Euan's blog a few days ago mentioned a three stage model of blogging and Joi Ito confirms the source and extends it into a test. I'm certainly getting there on the basis of today... sixth post in as many hours.
February 2003 Archives
There is a great hypertext reading list forming on Ben Hammersley's site. Both academic and fiction, philosophy and summaries of hypertext, this is sort of a note to self...
Something I found today, via Ben Hammersley, Granta have published an issue on Groups, with a range of writing on the topic of groups. Mainly people's good and bad recollections of being in a group, quite a bit of it is online too.
I'm interested in this area and remembered a good book on Group Processes, by Rupert Brown. A classic psychology text book, well written too. Thanks Chloe.
I can understand the imperative of companies to maximise shareholder value and if that resides in intellectual property, then patents are a valid mechanism for doing this, but some of the recent patents granted do take the piss a bit.
From sixlog comes news that Interwoven have won a patent on versioning systems for websites. CVS and wiki are obvious contenders for prior art in this case. Via Will a cnet story that Amazon have a patent on chat systems related to the sale of products, essentially it seems to cover message boards related to products for sale, where the user selects the item to be discussed.
"A method and system for conducting an electronic discussion relating to a topic. The discussion system of the present invention receives a selection of an item that is to be the topic of the discussion. The discussion system then receives comments relating to the selected item and generates a message that includes a description of the selected item and the received comments. The discussion system then sends the generated message to participants of the discussion. The discussion system receives from a participant who received the generated message additional comments that are to be added to the generated message. The discussion system sends the generated message along with received additional comments to the participants of the discussion."
See us patent 6,525,747 and ongoing discussion on slashdot and finally google news on the patent. The "user selection" aspect of this patent is the key feature that they have patented, the fact that it is the user choice which starts the conversation as opposed to an editorial decison to start a topic for conversation. photo.net have been doing this for a while, I'm sure that there are many others.
Update: Google have got a patent on their pageranking system and they are keeping it tight and specific, plus a patent means they'll have to publish. Slashdot article and cnet article
Table football in shockwave, this is something a friend Adam made last year.
I was struck by how much Tony looked like Rick from the Young Ones in this cover image from the New Statesman, maybe it was deliberate.
Well I've now upgraded to version 2.62 of the blog software that runs this place and I've even got a Creative Commons licence to cover what is on here. See this 1.5MB flash movie for a nice guide to creative commons licensing.
Meanwhile everything is backing up in my head and threatening to rush unformed into NetNewsWire. How blogging relates to amazon and google; should other people I know blog; why didn't I do this before; how many people read this; all sorts really, extended essay slowly forming.
Chop a small onion and then fry it preferably in butter ( with one or two garlic cloves, add the garlic later if you want a more pungent taste. Then take some mushrooms and chop them roughly, you will want over a pound of them for two people. Cook them to drive out their water and then let them fry a little. Add water and stock, about a pint, bring to boil then simmer for 10 minutes or so. Remove about half the soup and liquidize, then return to the pan. Add some nutmeg, a splash of lemon juice and a bit of cream. This freezes well and makes a great soup for lunch. Thanks to Lindsay Bareham for the basis of this recipe.
Electronics Design Chain had an interesting article from last summer discussing the process that used to create the iPod. It is a good analysis of how decided to not only outsource the manufacturing of the iPod, but also the majority of the design process. Essentially acting as a client of a reference platform designer PortalPlayer, with contributions from DSP manufacturers and Sony for the battery, plus Toshiba for the hard drive. All contributing their expertise to create something faster and better than they probably could on their own.
Maybe the article preaches to the choir a little, but still interesting reading. the end of the article predicts that elements of the reference design used for the iPod will appear in other devices over the next few months, as it will only be covered under an agreement for a short period. Hence the similar products, even down to shape that have been announced recently.
About a week ago Google bought Prya Labs who provide the major free weblogging host, Blogger. There have been many reaction articles this week, here is my take on the events. This move into daily up dated content is the first time that Google will be a content provider rather than a search tool provider. All of their similar tools are means of access, including Froogle etc. to syndicated data sources. Google provides the scale for Blogger to grow, but with approx 1.1 million users of which approx 200,000 are active there is a lot of support to provide. For Google this means access to the whole of blogger's content. I suppose it fills in the space between Google's new aggregation services and their websearching services, they now own a services that provides meta information on the world around them. If they can map this to a knowledge hierarchy (correct word escapes me) then they can provide a google groups on the world view of events in real time. Quite exciting, if a little daunting to give one company that amount of power, even if their company motto is so friendly. For those of us on the non-blogger platforms, are we dis-empowered by this transaction ? Google still indexes our output, but will we loose out by not being in the right bit of google's information space, we an only wait and see what google intend to do, perhaps they'll make the api open to allow others to hook into it, just as with the blogger api right now.
I've put some more pictures of the stop the war march on the embryonic gavinbell.com site. This site will have mainly my pictures and writing as a companion to this site.
I wrote a review of cleaner 6.0, the video compression software from discreet. The review is in MacUser, the 21st February issue on p32, it even includes a picture of my cat and a nice shot of a tiger.
My banner from the march
From the Legal and General's summary of our ISA's six month performance, which I received today "After an indifferent first 6 months, global stock markets collapsed in the second half of the year."
lovely.
Lazyweb, how can I hold on to the fleeting trace of my navigation across sites on the web. Memory is contextual and browsing is often a parallel activity with multiple open windows. However my history is a linear entity. I want to be able to follow the path of my previous forays on the web, as I remember things based on sites, but often you end up on new sites and have no ball of string to get back.
This was prompted by talking about the new snapback functionality in Safari, given the ability to mark a place for trackback, I can then define the start point of a search, and so easily return back to the start.
If we extend this idea to general browsing then the start point seems arbitary and the end point indeterminant, but we can analyse this a bit futher.
Start points could be taken as a new page opening, or selection from a bookmark. End points or splits would be opening new windows from a page or closing the page or choosing a bookmark or finally typing in a url.
This would be a great tool for me and I think others, a sort of visual history.
There is a little bit of prior work in the hypertext field, and via google I found a master's project based on Conzilla a concept based browser.
Earlier in January I wrote a recipe for omlette. I make a good weekend brunch omlette so I'm told. This is the previous omlette recipe, worth a quick look. A different twist on this recipe is to use roast peppers instead of the bacon and mushroom. If you do this it might be a little too sweet, as the peppers release sugars too. You can also add various spices to the onions, coriander is good, as is smoked paprika.
Installed 10.2.4 on the day it was available via software update, found an odd problem. My email broke, the updater reset the .Mac account settings in the Internet control panel. So when I ran Mail it had disabled my .mac account. No where in the Mail application does it suggest that this is the issue. Your .mac account is disabled and you can't enable it, you can't edit the username, so you can't save the account. After a few tries of this and a session of repair permissions I remembered the preference setting for .Mac in the System Preferences.
It shouldn't be this hard to fix this. Also when an account is inactive you cannot access the folders of stored email, so suddenly my email vanished. not fun, though all is now better.
I went on the march on Saturday, like thousands of others. The experience was best described as quietly joyful. Over a million people and not a cross word all day, must be some kind of achievement for London.
The banners told all sorts of messages, from the mass produced CND Stop the war and palestine ones to the hand made. One of my favourites I think was "Blair Bush Project ... be very afraid". Photos of the day on tuesday, when I get them back from developing.
something you'll have missed from Saturday, if you didn't go, was the noise of the cheers and whistles as they came like a mexican wave along the march, especially around by Trafalgar Sq, echoing off the buildings. Felt like an alive thing, like the march decided to voice its feelings.
At hyde park, there were so many people, the whole of the field from speakers corner to beyond the trees, probably out the gates and onwards was full of people, most of the green on the map linked above was full of people. most of the speakers were interesting some a little tub thumping, but clearly stating that a war on Iraq is unacceptable without at minimum UN approval.
I do think it is a difficult issue, Saddam would not be disarming if an army weren't camped out on his back garden, but does an intention to follow through with violence in order to support the deterrent automatically follow ? I think that Tony Blair is actually muddying the water by now claiming that this is a moral campaign for humanitarian reasons, otherwise we'd be in Tibet and other places around the world.
An interesting experience to be involved with, whether it will make any difference remains to be seen.
Welcome to takeoneonion on its new permanent and public home. I want to say thanks to a variety of people Will for help setting up, Matt for a prompt back in Jan, Euan for gentle encouragement and Lucy for inspiration. Head back to the beginning if you want everything. Decoration is in progress, so things might change, certainly this template needs work.
It has been quite a month or so for Apple, culminating in the release of the new XServe and Xserve RAID machines today, plus an update to X11. So far this month and last they have released new PowerBooks, new desktops and new iMacs, iLife, Keynote and Final Cut Express, X11 software, plus of course a beta of Safari.
All they need to complete the full house is 10.2.4 apparently this month new iPods and a new iBook, with the usual faster speeds bigger drives and optional bluetooth and Airport Extreme.
I'm glad that Apple keep pushing at what is expected of a computer, it is these novel advances that make the difference and I think that the emphasis on laptops is completely correct, I haven't used anything else for about 3 years and have no intention of going back.
I think that Apple are playing an interesting game wrt new applications, FCP was a strong entry into a realitively dormant market place, video was either cheap and cheerful or hardware based and very expensive. FCE is now looks like a great application and it is really quite affordable. The iLife suite is fun, iDVD and iTunes are probably the best of the 4, I personally think iMovie is too limited, and iPhoto feels nice, but the web export frustrates me, I use Drooling Cat's BetterHtmlExport instead, which is flexible, if not as pretty. iPhoto also takes over my photos in a slightly irritating manner.
Keynote is quite nice to play with and really nice to create new presentations in, but it has real problems importing and exporting powerpoint. This is not really acceptable, many people have days of work invested in detailed powerpoint presentations. They expect perfect imports at the minimum, so that they can use their existing libraries of content. I suppose the analogy would be having all this video on tape and getting a muddied verison, rather than pulling it on over DV as a perfect copy, you'd be rightly pissed.
However despite these gripes, Apple are persuing a sensible strategy, as I've read in another magazine/blog/website (can't find reference) they've chosen areas where they haven't completely trashed third party developers, mostly. Video apps, presentation software and some reasonable, but limited free apps. The free software is good to attract people, but you grow out of it. iChat is fine, but what if your friends are on MSN; iPhoto is a good digital photography, but it is not photshop, nor is it as powerful as some of the image databases. So there is an option for an upgrade from iApps to third party products.
Two cases for a possible application from Apple I can see are visio and project. Visio was once a reasonable application I guess, it is now overly complex and unsure of what it is actually meant to be used for. It is the classic business choice for diagramming, and as such a complete lock in, visio is one of the main reasons to buy Virtual PC, as the file format is not widely readable on the windows platform and not editable on the mac platform. This is crying out for a KeyNote style competitor, that can read and write .vsd files and provides a MacDraw like simplicity. OmniGraffle is a possibility, but doesn't offer visio import or export.
A simliar argument against project can be made, it is another complete lock in an actually not that great an application, unless you are building buildings. These are all low hanging fruit that Apple could grab quite easily.
I mentioned this film in an earlier entry and still have it going around in my head. Partly as it was nominated for a Bafta this year, but also it is just there in front of you each day in London. Also reminds me of the film Bread and Roses, which takes a slightly different stance on those who have no rights, more of a union representation film, still really good though.
Buy Dirty Pretty things or Bread and Roses from amazon.co.uk.
is nice when you find old friends
Hi George =)
I used to think that the mark of a good cook was the ability to make sauce, as sauces (other than the ones in packets) seemed hard and complex. Now I guess I still think the same, but it is a wider definition, less fussy french and extended to daubes and curries.
Meat and two veg is simple enough, but sauce ties a meal together. Consider mushrooms on toast, which is a nice and tasty dish, but sweat a few onions first and add a little cream and it is a much richer feast.
Via Doc Searls' closing comments on the sad Columbia events I found a host of stuff about Space elevators. Such a really great idea, I've been idlely thinking around writing a novel/short story/film script over the past few years about this topic.
Essentially, build a strong cable to geostationary orbit and then run cars up and down it at a fraction of the cost of sending rockets into space. Also as Dana Blankenhorn notes there is a scaleability here, as once you build once then you have the facilities to build another and you can use the first one to put everything into orbit to create the second, third and fouth. location of the ground station is a concern as it will be a very vurnerable target, however if you have more than 2 then you can have redundancy. For lots more detail on this topic have a look at the conference presentations from the space elevator 2002 conference hosted by HighLift systems.
The Radio 4 programme, The Material World 5/dec/2002, has an interesting radio interview about space elevators, RealAudio file interview starts about 15 minutes in.
The end of Dana's article makes it sounds achiveable, at least within the next 20 years, certainly the costs are less than we'll spend on the coming war with Iraq
all intervene to mean patchy posting
back to semi regular posting now I hope
