Sarahs a regular at http://hollyoaks.com and noticed during the show today that the stylesheet was missing for a couple of minutes. Then the new style came into effect. I had to natrually check it out. There using Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.0. Theres a bit of Javascript mainly to control the multiple stylesheets which is pretty nice as the default yellow is not great on top of white and the open and close elements which work on all the browsers I've tested it on (opera, firefox, ie and mozilla). Two other things which impressed me. Decent print stylesheet and RSS versions 1.0 and 2.0. Shame the RSS feeds dont contain more than a single paragraph, but its pretty much what everyone else is doing anyway. What I find also really interesting is the link to Mezzoblue about what is RSS and the Accessability statement which is pretty good. On the bad side, its a really shame there not using more semantic elements instead of divs with multiple ids and classes but its all a huge change from the old website.
Awww yeah baby, you can ride my bus…
Sarah describes the journey we took on Saturday than I ever could. It involves one croydon bus driver and 3 women, enough said. Oh also a good point to say my wife Sarah is now blogging, and I never made her do it… well ok a little bit.
Xbox media centre and enclosures
I upgraded my Xbox media centre version about 2 weeks ago from 1.0 to a September CVS compiled version. Well before anything else, the speed is great and everything seems a lot tighter than before. But there's also a whole host of other things which can be easily missed if you dont look for them. Theres tons of screenshots which I did myself to show some features.
First obvious thing, there's a new submenu on the first screen. This can easily be over looked because it looks like restart rather than a menu. I have not looked into how to control this yet, but I will. In the menu there is a couple of Python scripts. Xbox trailers and Movie trailers do what they say on the menu, stream the latest clips to your xbox.
For example the above is what happens when you select movie trailers. It queries http://www.apple.com/trailers and lists them like most other things in xbmc. You can then select a trailer and it will give you options to progressive stream the low, medium or high quality version. Its that simple and its pretty much the same for xbox trailers but a different site.
So I've been thinking about this feature. First thing I really want to learn some Python so I can mess with the scripts and learn to point the scripts and site media I would love to watch on my tv. Also is there a way to do this without hardcoding the url into the script? So maybe you can type it in using the onscreen keyboard or even using the onscreen keyboard type in a url and it returns all the links and media links? So pointing it at something like the bbc world service site would you give you loads of links to pictures and a couple to the real audio stream. This really could do away with stream pack if it worked well.
And talking of streampack, I have been pretty impressed with the ability to watch live tv from all around the world and watch webcams etc. But Streampack is ignoying because its all messy and very flat in structure (even though you could change it yourself). And sometimes I just want http://www.shoutcast.com type listings. Well I got it now using the KML browser?
Very cool you have to admit…? But I want more! This got me thinking, with the whole hype around audio enclosures. Why doesnt someone write a RSS reader with enclosure support? So everyday I could read the news or blog headlines briefly and opt to download the audio or even video? This also reminds me, xbmc can rip audio streams to the hard drive but it doesnt have the extra logic of streamripper. Come on you know the xbox would be ideal for ripping music legally from shoutcast and the like. I guess the only thing to add before this would be the ability to rip to a smb or xbms connection as the usual 8gig xbox drive would be filled up with tunes before you knew it. And that would also go if the ability to rip video existed for xbmc. Imagine that? The way I see it, xbmc caches loads of streams anyway, theres no reason why it cant just build a complete file and offer it the filesystem as a complete file. is there?
Anyway theres more bits and pieces in the newer version, I've added some screen shots instead of talking about each little feature.
Creative Archive lecture
Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have had no option but to move the BBC Creative Archive project lecture forward to 1:30pm today.
There will be a live chat room and discussion forum for all students, staff and guests to ask questions and discuss the creaitive archive and creative commons before and after the lecture. It is advised that any burning questions should be posted to the forum before the lecture, so they can stand a chance of being read out during the Questions and Answers portion of the lecture.
There will also be a live audio stream for all to listen to during the event. Feel free to forward this entry on to others who may be interested.
After the event
I've posted up the pictures from yesterday. I am currently working on the audio which is safe on 2 hard drives. Its in 128k mp3 format right now, but I will convert it to a few others today once I've cleaned it up. I may also chop it up a bit. With regards to the video, its still on the imac which we used for capturing 
V tapes suck as we all know). I'm hoping I can transfer the lot over to a powerbook and sort out that footage as well as the copyright vs community lecture videos.
I dont know what everyone else thought, but besides the audio problems with the stream and the lack of a DV camera tripod. It all went quite well in the end. Actually thinking back there was a major blow to the online side of things when Roman tested the learn.rave site to see if he could post a few questions. Low and behold guests were not able to post on the forum and join the chat session. I tried to change it so guests could join and post but moodle was not having none of it. Because of this I never told students to login and so when they were urged to login, they did not know there raveID and password would work. Serious case of test it yourself beforehand, would have highlighted the problem in advance! Oh well…
In the after meeting, it was discussed that Paula's lecture was so fantastic and made so much sense that it was like a breath of fresh air. But it was a real shame that only 4 members of staff turned up in the end. Saying that we dont know who was listening in, we have not looked at the logs yet. The break came perfectly timed which was great and Jamie's comment about the Creative commons being typicaly american made him look very bad in the audiences eyes. Even I was suprised to see Mylz, JC and few others argue back against him. Maybe the message of the day was not lost on the audience?
Enclosures and Links
In blojsom theres 4 types of content syndication available to you, RSS 0.91, RDF 1.0, RSS 2.0 and ATOM 0.3. Well I've got rid of the RSS 0.91 icons and prefer people grab the others. But realisticly its all the same content at the moment. However I'm going to start experiementing with Enclosures in the RSS 2.0 feed. It relates back to some thinking earlier. At the same time I'm thinking of trying out Greg G's idea of using the Link element in ATOM to do the same. The first piece of content I'm considering adding is related pictures based on not the title but metadata which I'm going to add to every blog entry in the near future. So if theres metadata and the flavor is RSS 2.0 or ATOM it will add an enclosure to pull in a picture from Flickr. For example on this post I've added metadata hyde park(meta-keyword=hydepark). Which when searched in flickr will generate this page. So I will grab the first one and attach it as a flash file? What would be better is if I could filter by cc only licenced photos. Shame Open photo doesnt have a better system behind it. I'm also considering putting cocoon somewhere in the middle of the process so I can use xsl to transform content rather than using vm templates. One of the things which has made me think about this area more is this posted by doc searls.
By the way this would be the search string which would be generated – http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-nc-sa-2.0/tags/hydepark and I would take the 2nd photo in this example. And the end result photo would be this sweet entry by myself.
Enclosures, Links and mobile clubbing
Paul sent this around the office today. Its a link for the London pillow fight club, a take on fight club I'm assuming. But what I found more interesting was the mobile clubbing site. Bit like the ARGs, I've always heard about mobile clubbing but never really looked into it with any depth. Might have to give it a go one day soon.
In blojsom theres 4 types of content syndication available to you, RSS 0.91, RDF 1.0, RSS 2.0 and ATOM 0.3. Well I've got rid of the RSS 0.91 icons and prefer people grab the others. But realisticly its all the same content at the moment. However I'm going to start experiementing with Enclosures in the RSS 2.0 feed. It relates back to some thinking earlier. At the same time I'm thinking of trying out Greg G's idea of using the Link element in ATOM to do the same. The first piece of content I'm considering adding is related pictures based on not the title but metadata which I'm going to add to every blog entry in the near future. So if theres metadata and the flavor is RSS 2.0 or ATOM it will add an enclosure to pull in a picture from Flickr. For example on this post I've added metadata dance (meta-keyword=dance). Which when searched in flickr will generate this page. So I will grab a random one and attach it as a image file. What would be better is if I could filter by cc only licenced photos. Shame Open photo doesnt have a better system behind it. I'm also considering putting cocoon somewhere in the middle of the process so I can use xsl to transform content rather than using vm templates. One of the things which has made me think about this area more is this posted by doc searls.
By the way this would be the search string which would be generated – http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-nc-sa-2.0/tags/dance and I would take a random photo in this example. And the end result photo would be this sweet photo. Now I just need to work out how to do this using the webservice API's and without transforming html pages.
Been explorering RSS 1.0 (RDF) spec for the ability to add extra content. Looks like it can be done easily.
The Evil Anime giraffe
After the axon run around in piccadilly yesterday evening, most of us went to to eat. So we got to know each other alot better. Despite the terriable service in Deep Pan pizza we had a good time. And I got speaking to Flidget Jerome. Well theres a lot more to Flidget, than meets the eye. But one of the most interesting facts about her, is shes a very good Anime artist.
You can find more at her website evilgiraffe.
the bbc creative archive project lecture
Project Syzygy
A new game is starting and the puppet masters are based in London. I'm hoping they will build on a lot of the new and interesting technologies and cultural differences there is in europe. Its starting soon and you need to drop a email to curious@projectsyzygy.com address if you want to be involved.
First thing guys, what is up with this metadata? – < meta name="keywords" content="TE OE K MQD J JE IFUDT JXU HUIJ EV OE KH BY VU IU BBYDW IKWQ HUT M QJUH EH TE OEK MQDJ JE…" > and why is there a wrongly writen fibonacci sequence? More clues and thoughts can be found in the unfiction forum.
Jeanine Salla the Sentient Machine therapist (i love bees)
A Puppetmaster flung back the alternative reality game universe today. I've always heard of it but not really looked into it. I am currently getting involved in the ilovebees.com game, which started with the Halo2 trailer. But I may have hit the ARG market too late because the big guns are starting to take notice. Yahoo, However the social aspects are kinda of being talked about at Smartmobs and blogged of course.
So what is this all about? Well for a histroy lesson its worth checking out unfictions introduction. It talks about the first major game which was AI's Beast. And Majestic by EA was ment to bring forward a new movement in the game industry but was closed down due to September 11th. Thinking back, nokiagame was my first contract with this genre of gaming. Its not the same, but drove my attention to unfiction games.
Ok so whats the big deal your thinking? Isnt this like Flashmobbing some of you may be thinking? Well I think this huge and untapped as of yet. Yes it can be used for marketing and advertising but I've already got a idea up my sleeve for education. And goodness think about the massive amount of stats one game could generate. I'm sure marketers would love a bit of that. Whats really odd is that it has not hit this side of the ocean hard yet. Most of the games have been played in America and centre around american culture. Only I love bees
has made its way across the ocean, but I do hear that there is plans a foot to change the situation – not to start rumours of course.
From a gamers point of view the tools are there to be much more organised. I do believe the unfiction forums is one of the first I've seen with RSS per topic and per post. There using IRC, Wiki's, Email and Forums to get sorted on games, while the game rules are being bent in anyway possible. Number 8 is very interesting indeed, being a selfcailmed hacker of some sorts. The ability to reverse engineer files, turn over weak websites, cause transformation effects and ultimately peer around the curtain is too much of temptation. But the Unfiction community looks down on such underhand conduct, and weed out people who do so. I actually almost got involved in Project MU but I remember it being very american bias.
From a puppetmasters point of view, things are very interesting. They can use equal tools to the gamers to origanse themselves. But they need to use higher level security as the arms race for information is on. Also the presure to build bigger and better games must be huge. One of the things I thought about is relating the truth and the unreal. You could set a game in current times and use real permalinks with sites which are simular but unreal (i think there already doing this?) I also havent seen much in the way of Blogs being used? I can imagine teaming up with multiple bloggers to fill the blogsphere with unfiction news, forcing gamers to look inside rss feeds and special search engines like Feedster. I mean think about it, you could drop stuff into a picture and put it in Flickr and only the clued up would catch on. Talking of which, the internet has moved on and so could the games, why not use RESTful webservices where you have to fiddle with the urls to get what you want out?
I find the social aspect of the unfiction games very interesting and I love the way the gamers think out the box to outsmart the puzzles and puppetmasters. But equally the puppetmasters scour the internet to eves drop on IRC chats and follow threads on forums to see when puzzles are near to be finished and by who. They build up profiles and change the paths according to whos involved. Anyhow, tomorrow I will be joining the I love bees game tomorrow at 6pm to answer a call in Soho from our pupptmasters. I reckon it will be inside a cafe not in a phone box.
An account of the i love bee game I took place in today, from Flidget Jerome.
Today's axon hunters were Diandra, cubicgarden, Sarah, Rogue Element, bcriswell, Miles and myself. Cubicgarden should be along later with pictures.
Bcriswell had a GPS unit with him, and located the coordinate point on the triangular traffic island in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. There's no phones anywhere near there, so we're taking this to mean we're meant to go underground.
There's 14 phones in total in the row Rogue Element already reported about. Starting from the right, we're missing for sure the first, second and sixth in the row. We also lost control of the 4th and 13th for some of the time we were expecting Melissa's call.
So yes we failed, but the seven of us did a good job to cover the 14 phones which were public. Maybe next time…