The year of really simple syndication?

I was speaking to an ex-student on jabber instant messager tonight, and he said something which was out of the blue. 

[23:52:43] David> this is going to be the year of rss
[23:52:52] Ian> lol why do you say that
[23:53:15] David> last year was im
[23:53:15] Ian> have a answer already but just wondering why you say that
[23:53:18] David> this years rss
[23:53:58] Ian> hummm yes i guess
[23:54:26] David> and coss your working on it!
[23:56:12] Ian> just finished new intranet, uses rss all the way through
[23:57:18] David> for rave?
[23:57:34] Ian> yep
[23:57:52] David> so give me an rss demo feed

Now I've been using rss for a while now, but not in the tradional sense most people use it for. I'm tending to use it for serious syndication. As mentioned the new rave intranet and website is based on rss through and through-out. I was dropped a link by dave to live streams of new bit torrent downloads in rss, which I have aggergated into a nasty fat feed. And there is the webbased xmlrpc client which is built on jsp and html forms. All coming together really nicely, but i dont buy the this year crap – specially when you consider the Atom threat, Soap and others… But also I cant decide where the rss fits in the grand scale of things. Personal publishing or the Semantic web? And of this all links back to my one voice thought, which I still havent finished yet…

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Trailblazer

Miles dropped this in my email box last night.
Watched the demo, which seems interesting…
However trailblazer does look quite useful, the lucece searching is a nice touch.But I would prefer it to generate xlinks (or even rdf) with thumbnails.As it could make for some very rich data while researching around. Also I bet Google and others would love to get there hands on such data.

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Novell and opensource

Had a quick look at the range of very interesting opensource projects Novell are working on. Some great stuff, specially ifolder. Edd Dumbill has a huge review on his blog worth reading. Also mentions the nice looking F-Spot which seems to support FOAF depiction data. I dont know how it compares to my favourate photostudio which fully supports EXIF data. But we shall see…

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ipod white headphones dead giveaway

This is one of those things which dont translate well to europe. In Apples grand plan to be different, they made the design of the ipod mainly white. Unfortually this is a dead giveaway that your sporting one of the hottest gear of this year. Pefect victim, some would say…
Anyway I've been going on about it for ages, but would anyone listen? No… till now.

In america the fashion seems to be more about showing off your goods, while in europe you do that and your not going to have it much longer. Perfect point to Dave in regards to our talk about where you put your mobile phone. Note the Ericsson P900 is also hot pickings for thieves, luckly they have normal-ish headphones.

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Playstation Emulator for the PocketPC

FPSE arm edition

During one of my wonders around the internet, i came across a video which claimed to be a Playstation One emulator for PocketPCs. I kind of dismissed it because I was busy. But I just check out the video and I'm amazed. It doesnt store the Rom on a large CF or SD card, it doesnt even involve remove bits from the orginal rom. No you use Wireless to transfer the rom bits needed. Wow!

Not tried it out yet, but going to try it someday soon…

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How do you post via XMLRPC?

How on earth do you setup a page to post over XMLRPC using the Apache XMLRPC classes?

Miles found me this page but I swear, I can not get it to work at all. Anyway I tried to adopt the blojsom admin edit plugin to fit the purpose but still cant get that working either. So I'm stuck now…

Been doing more research into the whole problem.
apache xml-rpc metaWeblog api

Miles solves it…
Variables needed for it work, title, description, category. Stick these in html form elements with a form method=”post”, action=”thexmlrpc.jsp” and submit button and your away. Oh dont forget the Apache XMLRPC classes.

<%@ page import="org.apache.xmlrpc.*,
                java.util.*"%>

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? >

< !DOCTYPE html
     PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >

< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en" >

< head >

    < title >Blogging using XMLRPC from a JSP based webclient< /title >

< /head >




<%
// Grab the variables from the form before.
String title = request.getParameter("title");
String description = request.getParameter("description");
String category = request.getParameter("category");
String blogServer = "http://something/blojsom/xmlrpc/blog";

// This is crap as we should really not use a hard-coded path
//String errorUrl = "http://a/url/that/you/post/from";
// Slightly less crap...
String errorUrl = request.getHeader("Referer");

Vector params=null;

if ((title == null) || (title.length() < 1)) {
    response.sendRedirect(response.encodeRedirectURL(errorUrl ));
    }
if ((description == null) || (description.length() < 1)) {
    response.sendRedirect(response.encodeRedirectURL( errorUrl ));
    }
if ((category == null) || (category.length() < 1)) {
    response.sendRedirect(response.encodeRedirectURL( errorUrl ));
    }

// Create XML RPC Client object
XmlRpcClient xmlrpc=new XmlRpcClient(blogServer);

Hashtable structContents=new Hashtable();
structContents.put("category", category);
structContents.put("title", title);
structContents.put("description", description);
Boolean Booly = new Boolean(true);

params=new Vector();
// Dummy for blojsom
params.add("1");
params.add("username");
params.add("password");
params.add(structContents);
// Publish this post
params.add(Booly);

String created = (String)xmlrpc.execute("metaWeblog.newPost",params);
out.println("< p >This is the result: " + created + ".< /p >");

out.println("< p >This is the title: " + title + ".< /p >");

out.println("< p >This is the description: " + description + ".< /p >");

out.println("< p >This is the category: " + category + ".< /p >");

%>

< /body >

< /html >

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WTF : WTF’s The Future

WTF Event I attended yesterday, very good. Heres a load of links… Will write stuff around them over the course of the day.

Networked PVRs
Walked directly into the event with dave and started listening to a guy talking about the same idea as this Electronic programming guide for radios. His idea the Frequency clock seems pretty good and stood up to general questioning. I did ask about metadata which the whole system seemed to rely on alot. And yes he had thought quite hard about the issue, not sure he'd though too much about how producers would actual input the data. Some guy mentioned karmadownload which he runs. A lady from the BBC mentioned wrn.

The future of music, its digital because its remixable…
http://www.guerrillanews.com and
http://www.indymedia.org.uk

http://www.europeancreativeforum.org/

One Voice
At this point the whole event moved next door to the vertigo lounge. The choices of dicussions i cant exactly remember, but one was WTF's the future of wiki's. People talked about changing the world through wikis but its not happening. What can be done about it? And I was kind of keeping my mouth quite till Oliver Bradley outlined his idea. His idea takes the best parts of wikis and blogs. Then arranges them using lots of almost semantic technology to create a ground-up emergance aware system.
The semantic nature of well structured blogs or even better semantic blogs, could be systemanticly put closer together. So in Oliver's example he wanted to be able to see blogs which were physically and topic closer to his. I had to jump in and say at long last a idea which is possible and wouldnt require huge resources. I did show quite a few people the geourl stuff and wish I'd showed the London transport blog map too.
But these were only a step in the long path towards semantic blogs. The more metadata and semantic meaning you add to the blog, the easier it is for pools of blogs to be aggergated together for a long or short of period of time. And the author doesnt have to be involved in that at all. Oliver pointed out when he googles for a topic he usually gets about handful of related blogs, wouldnt it be nice if all those blogs got aggergated into one for the very short period of the search? Yes indeed, all google would need to do is know what rss is, and understand what a topic is made up of. Not impossible I would say, actually pretty trivial to do by google, and would give them even power than other search engines. Not to say all the web and others couldnt do the same, but the method they all use to decide whats a topic would become secret and the one which does that the best will be king of this area. I can just imagine google doing a good job because they own blogger and have already started using the AtomAPI.

But back to the event, unfortually it seemed the comments got taken as an attack on wiki's. So there was lots of talk about wikis vs blogs or collaboration vs personal publishing. And I felt the point was missed that these aggeragted blogs could be turned into a wiki. So all the subjects or topics were pulled from elsewhere and then edited and commented on using a wiki type interface. To me it makes no difference Blojsom as always had a wiki plugin built in, just not sure anyones done anything with it and/or if its survived the multiple user version of blojsom2?

More to come….

http://www.kendra.org.uk/ and http://jena.hpl.hp.com:3030/blojsom-hp/blog/ and http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2003/04/15/semanticblog.html and http://www.google.com/search?q=semantic+blogging&sourceid=opera&num=50&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 and http://rdfweb.org/

Lots of crossover with my own ideas…

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Microsoft bringing Smart to the pocket

What is the difference between the Smartphone and a PocketPC? Then you could ask whats the difference between a PocketPC and a TabletPC?

But seriously back to the first question, whats the difference between a smartphone and pocketpc? I only ask because Microsoft have just released there second edition of Windows Mobile 2003, Released Pocket streets for the Smartphone platform and have disclosed details about a new software development platform which allows you to write for the Xbox, PocketPC, Smartphone and Windows. The lines are getting very blury… This maybe not the best time to own all 3 of them.

The major feature in Mobile 2003 is the VGA screen resolution for PocketPCs and QVGA for Smartphones. So this means the next lot of phones will have the same resolution as my current PocketPC. The WPA support, if i'm thinking correctly will be good if it finally supports 802.1x TTLS natively, rather than through another crappy client. But I'm not sure I'm thinking along the same lines. Would like to see the same Internet Explorer for Smartphones used in PocketPCs. If your site uses frames, then it wont show – excellent, that will teach those old style web designers. Which reminds me I still havent done my CSS media = phone/palmtop test yet. Still a real pain that explorer shows all css, which isnt made for small screens.
Voice dialing including voice tags would be great for the Smartphone AS IS PROMISED in the Orange Manual. Still cant work out if its a fcuk-up or just feature which was promised and not delivered on.

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Casting away

Spent some time today working out icecast to see if it is possible to do a live stream for my copyright vs community lectures. The first one starts this Thursday. I was worried because it seemed like the icecast server would'nt respond to anything. Then I though about shoutcast, and quickly realised that it needs a client/source. In shoutcast it latchs onto winamp using a plugin. So there must be something like that for icecast? Well I was right…

3rd Party Applications – I'm using Oddcast which does a excellent job right inside winamp. Theres also lots of nice tools for streaming under the tool directory. So it looks like I will setup a internal feed using icecast and mp3 using my laptop as a client and some other bigger machine as the server, if I can get dave or miles to install icecast? Maybe theres a case to install a client on the streaming mac powerbook? Should be ok for a ogg vorbis and mp3 stream for the big stallman lecture in may and just mp3 internal for Thursday.

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Orange finally get around to it

Orange logo

About 2 months after the Dutch and 2 weeks after the French. UK finally get an update for the SPV E200. Finally I will beable to use my SPV as a bluetooth modem. Whoo, a reason to use bluetooth again. Downloading update as posting.

You can improve the performance of your SPV E200 by downloading a new ROM Code Upgrade. This will give you the following benefits:

* Longer battery life which significantly improves standby time so that you can use your E200 much longer.

* Improved sound quality from the loudspeaker, earphones, and microphone so that you can hear and be heard more clearly.

* Improved Bluetooth support so that many more Bluetooth devices now work.


Upgraded, took me ages and thought my SPV was dead a couple of time… More about it after I get to sleep.

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