I want to keep the whole of cubicgarden.com quite consistent in design, even though there are many different applications and services running under the site banner. The way I do this is by using the same external css for all the sections. But recently my designer side has been tweaking and fiddling with the css to see what else i can introduce to the site. So please dont be alarmed if the site design changes from day to day. Its just me fiddling.
Thinking Mindmaps again
Paul in 3rd Interaction pointed me at this nice topic map editor. I would say its pretty much the best one I've seen so far. First think its not written in Java, which doesnt bother me that much but does sometime have a effect when you have a large and complex diagram. It saves as SVG natively and imports/exports to XTM and a range of image formats. Its just a shame it doesnt import or export RDF but we all already know the massive aurguements happening in the semantic web community about RDF and XTM. So until that day I'm forced to transfrom between them and lose certain meaning and use other editors for RDF such as this one I found a while ago. The other one worth a mention which I use to use is, freemind which promises to have topic map and svg abilities soon.
Oh by the way I also saw this on plasticbag a moment ago, which is kind of related. It links to this pdf which shows Tom Smiths thought about social software.
Athlon 64 vs. Apple G5 Systems: NOT EVEN CLOSE!
PC World.com has just published some comparisons based on running applications, and the G5 generally loses to the AMD Athlon 64. “Even Apple's 2GHz dual-CPU G5 unit had a hard time keeping up with a single-chip FX-51 PC in most tests,” says PC World.com. The comparison table is here.
Yep we pretty much all knew this a long time ago. But I argue its actually worst than there making out. Apple have lost face because AMD have there 64bit laptop already plus the AMD 64 chips actually hit the market before the G5 computer here in the UK. Hey and lets not forget Apple OSX 10.3 isnt natively 64bit. Oh what a shame, so close but so so far…maybe next time eh.
Our Jabber server
Miles setup a jabber server in college about a week ago. In the effort to keep CNDI together even though CNDI has been split into 5 seperate pieces by higher management.
So far things are looking good. Me, Miles and Dave were using it for a while before Lisa and Kate were introduced to it. Then Adam and Kevin, now Alex and Hamid. Only a few more to convence then the whole team will be online.
But damm I have reservations, I dont know how useful it will be overall. See I love instant messaging I find it so so useful but I dont know if others will be happy about it. The first time Miles wrote the email talking about the jabber server I wrote a reply asking why he was doing it, and I thought his views were that im was a waste of time.
He replied saying yes his views havent changed but he was willing to try it out. Now thats the spirit!
I've switched from myjabber to neos because it has a H323 client built in to it along side the jabber client. Also it seems smoother in operation compared to myjabber. Anyway, I tried out the h323 client using my ipaq's SJphone H323 client and it works like a dream. Just asks if you want to accept the call from the ip address and what ever information is available. It also supports a gateway, so I should beable to dial up a normal land line phone from my desktop machine at some point in the future.
Which begged the question of how do I start a session with someone if there not a jabber user? Worked it out, its simple. Click play in the media panel and you can then put in any address you like, including a ip address.. Yet to try it but it should work fine. The other thing I was going to say was that I've successfully registered with our gatekeeper. So ip addresses should be a thing of the past when we set it up propely.
See now if Apple iCrapAV would support standards, we would all be able to talk using the same technology. But oh no, apple have to reinvent the wheel. They wouldnt even adopt something like sip.
Anyhow before I went off on one. Kevin's going to look at the gatekeeper settings so we can all dial up each other without the dynamic ip problem.
Open source democracy?
Me, Dave and Lucas got our butts to the talk quite late yesterday. And were hit by the instant heatwave in the ICA's Nash room. Goodness me, has no one ever heard of opening a window or a door before?
Anyway the talk was around douglas rushkoff's book he wrote for Demos. I had never heard of Demos before, but sure have heard of Douglas Rushkoff from the days of Rave.Anyway here's a few things I wrote down while listening to the talk.
- The internet shook off miltary, government and now business constraints over its time.
- All developments of the internet have been done for non profit in a gift economy.
- Our reality relies on software more than hardware – clever, as in software is man made.
- We can write the words that we live. Rather than listen to the ones we have been told.
- We have been taught to deal with narratives in the same way, start – middle – end. Revolutions are circluar.
- recruitiing people to narratives, is pointless
- Technophobia = People scared of there own power
- The media aims to exclude and divide, a lonely person is more likely to buy jeans if there told there acceptable with them.
- 92% of kids don’t want to re-program lego mindstorms
- A movement is a bad idea, easy target for the media to vilianfy
- Media can’t brand a mixture a non-movement.
- Emergence accepts the possibility that were nothing and that we may change that
- Effort should be spent on development rather than creating a movement
- Changing direction causes confusion and keeps businesses and the media guessing
- Courage in the moment, small steps and tweaks have profound effects
- Do rather than respond
- The dot.com era was a pyramid scheme – never thought of it like that, but makes sense
- Is google god?
- Finland is the most trustworthy nation in the world
- Governments need to get a grip on the digital divide
- Once you have access to the tools your relationship with the narrative changes
Anyway I've started reading the book which rushkoff wrote and its a good read so far. Also started looking at the Demos site and Rushkoff's own. Some good content on there which I know I'll be reading back and forth between college and home for the next month or so.
Blogging students
What’s my plan of action? Hummm i'm faced with 3 different choices.
Ideally there would be a blogging server in college which students could use without too much help. So I could try and convince miles that this would be a good idea and that this would be a test run for next year maybe?
Problems I foresee, is the college libal for anything put on the blog? According to the blog layer I met a while back the answer is no but its not been proven in court yet.
2nd option is to set them up on my own server at home. This would be trival to do, but should I is more the question? hey would I be liable? Would I have to guarantee some level of quality. See what would happen if my line goes down or server needs restarting? Would they expect 24/7 service?
Plus would 12 students blogs effect my bandwidth?
Last option, would be to use a 3rd party blogging service like blogger.com, livejournal, etc. Which would all be down to the students to maintain and administrate.
I would need to reckonmend one or more of the services to make sure I could aggergate the content into a class news feed. Maybe flock or cocoon for logic.
Anyway this 3rd option does make things a lot easier but I would need to also read the end user policy/agreement to make sure everythings clean.
This year the group is very diverse and a blog is a sure starting point for all of them. It will be interesting if it will bring them together as they all seem very disjointed with one another at the moment, which is good as there seems to be very few deers.
Bluetooth Smart Car
Saw this a while back, Orange, Smart Launch Bluetooth car. Orange and Smart have added Bluetooth to the new range of smart cars. Nothing amazing, just interesting that customers will get a 6month contract to Orange free with a T610.
If I had the choice in a car, I would get a smart car not because of this but there the best for fuel and space generally. The extra bonus is just that.
Orange’s SPV2
Ok its coming up to a few months since my contract ended for my mobile phone. My Ericsson T68 is doing odd things when it comes to Bluetooth and GPRS. I want to change but I would like a phone with a built in camera, as I'm using it more and more for shots.
So I saw Orange are finally bring out the SPV2. Its the first Microsoft smartphone which has built in Bluetooth and a camera, all packed into the same size package as a SPV, which makes me very happy.
I always liked the orginal SPV, but the lack of Bluetooth wrote it off for me. There have been a few other Microsoft Smartphone's which are good but none of them have had bluetooth to date. I'm also hoping Orange will do what they did with the Orginal SPV, sell it very cheap on a new contract. I remember when it was released it sold for about 139 pounds then was quickly dropped to 99 pounds then 79 pounds. I think just before Christmas when I go on holiday I will get a SPV2 at a decent enough price.
Xml for presentations
For ages now, i've been looking at better more effective ways of creating presentation material without manually doing pages in adobe illustrator or using microsoft powerpoint. See what I usually do is create a template in illustrator then edit that for each page before saving each one as a acrobat pdf file. Then I put them together using adobe acrobat and tag the whole thing for internet and presentation use.
And its been ok up to now. But now I want to start doing all presentations in xml format no matter what they may be, for example the same xml format for lectures, talks, teaching, etc.
I started looking around and decided that open office's presenter format (impress) was as close as I was going to get to useable and open. Its written into a soup xml file. So using the new xml file filter. I can write a xsl to turn it into anything I like. But lets not forget openoffice already lets you write to many formats including the dreaded flash and powerpoint formats.
But saying all that, I found SlideML today. And it does have the xsl to turn slideml into css xhtml and plain html. They seem interested in turning it into pdf, svg and docbook slides. So that would save me a lot of work.
At this moment I'm gonna stay with open office's impress because its simple and works right now, but I'll keep an eye on Slideml for the future.
RDF/Topic Maps and reification
Saw this while browsing around the oscom site RDF/Topic Maps and reification
On that same note, I've also been looking around the extreme markup conference site and wishing I could afford to go to these kind of events. Reading the abstract from this years keynote – William Kent. Data and Reality, really sends the shivers up my spine. Kent says: “Many texts and reference works are available to keep you on the leading edge of data processing technology. That's not what this book is about. This book addresses timeless questions about how we as human beings perceive and process information about the world we operate in, and how we struggle to impose that view on our data processing machines.
Wow, what a keynote that would have been.
Derren Brown Play – Russian Roulette live
Excellent entertainment, nicely done Channel 4.
On 5 October at 9pm, Derren Brown will attempt not to shoot himself in the head,
live on Channel 4.
Filmed in a secret location, one person selected from the thousands who applied will load a real handgun with one bullet and then hand it to Derren. Using a series of psychological tests, Derren will then determine which chamber contains the bullet, put the gun to his head, and fire until he comes to the live chamber.
“Most of the stuff I do I reckon has a 90 per cent success rate,” says Derren. See if the odds are in his favour on 5 October, at 9pm on Channel 4.
The media are really making a meal of the whole event now. But the general reaction is that it was all a big trick.
Unfortually because the whole event went over by 5mins, I only captured till 22:00 and missed the last 5mins which was the important part. So yeah only up to the point when the deer and derren are talking and loading the gun. Hoping someone posts it online soon, as I was going to do.
Blog Change Bot
Blog Change Bot (blogchangebot on AIM) is a blog monitoring service which updates you via AOL Instant Messanger when a blog you are interested is updated. Subscribe via AIM or iChat to be automatically notified when the blog is updated.
So basicly its a another bloglines type service which also accepts opml (good stuff). But notifies the person over instant messager. I havent yet tried it out beyond subscribing to the blogchangebot on AIM. But I may send it a subset of my rather large opml file to try it out.
I'm wondering two things to myself, is there anyway to grab the jabber/xmpp message using a cocoon pipeline? And when will mark release a 1.0 version of blojsim? I'm gonna email mark some time and ask for advice on getting blojsim working in blojsom2. Thanks for the link about Atom API Mark
Oh and saw this the Instant Gratification. Which instant messages you when some visits your blog. Sad or Tragic? which one is up to you.
calender for london events
Been thinking about this once again, and reality has started to shows its face again.
First up, I think the grabbing of louise ferguson's events page, would be too much work for small gain. So until she changes the format of the page so the content is seprated from the style there is little I can do. Its just too messy and theres too much inconsistency for me to write a xsl to transform the page into useable content.
I have however been thinking of other ways of doing what louise has done.
I first thought of creating a blog for events. Sounds perfect right? You know you have the calendar already there, the ability to search via category's, etc, etc. But there was a major problem which came up when I started thinking deeper. When you write a blog that is the date of the blog, just like this one is actually being written at 2am in the morning on Sunday 5th October. But if you wanted to blog a event, the event would have had to have happened. Which is no good because no one would then know about it till the day! Not much good you would say.
So i need to be able to change the actual date of the blog to certain specified date. Sounds easy enough, and maybe it is but not without some serious hacksawing of a blog server. The other way would be to touch the blog on the filesystem. But who would want to do that and who would allow people from outside to do such a thing. The last option I thought about was using the metablog mechanism. See usually theres a small amount of meta posted hence
#Thu Aug 21 13:44:45 BST 2003 blog-entry-author=ianforrester
Now if I could work out how to add – blog-event-date=20031027 which obvioulsy means 27th October 2003 and get the blog server to read that as the post date. We would be cooking!
So even thought the last idea would be fantastic, I'm forced to think about another solution because I want to start putting events up for my students soon. And of course for those interested in whats on in London.
So I've been looking at the ical format from two points of view.
I'm using Mozilia's Calendar and exporting the events as ical rdf and xml then putting them on my webdav server. The other view point i'm looking at it from is the ical spec. which is large and quite scarey in some parts, but its for the non xml version which is a problem but gives me a good idea of names and whats possible. Heres a example of a event i'm going to in 2 weeks time.
The completely xml version and The rdf xml version. So whats my next step, well I can easily write a pipeline in cocoon which will pick up all ical's in that directory and using xsl pull out the title and arrange them by there event date. so you would agree that is a good start for now. If i get time tomorrow I'll do it, but I know I got a few other tasks to do before this.
OpenOffice.org 1.1 final
OpenOffice.org 1.1 can be downloaded now.
I love the new XML file filter settings and cant wait to try it out. Maybe write one for some of the xml schemas I use. Now if it would only save back into a format of choice. Oh my after one look at my installed version, I quickly realised the xml file filter does support export as well as import. And the biggest thing is that its all done using XSL. Yeah I love open source technology.
Bloglines once again
Previous blog about bloglines. I found this blog, which is in favor of bloglines. Now i'm glad its useful to that person, but its not all that great! Interesting and simple hack though. I think that will be the last word from me about Bloglines now. hopefully…