The Blog
19 May 2005 HOW-TO: Make your own annotated multimedia Google map - Engadget - www.engadget.com.
[from: del.icio.us] Skype: be afraid: Corante > Get Real >
Why is Corante permanently broken? The comments forms don't work. The RSS is screwy. The site is slow. Anyway here's a comment to the above article in response to a whole load of misinformation. Let's try and get this right and get at the truth, please. There's a few too many half truths and "a competitor told me" stories in here. - If you stop an app and then uninstall it there is *no way* it could still be using resources, tcp sockets or connections. The only possibility is that it left behind a trojan or other malware. There has never been any suggestion that Skype does this. if it's failing to uninstall correectly, then that's a bug. I'm sure they'd love to hear the details. - If you're behind a firewall, you have a NATed IP address and you don't have large numbers of ports forwarded to your machine on your internet faceing router, there is no way Skype is going to make you a supernode. So any traffic is about your copy of Skype doing what it does in terms of displaying presence information and handling voice and chat calls. If you don't like it, sure uninstall. - *If* you are a full peer in the internet, then Skype *may* make you a supernode. In some circumstances, this can generate large numbers of connections which *may* cause your machine or router problems. You may also end up passing < 5KBps of switching traffic. You will *not* be passing other people's voice calls. I've got no connection with Skype beyond being a happy user who relishes the shake up they're giving the Telcos and IM companies. The detail above is true to the best of my knowledge and has been gleaned from scanning the Skype forums and talking to Skype specialists. If it's wrong, tell me. No matter what form of vehicle I'm using for transport all the other forms of transports are clearly being used by idiots.
- When walking, the bloody cars, cycles, motorcycles, and even other walkers seem to go out of there way to annoy me. Did you ever try and look in the non-existant rear view mirror while walking? Have you ever bumped into someone who started walking backwards or just stopped for no obvious reason? - When I'm cycling or motorcycling, the pedestrians seem to have a death wish, while the car drivers are all out to kill me or just plain get in the way. Why is it that Vans, 4*4s and especially the biggest Mercedes ae incapable of positioning themselves in the middle of their lane? - When I'm driving, the damn motorcyclists scare the hell out of me, appearing out of nowhere and then cutting across me with inches to spare. And the cyclists are just plain invisible. Seriously though as a cyclist the one thing that really winds me up is the car that accelerates to get past me before immediately braking hard to take a left hand turn. And as for horses, we don't ride or drive on the fields, what the hell are they doing on the road? And the same goes for pedestrians. I don't ride on the pavement, what are they doing in the road? The one that used to really excite me when commuting was people who play Frogger. Imagine the scene, It's the depth of winter, it's cold and wet and dark. The street lights are not all working. I'm coming down the outside of the traffic on my MegaScooter trying to peer between the raindrops on the visor and the flare from the badly adjusted headlights of the cars coming towards me. Standing in the middle of the road is a person of colour wearing a black coat, black jeans and a black bobble hat looking the other way waiting for the gap to appear in the traffic on the other half of the road so they can run across. This used to happen to me at least once a day in Stoke Newington when commuting from the City to the A10. If you routinely walk in London, please look both ways each time you walk into the gap between cars. That's next to each pavement AND the gap between lanes. The other wind up is people who start walking before you get to them as they judge the gap to end up just behind you as they pass. On a motorcycle they represent an obstacle to avoid so you pull away from them, so now they can walk faster, so you pull across a bit more, so they can walk faster, so you're now on the wrong side of the road with cars coming towards you. Having said all that, I really like riding cycles because you are almost completely anonymous, invisible and outside the law. You really have to wind up the police to ever get stopped and even then you'll only get a caution as prosecuting is just too much hassle. And I've only ever once been so under the influence that I couldn't ride a bike. Anything motorised and they have systems to deal with you. And as a pedestrian, you're at risk of the half hour stop and search or an overnight stay on sus. As good middle class citizens this probably no longer affects any of us, but it affects our teenage children and it's one to remember if you ever go on a march or decide to go somewhere vaguely illegal like Stonehenge at midsummer. Or Brixton/Toxteth/Handsworth. <victor meldrew>And there's another thing... </victor meldrew> Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog :
Kim believes that it has to be an entirely open system. My understanding is that Microsoft will find a license (I also understand they have not settled on one, in fact Kim is looking for input), that allows anybody to create any part or all of InfoCard themselves. Unlike some earlier rumors, InfoCard does not seem to be released as open source itself, but admittedly, that would really have surprised me. So: - User end requires Longhorn or an XP upgrade - Depends on SOAP and the WS protocol stack - Uses HTML OBJECT tag wth DLL support - Multiple commercial licensing but with probably no open, free, license. So that counts out Apple and Linux clients. It may well count out Firefox and other browsers. It almost certainly counts out PHP-Apache websites. Java/Perl server environments probably won't work because interop between MS implementations of the WS stack with Java/Perl implementations is extremely patchy. So >50% of the market is excluded. And *all* of the long tail of small and medium sized web sites. Which is exactly the same problem as with Passport. It ends up as an IE only, MS Windows only, client tied to a server system that only works with the very biggest players. And each one of them involves a huge sell with the corresponding bad press when they back out. What's sad about this is that Microsoft cannot separate the standards process from it's commercial business. It's completely unable to take a view that a larger market raises all boats. So I'm not at all surprised at the approach and I also predict loads of noise and very little implementation leading to another failure. I think the rest of us can safely ignore what they're doing. While at the same time borrowing from all the excellent work that people like Kim Cameron are doing on the fundamental analysis of Identity. 18 May 2005 yadis: yet another distributed identity system
From the LiveJournal guy, Brad Fitzpatrick [from: del.icio.us] 17 May 2005 O'Reilly Radar > Google has del.icio.us tags and RSS feed autodiscovery
W00t! Is this real? Or has Rael got some Firefox add on that he didn't realize? According to Rael, some google searches have added an XML icon if the target web page has an RSS/Atom feed. And an info button if it has del.icio.us links. 16 May 2005 Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
More Shirky, taggy tasteiness [from: del.icio.us] 15 May 2005 Doc has been writing about the perils of IQ tests. The Doc Searls Weblog : Saturday, May 14, 2005
I'm reminded of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. To paraphrase. "I'm a Beta. Betas are the best. Those Alphas are so stuck up. They think they can do anything with their precious intelligence. I don't want to be a leader like them. I'm better being second. And Betas are so much better than those stupid Gammas. And as for the Deltas. Well somebody has to do all those terrible jobs like picking up the trash. And I'm glad it's not me. Yes. Betas are the best." And I'm also reminded of one of Gurdjieff's teaching stories. As a kid he was out with his father and uncle in the fields listening to them talk. Father: What is God doing now? Uncle: He's making ladders. Father: What are the ladders for? Uncle: For the nations of the world to go up and down on. It seem to me that IQ tests, streaming in schools and national propaganda are all aimed at the same thing and for very much the same reasons. They are simplistic techniques for telling us what to think. And they get used because it's a great deal easier than teaching us how to think. 13 May 2005 MPAA targets TV BitTorrent tracker sites
There's a certain insanity here. Take content that is transmitted free to air, remove the ads, rip it to Divx, post it on Bittorrent. Fairly obssessive people then spend considerable time downloading it so they can watch shows they've missed. The MPAA then goes after the tracker sites. Meanwhile the BBC is hard at work trying to find ways to give away it's content in ever more useful ways. Now somewhere around that 2nd stage (remove the ads) the TV industry's business model fell apart. Which makes the final action by the MPAA inevitable. And ultimately it's the obsessive end user who suffers. So you business model is screwed. How is that my problem? My experience of this is an obssession with Alias. In the UK, it's on a minority channel at an awkward time. In order not to miss an episode, I've been collecting rips of season 4 via BitTorrent from BT@Effnet. It's really pretty hard to see how doing this is impacting the copyright owner's ability to make money from the series. More on this. Mark Pesce (the well known digital Magickian) has a great article about the business models affected here. 12 May 2005 Please read. How Not To Blog - REAL ID is not an identification card. It's a national surveillance infrastructure
The background is that the US government has just sneaked an ID Card bill through on the back of a very large budget allocation for Homeland security. It calls for all the same things that have been mooted for the UK ID card. A centralised database, machine readable ID cards, embedded biometric information. Don't let them try the same thing in the UK. The much reduced Labour majority will make it considerably more difficult, but it's still worth supporting people like No2ID. [from: JB Ecademy] Many-to-Many: Google Acquires Dodgeball : Google Acquires Dodgeball
There should be a good fit between Dodgeball and Google maps. The problem I have with Dodgeball is the need to report where you are and the process for doing it. This is another application case for the phone knowing where it is either by GPS or cell ID and a small app on the phone reporting up to the central server. This App could either poll periodically or on demand under user control. Then we have the fact that it's still US only (I think). And that to really take advantage of it we need flat rate data transfer instead of per Mb charges. So all the usual issues with walled gardens, awkward networks, lack of application development tools on the phone side, lack of standards and missing LBS support on the phone side. So what's next? Google starts an MVNO? 11 May 2005 Let's say you have an image that is actively updated but keeps the same filename. How do you force browsers and proxy caches to refresh at the browser end? I "touch" the file so that it's last modifed date is now and often it has a different size and hence etag. Apache correctly honours this and returns 200 OK or 304 no modified it asked. but it seems that a lot of browsers and caches don't ask.
You may have noticed we've got Skype indicators on Ecademy today. If you're in my contact list, then your indicator will be live while I'm online.
The way this works is that I have a desktop tray program running that watches my copy of Skype. Whenever it sees a presence change, it makes a webservice call to the Ecademy web server. You can see the web service here. The server side then creates a pair of images in /skype/ called your_skype_name.gif and your_skype_name_g.gif These are the images that appear on your profile and against your name in lists. The web service checks to see if the Skype_profile_name is a person that is an Ecademy member. So this is not a general service but only for Ecademy members. The problem here is that when your skype contacts list gets very big (eg >500) presence updates get slower and slower. So I can't really run a single Ecademy Skype Presence server and have everyone connect to it. People who've tried to do this (Like Jyve) discovered that updates were taking 15 minutes to several hours to propagate. So what I'm looking for is:- - A few more people prepared to run the desktop app. The benefit to you is that your presence on Ecademy will change immediately. The side effect is that all the Ecademy members in your contact list will also be activated. - A programmer prepared to take on the code for the desktop app. It's currently written in Delphi but could easily be reverse engineered into C#, C++ or others. It's fairly clean but it doesn't yet cope well with putting the machine into sleep mode or closing down and restarting. BTW. My Skype contact name is julian.bond BTW2. It's important that the skype name in your profile is the same as your actual Skype name. And it is case sensitive and typically all lower case. [from: JB Ecademy] O'Reilly Radar > ETech 2005: Where Did They All Come From? :
Europe and UK do seem to be under-represented in the data. There were times during the conference when it seemed like the Brits had taken over. Maybe it's just they were all giggling a lot, or that they were more active on IRC, or had taken over the bar. And what about the "Virtual SuW" Does a person from Wales attending via iChat count? More seriously, the contact detail for attendees and especially presenters seemed surprisingly thin. For instance, I'm sure there were a lot more people with a Skype address than mentioned this. Perhaps next year the data entry form should have a FOAF import filter. And to make geocoding easier, make Zip/Postcode a required field. There are some good Zip/Postcode to Lat/Long databases freely available. And lastly, it always seems like conferences are overly protective of all this data. I'd really like to see the contact list online in the run up to the conference and afterwards. It shouldn't be too hard to have an online registration form that has a privacy switch and where access to the data is only available if you've registered. 10 May 2005 Formal Friday
Suicide fever is a keeper. Suicide is painless mashed with Pacman game sounds [from: del.icio.us] The Huffington Post | The Blog : The new iPod my girlfriend gave me is a trap.
Is Hilary gay? I think we should be told! But really, doh, the humanity of it all. Here's the ex-head of the RIAA railing against DRM and lock in. Well surprise surprise, the iPod does actually support non-DRM Mp3 files just like every other music player in the world. You don't actually *have* to get your music from iTMS. So don't. Just Say No To DRM 
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