Overkill

Been thinking about the xml blogging again.
Oh god yes, overkill it is using cocoon to transform the xml into text before blojsom uses it. But its a way forward because I have cocoon installed already for the site transformations. And I know where i stand with xsl.

Just thinking about why I want my weblogs in xml. I have a bookmark page and at the moment I usually copy and paste my bookmarks in. If I could grab all the href attributes out of the weblogs, use the section / catergory (as in this one is advanced blogging) for sections also. I could automate the bookmark page from my weblogs?
Actually if it was xml I could put in any tag i like, so in the transform a tag named italic tune link could actually be a short cut link for a link to my mixes. You get the idea? So the weblog would feed off the website and the website the weblog.
Nice idea needs work and time.

Humm, need to do some reading about xmlrpc and look into java development. Actually just thought, maybe I should speak to chris our java guy at work. This has to be easy enough for him to do as he will have classes to check for well form-ness, to validate xml, etc – Already.

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New found dango

I finally put a game on the xbox, crazy taxi 3 high rollers. i had it on cdr (yes one of the few games that will fit on cd i suspect. After copying it to cdrw because my pc drive wont read the disk with xbox data on. And using a xbox game ripper – the name escapes me now. I was away. Shows up in the evo x menu with correct name. No configuring it just works. Game is mighty adictive too…

Been using xbox mediaplayer a hell of a lot now, basically for all films and music. the stereo to ac3 feature is great and actually better than my cinema amp's theatre or hall modes.

Also on the same note, i was first worried about the playlist thing on the xbox because it wouldn't read the file names correctly. When i say correctly i mean if i enable read id3 on load it will arrange them a-z but by there id3 title. great you say, but when you got a album of music with the filenames in logical order like track1.mp3track2.mp3track3.mp3 its bloody ignoying to be presented with a mess. I could everytime disable id3 on load then find the tracks then enable id3 on load then switch back to the filelisting to find all the tracks have the correct names and stay in the correct order. yep damm ignoying even if it only takes 1 minute. I can also i found out use the playlist editor in the xbox mediaplayer but man if you got as many albums as i have and access them over smb rather than off the internal xbox hd, its a real bitch to do it and remember the order. why do i need to this if the the other way works quicker? because the mediaplayer doesn't support spaces! i so hope they fix this because track1 like this like that.mp3 comes up as that.mp3. frustrating to the max!

There is salvation, i found out it supports m3u playlists. not tried pls files yet. So for all the albums on cd already its too late. but for new ones i download thats the way forward

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Microsoft Rolls Out Xbox Upgrade

Wired news – Microsoft Rolls Out Xbox Upgrade

Funny as hell, I've been telling people this for a long time in my lectures. You currently have to mod or chip your xbox to do this, this and this. But how long will it be till Microsoft allow you to this, this and this as default?

You can just imagine it now, once they put windows media player 9 on there with its sick drm features. Then allow the users to download music for a small cost just like apple have then you have something not even apple could have thought about. a machine which plays dvds, music, movies all in a nice under the tv box.

Will be very interested in what the xbox hacker scene makes of all this?

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Ideas and plans

Ideas and plans, boy oh boy have I got ideas and plans in my head. If you’d been to this page before you’d notice it was something slightly different. Something about joining Consume.net, yep I will but this is only part of the overall strategy as such..

So whats the strategy? well its a mix of ideas and plans (wouldn’t you know) If things get very busy on this page I will start breaking the ideas down into multiple weblogs. And I hope to at some point draw up a map of how things should be, and what I need to buy and fit to complete it.

Ok so the idea is to use digital technology to make changes to me and my partner’s lifestyle. Ok sounds easy enough. At the moment we watch films through a computer rather than a dvd player. Because of course you can not watch divx or xvid films on a standard dvd player. Now I know thats changing due to the kiss dvd player and others like it but standard dvd players only have support for mpeg 1 and 2, not mpeg4. Anyhow I’m looking to solve that problem by using a modded (preferred chipped) xbox. So thats part of the plan at least. more later

I already own a home cinema system, which is a 32 inch widescreen tv, Sherwood prologic cinema reciever, Technics ac3 decoder which supports all 6 channel formats including dolby digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1. And if you include 5 speakers and 1 subwoofer you got the picture. To add the picture I have a freeview digital television box which was originally ondigital’s own box. More about that at some point maybe.

On the computer side of things, got 1 workstation with stacks of memory, beefy Ati all in wonder 8500 dv graphics card, multiple hard drives and a cd bruner and dvd drive. That is then connected via 100megabit ethernet to a server which is where your reading this weblog now. That server has stacks of memory, hard drive space and also has a cd burner and region free dvd drive. The Network I’m using is all 10/100 and has a wireless hub using dhcp to allow the tabletpc and my partner’s laptop to roam anywhere in the house. there is also a 400megabit firewire link between the server and workstation to stop tieing up the network during heavy transfers. But doesnt work because Microsoft didnt put in the driver for firewire networking on windows 2000 professional, such a shame too. In the kitchen there is an old 21 inch toshiba television which use to be my main television, its mainly used by my partner while cooking for watching analogue stations. And I think that basicly covers everything for now.

Ok so plans and ideas. First thing the wireless hub, its an 802.11b hub and supports 11megabits, its based in the living room and covers the whole house but signal drops alot when it hits the bathroom at the far end of the house. You can get a signal, but not a very good one if your on a laptop. If your on a pocketpc with wireless, it drops the connection at the bathroom door. So no streaming music while in the bath at this moment. I could either move the current wireless access point to the middle of the house and get a even spread of wireless or buy another one and stick it down pass the kitchen and very near the bathroom. See that option sounds good because I can then cover the garden which is also on the far end of the house, past the bathroom. that will also give me a chance to swap the hubs around and put a 802.11g hub in the living room and the older 802.11b hub near the garden instead. I was thinking of using the bridging mode, but i think a long ethernet cable to the far hub will do the trick.

Next up, the xbox media player. I have been following the xbox scene of the sly and have been quietly surprised by the amount of development going on. The best development effort has to be the xbox mediaplayer, which will play divx 3 – 5, xvid, vcd, supervcd’s and dvd’s. Aka every kind of film I own. So what i’m thinking is that if I buy a xbox then get it chipped or modded I could use that as digital media jukebox (sorry yes it plays ogg, asf and mpg3s as well). But rather than use the cd drive or small local hard drive all the time I can use the network sharing option to access shared drives on my server or workstation as well. There is also a ftp option if all else fails. Ok so that means I can access all my films without unlocking a computer, which will make my partner very happy. If all goes well then maybe I’ll buy another one for the kitchen television.

Ah i love digital television, its clear bright and cheap. We in the uk have had 3 main ways of recieving digital tv, sky (expensive and requires a dish, but has tons of interactivinty and channels), Cable (just as expensive and lacks serious interactivity) and Free to air (use to be called OnDigital before ITVdigital took it over and that was before the BBC pumped millions in to it and called it freeview). Freeview is just that, free to view. Basicly its partly funded by the tv licence (yes we have to pay to watch tv here) and all you need is a set top box and a ariel nothing more. You get about 30 channels on freeview at the moment with more in the pipeline soon. Anyway, I’m thinking of buying one for the kitchen and or one for the workstation so I can watch one thing and record another.At this moment i can only record what i’m watching, unless its on analogue tv and i can watch that and record the digital feed. there is a freeview box by pace which has pvr (tivo) fuctionality and has two digital decoders, so you can watch one and record another on to its local 20gig hard drive. Its good but not at 300 uk pounds its not. Specially now you can buy freeview boxes al low as 70 pounds brand new.

How stupid am I?

Ok, ok… After dancing around my computer screen lit living room for 3 mins flat.
I had to write this blog.

What on earth was I on? $marklus$ offered me help and I replied with my configuration files for http://blojsim.sf.net and http://blojsom.sf.net. There were two problems.
First one simple, the smack library does not like full jabber user ids. So drop your something@jabber.org for just the user id something. Easily solved.
Number two shows the problem non programming people like me, get involved in new areas like this.
I put the http://blojsim.sf.net war file inside of the webapps folder and it unpacked as usual, but I never moved it to the http://blojsom.sf.net folder! Major stupidness, even i gave myself a slap for that afterwards. For the last few days I've been wondering why there file systems were so simular? Unknown to me that the http://blojsim.sf.net items should have been in the http://blojsom.sf.net folder all along! I even wondered why the web.xml file wasnt included in the http://blojsim.sf.net install, and how http://blojsom.sf.net knew http://blojsim.sf.net was actually there.
Slapped back to reality, after looking at the entry of the web.xml again for the n'th time it came to me that they should actually be in the same folder. Yes ladies and gentlemen, i am a idiot…

Anyway now its working and I can see my http://blojsim.sf.net user on my own jabber list.
Next problem comes along… How on earth do you make entries? Hence what are the codes or commands i need to tell http://blojsim.sf.net before I can start posting?
It would seem just from my mindless tapping that just typing isnt correct and you need to do lots more beforehand, which makes perfect sense. I just need to know how to start?

Havent got the time to really try it out because its now 4am here in the uk and if I turn the light on, my eyes are going to implode.
Lets hope tomorrow, today, i can be blogging from a wireless pocketpc.

Oh yeah I've also worked out the plugin controller, so now you will see my posts are restricted to about 600 characters before a little thing says click for full text. I'm still unsure about this plugin and am trying it out for a few days. Its damm ignoying when your writing a comment not to see the whole text. But I remember someone found a solution for the problem?
Hopefully, trying it now, the macro plugin should be working. Which me and $flashharry$ talked about on thursday afternoon.
Yeah it will replace any text i put within two dollar symbols with something i put in the macro file. So at this moment I have most of my friends websites and weblogs. Noticed a couple of things, it doesnt like capitals or spaces? but it does support html, so i can make links with titles like you noticed on the page already. Cool.

I see others have got blojsim working too. Good stuff hopefully I can ask them how there getting on with using it. And i'm really looking forward to spending time learning about adding my own metadata to each post.Metadata in the new blojsom and metadata entry via jabber. You can just imagine the possibilities… Maybe your profile and/or presence will be reflected in your post? Then there so many clever things you could do server side, like how long you took to write it, from where, blah blah blah.

Anyway you can tell i'm tired…goodnight…:p

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How quick things change

Check me out, less than a week I was thinking of getting a chipped xbox and moving or buying a new wireless access point. Now I’ve got a chipped xbox for a the same price as a new one. By the way Microsoft dropped the price of xboxes to take out the gamecube. So 130 pounds will now get you a new xbox with no games and one controller, good business move on microsoft’s part – cant believe they sold for 300 pounds when first launched, and i sweared not to buy one because it was the same as my pc. Now thats the reason why I’m getting one.

Anyway, basicly the xbox has already been chipped / modded and has evolution dash board, media player and some other stuff on there already. So it should be a simple case of plug it in and away I go. Already plugged the optical cable into the digital processor and got the ethernet connection ready. It looks like I may have to switch scart sockets with the playstation everytime I want to use it because my television only has one scart socket that can produce a rgb signal. Luckly I got a two scart switcher box, but its a little crap and already has svideo input from the computer in the other socket. Seeing how the xbox will become the main movie player, I will disconnect the svideo for now. More details and maybe another log when I actually get the xbox today.

On the wireless side of things. I moved the access point to a much better location in terms of spread of the signal, the middle of the house. I was outside in the garden getting a pretty good wireless connection the other day (its nice and sunny at this moment in the uk) and I’ve taken to the garden alot more for just checking email and the like, instant messager on the ipaq outside in the garden is also a favourate of mine. Still thinking of getting the 802.11g access point on the next pay cheque to really cover the whole house and garden with a nice even spread of wireless. Should speak to neighbours about using my bandwidth.

Hacking the xbox

Hacking the xbox – A book so controversial that publishers are afraid to print it
'Banned' Xbox hacking book selling fast

Oh yes, i was thinking about getting a copy just because theres little like this out there at the moment, to my knowledge. There usually based around software hacking, cracking, blah, blah.
No we so need more books about “hardware hacking.” stuff like mobile phones, pda's, digital tv boxes as well as xbox's would go down a treat.

But I'm honestly in two minds about the whole issue. Just because its in print people are going nuts. But you only have to look at xbox scene and xbox hacker to get all the information you need to start.
So whats the big deal really? Because its about reverse engineering, or is because its reverse engineering in print? Hummm? I think it speaks for it self.

Zdnet – Hackers 'improve' Xbox Microsoft's next-generation game console's PC-derived design is encouraging unprecedented tinkering
Business week – Story about the book

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Hackers use Xbox for more than games

There seems to be alot more media coverage of the xbox now than ever due to Microsoft's plans to bring the xbox to the living room as more than a console.
A direct link to the story

Of some interest…
Hackers have modified an estimated 150,000 of the 9 million Xboxes Microsoft has sold worldwide to turn them into PCs that would normally cost $800 or more. What it takes:

A new Xbox, with 733-megahertz processor, custom graphics
chip, 8-gigabyte hard drive: $180

A keyboard and mouse, with adapters: $35 – If you get the usb adapter

A modified start-up chip: $21

120-gigabyte hard drive: $120 – do you really need this size hard drive?

Linux or other free software: $0

Total: $336

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File syncing

I really need to sort out file syncing when it comes to my weblog now, most people are lucky they have one way of writing into there weblog only. Me, well i have about 5 or so. The ipaq and tabletpc are going to be the most used i feel and I need to sort out a way of centralising my syncing so for example this weblog i'm writing on the ipaq while on the bus will not be over written by old data from the tabletpc

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Blojsom themes

I'm a little lost on how to change things around on blojsom?
I've looked at how to customimse blojsom and it seems quite straight forward using css but to actually move things around seems a little more difficult. You seem to need some odd kind of *.vm file. Now I think I understand as default blojsom uses the Jakarta Velocity engine instead of jsp. And I'm unsure if I should change it to jsp which I know and understand a bit or learn what the weird commands in vm mean?
I remember reading on david czarnecki's weblog that the performance of jsp was poor and there were other issues. I cant remember what the other issues were but I need to know before i make the change.

But that aside, if I did want to change the current blojsom theme. How the hell would I do that? seriously because I cant see any *.vm files which I can change except the ones in the themes directory. And thats a different theme from the current one.
I'm either really stupid and missing something really obvious or need to do lots of research. Looking at the log file might help, when i find the time.

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Blogging desktop tools

I've been thinking of ways to get the students blogging. One of the easy ways is a desktop client. The list is mainly from searching the web for desktop clients. Will reduce the list as I try them out and look at there actual interopability with blojsom and features.

w.bloggar – Looks quite big and very developed. Too many features to mention.
blogBuddy – Seems very under developed but has th ebasic features and nice and small. No xml-rpc but supports the blogger api.
Slug – not good, seems to work for the moveable type only and requires the .net framework. One to forget for sure.
Kung-Log – oh this looks good, first things the developer is looking at the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines draft and his thinking seems to be going in the right direction. Ah but its totally for mac osx only. No good but looks sweet. Maybe one for the mac heads?
EspressoBlog – another osx only app, whats the deal with macs and blogs?
Azure – J2me based, so any mobile phone in the uk should work fine. Supports xml-rpc and moveable type. Looks promising and could be a extra app for those students without expensive phones or pdas which supports instant messager
My simple Google query


Something's buzzing online about weblog APIs. Someone posted a comparison between the Blogger and the MetaWeblog API on his weblog. Then Dave Winer is getting pretty riled up about Google's plans to develop a new version of Blogger API, which should better be based on the MetaWeblog API instead.

Another interesting service in regards to blogging which I came across.
TypePad is an upcoming hosted service providing powerful tools for creating full-featured weblogs. Built in response to the needs of webloggers, online diarists and writers, TypePad harnesses the power of Six Apart's popular Movable Type personal publishing system into a turnkey service, suitable for beginners and experts alike. Google's blogger beware…

Chronicle Lite – java based works with any platform which supports java but only plays with the blogger API.

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Blogging and the cubicgarden

So yeah its a weird one.
i've been thinking about blojsom and how this affects cubicgarden.com
realisticly i've been thinking this is what cubicgarden was about orginally, but i feel things have progressed on. I want to have solid links I can depend on when quoting things etc. I know you can have Permalink which will basicly do that but the arrangement isnt as I would like it. Maybe its the designer in me screaming for control again?

Anyway what I'm thinking is if I keep my source weblog files as xml then I can always apply a xsl to cetain ones or all of them to fetch out the best content for direct linking and what not. Yeah it seems blojsom does support html and xml because it just outputs the lot to the browser, and of course any tags which dont make sense to the web browser are ignored. So in all my postings I've included a content tag to enclose the lot. It seems about now is when I need my generic xhtml schema more than ever.

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Welcome to the cubicgarden

I'm now starting to actively promote the cubicgarden.com as my news site which is kind of weird because its just evolved not really changed. Anyhow I guess with this whole new blog area and the ability to comment on what I write, its starting to come together nicely.
I'm hoping to add less techie things, but that will come as I start to do less techie things. I mean for example the last time I did mix on my computer was such a long time ago. And I love and listen to dance music everyday. Oh well hopefully gatecrasher in 2 fridays will inspire me to do more mixing.

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