I was reckonmmending a student In the Beginning was the Command Line. And came across this directory of nice interesting ebooks. Will have to read some while I'm away on jury service for sure.
Oh i also spied this a while back, good faq for ebooks
XML tools by category
Found this
caught in my news feeds.
Looks quite big and as useful as searching freshmeat and sourcforge. I also notied they provide the site contents as a topicmap. Which is useful not only for viewing but also for seeing how to write one correctly. I still want to get into topic maps for mapping alot of things.
Eigenradio = Statistically Optimal Music
Ok so Miles dropped this in my inbox the other day, but I was following the convo on alter slash but like most things on slash dot it was lost before you know and replaced with something just as interesting.
This is from slashdot –
ShinyPlasticBag writes “'Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. Since we listen to so much music all the time, Eigenradio is always on and always live. What you hear on Eigenradio is the best of the New Music, distilled and de-correlated. One song on Eigenradio is worth at least twenty songs on old radio.
Anyway so yeah this eigenradio sounds like a intersting project but is somewhat not when you actually listen. Maybe its the slash dot effect, but tell you what it sounds pretty poor at the moment.
The slashdotters have gone crazy about the issue, and its all a good read. Heres some of the best.
bobtheheadless (467304)
I wonder if you can do the same thing with video… hm.
Sanity (1431)
I wish they had spent as much time documenting what this actually did as they spent making the website pretty, the one remotely technical diagram on the website has no explanation whatsoever as to what it is about.
IMHO this is yet another example of how academic projects are judged by the amount of attention they attract, rather than on whether they advance the state of the art. This is the reason why people like Kevin Warrick [sundayherald.com] can stick a dog tag in their arm and go around claiming they are the world's first cyborg – all while being lavished with attention by the mainstream media.
All of this leads to an academic system that increasingly rewards self pubicity at the expense of real reasearch.
Oh, BTW – I listened to the radio station, it sounds like a garbled mess – I certainly couldn't determine the point of this from listening to it, but then I could say the same thing about rap.
JohnGrahamCumming (684871) comments about the website,
1. Horizontal scrolling required
2. Tiny
3. Virtually no links to anything
4. Very small amount of information
I personally think its all good fun but the genres are too wide for any good experience. Also I expected it to generate tones for human listening? Some of it was hardly that. I would like to see it take only a single genre and use the same engine then hear the results.
No matter what the slashdotters say, the author page sounds like he has lots of interesting projects going on, but not much to show at this moment. Some of the papers I will have to read through when I got the time.
Pocket Internet explorer
Why do Microsoft do it? why? oh why oh why?
Pocket IE 2003 renders CSS stylesheets and if that wasnt bad enough it seems to support limited javascript? I think. I visited a site a while back on the ipaq and it left a big dialogue box on the screen. What on earth is going on with this browser?
I am pleading with Opera to realease there amazing micro browser for pocketpc. There seems to be no real altenative browsers on the pocketpc unless you look at using wap
Saw this on code monkey
So, if you have a PDA running PocketPC 2002 or earler, could you do us all a favor and upgrade? And for those of you who don't, could you see what you can do to get whoever it is who makes your mobile browser to upgrade theirs to some modern web standards? It would make everyone's life much, much easier.
Ok why should people upgrade so you can now design using css on a palmtop device?
Theres no solution to this, I just wish I could turn off css on the ipaq. I also think the new palms support css too. Enough said for now!
Slashdotters meetup updated
Ok, I cant count this meetup, the unexpected happened. I left to go to the slashdotters meetup and got to east croydon by 1800. Great I thought, what I'll do is go via New cross gate and pop up to brick lane via the east london line. Got to New cross gate, boarded the tube and the train suddely stopped. Why? The tube driver said it was down to a signal failure. Nothing new. But no it was more serious than we all thought, and while i sat there between new cross gate and surrey queys. The choas unfolded.
I only found out later when I finally got out of the tube and got a text message from my wife. Did you get to the meetup with the power cuts? What power cut, I was thinking? Everything seemed fine, only realised now I was sitting on a tube while most of the national grid in London had gone down.
The funny thing is I was having a go at my wife about americas power outage last week. Well at least it was only 30mins here not days!
The interesting thing I found thinking about Zeldman's blog, was that the mobile phone transmitters never went down once as I was able to get a gprs connection while sitting there on the tube. I never looked at my 3g phone, but I'm sure it was all fine too.
Anyway back to the meetup as such, I was lucky because the east london line power was quickly restored and I was away, while the other lines were all down. But it was pointless because no one else made it I dont think, plus the fact I got there 1 hour late. What kinda of host am I? But come on the there was bloddy power failure! in London!
Bluetooth Personal Storage Server
Nizam pointed this out today. Its a nice idea but only uses the bluetooth ftp profile, so streaming wont work I believe.
HOPBIT is a personal mobile server that combines the wireless connectivity of Bluetooth with the storage capabilities of a large capacity hard disk drive. Small enough to slip into a pocket and light enough to carry everywhere, HOPBIT is a powerful personal tool that can transmit, receive and store large volume data sources–including images and music–communicate with digital networks, and provide a new dimension in portable memory for personal information equipment, such as PDA and PC.
Linux Migration Quick Reference
This Linux Migration Quick Reference site gives you the nuts and bolts view of how to get things going in Linux in the shortest amount of time. No need to wade through lots of documentation.
People generated content
More stories pointing towards user generated content. Yep we've all heard it before, move on nothing to see.
Personal Life Annotation Devices and Power to the Mobile People. Both look at blogs for a reason, like we never thought about that… move on!
Brazilian Government Continues Push For Free Software
Seeing how I'm hosting the slashdotters meetup tomorrow, I spent a few hours reading up on the news while on the bus to and from work. This caught my attention.
Brazilian Government Continues Push For Free Software. The comments say it all, here some of the best bits
Most of us here have long known the realities of TCO and Microsoft. The only big cost with free software is in retraining staff. And retraining can be done for free – give a hungry man a can of food and he'll find a way to open it.
I guess with all the economic trouble in South America of late, governments such as that of Brazil are being forced to recognise that reality. Microsoft can probably no longer buy their way into Government contracts with 'discounts' and whatever other tactics they might use.
Farming out developement of other software has got to be cheaper than paying M$ obscene liscensing fees. Furthermore, when you hire contractors, you can get a solution which fits better than an out of the package software-suite. At the beginning, they may have to send some of that work overseas, but they will probably find local talent pretty quickly.
Seriously, lets see 'PAY LICENSES' or 'FEED PEOPLE'
Ok the argument is not always about feeding the people. Paying license fees is not what third world countries want to do. I mention this as a start because it will shift to other things other than software, eg Drugs Patents, Copyrights, etc. The West better be paying attention, because people like the RIAA say, “Why do you need bread when you can eat cake!”
The Bluetooth Blues
The new palms have now caught up with the pocketpcs, in speed, wireless options and screen quality. But it seems Bluetooth is still not as smooth as pocketpc 2003 it would seem. Larry Garfield does make a great point about a dumb phone. I also would like a dumb phone but with a camera either on the phone or palmtop.
Slashdotters meetup
Ok, this is it I believe. If the slashdotters meetup this Thursday doesnt pull people in, then I'm gonna start slagging off meetup and start rethinking going to them. You know what to give this the full go, I'm gonna be the host this time!
My profile: If sunny, will be sitting outside on a bench sporting a ipaq in one hand a redbull in the other 
Yellow trainers and something bright for a tshirt. If cold, look for the meetup sign or ask the bar people.
Good stuff, should do the trick.
Ups and downs of my ipaq
Recently, my new ipaq has been giving me the metaphorical lip. First of all the sd card started playing up, but it was odd becasue the sd card worked fine but only a few applications picked it up. One of those was pocket music, but others like word, pocketstreets, etc didnt. Some like Pocket MVP saw the sd card but only because they were using the extented file selector. Trust me all this was a pain to say the least.
Anyway, so moving. The biomentric finger scanner doesnt scan too well when its hot or hummid so the pin option was being used during the heat wave.
Then over the weekend the wireless packed up! That was the last straw, i took the battery off the back and replaced it 30 secs later. And believe it or not the wireless came back? Also I put 0 byte file called ignore_my_docs on the sd card and seriously it now works fine. Odd piece of hardware!
The tablet is back
Over the bank holiday, I reinstalled tabletpc from a fresh back up I did when I first got it. And to my amazement it actually worked. So I have not got my pen and inking back, its a shame I now have to install office 2003 beta once again, but it was time for that beta2 technical refresh anyway. Now if I can just find who nicked the cds…
Output escaping = bad?
I am so pee'd off, People are saying output escaping is evil, dont use it blah blah. I yes I somewhat agree with the points. But what happens when your recieving a xml stream which unfortually you have no control over? Well? Exactly what can you do? Output escaping is very useful in such a situation. But oh no, its evil man.
The feeling is that like html to xhtml there was a transision, and this also needs to happen in this area too. Until we get finer grain controls in xslt 2.0 and xpath 2.0 then I challenge anyone to solve the issue.