Latest rant:Media convergence
I've just been watching a program about the future of media consumption, and it made the same old mistake about TV/Computer convergence that people always make.TVs and computers should not converge, that's a silly idea.
A TV is a dedicated display device and should remain so but what it displays will change. What the world needs is an open protocol for addressing content for TVs that they can then be directed to use.
What's required is a wafer thin touch sensitive tablet PC (think of a big iPod Touch) that happens to have a TV as a alternate display.
Only the TV isn't an actual alternate display - your tablet doesn't fetch then stream content to it - but it can direct the TV using the protocol I speak of on what to fetch and queue for viewing.
So users can sit calmly on their couch, look up what content is currently interesting, the top YouTube clips of the day and flick them off to their TV. The tablet shouldn't even be able to display full screen its content - that's the TVs job.
Random thoughts
Cell phones should receive faxs. Some of the modern screens on phones would be good enough to read them but I'm thinking storing for printing (or transfer to PC) would suffice. Pictures taken could then be sent as faxs.
And when are we going to get Voice-to-text on cell phones? It would be so useful - for updating blogs, sending complex txts or any of a myriad reasons one could want to side-step laborious text input.
Cell phones should record phone calls (I'm guessing some already do). I think of this because of a newspaper article about an emergency call that was mis-handled.
You're not likely to think before hand that any given conversation is going to be important and you might want a record of it, but you may very well think afterwards that it'd be nice to have an accurate record of one.
So I think it'd be a good design choice to record each phone conversation, just record over any previous ones. Have options to save the last one to the side, wipe it if not saved after an hour or two, or demand a decision on saving or wiping at the end of the call or some such.
Random rant:TV broadcast news is irrelevant.
I literally screamed at the news presenters on TV last night. The idiotic, inaccurrate, scare mongering nonsense they were presenting drove me over the edge. I was just waiting to see some footage from the world cup and mistakenly sat through the sorry excuse for information TV news is.
Talking heads perkily lecturing in fifteen second bursts is a useless medium for explaining complexity. Tv just isn't any good at anything except showing pictures and they should stick to that. When they try and explain something they try and do it from the point of view of some sort of imagined social consensus they believe their audience shares and end up doing nothing but sprouting propaganda.
Latest sports, plays of the day, spectacular vistas, imploding buildings, pretty girls, damage and destruction. That's what TV is for. When I want to think or learn something I'll consult the Net.
Random rant:Law and order drum banging oafs
People in the U.K believe crime and violence is rampant and growing although it's been trending down for decades.
Why the disconnect? Because the government keeps telling people crime is a problem so as to win support for their simply fascist plans to enslave citizens by making their every movement and action accountable to the State. And all the idiots who can't think for themselves and fear independence march merrily through a very dark door.
In the U.S the Republican Party has become the Monarch Party where they believe the purpose of elections is simply to chose monarchs who will rule without accountability or responsibility between elections.
These are connected, and not just by the fact that politicos are by nature insane egomaniacs. The assault on individuals and social liberty is a constant and ever present threat inherent in the lure and corruption of power.People need to remember to have the courage to say 'No, I am not afraid to be free. You may not scare me into servitude'.
Windows Mobile 6 and the Compact Framework
I've written an application to improve the U.I of my new phone (a HTC Dual Touch) called SlideActions.
It lets users decide on how the phone should behave in locking, hanging up and other options when its slide is opened or closed. And although it's written for my phone the code isn't particularly specific - it may work on others.
But it'll need someone a little clued in to configure it for other phones - I've put notes on what's needed on it's homepage.
Id'ing unrecognised devices
This article helpfully describes how to get info on apparently unsupported installed devices.
To sum it up once you drill down through Device Manager to find the device instance ID (i.e PCI\ VEN_8086&DEV_266E&SUBSYS_3006103C&REV_03\ 3&B1BFB68&0&F2) you can extract a vendor and device ID (in the example, Vendor Id : 8086 and Device Id : 266E).
Then if you go to PCI Database you can find what's required to obtain drivers.
Script to remove Local Folders from Thunderbird
When you use Thunderbird for IMAP accounts it can be annoying having the Local Folders sitting among your accounts.
To get rid of Local Folders you need to edit Thunderbirds prefs.js file for the relevant profile.
I've written a script to make the relevant edits, even if you've already created more accounts than the default.
It's a prettty cheap VBScript thing I just knocked up in a hurry so it isn't very pretty or cross platform (I may swap it out for a Perl version sometime). Just copy it into the directory prefs.js is in and run it.
It automatically creates a backup before over-writing prefs.js. Your prefs.js file will be somewhere like:
The Lagoonarium
If you know what the lagoonarium is and you want a copy of the video contact me, because I've lost your address.
I stood at Thermopylae with Leonidas
No, really, I really did. And here's the picture to prove it. That's me up on the monument at Thermopylae a few years ago on a trip from England to Istanbul (and most of the way back). I saw 300 last week and, eh, it was okay. The best bits were stylish stagings of the comics panels - but comics transcribed as movies don't have good scripts or dialogue (Sin City also demonstrates this).
The most interesting thing I noticed, given the debates and anger the movie aroused, is the addition of some dialogue: when Leonidas meets Xerxes emissary early in the story he warns the emissary he'll be held responsible for his words as if they were his own - a clear warning that this messenger may be blamed for the message he is about to deliver. This is not in the comic. So the producers demonstrate they know there's something unseemly about Leonidas in this story and attempted to defuse it by inserting language to moderate his character. If they now reply to accusations of producing propaganda with claims to only have been reproducing another work of art in a different medium, without responsibility for the story, they will be lying.
Comet McNaught, the Great Comet of 2007
Finally the weather cleared up enough for me to get out and have a look at McNaught. About four days after it's peak appearance it's still mighty impressive. Supposedly the second brightest comet ever measured for brightness it covered about 20 degrees of sky. Much more impressive than Halleys or Hyakutake
Took my camera out and made my first astronomical pictures. At first I left it's battery in the charger. And after getting it I took the wrong lens. Oh well, they didn't turn out too badly.
Thunderbird 2
While driving to work today I saw a ~four meter long fibreglass model of Thunderbird 2 parked on the roadside. Très cool!
Swimming with Sharks and a moray in Bora Bora
Some reef sharks and rays in the Bora Bora lagoon.
While snorkeling in Bora Bora I found this moray. He was gorgeously coloured (underwater photography without lights washes colours out a lot).
He was something like six to eight feet long and I remember his eyes as being richly coloured and beautiful flecked with gold.
Ryan and Linda's wedding
A short clip from my camera to test video streaming. I'm quite impressed at how well this comes across from the original just off my happy snappy Canon IXUS.
Bluetooth Headphones
I recently bought these Jabra BT-620S headphones.
And I think they work quite well - the sound isn't all that good but I didn't expect it to be (I've got a good stereo for when I want to hear music at it's best). Bluetooth just isn't a good medium for high fidelity music and it would be foolish to expect excellent sound.
I didn't buy with any intention of using the microphone so I offer no opinion on that, but the review I linked to is correct that they can get uncomfortable (not enough for me to mind, but a more sensitive person could get easily irritated).
I approve of their user interface, very well thought out, just pressing the ear pieces does what you need in most contexts.
I also bought Jabras Bluetooth dongle to go with them, but also wanted to make A2DP (the Advanced Bluetooth Audio Profile) work on my Windows XP machine with my existing Bluetooth kit (so I could have these headphones paired with both my laptop and my PC). My cheap Bluetooth dongle I discovered (by looking at it's driver details) was manufactured by CSR, and it happens that Blue Soleil manufacturers Windows drivers that provide A2DP functionality to CSR Bluetooth chips.
I have downloaded and tested the latest Blue Soleil software and it did indeed work with my cheap Bluetooth dongle. Only I can't buy it - because you do that via the applications Help menu and it won't enable 'Buy' for me.
And it seems they offer no option to buy via their wesite (I guess they want to tie your purchase to the applications detection and identification of a particular Bluetooth device). So apparently they don't want me as a customer.
Squeezing table columns together
Sometimes you need a lot of columns in a table, and sometimes the plain language headings are too wide - they push the tables edge off any reasonable sized screen.
It'd be great if you could just rotate the headings a little so the colunms could be thinner. But you can't rotate HTML text (not even using the new Canvas element of modern browsers).
So I created a little code to generate text on the fly as an image, rotated and in the colours one might want.
New web fonts
Microsoft has released several new fonts with Vista that make very nice additions to the commonly used choices for web pages. As I understand it these fonts are available for one and all to install using Windows or not.
If you're using Windows the easiest way to obtain them is installing Microsofts Powerpoint viewer.
Animations
On my photo pages I've been playing with Javascript animations to create light-box type effects.
I've noticed that different libraries perform quite differently (YUI animations for instance seem smoother than Moofx). But I also found out that having many animations occurring at once (which happens if you drag your mouse across several photos on my site) can be quite a drag on performance. So out of curiosity I wrote a simple animation function to see if I could make many simultaneous animations work more efficiently. Check out 'Puna' compared to 'MooFx' and 'YUI' to see if I did.
Update: I don't think I made much of an improvement in performance, and I'm going off the whole method of growing/shrinking as a poor UI at all. It also seems to have a bit of trouble dealing with the unreliable mouseover, mouseout events of fast moving cursors. Moofx's extra mousein and mouseout events don't seem to help much.
YAHOO Javascript UI
As a learning task for finding out about Yahoos UI library I've used it to animate my sites login. If you click on the logo (at the top left) you ought (providing you have javascript enabled) see a cute animated creation of a login dialog. It works on all the pages of this site with the common banner.
Presuming I haven't broken it yet, and there's been enough time for the library to download (it isn't huge, but if you're getting slow service right now you might have to wait a bit). The library is loaded by my site AFTER everything else.
Update: I've replaced YUI with Moofx (using Mootools) to expand my experience. Moofx doesn't have some of the cute animations YUI has (specifically my Login no longer 'bounces' quite the same way) but I think the intergration with Prototype is a good reason to use it even though in this case I've used the Mootools version.
Single sign On using OpenID
I thought, for the fun of it, and because I'd Stumbled over it, that I'd implement OpenID as identity verification for logging in to this site. How hard could it be, I thought.
I know how these authentication schemes work, and being an open source project I expected there'd be some scripts I could grab and mutilate to my ends. But nope, I could find nothing except the original demo by danga.com (the folks responsible for LiveJournal) that suited my purpose (as light-weight as possible) and a crucial part of that is a Perl file whose source I could not view. For some reason the downloadable source file was missing. But I fortuitously found their CVS repository and snagged a copy.
Then I had to make sure I had all the supporting packages. And discovered that Crypt-DH (an essential part of SSH communications) wasn't readily available. But that's just a typical little installation glitch quickly sorted with a few choice searches.
More annoying were substantial changes required to the Perl source because it was originally written to make use of some sort of framework danga.com uses and I do not. But hey, what's a little tweaking and debugging among friends?
So now I have a sample of using OpenID to verify identity.
Firefox Extension for Spinning Logo
I like the idea of XUL. A mark up language for web applications (as distinct from HTML which was intended for marking up documents) is a great idea. Unfortunately it's unlikely to be widely adopted by browser publishers, although it's probably worth insisting users install Firefox just for it's XUL abilities when you can (Microsoft's XAML is pretty much the same thing but within the dot.NET framework, so not such a compact or cross platform option).
Anyway, because Firefox is itself a XUL application it can be modified with changes to it's markup. This is how extensions work. And to help out a developer who prepared some pretty animations for Firefox (see this page for a new 'throbber', a.k.a 'busy', animation in Firefox) I packaged this extension to answer the authors request for such a thing (they've since tweaked it and updated it for Firefox 2.0 it seems).