Andy pointed me to a crazy website which does odd things on the first page. Actually its so bad on Opera that you have to pretend to be IE for it to load a page. But it turns out to be a great resource for emulators. I'm dying to try out some of the ST emulators. If I can emulate a Atari Falcon which was 32bit and had 24bit colour on my pc I will be extremly happy…
Content Management is for losers
Rushkoff stirs the content management pot at the feature.
Content Management is for losers. Young people may have discovered the dark truth about digital media: the person who wins the right to store a piece of data has actually won the booby prize.
Well done Rushkoff, I tend to agree with alot of the sense he talks… Been also keeping an eye on Theoretical PerspectivesRushkoff's online classroom. With that and danny boy you can get some really good ideas about interaction design…
Xhtml friends network
I briefly saw this in my offline reader while reading my news in the car on the way to the Twin cities but was obviously offline so couldnt check it out futher. However in the back of my head i've been meaning to catch up on XFN. It actually looks very good and so so simple compared to FOAF even though there not really compareable… Will start using XFN soon i think…
XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a 'rel' attribute to their a tags…
My first XFN link to Dave, just need to add profile to my blog pages and i'm ready to go… might do that in a bit before i sleep.Oh just to note I also added a GeoURL to all the pages too, while i was at it.
Smoothie
Finally got a machine setup for Smoothwall 2.0. The Machine is a Pentium 2 233mmx with all of 64meg of 100mhz memory and a 3 gig hard drive. Unfortually I've run out of video cards so I'm using a FireGL 1000 pro which orginally thought was a powerful 32meg FireGL 1 card. But it seems it wont be so wasted as its only a 8 meg card and wouldnt be a good idea to swap with my 64meg ATI Radion card. Specially seeing how the Smoothwall server has no display, keyboard or mouse now. I however did put in two 3Com network cards and my ADSL PCI modem card in the hope smoothwall would pick it up, it seems it didnt and I'm now stick using the Green frog usb modem till I sort it out.
So tomorrow when i get up, I will take down the current server and change my network setup till i get it all working behind smoothwall. Better hope google caches this before it goes down later today…
If you can see this post, then i'm now sitting behind a linux firewall and everything is working well… love it when a plan comes together.
Catching the big one
In my post a couple days back, I emailed alot of leading heads of the internet about talking at the college. Well I'm pleased to say Richard Stallman has agreed to come talk in May.
I should be in the UK in May, so I could give a speech.
So simple and yet so amazing… This is going to be a huge event and I think there will not be enough space to house all the people who would like to hear him speak.
Presence and Location management?
One of the things which bugs me about mobile phones is the location trianglation which is possible to find where I am at the time. And I always thought the profiles on mobile phones were powerful but not natural enough for widespread use.
Bell Labs claim to have solved the first one at least…
Bell Labs sets its sight on location privacy and
Hiding your Location Information.
Inviting the internet to the college
I've been writing emails and back and forth to some of the leading lights of the internet. Hoping to get them into college to do talks to students and staff.
Some of the people in my hit list include, Howard Rhiengold, Lawrence Lessig, Linus Torvalds, Jon Johansen, Richard Stallman, etc, etc… Hoping to add to the list when I actually recieve replies…
Ok I've recieved lots of auto-replies and a Authorize from mailblocks but the only person to really reply is Howard Rhiengold so far…
Ian —
Why don't you consider joining Brainstorms? That way, you'd have contect with others who share your interest — and you'd know when I might be in the UK. (No plans at present, but I usually make it to London every two or three years).
Here's info. Let me know if you are interested: http://www.rheingold.com/community.html
Urban Infomatics Breakout
If you want to understand cities today and especially in the future, keep mobile communications in mind. Ten years from now, understanding the way people use mobile media will be as fundamental to urban planning as understanding the buildings they inhabit and vehicles they use. by Howard Rhiengold
Thoughts soon…
Following on from twincities post
Birch sent me a link which basicly said all what I had said about the twin cities. In Birch's own words I coined it, that article is everything you already iterated
.
Birch (19:29:05): Did you ever call it or what? Cars are the biggest problem. Whether driven or parked, they require enormous amounts of space. Unless auto dependence is reduced, the classic neighborhoods that Minneapolis plans for cannot happen. More transit and more walking are the only answers.
At the same time I was talking to Miles about the whole Twin cities thing and he pointed me towards Jane Jacobs which I'm sure I've either read or heard of before. I know we had talked about her thoughts along time ago but I'm sure i've read her books. She thought all this through 40 years ago and no one took her serioulsy till 25 years ago. How many times do we hear the same story? McLuhan, Chomskey, etc etc… Its a shame because we could be in such a better state if we did.
Miles asked a important question regarding the twin cities.
italicdj (20:00:51): Is through planners – or is it social change? that things are happeing in twin cites?
Birch replies
Birch (20:27:26):
I believe we are all products of our environment. Regions of climate extremes tend to embrace femenine qualities. Not at the individual level, but at a cultural level. Social structures are of course evolutionary abdaptation that ensure survival. Public transporation, health care, public schools, etc are all natural aspirations now that colder cultures as able to satify Maslow's hierachy need
Birch (20:29:57):
urban planning is logical social step on the cultural latter. social change is a bi-product of the history/climate. we are what we are. nothing nobel about it.
Birch (20:33:26):
Geert Hofestede is a Dutch author who developed this theory by make cross cultural comparisons. It is Hofestede's 'Masculinity-Femininity' theory to which i am referring. It shreds perspective on why Sweden exists in one frame of mind while Texas exists in another.
Birch (20:36:17):
The theory would suggest why northern U.S./Canadian cities tend to fall on the far more socialistic end of the spectrum. Why they might adopt social change more quickly then cities of the south
jxCAL – I want it now…
The jxCAL project aims at providing a calendar publishing framework based on Cocoon/XML/XSLT. It can aggregate multiple sources of events and display them using nice SVG views.