the police do come calling and the one tape that can prove his innocence has mysteriously disappeared.

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Revolver: Your mind will not accept a game this big

Everyone seemed to hate Revolver, and honestly I can understand why. On the surface its nothing like any of the other films Guy Ritchie has done. It also takes its self far too seriously. But what people missed is the sharp plot and cool one liners. The person to look out for is André Benjamin as Avi, he brings a certain element of smoothness to the whole plot, which I have to agree is complex and not easy to explain.

After spending seven years in solitary confinement and having his sister-in-law murdered, confidence trickster Jake Green (Jason Statham) is out to get revenge on Dorothy Macha (Ray Liotta).

Jake Green is a hotshot con artist who has acquired a specific strategy (referred to as “the Formula”), that is supposed to lead its user to win every game, during his seven-year stint imprisoned in solitary confinement. The Formula itself was discovered by two unnamed men in adjacent cells either side of Jake’s own. During the first five years of his seven-year sentence, the three men communicated their thoughts on confidence tricks and chess moves via messages hidden inside provisional books, such as ‘The Mathematics of Quantum Mechanics’. They plan to leave their cells simultaneously, but end up leaving Jake behind, who ends up serving the remaining two years. He finds that all of his possessions and money have been taken by the two men with whom he had shared everything but, having the two men’s Formula, he went about making a lot of money at various casinos. Two years later, Jake has garnered a reputation that leads many casinos to fear his freakishly good ‘luck’. The Formula is seen to apply to any game, and is often exemplified by his apparent mastery of chess. The story revolves around Jake’s epiphanic awakening, as he learns how to apply the Formula to the ‘game’ of life.

I think the reception says it all about the film…

The film was generally panned by critics: for example, it has been criticised on grounds of pretension and having an over-complicated plot by critics such as Mark Kermode. Reviews were so poor in the UK that The Guardian ran a story on how the distributor was able to attribute a quote to The Sun saying that the director was “back to his best”. The quotation came from a section of the Sun Online website created by a PR agency on behalf of the film’s distributors.

There were, however, some positive reviews as well. Mark R. Leeper conceded that it was “a film for a narrow audience”, but said that he personally rather “liked it” and gave it a score of 7/10. According to Brian Orndorf, Revolver “is the perfect movie for those who like to crack things open and dig around the innards”, saying that it “reminded [him] quite a bit of Richard Kelly’s film, Donnie Darko”. He goes on to explain that “both films have a taste for the deliberately confusing, sharing scripts that take the viewer on a ride that requires much more than one simple viewing.”

So there you go a film for a niche audience who like there films with complex story arcs and twisted concepts. What more do I need to say?

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Wake up to light in the mornings

Philips Wake up light

I heard about these light alarms which wake you up using daylight from a large bulb instead of a nasty buzzing noise like traditional alarms. So in an aid to improve my wake up routine I invested in a Philips Wake-up Light HF3463. Of course I never paid 100 pounds for it, actually I picked it up for 20 pounds because I knocked the retailer down again and again due to the bad state of the box, paint on the power lead and that it was a return product.

So far I got to say its working pretty well, I do feel better waking up to the bright light and I tend to wake up about a minute or two before the set time or the noise of blips (which I have mine set to). It all sounds like marketing crap but there is something about the bright light which does work even in my room with lots of glowing leds from machines and mobiles.

Will this be a path to a more healthy lifestyle of waking up early and feeling full of energy? I doubt it, I still feel very rough in the mornings and feel so much more alive at night but anything which gets me up without that jolt has got to be pretty good.

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Tesco: All that technology but no ethnic food?

Tesco's online store for home delivery is great, I've been using it for something coming up to a decade I'm sure. But what I don't understand is with all the choice, options and clever ways to drill through the database of items, you still can not buy or order ethnic food or drink.

I'm sure I've highlighted this problem before and Tesco said it depends on which store your close to. Aka they only reflect whats in the store around the corner. Well I'm sorry but its almost 2010 and thats not a acceptable excuse as far as I'm concerned. Imagine if Amazon said that?

What kills me is I'm only after Popcorn Kernals to go in my new popcorn machine. I had no idea that Popcorn Kernals are ethnic goods, wow because they are so exotic of course. So now on top of my full tesco order, I now need to head down to ASDA in Hulme to buy Popcorn Kernals and a loaf of hard dough bread. Tesco if your listening, everything should be available, if it requires extra time or effort to get the item, warn the customer and in extreme cases, suggest a very small service charge. I would have paid at 50p extra to have it delivered instead of having to scoot down to hulme just to pick up two items.

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Is the Relational Database Doomed?

databases

Of course not, but finally thankfully people are starting to take serious stock of other types of Databases. I'm no Database expert but for ages I never understand why I was serialising XML into a relational database to pull it out a bit later in XML. So I started doing some digging and found out about XML databases and object stores. This was way back in 2001. Later in 2004, the suggestion of a XML database or any other database except MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle was a no go. How things have changed.

In BarCampLondon7 Simon Wilison gave a talk where he listed a range of different types of databases or datastores. There all listed on this Etherpad titled #bcl7 non-relational database BoF. A very impressive list indeed and there's much more. So will we finally see people moving away from the LAMP stacks? Maybe but I its going to take a while.

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Novell Pulse catches the Wave

You got to hand it to Novell, they are quick off the mark. Rather that trying to fight Wave they have embraced it (something I suggested big collaboration corps should do). Novell have a nice clean enterprise product/service called Pulse, which looks and feels like a very cleaned up Wave system. But here's the kicker, it interoperates with the Wave protocol. smooth move Novell and I'll certainly keep an eye on Pulse for our future plans.

Novell Pulse Demo from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.

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Software ahead of the curve: Gwibber 2.0

Gwibber 2.0 Screenshot

Gwibber is an open source microblogging client for GNOME that supports Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Pownce, Identi.ca and other popular social web services.

Yes I know its not Tweetdeck but hey hello, it supports more account types than just Twitter and Facebook. Its also got interesting support non microblogging services for Flickr, Brightkite, Digg and a few others. I've been pretty vocal about knocking Gwibber's stability in the past but now its rock solid. Currently I have 7 different accounts running through it and it doesn't even blink. So solid, that I have dumped the Air app Twhirl. The only thing which I have seen which is close to Gwibber is Eventbox/Socialite which is mac only. There's already talk about making a QT version of Gwibber which could work on the Windows and Mac platform too. I expect most people will look at it and say, yuk. But to be fair its using my own custom style from ubuntu, and it will get better. The concept of Gwibber and how it works puts it a few steps in front of a crowded microblogging market.

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