mbites - The Big Bluejack Heist at Waterloo This is a fairly balanced story about the practice of bluejacking or using bluetooth to send messages between phones. What interests me about this is the possibilities for phone to phone communications. It wouldn't be hard for phone manufacturers to start building in features for P2P Phone to Phone communication. Everything from swapping ring tones, MP3s, multi-user gaming to walkie talkie direct voice comms. Bluetooth is one way of doing this but at least some of it could use the normal GSM and GPRS channels or even WiFi for Wifi/GSM/Bluetooth enabled PDAs. The downside is obviously that it would affect revenue for the carriers and some of those swaps are dubious from a copyright point of view. But technologically this shouldn't be hard. [from: JB Wifi]

Esther Dyson on Social Networks Worth reading. [from: JB Ecademy]

Here's an idea. Schedule a time when your club will collectively join the Ecademy chat channel and meet online.

Ecademy chat, irc://irc.freenode.net/ecademy [from: JB Ecademy]

Two links I've been meaning to post.

3 styles of ethics. This is a paper on the three styles of ethics. Information, Commercial, Guardian. The Information ethic is the one that says information wants to be free" and values cooperation above personal gain. Commercial ethics are appropriate for business and trade, which seek to increase value to all parties involved. Money is the lifeblood of commerce. Innovation and efficiency are more useful than tradition, and the use of force is severely frowned on. Guardian or Government ethics are appropriate for governments and police forces, organizations that defend laws and land. In such a group, betrayal can cause disaster; force is frequently necessary; tradition is valuable; and loyalty is more important than money. In short, Information - Spread Innovation, Commercial - Improve the Status Quo, Guardian - Maintain the Status Quo.

The problems come when one set of ethical values are applied to a situation that is normally handled by another and this goes some way to explian the constant tension between the three areas

The second link is to The Political Compass. This is an attempt to change our view of politics by adding a second axis to the normal left-right, communist-capitalist axis. The second dimension is Authoritarian-Libertarian. Hence they've added a social scale to the normal economic scale. This gives a new look onto some traditional problems. In particular Fascism can be seen to be an extreme authoritarian position that can be either left or right wing . [from: JB Ecademy]

GNER Mobile Office is the launch of a Wifi service on GNERs trains. Principally Kings Cross to Doncaster, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. They claim it is First class only, but I can't see anything that would restrict it.

If you use the service, please report back here. [from: JB Wifi]

DailyWireless - One-piece Access Points is one of their typically link rich and complete articles about various devices that can function as access points, from PC code to hotspots-in-a-box. On interesting little tidbit in there is that the Nocat crew have succeeded in adding nocatsplash to the Linksys WRT54G. This is still quite a long way from real security. In theory it would let a consumer set up a captive portal page to slow down guest users coming on to there home WLAN. Apart from the Linux geeky fun of hacking a commercial box that has software based on Linux, there's a point here which is that consumer grade equipment should really have this sort of capability built in so that people can share their broadband in a more organised manner.

From a recent brief war-driving session, my perception is that home WiFi use is growing rapidly but that 90% of the home boxes are installed with everything on default. There's an awful lot of APs round me called Belkin54g or Linksys that are clearly connected to NTL or BT. They've got a working system, they're pretty unlikely to be abused and they are of course breaking the ISPs T&Cs. But regardless of all that, free ubiquitous internet access is happening anyway.

One of the things I've been hoping for on wifi.ecademy.com is a guide to setting up your home LAN so that you deliberately share with guests but in a controlled fashion. I can see the need but I don't have the knowledge to write such a guide. If you do, why not get in touch. [from: JB Wifi]

4pm is chat room time. Come on in. [from: JB Ecademy]

Now we've got the Chat more or less working, the next trick is to try and get a critical mass of people in there. There's nothing worse than arriving to discover there's only one other person online and they've gone away for 10 minutes. I'd like to suggest that all those that are vaguely interested make a point of trying to open the chat client at 4pm GMT each afternoon.

If you'd prefer to use a real IRC client, take a look at the Google Directory. I can recommend Chatzilla if you have Firebird. mIRC is the most respected Windows client but it's pretty intimidating to set up. The URL for the Ecademy chat room is at irc://irc.freenode.net/ecademy on the standard IRC port 6667.

People new to IRC should look at one of the many tutorials on the web.

[from: JB Ecademy]

Those of you paying attention may have noticed that their network just got smaller. What's happened is that we've made a subtle change to a lot of the lists of networkers. People are only included in the list if they've returned your message. So there has to be at least one message in each direction for the network contact to be "real" (Connected).

When you are looking at your network contacts list you'll see a new option "Unconnected". This shows the list of people where there's only been a message in one direction.

This has no effect on your ability to network message anyone. And it has no effect on the 10 outgoing contacts limit for non-power networkers.

It also has no effect on your ability to rate people up. You can still only rate people up if you have sent them at least one message.

Hopefully this will make the networkers lists more effective and more accurately reflect actual links between people.

If you see any odd behaviour associated with this, please let me know.

BTW. I've had a little feedback about the Block Contact functionality. As expected people generally appreciate that the function is there, but don't expect to ever use it. I've had one person who intended to block 20-30 people but this should be the exception. [from: JB Ecademy]

It's taken a while but I've finally found a half way decent embedded IRC chat client. The URL is http://www.ecademy.com/chat.php Let me know how you get on.

If you have a full chat client (like mIRC), try irc://irc.freenode.net/ecademy

The next task is to try and arrange for archiving of the messages. [from: JB Ecademy]

Compare this DailyWireless - Jukebox Cloud with this, WiFi Ghetto Blaster One's a commercial exercise from the people who brought you the Cloud. 2million MP3s delivered by broadband to a Jukebox device. The other's a stripped and hacked boombox with a fat hard disk, running Linux. Using WiFi anyone within range can up or download MP3s, and change the running order via a web interface.

The Jukebox is mostly interesting because of a hidden piece in the press release about selling MP3s via email. If they've got the music library, and delivery method, they've clearly also got the potential for an iTunes competitor. What would be really neat would be to have a USB, Firewire and Wifi interface on the Jukebox so you could just plug your iPod in the side and buy some more music. [from: JB Wifi]

New Media Knowledge have got an event on Dec 3rd that unfortunately clashes with the next Ecademy event (which is our Xmas Party) on Selling Social Software. incidentally I discovered this via Marc Canter who has some nice things to say about me It's also mentioned on the Corante Many to Many blog. Does anyone know the speakers? Will Davies, Lee Bryant, and Louise Ferguson

As a result of this I discovered Marc Eisenstadt who has a bunch of innovative software around new forms of social communication. [from: JB Ecademy]

I was just looking at the Dean for America contributions page One of the key questions you have to answer yes to is "I am a United States citizen or a permanent resident alien." Well I'm a UK citizen but like much of the rest of the world the US government has quite a large effect on my life and I'd like to participate. So why can't I contribute to a US election campaign fund? If I can't do it via this route, then how can I do it? Do I have to send a paper letter containing crisp dollar bills? If I did, what would the campaign have to do with them?

Before anyone attacks my politics, I'm not actually suggesting I give Dean money as opposed to Bush, or Clark or any of the other candidates. It's the principle of the thing I'm trying to understand. To some extent we're all US citizens now so why shouldn't we vote or contribute or influence the election in some way? [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm sure the correct answer to "Where's the Bush" is "Yes, doesn't it" but for the next three days, Interwebnet.org have got a campaign to track the leader of the free world. Since he will be moving around Britain with all the finesse of a stealth bomber, despite being protected by 16,000 policemen, we need the help of the public to track his movements. If you see him down the chip shop or in your local pub, perhaps eating with Nigella Lawson, know of a possible location ahead of time, or have images of him (or protestors) to share, then send them to: bush at internetweb.org or to text information to this address, enter this email address, then a space, then your message and send to: 07766 404 142.

If you're in London during the next few days, the Stop the War coalition have a selection of activities for you to keep you busy. These are vaguely legal unlike the woman who managed to dodge security, climb the front gate of the palace *and* erect a flag... while wearing a fluorescent jacket. The star attraction is the traditional march from Russel Sq to Trafalgar Sq on Thursday complete with the destruction of a papier mache statue of the great dictator, but there's also an evening of poetry and music in Camden on Wed evening.

And if you are just as uncomfortable with the political leaning of Stop the War and the Muslim Association of Britain as with Bush, why not make up some "Capitalists against the War" flags and banners. Despite what the media might say, you don't have to be an extreme lefty terrorist to disagree with what Shrub and Tone have done this year. [from: JB Ecademy]

kuro5hin.org || Top Ten Internet Fads

Fun article but what really caught my eye was these two statements:-

WAP is the sound a clunky Internet-enabled cellphone makes when you throw it at a brick wall in frustration.

3G is approximately the acceleration required to crush a clunky Internet-enabled cellphone in frustration. [from: JB Wifi]

Chasing Bush - Tracking George W. Bush throughout his UK visit

IF YOU SEE GEORGE W. BUSH, EMAIL OR TEXT THE TIME AND LOCATION TO:
bush at interwebnet.org

To send a text, enter the email address, then a space, then send to:

07766 404 142

Images of protests and exclusion zones are also welcome. The public has a right to see it all.

Here's the problem. This blog and Ecademy are PHP (Mysql) systems. I need to accept some data from a client that's built in MS dotnet. The first iteration of the client used dotnet web services to talk to a dotnet server using SOAP. Now it's a while since I've played with PEAR::SOAP for PHP and that was a test client to Google's API. This time around I've got to build a server. The data's really only an array of structs with 2 or 3 elements each.

Shouldn't be hard, right? After all SOAP is a standard, and there's been lots of interop work since I was writing about this stuff all the time 2 years ago.

Wrong.

- Dotnet wants to use document/literal all the time. This turns SOAP into little more than a REST call that passes a large XML document. Did we really need SOAP for this?
- The dotnet programmers aren't aware about what's happening under the hood at all, at all. There's no disrespect here but the MS GUI has hidden all the detail to the point where asking them to change to suit me (like using RPC) is a non-starter.
- PEAR::SOAP does support document/literal but I can't find a recipe for a server.
- Documentation for all of this is minimal.
- The test client and server I built using RPC just worked. An attempt at changing this to doc/literal resulted in reams and reams of meaningless error script.

So far I've wasted 3 or 4 hours on what should be a trivial task. Aaagh! Really. This sucks.

But I have to keep at it if my dream of a PHP port of Liberty is going to happen because Liberty uses some SOAP and I just know doc/literal is going to play a part.

What the hell happened here and how did the simplicity of XMLRPC end up as the huge pile of messy contradictions that is SOAP?

So after a week of running, the "Am I connected" game has now stabilised. Here's the current stats:-
People who've been rated: 2629
People who could be rated: 2739
Votes cast so far: 10654
Voters: 269

Despite some early attempts to game the system and fill the top 25 with Ecademy women , it's settled down and the usual suspects are well up there. What's fascinating about this is that it's not at all clear what you're supposed to be ranking and a few people have asked what "Connected" means. Despite that the people who've taken part seem to know. And with 10 thousand votes the results now statistically mean something, although as I say we don't now exactly what.

If you haven't worked it out already, the faces shown are chosen at random from Ecademy people who have a photo and haven't hidden their profile. So it obviously helps your likely score if you've got a half way decent photo, you look interesting and your fifty words look interesting. After that the high scorers also appear to have a good reputation in the community as well. I'm fairly sure that Ecademy women get consistently higher scores than the men, but maybe I'm imagining that! I feel sure they deserve it anyway.

Anyway, here's a big cheer for Lesley Atkinson who's currently leading the rankings and has been in the top 3 all week. Whatever she's doing is clearly having some effect.

ps. We have had one complaint that this wasn't very business like. Well while I understand that position, it is only a bit of fun and fairly harmless. If you don't like it, you don't have to look a it. [from: JB Ecademy]

Hey, it's Microsoft Free Friday again. So which non-Microsoft application will you install on your machine today? Will it be:-
- A better Browser?
- A better Email client?
- A better Office suite?

You don't have to switch now, but you owe it to yourself to take a look at the alternatives. And what better time to do it than on Friday afternoon when you won't be doing any work anyway? [from: JB Ecademy]

what kind of social software are you?

I am a Wiki and I just deleted everything.

[from: JB Ecademy]