Category Archives: Internet

Mobile GMail, Twitter and why I’m no better than Crackberry addicts

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At the company Christmas meeting/lunch/disco in 2006, I had the pleasure of sitting at the same table as one of our directors. During the meal he checked his email on his Blackberry (nicknamed “Crackberry” due to the addictive nature of anywhere, any time email) several times. I seem to remember telling him, in jest, to “put it away”.

Fast forward to 2007. Three has the best-value data packages of the UK mobile operators: £2.50 per month for 10MB of data, which is plenty for mobile e-mail and the odd bit of Twittering and Mobile Facebooking. You can get “unlimited” (actually 1GB fair use) for £5/month, but that’s overkill for me. It’s the same price as ten train times lookups via the official, paid-for service on Planet Three, so in those terms: why not?

Well, it’s a good job that Three’s 3G coverage is patchy near our house. I do find that I don’t want to miss anything on Twitter, especially, while mobile GMail is a strange mix of regular email, commercial marketing that I have signed up for, and mailing lists. The latter, like Twitter, plug me in to online community to such an extent that I find it hard to resist continuously checking for replies and new conversations.

Perhaps I’m filling a void because I don’t get out much IRL. Hey, having just had another baby, I don’t have the chance to get out much! My evenings are mostly cook (unless Kathy’s done that), eat, clear up, do some housework, rock Abi to sleep and then go to bed – preferably early so I don’t feel the effects of broken nights too much.

Online community is most of the community I get at the moment.

12 days until BarCamp Bristol

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Because not everyone has time to read mailing lists or check Upcoming, and one of the rules of BarCamp is that you do blog about BarCamp, here we go.

BarCamp Bristol (Bristol’s first) will be taking place on October 12th-13th 2007 at Sift’s offices in Victoria St., Bristol.

More information is available at BarCamp, Upcoming and you can sign up, too.

What’s all this BarCamp stuff about, anyway?

BarCamp is an unconference, which means that there is no distinction between attendees and speakers. This is because everybody who attends has to give a talk or lead a discussion; there are no “tourists”.

It’s a chance to tell other people about the one thing that you know heaps about but others perhaps don’t, or lead a discussion about the best way to solve a particular problem. What it isn’t is a Hackday-style geekfest; we want people to feel comfortable attending no matter what their level of technical knowledge.

We have got sponsorship for the event from various companies, so the event is basically free to attend. We would like people who sign up to put £5 down so that their money’s where their mouth is, so to speak ;)

Come on then – what are you waiting for? Sign up now!

Skillswap report

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On Tuesday I spoke at the February 2007 edition of Bristol Skillswap at The Watershed. I think it was the first time I’d given a public presentation, though I’ve given a few talks at work. There were about 25 people there, which was a sufficiently large number to elicit questions and feedback but not so large as to be intimidating.

The subject of my talk was “Microformats: The Semantic Web for the Rest of Us”, and the slides are available online in lovely s5 format (a simple html file plus CSS and Javascript magic).

I managed to bag a couple of beers (for later consumption, I should add – I thought it best to be compos mentis during the talk itself) and then began the presentation. I described what the Semantic Web is, what Microformats are and what the point of it all is before showing some real-world examples. The main, meaty part, though, was to dive into some HTML and add some Microformats for contact information and events — the two Microformats I know best.

In the end, the talk ran to about an hour (which I’d hoped it would, but I wasn’t sure). There was a good amount of questions and feedback, and several of us carried on the discussion in the Watershed bar afterwards. I’m not sure how well it’ll come out on video, but never mind!

One Day In History: a grey start

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I didn’t sleep well last night, and eventually got up at 6.40am (the alarm had gone off at 6.20). Showered while it was still dark; bring on the clock change – I want my sunrise back! Kathy brought me toast and tea, which I started to eat while I got dressed. Phoebe was still asleep, though she had woken up a few times around 6, calling for her mummy.

I synced my iPod to the computer. Despite Adam Christianson’s great tip about how to keep your iTunes music on an external hard drive, iTunes hangs on sync (at the “syncing calendars and contacts” stage) unless the external drive is connected. Oh well – I only did it to update my Last.fm stats. Kathy has the iPod today as she’s driving to Bristol Zoo with her mum, Grace and Phoebe.

We got to the station at 7.25. Kathy collected Grace, and Teresa (Grace’s mum) and I got the late-running 7.24 Cardiff Central train instead of our usual 7.37 Bristol Temple Meads. I was very nearly squashed by a middle-aged lady who, rather in a rush and keen to get off the train, decided to stand right in front of me (I was standing in the mouth of the bike compartment). It’s like I was invisible.

Anyway: I was in the office before 8, which is quite unheard of. I need to renew my season ticket later, which I’ll probably do at lunchtime. There are advantages to working near the station!

One Day In History: not quite Web 2.0?

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The History Matters project is encouraging the ordinary citizens of the UK to blog about their everyday lives tomorrow, October 17th 2006. On first inspection, it sounded like a fine idea. I was all ready to kick the dust from my underused blog and start blogging.

It’s not quite as simple as that, though. You can’t just blog anywhere; you have to use the History Matters One Day In History site. You must also agree to their Terms and Conditions and waiver copyright to your blog entry, which can be used by the British Library in published works, media etc. as pointed out in the blog form’s footnotes:

Your diary will be stored in electronic form in the British Library’s Web Archiving Section which is a part of the Modern British Collection.
Members of the public will be able to consult your material.
The History Matters partners own the copyright of any materials that you submit and be free to use them in any History Matter related materials such as any media stories, published books etc.
Please see the Terms & Conditions for further details as to the use(s) of material submitted to ‘One Day in History’.

Now, I’m no Cory Doctorow, but I care about the overuse and downright abuse of copyright law to benefit the wrong people. I’m sure that the History Matters project thinks it’s being really revolutionary by having “one of those new fangled blog things”, but is playing the same insidious All Your Posts Are Belong To Us game that I would expect of major media organisations like NewsCorp.

The second old-economy mistake that HM makes is centralisation. There is no need to force people to use the ODIH (sounds like “oh dear”; well, it is made using an ASP CMS) site; RSS and other open data standards, combined with tagging (tag=odih, for example), would have made it perfectly possible to have a decentralised blog day effort. This could have been harvested by archive.org or the British Library after the event, in case the original blog posts went bit-rotten over time. If the bloggers used a suitable Creative Commons license, then their posts could have been repurposed as derivative works by the HM project and the British Library.

I can understand why the ODIH blog operates in the way it does: centralisation lowers the barrier to entry for people who probably don’t have a blog to speak of. Raise the barrier too high, and you won’t get the participation required to make the event a success. Decentralisation would have meant that the HM project would have had to exercise a degree of trust in the data quality used by the bloggers and their content. However, as they make no guarantee of quality or suitability for the data submitted to ODIH anyway (We may remove any postings or other material or interaction at our entire discretion.), there’s nothing to be gained in that regard by centralisation. It really does appear to be all about the snatching of copyright over the submitted work (If you do not want to grant the Partners the rights set out above, do not submit your material to the Site. Um, OK).

These same people probably don’t exercise themselves about copyright and freedom issues, but may take exception to the handing over of their intellectual property in such an all-or-nothing way to the HM project. Unfortunately, they are unlikely to be aware of Creative Commons and the range of licenses that it offers as alternatives to full copyright.

It seems churlish to advertise this as a mass blog, yet potentially exclude those people who have made blogging so important for the project even to exist: bloggers themselves.

In conclusion, my initial enthusiasm for the project has waned and I don’t plan on blogging via the ODIH site tomorrow. I will probably blog on my own blog though, as a mini-protest against the lip-service paid to blogging by the ODIH site.

As an aside, it would be wise to consider these issues as we enter the Brave New World of community web sites. You have to trust your users, not take away their rights.

Bradford-on-Avon geeks meet-up

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I made the 8-mile, 50-minute (walk, train, walk) journey from Bath to Bradford-on-Avon last night for the inaugral Bradford geeks meet-up, organised by Giles Turnbull. The other attendees were:

Anyway: it was good to meet everyone and have a good chat about geeky stuff, like the best way to present massive numbers of product colourway combinations photographically on a website; paper lens hoods; and going on telly to be grilled by angel investors.

As a bonus, the pub (The Barge Inn) had Bath Ales on tap, which was nice. ;) I took one photo (from which I seem to have omitted Sam – sorry, Sam!) which I will post on Flickr at some point.

Final note: thanks to Big Dave for babysitting!

Finally: a Windows-based RSS reader that I enjoy using

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I have two requirements in an RSS reader:

  1. display RSS feeds in a manner that is pleasing to the eye (reading loads of feeds is hard work, man);
  2. use the space bar to both scroll down or go to next unread if there is no more item to scroll.

Most Mac-based RSS readers seem to work this way, but I thought that I was out of luck at work in MS-land. A quick bit of googling turned up a program called GreatNews. It has six different display styles (I’m using “newspaper”), renders RSS quite nicely indeed, thankyooverymuch, and is freeware. Oh, and the space bar does what I want it too. I’m a happy RSS bunny again.

Recording streaming audio using Radiopod on Mac OS X

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Ben Hammersley wrote a little perl script – Radiopod – a while ago. It uses mplayer and the lame mp3 encoder to create mp3s of RealAudio streams, which are then usable on iPods and other portable mp3 players.

I had a bit of a nightmare getting set up on OS X, though. At first I tried installing mplayer and lame using Fink; this didn’t work, so I switched to Darwin Ports. This was fine for lame, but the DP version of mplayer didn’t play ball with downloaded RealPlayer codecs.

I then googled and stumbled upon this blog entry where the author describes how to set up lame and mplayer on OS X, for use with his own shell script.

Anyway, there it is: install the ffmpegx version of mplayer and all will be well. I can now listen to Gilles Peterson and Hotpot Radio (Mr. Scruff & Treva Whateva) on my iPod. Yay!

An aside: one of the limitations of Radiopod was that the start or end time couldn’t be after midnight. This is a bit of a limitation, as most of the shows I timeshift are late-night ones. I modded the script to take a duration option (in seconds), which the script then uses instead of the duration it calculates from the start and end times anyway. If I pull my finger out, I may submit my patch back to SourceForge.