Media City UK? Its not about the buildings

Media City UK

The current state of Media City UK? Well its coming along very quickly and nicely. I had planned to take some photos myself but the day I went down there it was wet and not very nice. Obviously the buildings are nice, but its the change of culture which I'm doing my bit to change which interests me more. Unfortunately this is shared by everyone.

Ariel with TimB on the cover

Take the recent issue of Ariel (BBC's internal newspaper) Tim-Berners Lee on the front cover with a question will internet kill tv? First up should this even be a question at all? Secondly the article says goto page 7? and you get a little bit more and nothing much else. Greatly disappointing! I stand by the notion of broadcast being dead or at least on its last legs. How a public broadcaster can move beyond its broadcasting roots interests me and I think the result of that culture change could happen in Media City.

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The review of Marina Abramović

Eun-hye Hwang

So I spent most of the day at Marina Abramović presents which was part of the Manchester’s International Festival. And I can say it was an impressive day. I won’t go into much detail just incase Marina does decided to run the event again using the same artist.

So they were right, its challenging. for example at one point I was attempting to clean someones teeth with a toothbrush and at another point a naked lady shuffled up to me and stared me in the face from about half a meter away. Marina introduces the whole experience in a room full of people for the first hour. She runs a series of exercises to calm your breathing and get you use to understanding long duration art. One of those exercises is drinking a small cup of water but over a period of 10mins.
There’s also a period of staring a strangers face for up to 5mins.

After spending a hour with Marina your ready to make your own way through the rest of the experiences.

There were about 12 different artists performing through the day, some of my favourite included Nico Vascellari‘s songs which involved banging tin and rocks together in a basement with a additional sound track coming from the 2nd floor. Eunhye Hwang did some very interesting things with radios and the public. If you wait long enough, you will see Jelly and Radio, I’ll say no more. Nikhil Chopra spent hours drawing over the walls and floor using charcoal, according to others over time he sketched many pictures, which here would later scribled over it.

Really wrorth going and I’m glad I went along

 

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Marina Abramović Presents…

Following the iconoclastic Il Tempo del Postino in 2007, MIF returns to the crossroads of visual art and performance, inviting world-renowned artist Marina Abramović to curate an epic group show featuring some of the most innovative live artists working today.

For this groundbreaking event, the Whitworth has emptied every gallery space in order to create room for this unique work to develop and breathe. The show will begin with an hour-long performance initiation with Marina Abramović, leading up to a series of extraordinary encounters between artists and audience. Quite unlike anything staged before in the UK, this will be a provocative and visceral experience.

Everyone seems to be talking about this event/performance/experience, and I have the pleasure of going tomorrow. The Telegraph said it was shocking and bizarre and someone else told me they heard Mark Lawson had reviewed it on Radio 4 just recently. I’m starting to wonder if its so intense? And what is in store for me tomorrow? If all goes well I should try and get tickets for the Adam Curtis mixed media documentary, it felt like a kiss.

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A ton of new mixes are now available

While my blog was down, I was also on the train a lot. That means I had plenty of long journeys to create mixes using my pacemaker. I have uploaded 4 which I was pleased about.
In the Park during daylight mix – was recorded while I was lying in a central Manchester Park during the hot spell of weather we recently had. Its quite up beat and rocks along with some good memorable tunes. All the way into space mix was recorded during the same hot weather but on a recent journey back from somewhere in London to my hotel in West London late at night. I remember walking most of the journey because I wanted to keep the mix going for quite a while. And at 2hours long you can get a feel for how long that walk was. Sunbeams at dusk mix was recorded on the circle line tube. Its quite short, but so was the journey. It was meant to be very uplifting and I had planned to create a mix for a dj competition that I had seen online, but I know I can do so much better so I created Sheffield sizzles in the late night mix which now on reflection is maybe too dark for a dj mixing contest. I tell a slight lie because actually I created a mix called London Sizzles in the late night but wasn't happy with a couple of the tunes and so went about recreating the mix again but with those tune changes. The sheffield mix has the right tunes but isn't mixed as well as the London one. So I really need to work on that.

I've been checking out some the video blogs from djs and came across Dj SOS whos a female drum & bass dj. And it got me thinking I should do more live mixes on internet radio like I use to, I'm not sure video would work as well however, although you could get to see the weird and wonder locations I dj from. Certainly beats Dj Sos's party garage.

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Running Android on HTC phones

Android on Touch HD

So I'm getting more and more fed up with Windows Mobile as a operating system for my mobile phones, and finally the idea of this closed marketplace tipped me over the top. So I tried to first install Android on my HTC Touch HD and then later on my HTC Diamond. Sad to none of them have worked enough to give me a complete android operating system but I did want to point out where to go if you wanted to try it yourself. There's a lot of fluff out there and so it can be difficult to find exactly how to do it correctly.

So if you have a Orange HTC Touch HD aka HTC Blackstone you want to follow this guide to installing Android 1.0.

  1. Disable the PIN from wince

  2. Unzip to your SD card (it should create a directory named tmp):

    android_cupcake_2009-03-10.zip

  3. Unplug your phone from the USB or configure it to use “Activesync” and not “Disk Drive”.
  4. Softreset or reboot (switch off and on) your phone
  5. Run haret.exe on your phone (under /tmp/boot)

If you have a Orange Touch Diamond or HTC Raphael or O2 XDA you want to follow this link.

  1. Download this file diam-20081229.tar.gz Mirror
  2. You also need a copy of Haret.exe.
  3. Unpack diam-20081229.tar.gz to your computer (e.g. your dekstop).
  4. Create a folder on your Diamond's Internal Storage named 'tmp' and put the three files from the 'imgs' folder from the zip, along with the three files in the root of the zip (initrd…gz, default.txt and zImage) and the 'haret-0.5.2' executable into that folder
  5. Start haret from your Diamond.
  6. When nothing is happening ond screen anymore type '/init.android' (without the quotes) and press enter.
  7. Android should now boot!

Best thing about these procedures is that if it works it doesn't screw up Windows Mobile so you can still use it after a soft restart. So you might as well try it and see what happens.

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Microsoft, the word your looking for is differentiating

TechCrunch has a post about the launch date of the Windows Mobile store and all the mistakes Microsoft are making.

Microsoft is stepping into this game ridiculously late. While there are already an estimated 20,000 applications for the Windows Mobile platform out there. Marketplace will only be available to WinMo 6.5 users next Fall and to 6.0 and 6.1 users by the end of this year. Microsoft is essentially acknowledging Apple got it right with its App Store years ago and is only now trying to follow in its footsteps.

n the meantime, Google has already gone live with the Android Market, while RIM has its App World for BlackBerry, Palm has introduced its App Catalog store and Nokia recently took the wraps off its Ovi Store. Heck, even handset maker LG beat Microsoft by launching its own application store with about 1,400 apps for Windows Mobile-powered phones just yesterday.

I wonder if by the time Microsoft finally gets around to pushing Marketplace for Mobile live, people are going to have a problem looking at it as a differentiating product rather than as a late catch-up play by Redmond.

Like I mentioned ages at Microsoft's Mix09, they should not have simply copied Apple. Even the revenue share is the same! They really had the chance to do something different but oh no, we need to play it safe. They should have taken advantage of the open nature of Windows mobile phones. Bluetooth sharing could have been huge for adhoc transfering of apps. But oh no play it safe. Well I'm this close to switching over to Android now.

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XHTML 2 Working Group Expected to Stop Work End of 2009, W3C to Increase Resources on HTML 5

Ok I'm not going weight into this because I think its personally all going to sort its self out with a hybrid mix of xhtml 2.0 and html 5.0. Gareth Rushgrove has written much more about the issue and I agree with him too. The fear and misunderstanding around this whole thing is scary. If people actually read the FAQ's they might also get it.

Does W3C plan for the XML serialization of HTML to support XML namespaces?

Yes. The HTML 5 specification says in section 9.1 “The syntax for
using HTML with XML, whether in XHTML documents or embedded in other
XML documents, is defined in the XML and Namespaces in XML
specifications.”

However, see the question below for the relationship between
XML namespaces and decentralized extensibility.

What are W3C's plans for RDFa?

RDFa is a specification for attributes to express structured data in
any markup language. W3C published RDFa as a Recommendation in October
2008, and deployment continues to grow.

The HTML Working Group has not yet incorporated RDFa into their
drafts of HTML 5. Whether and how to include RDFa into HTML 5 is an
open question on which we expect further discussion from the
community (see also the question on decentralized extensibility).

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